The sane men of Satan
Date: 2024-01-04T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction; Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction

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Title: The sane men of Satan

Author: Sam Merwin

Release date: January 4, 2024 [eBook #72615]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SANE MEN OF SATAN ***

the sane men of satan

By Jacques Jean Ferrat

Does the past still live and not
in dreams alone? Justin thought
not till a strange decision took
him back to days he knew as dead.

Until recent times the Devil, to give him his due, was a figure of fear rather than of Hallowe'en fun. Nowadays, to most of our enlightened citizenry, Satan is a device used by the clergy to keep folk in line, or by a Goethe to create Faust. Consider then the plight of a thoroughly sophisticated man of today who discovers Old Nick to be not only real but deadlier by far than the horned brimstone-breather of legend.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe October-November 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Charles Justin paused briefly in the encroaching darkness to look at the north front of the Old State House in Boston. He was engaged in the process of walking home from his office on State Street to his house in Louisburg Square.

The ancient building, he thought, with its palladian windows and gilded lion and unicorn, still looked much as it must have when Paul Revere engraved his crude but effective print of the Boston Massacre, back in 1773.

One of the things Justin loved most about Boston was the fact that so much of the old town still breathed. Faneuil Hall, a few blocks behind him, where James Otis and Sam Adams had roused the Commonwealth against the crown, still did duty as a major market. Worshippers still paraded on Sunday mornings to King's Chapel, Christ Church, the Old North Church. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of twentieth-century Bostonians still lived and worked upon the same broad planks of old T-Wharf that had felt the measured tread of Gage's grenadiers.

Justin, born and bred in rawer if no more bustling Midwestern surroundings, had felt a powerful tie with the old thus standing alongside the new, a strong déjà vu, from his first glimpse, more than twenty years before as a Harvard freshman. This, he had known instinctively, was home for him. He had made it his home ever since.

The sense of the past was strong upon him this evening—perhaps, he thought wryly, more strong than was proper for an executive vice-president of the Ninth National Bank. As he scaled the slope of Park Street on Beacon Hill he felt like a man born out of his proper time.

Life and color and revolt had been strong in the little city of two centuries ago. Men had thought and dreamed—and then had talked and acted. Unlike their descendants, who seemed to have relapsed into an everlasting featherbed of trustfundism.

Passing the gold-domed balustraded beauty of Bullfinch's classic New State House, he wondered how the crest of the hill had looked when John Hancock had lived there, in his magnificent Georgian mansion, with its landscaped gardens and carriage house containing the merchant-governor's gilded English coach.

Old Boston held Justin tightly in its grip even after he turned the key in his own lock and entered his house on Louisburg Square. For the house, if not quite Federalist, dated back to the early era of Clipper Ship affluence. Fine white paneling, graceful mahogany banisters, blue-and-gold silk wall covering of heavy Chinese silk, Sheraton furniture, Revere silverware—all combined to retain illusion of a past still alive.

Not until he walked upstairs was the illusion shattered. And again it was not the room that shattered it—for graceful mantel above gently roaring fire, fine old furniture and a pair of glowing Copley portraits on the west wall maintained the dream.

It was the two persons awaiting him there that spoiled Justin's vision of time past relived. Jack Fellowes joggled cubed ice in a broad-beamed highball glass in front of the fire—as modern in his midnight-blue dinner jacket and soft white shirt as the post-Freudian psychiatry he practiced.

He said, "Ah, there, Charley, have a drink on you." Then, with a rueful half-smile at Justin's wife, Marie, "You seem to have married the only banker in history who works overtime."

In an ice-blue satin dinner gown Marie Chandler Justin was as brilliant as a candle's white flame—and even less warm. She stirred faintly in greeting to her husband, said, "You're late, Charles—you'll barely have time to dress."

Justin reached for a drink that stood ready atop the red-lacquer Chinese cabinet some ancestor of his wife's had brought from Canton. He said, "Sorry, I forgot about the Iveson party. I don't think I'm up to it tonight. You two will have more fun without me."

Marie pouted prettily, said, "But, darling, I'll have to explain to everybody—and they'll all think the most horrible things."

"Let 'em," said Justin bluntly. He turned to Fellowes, added, "By the way, how are you coming along with Marie's psychoanalysis?"

"These things take time," said Fellowes.

"So I understand," said Justin. Some devil prompted him to add, "I've heard that some women wear out two or three psychoanalysts in a single lifetime."

"Charles!" Marie looked warningly up from the pleats in her skirt.

"Really, Charles." Fellowes sounded hurt.

"Sorry," said Justin. He decided to jump the conversational track before there was a wreck. "Henri Dubois visited me this afternoon."

"You mean the Golden Rule fellow?" the psychiatrist inquired. "Interesting phenomenon of our times. What sort of chap is he?"

Justin thought back to the soft-spoken man who had sat in the white leather armchair on the far side of his desk, the man who had asked him for two million dollars to support his Missionist movement. He thought back to the meeting in the Garden he had attended the night before—a meeting attended by twenty thousand quiet intent hopeful people, by many thousands more who had listened via loud-speakers outside in the streets.

Henri Dubois did preach the Golden Rule, the ideals of cooperation and humanity toward one's fellows, as the world's only salvation. It wasn't quite that simple, of course—but the Golden Rule was its essence, a Golden Rule to be practiced not merely in church on Sundays but seven days a week.

And Missionism, as preached by Henri Dubois, was sweeping the country. Dubois had received more than fifty thousand dollars in spontaneous gifts from the lecture the night before—and before noon that day. Yet he felt unable to spend it in support of his movement lest such spending should lend aid to possible smears of fraud and graft later. And Dubois needed two millions. He wanted the bank to use his huge backlog of contributions as collateral on a loan.

"It will save you many times that sum," he had said, leaning forward and resting a forearm on Justin's desk. "Consider—Missionism's widespread adoption will mean cooperation rather than competition. It will mean that, instead of wasteful conflict between selfishly warring groups—say of contractors versus unions—you'll have voluntary union. It will mean, to take a specific instance...."

Justin had been, was still, of more than half a mind to grant the evangelist what he asked. For Missionism was catching on, would soon be sweeping not the country but the world. Yet Corinne Forrester, Dubois' woman, had come back later to ask Justin to refuse the loan.

Dark, slimly flamboyant, a smoker of dark Cuban cigarettes, Mrs. Forrester was a factor to be reckoned with. She had left her gloves—deliberately, he suspected—had returned for them and said, "Mr. Justin, I have loved Henri Dubois for more years than I intend to admit. Until recently he has loved me as well.

"Now, thanks to Missionism, I am losing him. I gave up a perfectly good family and home and husband for Henri—but I cannot compete with millions of rivals. I'm not an ingenue any longer and I am not the sort of woman who can exist for long without a man."

"This hardly seems to concern—" he had begun.

And, dark eyes disturbingly fixed on his, she had said, "Mr. Justin—you're not the sort of man who should live long without a woman. There are a hundred little signs—restlessness, too-rigid control, vast energy uncompensated." Then, rising, "I shall call you tomorrow at five. And perhaps...."

Justin had been in a foul mood since. He came out of abstraction to realise that Jack Fellowes had repeated his question about the evangelist, said, "What sort of fellow is he? I'd say the oddest thing about him is his very lack of oddities."

"Hmmm." Fellowes was definitely interested. "Did you get much impression of repressive influences, Charley?"

"I'm no psychiatrist, Jack," said Justin, "but I'd say no. He was quiet—yes. But he didn't have any trouble expressing himself. More intellect than emotion-dominated."

"And you say you're no psychiatrist," said Fellowes. "Charley, if you weren't a damned good one you'd never be able to hold down the job you do at the bank."

"Can't you two talk anything but shop?" Marie asked irritably. She stood up, added, "This dreadful Dubois man—I don't see why we have to have reformers anyway. The world would be all right if some people weren't always trying to change it."

"Change is the natural order," Justin said mildly.

"Only because men like this Dubois make it so," said Marie sharply. And, to Jack Fellowes, "I'll be ready in five minutes."

Justin waited till she had left, then said, "You know, Jack, this is charmingly old-fashioned. You and I having a drink together while the woman who has us both in her clutches prepares for the evening."

The psychiatrist winced. "You know, Charley, you can be alarmingly frank at times," he said. "That wasn't funny."

"I know it wasn't," Justin told him. "Nothing about Marie is ever funny. She considers a sense of humor practically subversive. How are you getting along with her—professionally?"

Fellowes shrugged, said, "Nowhere, professionally or personally. What's more I suspect you know it, Charley."

"Let's just say I guessed." Justin reached for the bottle to refill his glass, added, "I know Marie. Since she has no intention of facing facts you'll never get out of the batter's box professionally. Personally? Well, she has no intention of giving me any grounds for divorce. Not that I wouldn't appreciate some, Jack."

The psychiatrist said, "Charley, there's just one sort of human that absolutely baffles a man in my profession—that's an absolutely sane man."

"Oh, come, Jack," said Justin. "All sanity is relative."

"That's why it's so damned baffling when we find it." Fellowes lifted his glass. "Here's to the one and only sane man I ever met."

Marie, coldly magnificent in ermine, with bits of silver-leaf glittering in her blond hair, appeared in the doorway. She said, "Jack, I'm ready." She didn't seem to mind at all that Justin wasn't going.

II

Charles dined alone on a pickup meal and went to bed early. Undressed, in his third-floor bedroom, he scratched a naked stomach that, at forty-one, was beginning to show a faint bulge, noted a more marked bulge in a side pocket of the jacket he had just removed and hung up.

He dug out its source—an odd little gadget, nicknamed the "spider," which he had shown to Henri Dubois and Corinne Forrester that afternoon when they were in his office. It had happened to be on his desk. Supposed to spray a transparent waterproof film over any surface, its backers were seeking money to promote it as a substitute for raincoats and umbrellas.

There was a hitch, of course—it clung abominably to human hair and for this reason, since it was chiefly intended for women, its financing was still highly problematical. But it had certain other uses, according to the testing laboratories, which its inventor seemed to have missed. Justin must, he decided, have stuck it into his pocket instead of back on his desk. He wondered what it would be like to plaster himself with a form-fitting suit of invisible pajamas.

Then, regretfully, he laid it on the bedside table and got into orthodox nightwear. After settling himself with twin pillows, he reached for a well-worn copy of Esther Forbes' Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, began to browse through its vivid pages.

Again Old Boston came to life. Church bells pealed, small colored sweeps carried their brooms through the cobbled streets, fish vendors shouted the merits of their wares.

Contrary to the bowdlerizations of nineteenth century historians, there was little of the Puritan in Boston life two centuries ago. Chaperons were unheard of north of Spanish territory and the powerful rum of Medford and Newburyport was the staple festive drink of a generation which would have considered cola depraved.

According to a young rhymester of the period, describing a party "where kisses and drams set the virgins aflame"—

The chairs in wild order flew quite round the room,

Some threatened with fire brands, some with a broom,

While others, resolved to increase the uproar,

Lay tussling the girls in wide heaps on the floor.

Eighteenth century Boston, Justin decided, would hardly have been a happy home for inhibitions. He tried to conjure up a vision of one of the merry maids of the period, a girl as warm and charmingly devilish as his Marie was chill and repressed.

She would not, he decided, have been beautiful according to Hollywood standards. But her features would be the more intriguing for their very irregularity. Her simple grey or blue dress, no matter how modestly cut, would have failed utterly to hide the vibrant young figure beneath. Her lips and eyes and complexion....

The telephone rang on his bedside table. Justin came out of a wild dream in which Corinne Forrester, wearing a Navajo Indian blanket adorned with Puritan cap, collar and cuffs, was seated firmly on his lap and refusing to get up. It was odd, he thought fragmentarily, how Dubois' woman seemed to have moved into his subconscious. And with her vibrant, almost tangible allure....

Devereux Chandler's urbane tones greeted him. "Hope I didn't wake you up, Charles."

"Not at all," Justin croaked. By the banjo clock on the wall opposite the wardrobe he saw that it was still twenty minutes short of midnight.

"I hoped I'd run into you here at the Ivesons'," Chandler explained. "Marie tells me you were too tired to come."

"That's one word for it," Justin told him. Despite the fact that Chandler, as his wife's uncle and a member of the board of the Ninth National Corporation, held complete power not only over his job but, at least indirectly, over his domestic life, Justin had always been frank, even blunt with him. He had long nursed an idea that this outspokenness with a man used to subservience was one of the reasons he had been able to hold his favor.

But the Bostonian merely grunted and said, "I understand Henri Dubois has been after you for backing."

"That's right," Justin replied.

"Hmmm." Chandler sounded thoughtful. "I suppose a decision now might make or break the man. How do you feel about it, Charles?"

"I'm going to sleep on it," Justin told him.

"That's sound," said Chandler. "I must say I'm beginning to be interested myself. Marie's been talking to me."

"She's dead against him. Oddly enough, for quite different reasons, so is Dubois' own woman, the Forrester female."

"A point to consider, perhaps. I hope I haven't disturbed you, Charles, but I wanted some inkling of how you felt about this matter."

Justin put the phone back on its cradle, picked up the spider half unconsciously. Devereux Chandler, cheerfully sardonic, polite, urbane, was the most difficult human being to interpret correctly the younger man had encountered in his not inconsiderable experience. Why was Chandler seeking preliminary knowledge of the decision?

Until then Justin had thought of it as no more than another job to be handled to the best of his ability, one of a long series of decisions that had brought him to his present position.

Now other considerations began to crowd this basis for judgment. It occurred to him that quite literally the fate of a goodly portion of the world might well depend upon his answer. There seemed little question but that Henri Dubois could not get the money he wanted elsewhere.

Or, if the evangelist should obtain such financing, it might not come in time—or in sufficient quantity. And if Dubois were forced to use the contributions sent by his followers to promote his own cause he might be laying himself open to sordid subsequent court actions that, however unjustified, would inevitably soil his character and reputation in the public mind.

Justin became aware of an ominous physical sensitivity that caused him to feel every thread of the nylon pajamas which encompassed his body, every bit of linen in the fine sheet that covered his bare feet.

Twice before he had felt such heightened awareness—once on the eve of his marriage to Marie, again on the night before he had made his first important decision at the bank. On each occasion it had been the prelude to an event that had shaped inexorably the life that followed.

Now it was sharper than ever before—and he wondered if perhaps it meant that the decision he would have to make on the morrow might shape not only his own life but that of the world. He discovered that he was sweating lightly and that the sweat was cold.

This, he told himself, was nonsense. No matter how far-reaching its results a decision was a decision, to be decided one way or the other, according to the best available facts, thereafter to be abided by whatever happened.

He tossed the whole mess out of his mind, turned off the light, pushed one of the two pillows from beneath his head and rolled over on his right side. He had just remembered how to lick it.

The device dated back to his childhood and adolescence in the Midwest, to his years at college, to the early years of his job. It involved a mixture of all three elements—the small town within commuting distance of a medium-sized city, Harvard and Boston—connected by an odd Toonerville-ish single-track railroad on which ran just two passenger trains a day.

The railroad had been real enough during his childhood—it was, he had recently learned, long extinct, its rusted rails torn up for sorely-needed scrap metal during World War Two. Yet, fifteen years and almost fifteen hundred miles away, Justin could still hear distinctly the asthmatic beep of its steam whistle as it pounded along behind its stubby black engine across the cornfield.

Even in his boyhood the railroad had been dying, its three cars never more than half-full. It had run miraculously through a deep cut in the one hill the countryside boasted, then through woodland clumps and across the river on a wooden trestle, into the larger woods.

Thereafter it had run straight and true to the city—but it no longer ran there in his visualization. Instead, by some strange twist of Justin's geography, it deviated from its straight path to become briefly a part of the subway running beneath Harvard Square.

Thereafter it crossed under the Charles to plunge beneath Boston's Back Bay, never quite becoming a part of the city's subway system. Finally it wound up in a maze of circles between Washington and Devonshire Streets, whence it turned easily for the return journey.

Now, faced with the most important decision of his career, Justin summoned the odd little train to his rescue. To his relief he was easily able to take it through the cornfield to the cut.

But thereafter, it traveled a different path. Midway through the cut Justin realised two things. One, he was the only passenger on the entire train. Two, he was able to see over the sides of the cut, down the fallaway of the hill to the flat countryside beyond.

His range of vision grew and, as he peered through the soot-grimed panes of the windows, he felt a sudden jolt of fear. The train was no longer following the familiar track of his barbiturant fantasy. It was, instead, flying through the air.

Fear became panic as clouds became woolly lambs, far below, then mere streaks and patches of white. He had sudden memory of a movie, taken from a V-2 rocket above White Sands, in which the world twisted and grew small and curved in a matter of seconds.

Then, with a rush of sound never heard on that one-track spur, the train rumbled into a tunnel of darkness, its wheels clacking a samba-beat on rails that could not possibly exist. Coal smoke from the funnel invaded the car and Justin found himself blinking his eyes and coughing. He had to breathe now and the gas was invading his lungs.

His last thought was that it had not been such a happy way to go to sleep after all....

III

Justin awoke with a slight headache. He seemed to be resting on some sort of hospital cot. Even as he sat up he could feel it move slightly beneath him. It was obviously portable. And, while the mattress was comfortable enough, it lacked pad, pillow or covering of any kind. He was, he noted flickeringly, still wearing the blue-piped grey nylon pajamas in which he had gone to bed.

Nor was he in the old house on Louisburg Square. Walls, floor and ceiling of the windowless cubicle around him were all of a neutral composition. Such light as there was was indirect. Evidently, he decided, some sudden sickness had landed him in a hospital room.

At first glance the man who stepped forward from a corner added to the hospital illusion. In knee-length Prince Albert and with grave bewhiskered countenance he looked the picture of a conservative man of medicine. In accents only a little too British to be Bostonian he said, "I was beginning to fear you weren't going to awaken at all."

But as he moved forward it became quickly apparent that this was no twentieth century Boston physician. His hair and whiskers were of much too full and luxurious a cut, the octagonal steel-rimmed spectacles upon his nose much too archaic—as was the upright stiff collar that held his black ascot tie, and his Prince Albert itself.

Justin's eyes ranged downward and froze. For his dignified companion wore neither trousers nor shoes. Below the skirts of his long coat thin shanks protruded, clad only in tight-fitting long drawers, to end in blue morocco slippers with up-pointed Turkish toes. Justin said, not wanting to be too obvious, "How long have I been asleep?"

"It is difficult to tell," said the bewhiskered one. He fumbled beneath his Prince Albert, produced a parsnip of a silver stem-winder, looked at it and shook his head sadly. "My timepiece seems to have stopped utterly since my arrival here."

"All right then," said Justin, running a hand through his close-cut hair, "Where in hell am I anyway?"

"That too is difficult. I believe it is called Belvoir. By the way, I am Dr. Ian Phillips, at your service."

"Then you are a doctor!" Justin exclaimed. "Would you mind explaining what's happened to me?"

"A doctor of philosophy," was the gentle reply. "I was rather hoping that you, sir, were a physician."

"Charles Justin, alleged banker, at your service." Justin swung his legs over the side of his cot, tested the floor, stood up. He discovered he was holding the spider clutched in his right hand, dropped it unobtrusively into his pocket. He must have taken it while falling asleep.

"You must be an American, Mr. Justin," said Dr. Phillips.

Justin, slightly bemused, said, "What? Oh—yes, Boston."

"Remarkable," Dr. Phillips said unexpectedly, "that we should have two Bostonians with us."

"Let's count ten and start over again," Justin told him. "Isn't this Boston?"

"Hardly!" Dr. Phillips' laugh was dry and sharp. "This is Belvoir. As to myself, I was in my diggings in London, taking a doze after tea before marking some tests, when I made the trip here."

Justin made his way to a chair in the corner and sat down heavily. Dr. Phillips said, "Perhaps I'd better get your fellow Bostonian. I don't seem to be doing you much good."

"Perhaps you'd better, doctor—thanks," murmured Justin. He put his head in his hands and tried not to think of what was happening.

A minute or two passed. Then quick soft footsteps sounded and a pleasant voice said in utterly indefinable accents, "Ye mustn't feel so upset, Master Justin—we're all in the same boat."

The girl had heavy brown hair that fell in neat slow ripples well below her shoulders. Like himself she was barefoot and her figure looked enormous in a tentlike white nightgown that covered her from shoulder to ankle. She had fine healthy pink-and-white skin, made intriguing rather than marred by an occasional pockmark, and her eyes were as blue as the waters of Cohasset Bay.

Instinctively, despite a growing conviction that he was utterly mad, Justin scrambled to his feet. He said, "It does take a bit of getting used to—but perhaps you can help."

"That's why I'm here, Master Justin," she said. "Poor Dr. Phillips tells me ye too are from Boston. I must say I do not find ye'r countenance familiar."

Her accent, her phraseology—both were alien. As, come to think of it, was the nightgown she was wearing. Yet it was of a piece with his own pajamas and the dignified Dr. Phillips' lack of trousers. And those pockmarks—Justin studied them, then felt a surge of excitement. He said, "Pardon me for not knowing your name but—"

"Deborah Wilkins, spinster, of Prince Street," she cut in.

"—but," he went on, "would you mind telling me, Miss Wilkins, just when it was that you were brought here?"

"To Belvoir? Why, I retired to my bed on a February evening in seventeen sixty-one, to dream of the great white ship that would carry me far from prosaic Boston to some fine city overseas, instead of which the ship brought me here to Belvoir."

"I'll be damned!" said Justin, stunned not only by the date of Deborah's transfer to Belvoir but by the similarity of her experience to his own.

"Methinks we are all damned," said Deborah Wilkins. "Certes we are not in heaven unless our good pastors have been led sorely astray. And if they have been led astray they must indeed be tools of the devil, which leaves us small chance of salvation."

There was a neat syllogistic logic to her reasoning that brought Justin up short. This girl, who or whatever she might be, possessed both fearlessness and intellect. He said, "You don't seem to be afraid of hell, Deborah."

An unexpected dimple appeared in one smooth cheek. She said, "Thus far there seems little to be afeard of, Master Charles." Then, eying him with frank curiosity, "What sort of attire are ye clad in? I have seen nought like it."

"I might say the same of yours," he replied as frankly.

She blushed. "And ye'r accent—surely 'tis not Boston."

"It has a Midwestern base," he told her. Then, "But yours too is strange, Deborah. You see, I come from a time almost two centuries after yours. And as for my 'attire'—like you I was snatched from sleep to come here. These are what is known as pajamas."

She came forward, fingered the material, said, "They are as fine as silk—yet they are not silk."

"If I told you what they were made of you wouldn't believe me," he said. "It is called nylon, Deborah."

"A strange term," she said thoughtfully. Then with a sudden flash of blue eyes, "Methinks ye make free of my name for a man so young and so recently acquainted."

"I'm not so young," he told her, "I'm forty-one. As for calling you by your first name, if you object...."

"Nay, to what avail?" she countered, blushed again, added, "Surely ye must be an agent of the devil himself, Master Charles—ye look no older than twenty-five or six."

"In two hundred years we have learned to take rather better care of ourselves," he added gently. "We don't age quite so fast."

"And ye'r women?" The question was blunt.

Justin said, "And our women too. Few of them show much age until they are in their forties—some not even then."

"Methinks I would appreciate ye'r time—if indeed it is ye'r time," she told him. "But come—ye must be hungry."

Her remark made Justin conscious of the headache that was plucking at his temples. He said, "Come to think of it I'm starved."

"Then follow me, Master Charles," she said, moving toward the doorway. There she paused, turned to study him again, added, "But surely ye cannot be forty-one. Ye look such a young man."

"I'll see what I can do," he replied. "Lead on, MacDuff."

He followed her down a long corridor, off which other cubicles opened, similar to that in which he had so recently awakened. And he noted that her walk was light and graceful, that her ridiculous tent of a nightgown swayed as she moved to suggest her figure filled only a fraction of it.

He said, "Why did you starch that ghastly gown, Deborah?"

Without turning she replied, "Mother made me do it—she is much afeard of my worldiness."

A couple strolled out of one of the cubicles ahead of them. The man wore the brief belted tunic of an Ancient Roman. His hair was short, his broken-nosed Latin features bordered by what looked like gigantic spit-curls.

With him was a dark-skinned woman, veiled to her liquid black eyes, her figure hidden more effectively than Deborah's by a voluminous bright silk sarong. Both of them waited while Deborah and Justin walked past them, regarding Justin with curious dark eyes. The Roman said, "Ave."

Culling a forgotten scrap of Latin from his schoolday memories, Justin replied, "Pax vobiscum," saw the Roman start with surprise. "Who are they?" he asked in an undertone of the strangers who had let them go ahead.

"Belvoir is full of their like—and even odder," was the girl's reply. "But ye will soon see for ye'rself."

"Have you been here long, Deborah?" Justin asked her.

"'Tis hard to say," was her reply. "Longer than Dr. Phillips or yourself—not as long as most of the others. Dr. Phillips says we have been waiting for ye, Master Charles—that soon we shall go home."

Curious, thought Justin, when she frowned slightly at mention of returning home. It seemed unlikely that any girl could be happy in this strange place.

They came to a large chamber filled with long tables. Running down the center of each was a sort of wall. Seated at perhaps half of the hundreds of modernistic comfortable-looking chairs was the oddest collection of humans Justin had ever seen.

He noted one hirsute low-browed male, clad in a mangy looking hide, who seemed scarcely more than a giant ape. This specimen, with fierce concentration, was gnawing greedily on the scarcely-charred thighbone of a medium-sized animal without benefit of tableware. Beside him sat a squat mocha-skinned female whose skinny pendulous-breasted body was entirely innocent of clothing.

He saw a gentleman in ruffled shirt and magnificently brocaded waistcoat of the period of Louis XIV, who was methodically eviscerating a small roasted bird. Beside him, clad in what Justin could only conceive of as a shift, a lady in a towering headdress sipped champagne from a crystal goblet.

There were others, including an apparent Egyptian, clad in the briefest of loin-cloths with a marcelled spade-beard that recalled the statues of the Pharoahs—a cluster of Orientals of various shapes and skin colors and degrees of disarray, busy with chopsticks—a Hindu temple dancer whose modest demeanor denied her professional carnality.

Justin said, "It must be quite a job supplying each of these people with the food they want."

"'Tis truly remarkable, Master Charles," the girl told him. "Faith, never in my wildest dreams have I conceived of such a miracle."

"I wish you wouldn't call me 'Master Charles'," Justin said.

"And how else should I call thee?" she inquired.

"It's that 'Master' business," he explained. "In my time it means a boy, not a man. Just as 'Mistress', in my era, implies a kept woman rather than a wife."

"Mast—Charles, ye abash me!" she murmured demurely although twin blue devils danced in her eyes. "Here we are."

She had led him to the far end of one of the long tables, at which a small cluster of oddly assorted folk were seated. One of them, a rough-looking little specimen, who seemed to be wearing nothing but a shirt of slightly rusted chain mail, was slashing a large chunk of half-raw meat.

A plump motherly-looking grey-haired lady, clad in a petticoat from the waist down and nothing at all above, smiled at Deborah over her suet pudding and said in English even odder and quainter than Deborah's own, "Good day, Mistress Wilkins, be this the other guest?" And, when the girl nodded, "Truly a comely cod!"—to which Justin, quite aware of the phallic meaning of the word, felt himself blush.

"Ye must not mind her," Deborah whispered, directing him to a chair. Then, mischievously, "'Tis no more than truth—and she means it well."

"It's okay," said Justin. "Just a bit unexpected. Hello!"

At the base of the barrier, opposite his chair, his name was printed in gilt letters. He glanced to his left, saw that in front of Deborah's chair, in slightly more antique-looking script, her name was inscribed. She caught his glance, nodded toward the barrier, told him in a whisper, "'Tis but a trick. Ye speak ye'r wish into the hole and then lift it from the wall. Like this, see...?"

She leaned forward, said softly, "Prithee, fetch me a plate of turkey with brown sauce and wild chestnuts—white meat only. And a large tankard of ale."

Justin blinked, saw Dr. Phillips waving a friendly fork at him from a half-dozen places further along, decided to do things up right. He said, "One double Gibson, extra dry."

As he spoke a light went on in front of Deborah, disclosing the apparently solid barrier to be transparent. A window, reminiscent of similar windows in a New York City automat, opened and from a compartment behind it the girl took out her food and put it on the table in front of her. She had been given a savory-smelling well-heaped plate of turkey, gravy and chestnuts, a fine pewter tankard of ale, along with antique-appearing knife, fork, spoon and ringed napkin.

She picked up her fork, gestured toward his own section of the barrier. He followed her motion, saw an enticingly pale dry Gibson awaiting his disposal. Taking it out he toasted Deborah, who lifted her tankard, then asked, "Prithee, what is that?"

"A cocktail," he told her. He pushed it toward her, ordered another for himself. Deborah sipped it, made a face, then sipped again.

"Why!" she exclaimed. "'Tis like strong rum! I must tread warily or my poor head will spin like a windmill."

"Right," he told her. Finishing his drink he ordered himself a small steak, medium rare, with mushrooms, soufflé potatoes and a tossed green chef's salad. They arrived in seconds, perfectly done and equipped with the finest sort of silverware, bearing his initials.

He had just about decided that Belvoir, real or otherwise, was a promisingly pleasant if bizarre place, when a rasping voice filled the hall, saying, to Justin's ears at any rate, "Now hear this—now hear this. Your final briefing will follow immediately. Please return to your chambers and await further orders!"

IV

Alone in his cubicle Justin longed for a cigarette. Fortunately he did not have long to wait. The man who entered with brisk graceful steps wore soft grey flannels, a comfortable blue shirt and gay but not loud figured silk tie. He glanced quizzically at Justin, drew a silver cigarette case from a jacket pocket, offered one to Justin, took one himself, lit both with a silver lighter.

He sat down on the chair in the corner, said, "I'm Ortine—I run Belvoir. I suppose you're wondering what this is all about, Mr. Justin."

"That," said Justin, "is understatement, Mr. Ortine. I suppose I must have lost my mind."

"On the contrary," said Ortine with the trace of a smile, "you have been brought here because you are absolutely sane."

"That's a relief—or is it?" Justin countered. There was, he thought, something epicene, almost effeminate, in his host's gestures, in his voice. Furthermore, there was something familiar in his handsome, rather delicate cast of feature—a familiarity that played elusive hide and seek with Justin's memory.

"I shall try to make my explanation brief as possible," said Ortine. "However, Mr. Justin, you are sane—and you are not dreaming. You have been brought to Belvoir in thoroughly material fashion."

"Just what and where is this Belvoir of yours?" Justin asked bluntly.

"This is not going to be easy to explain to you, Mr. Justin. To most of the others I merely call it heaven or fairyland—and that suffices. But you and your era are a little too informed for such credulity.

"Belvoir, of course, it not its real name—and actually it isn't a place at all—at least not in your terrestrial meaning of the word. I suppose you'd call it a ship."

"A ship!" Justin exploded. Then, to humor his host, "I suppose you mean some sort of space-ship."

"After a fashion it's a space-ship—but my vessel doesn't actually inhabit your concept of space." Ortine still looked troubled. "Some of your science fiction authors have come closest to it with something they call sub-space."

"I'm afraid I can't follow you there," said Justin.

"Try to think of the vast areas of so-called empty void between the galaxies," Ortine went on patiently. "Try to consider that these areas are no more empty than the areas between the stars visible to you in your telescopes. My universe might be called the other side of the universe—if you can think of the universe as a coin."

"I understand—a little," Justin told him. "Now tell me—why are you here? And why do you want me?"

Ortine flicked ashes on the floor, which immediately absorbed them. He said, "I have been sent here to prevent your planet from destroying itself and probably forcing your sun into nova.

"For while your sun is not a great star it lies in an area correspondent to one of the most congested and thickly settled areas of my universe. It is not supposed to go into the nova stage for some billions of your years. Should it happen in the near future—as it will if my mission is unsuccessful—something like catastrophe will result on the opposite side of the coin."

"How can you be sure it will happen?" Justin asked quietly.

"Because, thanks to certain differences of structure between our universe and yours, we can follow the whole stream of your time," Ortine replied matter-of-factly. "Your past, of course, is not dead—you have already seen proof of that here on Belvoir—nor is your future yet unborn. In short, the past still exists, the future does exist."

"In that case," said Justin, "Why don't you give up and go home?"

"Because"—Ortine's sincerity was self evident—"neither your past nor your future is immutable. Needless to say, we do not believe in altering history on any world unless it must be done to avert needless disaster. It is my mission to alter both Earth's past and its future by effecting the course of the key events of your history."

"It sounds like rather a large order," said Justin.

"It is," Ortine replied simply. "While our time-span is far different from yours—I suppose I have existed for several thousand of your years—it is the first such assignment in my memory or that of my mentors."

"Then you cannot follow your own past and future," said Justin.

"Unfortunately not." Ortine looked unhappy. "No species has ever been able to do that reliably. We are all trapped within the span of our own time. But yours is so infinitesimal to us that we are able to read it easily—just as your scientists can read and to some extent predict the lives of fruit-flies."

"Not a very happy simile," Justin put in.

"My apologies," said Ortine. "In the matter of size between us there are no such discrepancies. It is wholly a matter of temporal maladjustment. And it is my theory that the shortness of your life-span is responsible for the self-inflicted doom that threatens not only your world and your sun but a number of ours."

"You might have something there," said Justin. "But what in hell do you want us to do about it? Live forever?"

"It is precisely because you cannot," Ortine told him, "that I have been sent to rescue you from your predicament—with the help of each of you summoned here, of course."

"And just how do I figure in this mission of yours, Mr. Ortine?" Justin inquired.

"You have been brought here because a fanatic named Dubois appealed to you for financial backing during what seems to you to be yesterday afternoon," Ortine informed him.

"So ..." said Justin thoughtfully. "He's that important?"

"He will be," replied the other, "if you give him the money he is seeking—and I have received information that you intend definitely to come to some sort of arrangement with him."

Justin said, "I must say, everyone seems to know more about my intentions than I do myself. But let's say I do arrange to let him have some money—just how is that going to drive the sun into nova?"

"Henri Dubois," Ortine stated, "is perhaps the most dangerous type of madman that exists. His madness takes the form of a fanatical oversimplification of the virtues through which mankind can hope to attain happiness."

"I have already considered that angle," said Justin.

"I feel certain you have," said Ortine. "However, it is not Dubois' oversimplification that represents peril to your world and mine—it is his persuasive ability to bring others to act as he would have them act, without thought of the consequences."

"Then you think," Justin said curiously, "that if mankind follows the Golden Rule it will destroy the world—how?"

"Because," Ortine replied patiently, "neither Dubois nor any other man will be able to get enough people to do as he wishes. Yet if he obtains backing from you he will be able to spread his doctrine to enough people so that the natural enemies of the Golden Rule will be forced to take action against them.

"Consider then the results of a Missionist success, Mr. Justin. It would mean that your world would be torn asunder by a hot war—a war in which biological techniques and fission weapons must inevitably, within a five-year period, send a blasted planet spinning into the sun. Result—nova and catastrophe in my own universe."

"You seem to have it all figured out," said Justin.

"That is what will happen if you give Henri Dubois the backing he asks," Ortine continued. "Now consider what will happen if you do not. Take my word for it, other banks will be slow to give him credit once the Ninth of Boston has turned him down. He will be forced to use the contributions sent in by his followers to maintain himself. Consequently, before he has become too dangerous to the Marxist leaders, they will be able to whittle down his prestige through a carefully planned series of smears and exposés."

"And this will be good for the world?" Justin asked.

"It will prevent its destruction," Ortine told him. "It will give sane men, men of reason rather than emotion, men like yourself, Mr. Justin, opportunity to get the reins of power more firmly into their hands."

"Has it occurred to you, Mr. Ortine," said Justin, "that without an occasional 'madman' like Dubois humanity might still be picking its teeth with pieces of flint in a cave?"

"My dear Justin," came the urbane reply, "your question is perfectly logical—however, to one who has viewed the entire panorama of human history, the answer is all too simple. The history of humanity has always been a bloody and stupid one. Men are always struggling because of some shibboleth, killing others who disagree with their pathetic beliefs."

"Not a pretty picture," mused Justin. Then, rallying, "But it is only part of the story. Men have done great things as well."

"True," replied Ortine easily, "and they would have been free for greater accomplishments if they hadn't been oppressed down the ages by a series of influential madmen. Some of them, of course, were foiled by the sane men around them. Consider Napoleon, Charles the Twelfth, Julius Caesar, Aaron Burt, Bolivar, Joan of Arc, Adolph Hitler.

"Each was mad, each came close to altering the world to his own pattern of lunacy at tremendous cost—yet each, at some critical point in his career, was checked by a man of sanity."

"All of them were insane?" Justin asked, surprised.

"Certainly—by what you would term modern psychiatric standards," said Ortine. "Napoleon, Caesar, Bolivar, Joan of Arc and Hitler were all epileptics with paranoiac complications, Burr and Charles straight megalomaniacs.

"Save for the sanity of Talleyrand Napoleon must have united Europe under his imperial sway. Peter the Great wrecked Charles the Twelfth when he apparently had the western world at his feet. A sane Cassius brought about Caesar's death, Jefferson smashed Burr, businessmen of Peru foiled Bolivar, an English bishop saw through Joan, Winston Churchill foiled Hitler. In each instance it was a close thing."

"I'll go along with that," said Justin. "But if the madmen have been foiled, why try to foil them again?"

"I," said Ortine, "am concerned with the madmen who were not foiled—or not foiled in time. Such maniacs include, among alas too many others, Alexander, Mohammed, Peter the Hermit, Pizarro, Martin Luther, your friend Dubois as well...."

"Alexander was killed by peritonitis in his thirties," said Justin doubtfully.

"He did not die in time," replied Ortine firmly. "Not before the terror of his name was so implanted in the Near and Middle East that for centuries it caused Asiatics to be over-whelmed by a shadow of fear they could not hope to overcome with reason."

"You've certainly been taking a dive into our history," said Justin uneasily. "I don't suppose you'd tell me how that is done."

Ortine said, "Gladly—but I fear my explanation would do you little good. The process involves an alteration of atomic structure that can be achieved only in the sub-space that is my native universe."

Then, abruptly, "I hope, however, that the explanation I have given you, along with the fact that I consider your current problem sufficiently important to bring you to Belvoir, has revealed to you how vital it is that you refuse Henri Dubois any important funds."

"It has raised another factor worth consideration," said Justin equivocally. "I have noticed that you bring people to Belvoir only in their sleep. Would you object to telling me why?"

"Hardly." There was a rueful twist to Ortine's half-smile. "I am not, in any real way, possessed of what you would term supernatural equipment. What may look like magic to you is nothing more than a demonstration of the realities of my own universe."

"But...?" said Justin.

"But"—Ortine grimaced—"I have no actual control over the minds or bodies of human beings. Not on their own world at any rate. Incidentally I have no control over your mind here on Belvoir, though actually, while here, you are in my type of space rather than your own.

"However I can attain control over you when you are in the process of drifting into sleep—and then only when the distraction of some impending judgment has lowered your normal psychological defenses. In your instance, as in all others, I was forced to enter your mind through a dream—but surely you remember...."

"It scared hell out of me."

Ortine looked regretful. "Unfortunately, there is a slight narcosis necessary to effect a transfer from your atmosphere to that of Belvoir," he said. "It usually takes the form of unconsciousness, as far as the subject is concerned, most easily connected with the dream involved. A number of more primitive folk seem to have imagined themselves drowned or consumed by wild beasts or fire, poor devils."

"And you say all of this—of this odd assortment you have brought here—is made up of sane men and women?" Justin asked.

"My dear Justin"—Ortine looked pained—"you must be more tolerant. Mind you, these people have been culled from all of human history. You must have seen quite a variety at mealtime."

"Quite," replied Justin. "Incidentally, your feeding arrangement is ingenious to put it mildly. How do you know I shan't take advantage of it to get drunk and foul up the assignment."

Ortine laughed openly. "My dear Justin," he repeated, "you are a sane man."

"Mr. Ortine," said Justin, "from what one or two of the others have said since I got here I am the last one they are waiting for."

"That," said Ortine, rising from the chair, "is entirely true."

Justin gulped as the implication sank home. If he were the last it meant, as his host had already implied, that the sands of Earth, or at least of human existence on Earth, had about run out. It implied that his was the ultimate decision upon which the final fate of the planet hung.

"Naturally," said Ortine pleasantly, "I shall give you time to become used to following the course you must take. You are perfectly free to roam Belvoir for the next few hours...."

V

With Ortine gone Justin paced his cubicle, trying to digest what he had been told and wishing he had asked his host to provide him with a supply of smokes.

His dream was getting seriously out of hand. Or was it a dream? It occurred to him that if not a dream it must be madness. And then, for the first time, he began to wonder if the journey by train through space, if Belvoir and its inhabitants, especially Ortine and the assignment he had outlined, might not be real after all.

Even before the gates of fantasy closed behind him, Justin had recognized that his decision to back Henri Dubois could well be the key to the entire future of Missionism. As such it was entirely possible that upon that decision might depend the immediate future of humanity—if humanity still had a future.

Perhaps some of these others had played similar roles in their otherwise inconspicuous lifetimes. He made up his mind to find out, walked toward the door of his cubicle, almost bumped into the trouserless Dr. Phillips, who chose that moment to enter.

"I was about to go looking for you," Justin told him. "Come in."

Phillips entered. He said, "I take it you have been visited by our host—like the rest of us."

"You mean he visited you at the same time he was talking to me?" Justin asked, surprised.

"He is a gentleman of remarkable abilities," Dr. Phillips told Justin, sitting down as he spoke on the chair. "Of course it is some form of mass-mesmerism."

"Possibly," Justin replied cautiously.

"It can scarcely be anything else," Dr. Phillips informed him. "Until my enforced visit to Belvoir I have been inclined to regard all such marginal devices as fraudulent. Now...."

"It could have been something in the food," Justin suggested. "But that's a technicality, doctor. What interests me is the nature of your assignment—if you don't mind telling me about it."

Dr. Phillips laughed—a shrill bark of embarrassment. He said, "Not at all, Justin, not at all. I'm a university don, you know." He sighed. "Fusty sort of work but it maintains me. At the moment I've been serving as temporary dean of admissions. When I retired for my nap"—he looked with more puzzlement than abashment at his trouserless shanks—"I was on the eve of tackling a batch of applications for the new semester. Beastly repetitious sort of work." He sighed again.

"And Ortine has asked you to grade some student's paper in a certain way for the good of the world?" Justin asked eagerly.

Dr. Phillips blinked behind his spectacles. "My word!" he exclaimed. "How'd you know that?"

"I didn't," Justin told him drily. "I merely surmised it from the nature of my own assignment. Could you give the details?"

"Certainly, Justin, certainly." Dr. Phillips paused to check his memory. Then, "It was a black chap—a Hindustani, a most repulsive little fop. His record and paper were excellent of course—but there's more than marks to a university, what?"

"Oh quite," said Justin. "Would you care to tell me his name?"

"Not quite proper, is it?" Dr. Phillips looked distressed. "But I suppose there's small point in discretion. Chap's name was an odd one." He looked distressed, added a trifle uncertainly, "Believe it was Mohammed or something like that. Last name was like that river in India where the Hindus all take their annual bath."

Justin said, "Mohammed Ganges? It would be Mohandas K. Ghandi, wouldn't it?"

Dr. Phillips regarded him with admiration, said, "Bless my soul—that was it! Though how on earth you ever knew it...."

"He made quite a mark for himself in the world during the first half of my century," Justin told him. Then, "One more question, doctor—what does Ortine want you to do about him—flunk him?"

"My dear fellow, how can I flunk a chap who isn't even a student?" Dr. Phillips' tone was mildly reproachful. "No, all he wants me to do is refuse him admission to the university. I was already of half a mind to do so anyway. Can't think why Ortine should go to all this trouble."

"Probably he just likes to be sure," said Justin. Within him a glow of fresh exultation was forming. Each of them had been brought here because, at some time or other, he had made a decision favorable to one of the so-called madmen.

But Phillips was asking him about his own mission. Justin told him as briefly as politeness allowed, was pleased when Dr. Phillips seemed to consider it unimportant compared to his own task. His visitor rose, evidently prepared to leave, and Justin said, "Doctor, where can I find our mutual friend Miss Wilkins? I'd like to know what her problem is?"

"A very sad case indeed, poor young woman," replied Dr. Phillips, shaking his head mournfully. "Perhaps the company of a young man like yourself will cheer her. Three doors down to your left. You can hardly miss it."

Justin found Deborah lying on the movable cot in her cubicle. Her head was resting on her hands, her blue eyes staring frankly at the ceiling. Her bare feet were crossed and, starch or no, her absurd nightgown had hiked up sufficiently to reveal a pair of lower legs both shapely and attractive.

He stood in the doorway, staring at her, and wondering at the nature of an assignment that could reduce her native gaiety to what was evidently a mood of deep misery. Some small sound made her aware of his presence. She turned her head to look at him, gasped, sat up quickly and pulled her gown down over her ankles with an automatic gesture.

"Nice legs," he told her with a smile. "It's a shame to hide them."

For a moment he thought she was going to be angry. Then humor danced in her eyes and the dimple reappeared in her cheek. But she said quite gravely, "I've often thought so myself. But mother would birch me for the very thought." Then, regarding him with interest, "Now I know ye lied when ye told me your age."

"Since when has age been any stop to a man's admiring a pretty leg—or a pretty girl?" Justin countered.

She giggled at that, then without warning became intensely serious once more. Somberly she said, "To my misfortune age in a man is no such barrier. Would that it were!"

"I gather your assignment has to do with an older man then," said Justin, unexpectedly seized with a pang of jealousy.

She said, "I have no wish to discuss it."

"My apologies," he told her. Then, "I've been granted permission to see a few sights. I wish you'd appoint yourself my guide."

"Gladly," she replied, shedding her gravity once more as she stepped down to the floor. "Strange though it be, Belvoir is a place of surpassing marvels."

"That I'll believe," Justin told her.

They emerged at the foot of a gently sloping ramp upon an immense mall that reminded Justin of one of the carefully tended semi-tropical gardens outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

Resisting the tug of Deborah's hand, Justin paused to study the colorful vista carefully. At first the soundlessness troubled him—till he noted that no bird sang upon any of the branches or floated upon the lagoons. He looked upward, saw that fluffy clouds crossed endlessly a pale blue sky—as against a theatrical backdrop.

His sophisticated gaze found little trouble in discovering them to be mere aspects of a moving picture sky—and now and again, behind the illusion of space they created, he was able to discern the shadow of immense mechanical installations, whose hugeness and intricateness quite took his breath away. Evidently Ortine had spoken no less than the truth when he said that Belvoir was in truth a ship.

"Charles—Charles!" He realized abruptly that a worried Deborah was calling to him.

He told her, smiling reassurance, "I was just trying to figure something out. I'm sorry."

"Ye need not be," she replied. "Faith, I too was struck dumb when first I beheld the splendor of this garden. Come, let us explore its reaches."

They walked on soft warm turf that gave gently beneath their bare soles through what Justin decided must be a fair approximation of the average man's conception of paradise.

However, the inmates of this artificial Eden were, to Justin at any rate, more Rabellaisian than Godly. They watched a panting satyr chase a giggling nymph around and around the bole of a giant tree—but the satyr was a plump balding gentleman half-clad in red and yellow motley, while his quarry was a plumper if less bald damsel whose complex and tight-drawn corset and shift promised that while the chase would be brief, its consummation would prove to be appallingly difficult.

"'Twill offer poor Wilmot more woe than a chastity girdle," Deborah said, laughing. "Milady of Warwick is the only one of us he can catch."

"You mean that old goat has actually chased you?" Justin asked.

"And prithee, why not?" she countered coolly.

Justin grinned ruefully. He said, "Well, I hope you didn't let him catch you."

"That I have ne'er allowed any man," she replied quietly and a shadow of sadness returned to haunt her fascinating face.

They saw other bizarre sights in the Belvoir garden and Justin was amazed, not to say appalled, by the casual sophistication with which Deborah either ignored or found amusement in what were to him appalling spectacles. He kept reminding himself, other times—other customs, but he was relieved when she drew him into a secluded arbor at the far end of the half-mile garden.

There, without warning, she turned to him, put her arms about his neck and lifted her soft full lips to his. As he kissed her and his arms and body discovered to the full what the starched deceptiveness of her ridiculous nightgown concealed, Justin felt a sudden surge of desire such as had not assailed him in years.

He recalled, unbidden, what Corinne Forrester had said about his need for a woman, thought briefly of the purgatory in which his wife's frigidity had held him, then stopped thinking about anything but the sweetness of this unexpected and utterly welcome moment.

Later, when some degree of sanity had returned to both of them, Deborah said softly, "Prithee do not think me a light maid, Darling Charles, but I fear we have little time and it was vital to me that I give myself to a man of my choice."

"Debby dear," he replied, ignoring for the moment the implications of her remark, "I think you're unbelievable. Being with you, holding you like this, is utterly fantastic—for in my own mind I have long been in love with a girl of your own time and city."

"Tell me her name," Deborah said fiercely, "and I'll scratch out her eyes when I get back."

He laughed gently, replied, "She had no name, Debby dear—I made her up myself. And now she is Deborah Wilkins."

For that she kissed him and said, "But why, Darling Charles, should ye dream of a girl of my time—and my Boston? In truth, 'tis a horrid dirty town."

"You may not realise it, dear," he told her, "but you live in one of the most fascinating towns, in one of the most fascinating times of history."

"Ye speak madness!" she cried.

"I speak truth—what in my time is history," he replied. "Hasn't Dr. Phillips told you something of what happened?"

"In truth he sought to but I failed to credit him," she replied. "Ye mean, that in ye'r time, Darling Charles, our colonies will have their own king?"

"They'll have no king at all," he told her. He tried to explain something of the Revolution but so ingrained in her was the idea of monarchy that he finally gave it up and asked her to tell him what it was like to live in eighteenth-century Boston.

"'Tis mostly cold and heat and discomfort compared to life here in Belvoir," she said slowly. "Always is something lacking for our ease. When the river and harbors freeze so that we may glide over the ice, then never is there sufficient wood for our hearths.

"Come summer and we suffer the heat of hell—save for the governor, with his apartment on Castle Island, where he can enjoy the cool harbor breezes, and the rich with their estates in Milton and Dorchester and even beyond."

"But surely," he protested, "you have your good times. How about Guy Fawkes day, or Cambridge during Commencement Week? How about bundling parties and vaccination parties and all the rest?"

She turned her head away briefly and her eyes were full. "Aye," she replied, "there have been good times and I've had my share. But for me they are over upon my return."

"Is it this assignment Ortine has given you?" he asked her gently.

"Mayhap 'tis a part of my misery," she said.

Justin may have lived a life of enforced semi-celibacy for some years but he was neither a fool nor inexperienced where women were concerned. He thought—Hello—and suddenly a new and warm excitement flared up within him. Despite the suddenness of their passion, despite the fact that she had claimed an ulterior motive in flinging herself into his arms, this girl loved him.

Equally important, he was in love with her.

VI

At their places before the magical barrier on the long table they had two daiquiris apiece, followed with melon and prosciutto, chicken marengo with white wine and grapes, avocado salad and spumoni.

"Indeed," Deborah said dimpling, "if this be the food of thy age, Darling Charles, then Belvoir can be but a small miracle to thee."

He shook his head and replied, "We do have what must seem miracles of living to thee—to you, Debby—but Belvoir is years, perhaps centuries, and billions of miles beyond our reach. So marvelous is it, in fact, that I'm becoming once more persuaded this is all a dream.

"Certainly," he went on softly, "I've dreamed for years of having a girl like you, dear—and you're here and seem to show a certain fondness for me."

"Charles," she said simply, "don't jest about that." She regarded him gravely, then said, "Prithee, Charles, if I be thy dream, then how is it that thou art mine? For surely, never in my deepest sleep, have I e'er dreamed of a man like thyself."

He reached out and touched her and the softness of her flesh, beneath the now-limp nightgown, was as real as the touch of his own. Sudden terror struck him as he accepted emotionally for the first time the fact that Belvoir might not be a substance created by his own subconscious. If Belvoir were real, then he would never see her again.

"Charles darling, are you ill?"

He looked down, discovered that he was gripping the dessert spoon in his fingers as if it were a weapon. He unlocked clamped jaws and said, "Sorry, Debby, I'm okay. Now—I'd like to take a look at the arrangements Ortine has made for our return."

She rose quickly and he followed her out.

The gates to and from Belvoir, she showed him, were directly opposite the cubicles, one to each cubicle. Deborah entered the one opposite her own chamber, revealing a featureless room, just large enough to contain her portable bed. At its far end was an opaque wall.

She shivered, said softly, "I like not this place, Charles. Yet it is through these chambers that all of us were brought to Belvoir, through them that we must make our return journeys. Charles, I am afeard."

"You and me both," he told her. "Come on to my place and let's see if we cannot dope something out."

She looked puzzled by his twentieth-century phrases but went with him dutifully. Before entering he tested the portal opposite his own cubicle, found it exactly similar to hers.

Deborah had to pluck at his sleeve to remind him she was there. She said, "Verily thee are far from me much of the time."

"Not so far," he replied, leading her into his cubicle. At once her soft strong young arms went around him, her lips sought hungrily for his. He summoned the strength to thrust her from him, said, "Not now, honey—we've got a lot of thinking to do and we may not have much time to do it in."

She subsided meekly and sat down beside him on the portable cot. She said, "I too have the same feeling, Darling Charles."

"Listen, honey," he told her after a minute. "You say you have never dreamed of a man like me?"

"How could I?" she countered simply. "In my time no man such as thee exists. Perhaps the king in London Town, or the Crown Prince...."

"Listen, honey—the only chance we have to stay together is to go out of here together on the same bed." He gave the couch beneath them a slap.

"Durst we?" Her voice was tiny but there was a compensating blaze of sudden hope in her blue eyes.

"We'll dare anything," Justin retorted, "because the worst thing that could happen to either of us right now is to be separated. We durst—now the question is, who goes back into whose time?"

"I should love to visit thine era, Darling Charles."

"I'd love to have you," he replied. "But for ten years now I've been wanting to see yours. We're going back to your life together."

"But Charles!" Her eyes grew round with fright. "Ye can't! Think on it—we might awaken in bed together and—"

"Would that be bad?" he asked.

"Nay—but there is my mother. She well might—"

"And what about my wife?" he countered quietly.

She seemed to leap a full foot away from him, her eyes blazing. She whispered, "Charles—you never told me you were married!"

"I'd be a pretty poor man if some woman hadn't picked me out," he replied. "Furthermore, I have not been in love with my wife for a good many years—nor she in love with me."

"But this is horrible!" the girl moaned.

Justin scowled at her, utterly taken aback by her reaction. Other hints she had dropped came back to him, Dr. Phillips' pitying words about her problem. He said, "I take it then that you are involved with a married man in your time."

She flared at him, "Nay, I am not involved—though all about me, even my father, aye, even my mother, seem to wish me on my backside with this horrid old man. They say 'tis for the good of this or the welfare of that that I should give myself to him—me, who cannot stand the stench of his very breath!"

Justin had slipped from the cot. Facing her he said softly, "All the more reason that I should go with you. I can take care of this unwelcome suitor and at least I shall not have a wife in your time for almost two hundred years to come—unless of course I marry you."

"That would be highly improper, not to say felonious," she retorted but he could sense the softening in her voice.

He said, "No more improper than coming to my world and having my wife catch us in bed together. How would you explain that to your sweet New England conscience? Or perhaps we'd better call off the whole thing."

"Nay, Charles," she said simply and stood up and was briefly in his embrace. After a little, her face puckered with worry, "But Darling Charles, how am I to explain thee? And how will ye survive? Ye'll arrive in midwinter in ye'r outlandish costume without a groat to ye'r name."

"Wait a minute." He thrust her from him again and pondered the problems that would face him should he and Deborah actually be successful in their effort to flee Belvoir together.

"Yes, Charles?" she asked him after awhile.

"It'll be all right," he told her, "if we can just get over the hurdle of your parents. I'll need a little money, some clothes."

"Those I can get ye," she replied promptly. "I have a small savings in my cupboard—'tis not much—just what I've saved from dress-making these two years past. And I can get ye some of father's cast-off garments. But what will ye do then, Darling Charles?"

"I'll have my problems, never fear," he told her. "But you seem to have forgotten one thing in my favor—I have lived two centuries in the future, Debby."

"And prithee, how will't avail thee in my time?" she asked him.

"Just this way," he stated confidently. "I know what the course of great events will be in thy—in your time, honey. Once I have obtained the ear and trust of someone with money to speculate I'll be able to take care of myself, never fear."

"And that is work for a man like yourself?" Deborah looked at him doubtfully. "Somehow it seems to me dishonest," she told him. "Ye'r taking unfair advantage."

"And what is fair in love and war?" he countered.

"'Tis a wicked and foolish saying—or so my mother has told me," the girl replied.

"But you'll do it—you darling!" He pulled her close to him and she made no resistance. They were still locked together when a throat was cleared in the doorway.

Dr. Phillips regarded them benignly. "I must say," he remarked, "that compared to some of the lewd sights I have witnessed here in Belvoir, it is refreshing to see a couple as well-favored as yourselves embracing. But that was not the purpose of my visit. I have come to say farewell."

"Then it's coming soon?" Justin asked him quickly.

"Perhaps you two have been too—er—occupied to hear but the five-minute signal sounded a brief while ago. I wish you both good luck."

Deborah broke from Charles, ran to the elderly don and planted a buss on his cheek. He fluttered like a moth, visibly touched, said, "Thank you, my dear," and added quite irrelevantly, "'Twill be a great relief to return once more to my breeches."

"Come quickly!" Deborah whispered when they were once more alone.

He needed no urging, raced on tiptoe behind her to her cubicle. Hurriedly she scrambled onto her portable bed, reaching for Justin as he climbed on from the other side. There was scarcely room for both of them.

She whispered, "Charles, I'm afeard."

"We're together, darling," he whispered back.

She was silent for a brief while. Then she whispered, "Have ye no children?"

"None," he replied. "Marie has no wish to spoil her figure."

For some reason this seemed to dispel both Deborah's jealousy and guilt. She held him closer still and murmured, "Poor Darling Charles. No wonder ye dreamt of other women."

"No wonder ..." he replied, scarcely knowing what he said. For at that moment sleep crept over him irresistibly.

Once again he was in the extinct odd little train, emerging from the choking tunnel. Miraculously, rumpled nightgown and all, Deborah was with him. Her blue eyes were red with smoke and she was coughing and frightened. She managed to gasp, "What is it—what is this horrid thing?"

He held her close and said, "It's a part of my dream, darling."

Even as he spoke and wondered how and why his dream should be dominant it changed. The rectangular windows of the old wooden coach grew indistinct. The car roof seemed to grow dimmer, finally to vanish altogether.

Against the starlit black of space were outlined the spars and ropes and masts and sails of a full-rigged sailing ship. They stood on its gently rocking poop and forward and below Justin could make out the waist and, beyond, the rise of the forecastle and the sharp lift of the sprit from the bow.

He looked at Deborah, saw how the breeze caught her hair and whipped it like some magnificent pennant of brownish gold and saw that she was speaking to him, crying, "This is my dream, Darling Charles—and I like it far better than thine."

"So do I," he replied, over-whelmed utterly by the miracle.

They floated slowly down until the sky once more was blue above them, first a dark unlikely blue, then lighter and increasingly familiar in hue. Once more Justin saw the earth flatten out and the first white woolly clouds appear.

But from then on all trace of similarity with his own dream ended.

They were entering Boston Harbor and in his excitement Justin held Deborah's hand so tightly that she cried out and he relaxed his grip with a murmur of apology.

"Castle William!" he murmured as they swept past the chief harbor fortification, from which an English ensign flapped gaily in the breeze.

Where the South End now rests was only water and, beyond it, the highlands of Dorchester and Nantasket rose in wooded splendor, innocent of the grime of industrial tenements and factories. They rounded a headland and, slowly, Boston itself swam into view.

Justin let out a cry of sheer delight. There was the old city—little more than a large town by twentieth-century standards with its fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants—its numerous spires and church steeples topping its hills, its houses and buildings crowding the wharves to which were moored fishermen, coasters and ocean ships, their masts making an intricate and fantastic pattern against the sky.

Then darkness whirled briefly about them and they seemed to be plucked from the deck of the white ship by a sort of whirlpool. Justin cried out, involuntarily, again felt the firm softness of Deborah's hand pressed against his lips. He was lying on the edge of a bed whose bottom seemed to be spilling over the side.

"Deborah?" sounded a shrill matronly voice from somewhere beyond a door, closed and invisible in the darkness. "Deborah, are ye all right? I thought I heard ye cry out."

"Just a dream, mama. I'm quite all right," the girl called back. There was a nervous silent wait, the sound of scuffling footsteps growing fainter, then the slam of another door.

"I thought surely ye'r outcry would have them all about us," said the girl reprovingly. "Ye'r really here with me after all and methinks ye'll be a great problem, if not my ruination forever."

VII

The long winter night was unrelieved by any hint of dawn when Justin scrambled through a hurriedly-opened window, dropped to the gently slanting roof of a one-storey shed attached to the Wilkins house and slid safely into a deep pile of snow.

Working his way clear to the rutted icy alley that passed for a street, Justin's chief impression was not wonder at the miracle that had actually transported him backward through time into the Old Boston of his dreams. It was a combination of uncertainty, befuddlement and utter physical discomfort.

In the first place the cast-off clothing of her father that Deborah had managed to procure for him from an upstairs hall closet was extremely uncomfortable. Made of coarse homespun it felt like steel wool against his skin. There was no underwear to ease the contact, nor had Deborah thought of any.

A chill east wind from the Bay knifed up the alley and chilled the marrow in his bones. Bitterly he recalled that the climate of north-eastern America had been growing steadily warmer for more than a century in his own time. He had returned to the very depths of the cold era.

Nor was he used to strange and narrow streets, slippery with ice, littered with refuse and utterly without lights. Holding with one hand to the cocked hat Deborah had loaned him, he groped his way with the other stretched out before him.

From the Wilkins house he was to proceed east on Mills Street, past Arch Street, until he came to Long Lane. There he was to turn right until he reached, on the corner to his left, a house, a full storey higher than the structures around it. He was to rap the knocker until a Mrs. Cooper answered and tell her that Sam Wilkins had sent him.

The small "hoard" Deborah had given him clinked in the cloth pouch she had tied round his waist. In spite of his discomfort he felt his thoughts soften at her generosity, as well as at its pitiful smallness. She was, in truth, a lovely thing to happen to any man.

He found the house and banged the heavy brass doorknocker with congealing fingers. After awhile a faint light glimmered through the fan-glass above the door, to be followed by the metallic sounds of a bolt being thrust back. The door opened a crotch and, above a wavering candle, a long-chinned toothless crone peered out at him and said, "What devil's business brings ye to my door at this heathen hour?"

"Mrs. Cooper?" Justin asked, his teeth chattering.

"Aye, that I be," was the wary reply. "And who might ye be?"

"The name is Justin," he replied. "Sam Wilkins sent me here in the hope of obtaining lodging for the night."

"Hmmp—there's little enough left of it," came the sharp reply. "Ye needn't think 'twill gain thee a short fee. That'll be a shilling and tuppence extra for rousing me at such an hour."

Justin willingly disgorged the required sum with rapidly numbing fingers and was led by the grumbling old crone to a small but unexpectedly clean second-floor chamber overlooking the street. With its white-washed walls, small mullioned window, wood fireplace, bureau, bed, table and chair—all these of hard dark maple—and knitted sampler on the wall, it might have been any of thousands of "Colonial" restorations in suburban homes of his own epoch.

Since there was no wood in the fireplace, Justin undressed quickly, glad to be out of his raspy clothing, and crawled naked between sheets almost as rough. But fatigue quickly overcame him and he fell into a dreamless sleep of sheer exhaustion.

He was awakened by a pock-marked mulatto girl who was apparently in the process of changing his chamberpot. She informed him as he rubbed sleepy eyes, "Ye slept through breakfast, Master. Mistress Cooper ast me to tell ye there's a young leddy downstairs to see ye."

Justin got out of bed in a hurry as soon as the slave had left. He let out a gasp as his bare feet struck the icy floorboards, crawled hastily into his ill-fitting clothing. He had to break ice in the basin.

Deborah was awaiting him downstairs in the parlor. Wearing a full-skirted tight-bodiced gown of light blue wool that matched her eyes, with blue-and-white bonnet, she looked to Justin delightfully quaint and breathtakingly lovely. She rose from the settee on which she had been waiting and came eagerly to him.

But when, after a warm kiss of greeting, he sought to embrace her further she danced away, laughing and saying, "Not now, Charles. Ye'll have Mistress Cooper saying dreadful things about me. 'Tis a fine winter's morning outdoors. I came to show ye the sights."

He went upstairs for his own borrowed cloak and by the time he got down she had already donned hers, a warm-looking grey wool wrap with grey woolen mittens to match. Outside the sun was bright and the night chill was off the air. Deborah said, watching her own breath congeal and mingle with his, "I had to come and see that ye made Mistress Cooper's safely. I lay abed and fretted for ye all night long."

"You don't look it," he told her.

Then he looked at the snow-covered city about him. There it stood, the Boston of his studies, of his dreams, the quaint old shops and houses and taverns, many with overhanging eaves and gables, the ancient signs, some fresh, some weathered, the innumerable and oddly-designed weather vanes and chimney pots.

Yet his next impression was one of dinginess. The snow, piled high on either side of the street, looked almost as dirty as snow that had lain for awhile in the side-streets of his own Boston. A narrow passageway had been dug out and even as he and Deborah watched a horse-drawn cart, laden with night-soil, and an ox-cart, evidently proceeding north to market, stood motionless, facing one another, while their drivers indulged in the mutual invective city and countrymen have invoked in like dilemmas since the invention of the wheel.

"What horrid words!" said Deborah, feigning shock. Justin took her arm and they edged past the incipient combatants, about whom a crowd of rough-looking customers was beginning to collect.

A gust of wind caused Deborah's cloak to billow about her and she tugged him away to the half-shelter of the rope-walk, where despite the weather a few hardy souls were engaged in splicing and reeving and other intricate arts of rigging and sailmaking.

A gong rang in Justin's memory. He said, "Where does Sam Adams live?"

"Ye know of him?" she countered, added, "That big run-down house at the next corner. What would ye of Master Adams, Charles?"

"Never mind, honey," he told her but his thoughts were humming. Sam Adams, of course—here was his opportunity, not only to survive in Old Boston, but to do it creditably in Deborah's eyes. Surely the so-called father of the Revolution would not be able to refuse the aid of a man who knew the course of the future.

Anxiety struck him. He said, "You aren't a supporter of the Court Party are you, Debby?"

Her eyes widened in surprise. Then she said, "Nay, not yet—but unless certain folk cease plaguing me in the name of the Colony I shall become so in self-defence."

"Don't switch," he assured her, relieved.

They walked the streets of the Old Town, down Belcher's Lane and the Battery March, whence they could see scarlet-coated soldiers at frigid sentry duty atop the Fort ramparts. They warmed chilling bodies with boiled beef and bacon and steaming buttered Medford rum at Stratton's tavern just off King Street, then on to the Province House toward Beacon Hill.

Look at the palladian gable of that small but stately structure, at the gilded lion and unicorn that adorned its cornices, Justin reflected it looked scarcely younger than when he had paused on his way home in the dusk to survey it a scant sixteen hours—or rather a hundred and ninety-two years—away. If anything, in his own era, it was rather better kept up.

Then they rambled back along Rawson's Lane to Milk Street and Deborah's house, which by daylight proved to be a stoutly comfortable dwelling in obvious good repair. To his surprise Deborah bade him enter. He followed her inside, said, "How are you going to explain me, honey?"

"I'm not," she replied with a flicker of dimple. "There's no soul here but ourselves."

He pulled her close and for a few blissful moments they embraced. Then, again, Deborah pushed him away. He looked at her, said, "What's wrong?"

"Ye must leave quickly," she replied. "I have something to attend to and with ye around I cannot."

"Is it your mission from Ortine?" he asked her.

"If that were all," she replied, "I'd willingly defy Ortine and all the de'ils in hell for ye, Darling Charles—but there is far too much involved."

He argued but to no avail, reluctantly took his leave. By a steeple clock he saw that the afternoon was still young. He might as well, he thought, put his time along to good use. So he made his way directly to the ramshackle doorway of Sam Adams' ramshackled old house.

An immense shaggy Irishman, his face pitted by the universal pockmarks of the era, opened the door to his knock. His free fist was clenched about the handle of a large pewter mug and his accents were slurred as he said, "What have we here?"

"I'd like to speak to Mr. Adams," Justin said.

The giant roared, "Sam! A peasant to see ye—with the voice of a man fro' the moon!"

There was a murmur from within and Justin entered a house whose interior looked as threadbare and ramshackled as its facade. He was taken to a disorderly looking study where a tall red-faced genial-looking man, whose coat was glossy with gravy stains, regarded Justin not unpleasantly and said, "Ye wish to see me?"

"I do," replied Justin, his knees weak. Glancing at the glowering Irishman behind him, he added, "On a matter of some confidence, Mr. Adams."

Adams glanced at his companion and said, "I doubt me much that this honest-looking stranger wishes me ill. Outside, Will."

Memory rang another gong within Justin's head. Will—that could mean only Will Molineux, tough rugged South End mob leader and soon-to-be captain of the town's Liberty Boys, a vital lower-bracket cog in the machinery that ultimately set up revolt against the Crown in Boston.

"Now, Master...?" said Adams inquiringly.

"Justin—Charles Justin," he said. "I must ask you to accept some of my story on its face—otherwise I fear you will find it incredible. However, I think I may be of use to you."

"I'll be glad to hear ye out—if ye take not too long," said Adams, indicating the papers on his desk.

Justin decided to plunge directly into his proposition. He said, "To what use would you be able to put a man who could foretell the future in your behalf?"

Adams' face became hard as flint. He said, "I know not who ye be or whence ye come—but I ha' not the time to sit and listen to such childish prattle."

"Please, Mr. Adams—I shan't take long," Justin put in desperately. "I'm a Bostonian like yourself but I come from a different time—from two centuries in the future to be exact."

Something in the sincerity of his plea won Justin a reprieve. "Very well, Master—Justin—if that be ye'r name. Ye'r accent is odd enough to account for such a story—not that I credit ye with truth for a moment. Since ye know so much of what ye term ye'r past, mayhap ye can tell me something of mine own."

Justin said, "You and your father made the first open attacks on the Crown, following the return of Louisburg to France in seventeen forty-six after its capture by Massachusetts men. You have run through a fine inheritance and are incapable of conducting any sort of business because your interest lies in politics. You graduated several notches higher in your class in Harvard than your young cousin John of Braintree.

"At the moment you are seeking some means of renewing the fight against the Crown. You are in the process of organizing the North and South End mobs of Boston to that purpose, uniting them into a controllable body that will obey your commands. Will Molineux, in the next room, is one of your chief aides...."

"Thus far ye have told me nothing that is not common knowledge." But Adams frowned slightly as he spoke.

"Is it generally known how well you have organized the mobs, Mr. Adams?" said Justin. "Is it generally known that you are counting, perhaps at this very moment, upon the enforcement of Writs of Assistance to re-rouse the opposition to the Crown that has lain dormant so long?

"Is it generally known that your opposition to the mother country is based upon a snubbing you received from a British officer in an ale-house fifteen years ago?"

"Enough, young man," said Adams. "Ye are either what ye say ye are—in which case ye'r a wizard—or ye'r a spy sent here by my enemies to muddle me with poor advice. Ye know too much about me and I know too little about ye. Now get out!"

There was no mistaking the anger in those genial brown eyes as Adams rose to his feet. All at once Justin realised he was going to call Molineux, have him chased out of town, perhaps beaten. After all, there was no police force in the Boston of 1761.

Moving quickly he picked up a heavy paperweight, evidently once an Indian axe-head, that lay atop a stack of foolscap on the desk, and struck Adams on the head with it before he could call for help. The oft-called Father of the Revolution fell forward across his desk. Justin bolted.

Molineux, who had been facing a front window in the other room turned and made a menacing move. "In there!" cried Justin. "Mr. Adams has fainted. I'll get help."

Feeling like an errant coward, Justin fled.

VIII

Behind Justin, moments later, Will Molineux, brandishing his pewter tankard, emerged from Sam Adams' house, roaring his rage and anger. Even as he cut for Long Lane, Justin once again felt a curious undefinable flicker of memory—the same that had troubled him while listening to Ortine—and once before recently on an occasion he could not recall.

For a few brief moments, while Justin slithered up the uneven icy surface of Long Lane, Molineux's shouts were blanketed by the corner buildings. But before Justin had proceeded more than fifty yards past his lodging place of the night before, a rising outcry struck his ears—ominous not only because of its closeness but because it no longer issued from one throat. Evidently Molineux's gang was joining the chase.

To his right the uninviting walls of close-set shops and houses offered no refuge. But to his left the houses were larger and fewer, with stretches of solid wooden fence between. If he could only get through into the inner-block area of yards and gardens, he might be able to cut across them to Arch Street and thence to the Wilkins house.

The hue and cry was growing louder by the moment—his pursuers would emerge in sight of him and the chase would be as good as over unless he did something and did it quickly.

Providentially he stumbled, stretched out a hand, struck a small door in the fence which gave under his weight. With a sobbing gasp of relief Justin lunged through it, shut it behind him, leaned against it, panting, while the sounds of pursuit swept past.

Getting through the various yards and gardens was not easy because of the deep snow. It took him a good fifteen minutes but he finally worked his way through a manure-hole—mercifully the cold weather kept it from reeking—into a barn.

Horses, well wrapped but chilly, stamped in their stalls as he made his way to the front of the building. Justin found a small door, slipped through it and made his way to the snowpile against the Wilkins shed.

Luckily there was no lock on the window of Deborah's room. Justin crawled through it, sick with relief, closed it after him—and promptly skidded on the hardwood floor with a snow-covered heel and crashed into a small table by the bed.

Before he had time to put the table back up Justin heard heavy masculine footsteps on the stairs, heard Deborah protesting, "But I promise ye—there's no one there. It must ha' been the old house creaking."

The bedroom door was wide open. Justin stood there, unable to think of a thing to do. He wondered what sort of man Deborah's sire would be like.

While he waited helplessly, Justin irrelevantly saw the spider lying on the floor, half beneath the bed. He must have left it in his pajama pocket, Debby must have found it and put it on the table he had overturned. Out of sheer reflex action Justin stooped to put it in his pocket.

He rose reluctantly, his eyes first noting a pair of large black shoes with silver buckles, then heavy white hose covering long sturdy legs, grey kneebreeches and waistcoat and a maroon broadcloth coat with silver buttons.

Atop this tall stocky body was a square not-unhandsome face, distinguished by a rather flat nose, a low broad forehead, angry hazel eyes and some of the fieriest red hair Justin had ever seen. The hazel eyes were regarding him even balefully.

"And who in hell be ye?" the newcomer inquired. He swung about as Deborah appeared behind him in the doorway, the back of one hand to her mouth. He said, "Is this some scurvy trick to put me further still in the thrall of my wretched wife?"

"Charles!" Deborah whispered reproachfully. "Ye promised...."

"I know it," Justin replied desperately, "but I had to hide somewhere. There's a mob chasing me through the streets."

"But e'en so ..." the girl began, then hesitated as the faint sound of the hue and cry could be heard from the streets outside.

The red-headed man's voice was sharp as the crack of an Australian bullwhip. He said, "That's Will Molineux!" Then, fiercely, to Justin, "What have ye done to bring Will and his cutthroats on ye'r tail?"

"I had a little trouble with Mr. Adams," Justin murmured.

"So!" The big man took a menacing step toward him. He glanced at Deborah, who appeared stricken, then said, "'Twould appear there is more in this entire episode than meets the eye. Mayhap ye'r one with my wretched wife and her wretched Tory friends."

He took another step toward Justin, obviously measuring him for a blow. Deborah gave a little cry and leapt forward, seizing his right arm and dragging upon it with all of her weight.

"Please!" she cried. "Please, Master Otis...."

Otis! Justin was stunned. The resemblance to his well-known portrait was unmistakable. Here was James Otis, the brilliant and powerful young Boston lawyer who first, in that very month of February, in that very year of 1761, stood up for four hours in the Province House and defied the right of the Crown to issue the unlimited search warrants known as "Writs of Assistance" in order to check smuggling.

Here was the man who resigned his lucrative position as King's Advocate for Massachusetts, defied his wealthy Tory wife and all his wife's friends to make the first open plea for Colonial freedom.

Here was the man who gave heart to the Adamses, to Hancock and, in a vastly widening circle, to the Virginians Patrick Henry and, later, Thomas Jefferson. Here was the man who led Boston toward freedom until the tensions of his own career and domestic life drove him at length to madness.

Worse, as Justin quickly realised, here was the man to whom Deborah's friends and family were asking her to give herself. Justin understood their motives all too well. Apparently, unless he found some outlet away from his strife-torn home, Otis' friends already feared for his sanity. Employing an age-old therapy they had selected Deborah to supply that outlet.

Even in the misery of the moment, Justin found his mind ranging back to Ortine and his motives in having the girl go through with her assignment. In untampered-with history the girl must have turned Otis down. Perhaps in that turn-down Ortine read the outraged pride that had led Otis to stand up and make his revolutionary speech. By having the girl acquiesce Ortine figured, probably correctly, that the attorney would never be so inspired. The chain reaction that led to Independence Hall, to Saratoga, to Yorktown, would not have been touched off.

Justin saw, as if in slow-motion, Otis fling back his arm to clear it of the girl's desperate grip—saw her tossed against the wall. Her head struck with a sickening thud and she dropped to the floor in a pathetic unconscious heap.

Justin forgot about his near-worship for James Otis and sprang forward to do battle. He landed a hard right high on the lawyer's cheek, then felt the snow on a heel again betray him into slipping. Out of the corner of an eye he caught a quick glimpse of a large fist emerging from a ruffled cuff and arching directly toward his own jaw. He felt a jarring impact....

Justin found himself once more lying on a portable bed in one of the cubicles of Ortine's Belvoir dormitory. His jaw hurt and there was a tender spot over his right ribs that would, he knew, grow sorer with time.

He sat up, rubbing his chin, discovered he was still wearing the ill-fitting clothing with which Deborah had fitted him out. He glanced around—and his heart did a ground-loop. Alongside his own cot was another—and on it lay the girl.

Justin forgot his own sorenesses and went to her, put a hand on her face, felt his knees turn to oil as he discovered her face was warm, felt the rhythmic softness of her breath against his fingers.

She opened her eyes and smiled—and Justin felt his insides melt at the trustful happiness of her expression. He said, "It's all right, Debby dear—Ortine's brought us back to Belvoir."

"As long as we're still together," she whispered. Then, frowning, "My head hurts in back—a little."

A familiar sardonic voice spoke from the doorway. "I am glad," said Ortine, "that you find your return here so pleasant. I don't suppose you have the slightest inkling of what this unexpected insanity of yours has cost."

Justin considered for the first time the possible consequences of what he and Deborah had just managed to accomplish. He said, "We fouled up the works?"

Ortine stared at him for a long moment. Only by rigidity of manner did he give indication of the anger he must have felt. He said, "You show rather more discernment than I had expected, Justin—but I fear you still fail to realise the enormity of your sabotage.

"Time, as you conceive it, has no meaning for me, of course—yet I have had to spend vast amounts of it, searching, searching the entire course of human history, to select the exact men and women for my purpose, the exact moments in which they could be effective.

"The essence of my entire plan was simultaneous alteration of the historic line," Ortine went on. "Only thus could the salvation of humanity be effected without dislocation amounting to chaos. By your insane romantic aberration you two have disrupted the entire process."

Justin thought it improbable that Deborah could understand much of what their host was saying, yet the impact of his tone upon her was dynamic. She slipped from her bed, skirts whirling, marched up to Ortine and said, "I care not what ye think, Master Ortine. Neither Charles nor I asked to be brought here. Aye, and furthermore I'll not have ye using that tone to Charles."

Ortine said to Justin, "Perhaps we'd better talk this over in private."

"So ye can soft-talk Charles into doing ye'r bidding—and leave me to face Master Otis alone?" Deborah's defiance was magnificent and Justin put an arm around her.

He said to Ortine, "Since time is of no account to you, perhaps you'll give us a little of it together."

"As you wish." Ortine shrugged and turned to leave. "I shall await your summons."

"What did he mean?" Deborah asked Justin, when he had gone.

Justin studied her briefly, kissed her, then said, "Debby, just how did our friend explain himself to you?"

"Oh...." The girl looked vague for a moment. "He told me that if I failed to heed Master Otis' plea the redcoats would come to Boston and burn my home and kill my father and mother and brothers—aye, and ruin me."

Suddenly Deborah's arms were around him tightly, her worried face peering searchingly into his. She said, "Through my willfulness will all these dreadful things come to pass, Charles darling?"

"Debby," he told her gently, "I don't know. But I'm going to find out."

"Ye'll not desert me?" she pleaded.

He smiled down at her. "Debby, I don't think I could desert you if it meant the end of the world—and it may yet."

"Ye'r jesting," she said. "Kiss me."

He did—and again they were interrupted by a throat-clearing in the cubicle doorway. Dr. Phillips said in his old-fashioned London accents, "I don't quite ken why our friend has brought us back—but I see things are the same betwixt the two of you."

"Why, Dr. Phillips!" exclaimed the girl. "Ye'r clad in ye'r breeks now."

"I thought it might be a wise precaution before returning to my nap," said the professor mildly.

Justin said, "Come in, Doctor." He set Deborah on her cot, swung onto his own, while Dr. Phillips accepted the one chair in the cubicle. He seemed not at all surprised to find two beds where one had stood before.

"Dr. Phillips," said Justin, "I've been hoping you'd turn up here again. On our first visit I saw a Roman soldier down the hall toward the dining saloon. He was with a Mohammedan-looking female. Do you have any idea of who he is—or what his assignment is?"

Dr. Phillips nodded. "Aye," he said. "I forget his name—it is of no moment in history. He is—or was—a mere field officer in the suite of a Judaean sub-Praetor during the reign of Augustus."

"And his assignment?" Justin asked quietly.

"I believe to the best of my memory—" Dr. Phillips frowned as he delved into his own mind—"that this chap was supposed to arrest a fellow named John Something-or-other outside of Jerusalem and hold him on a trumped-up charge."

"I take it," said Justin, "that Roman Judaea has not been one of your fields of study."

"Gracious no!" replied the don. "My only knowledge of Latin is derived from an effort to study its imprint, if any, on the pre-Christian tongues of Northern Europe—including Scandinavia."

"Thank you, Dr. Phillips," said Justin, slipping off his couch again. "By the way, how do you summon Ortine when you want him?"

"Just press this button," said Dr. Phillips, indicating a circular buzzer almost invisible against the wall near the corridor door. "Well, in that case I'll be going."

IX

Ortine sauntered in. He nodded pleasantly, said, "That was quicker than I'd dared hope. Thanks, Justin—and you too, Deborah Wilkins. You have reached your decision together?"

Deborah spoke quietly, firmly, said, "Charles is my master. What he decides, I shall obey."

"Remarkable—this strange emotional fusion," Ortine remarked to the banker. He sat down, added, "Of all human madness love is the most difficult to understand."

"You should be used to it by now," Justin told him.

Ortine sighed and said, "Some things one cannot get used to. But come, Justin, I trust you are going to be reasonable."

"I'm going to ask you a few questions before coming to a definite decision," said Justin.

"Sane enough," Ortine replied amiably.

Justin began, "On my first visit here I noticed a Roman legionary a few doors down the corridor."

Ortine nodded. "Right—Marcus Rutilius Catanio. A very well-balanced young man."

Justin said, "When you first discussed with me the madmen of history who have succeeded—you'll pardon an apparent digression—it occurred to me afterward that you failed to mention the Christ."

Ortine made a deprecatory gesture. "My dear fellow, I can never be certain how deep such spiritual beliefs go in any of you humans. I thought it more tactful...."

"This Marcus Rutilius What's-his-name," Justin went on. "From what Dr. Phillips just told me, it is his job to prevent the Christ from going to Jerusalem."

There was a gasp from Deborah but Ortine ignored the interruption. He said, "Of course, Justin. It is my intention to remove much of the world's sense of guilt by preventing your Christ from dying on the Cross."

"I thought as much," Justin nodded. "I have also considered what such a removal of guilt, as you call it, would do to our world. It would not only mean the end of Christianity—it would mean it never had a beginning. For a Christ without his martyrdom would no longer be a Christ."

"I had no idea you'd be shocked," said Ortine, puzzled.

"I'm not shocked," replied Justin. "What has me baffled, Ortine, is your true purpose. You say that the salvation of our world rests upon elimination of all but those you choose to call sane men—the dull plodding fellows who never upset applecarts. Are you sure that these human vegetables are the ones to make a world worth living in?"

"Possibly not," said Ortine, unabashed. "But they will at least make a world in which people can live. Consider, Justin, you are one of them—a prime example. Or you were until very recently."

"I'm well aware of that." Justin shot a quick tender glance at Deborah. He added, "As a matter of fact I'm just beginning to understand what a living death I've been enduring."

"A pity you've changed," Ortine told him. He sighed.

"Ortine," said Justin, "you say you cannot control humans. Yet I feel certain that I have recently seen you twice in human guise—once as Will Molineux in Sam Adams' house, the other as Corinne Forrester in my own office." He looked at Ortine's cigarette, recalled Corinne's Cuban cigarettes, added, "You're quite a smoker, aren't you?"

Ortine hesitated, then said, "It's a pity I couldn't put this experiment into work with a finish date about fifty years before your time, Justin. Dr. Phillips would have been ideal. Unfortunately I must use all of the lapsed time of human history or the whole procedure is worthless—it must be complete and simultaneous. Which is why you and"—with a polite nod—"Deborah were able to make such a botch of it.

"You're quite right about my appearances, of course," Ortine went on. "There are a few people, in whom my strain is especially strong, folk I can actually control to some degree. Naturally I have tried to put such persons in positions close to my probable subjects."

"How did you happen to take up the role of Satan?" Justin asked him quietly. Behind him Deborah gasped again and Justin reached out a hand for her to hold. A faint stirring of her fingers suggested she must be crossing herself.

Ortine looked distressed. He said, "Really, there was nothing deliberate about it. It's something that—well, it just happened." He dropped his cigarette onto the floor, pulled out his case, offered a smoke to Justin.

"Consider my mission. To perform it successfully it was vital that I should become intimately acquainted with humanity not merely on the surface but inside, where fears and motives dwell. How better could I conduct such a delicate test than by testing people? And how better test them than by trying the strength of their so-called decent impulses?"

"You might have something there," said Justin. "But you mention your strain being strong in some of us. Just how does that fit in with what you've told me of your mission?"

Ortine actually appeared embarrassed. He said, his eyes not meeting Justin's, "Of course, you must by this time have surmised that I am polymorphous...."

"Who's she?" Deborah asked.

It stopped both men. Ortine looked puzzled—Justin was unable to suppress a chuckle. Seeing hurt overlaying the worry in her eyes, he said, "It merely means he is a lot of people at once, honey. I didn't mean to laugh."

"Oh," she said, a trifle vaguely.

Ortine said, "I don't suppose it could happen on another planet in your entire galaxy—it's rather embarrassing. Having quickly surveyed the entire course of your history until now I decided to go all the way back to the beginning."

"You must have found yourself dealing with some rather rough customers," Justin suggested.

"To a visitor like myself there is little choice between you and the Neanderthal," replied Ortine.

"I'm not sure the analogy is a happy one," said Justin.

"Perhaps not—but it should give you some idea, Justin." Ortine did not appear to relish criticism any more than a human. "As a matter of fact I didn't go back quite that far. The Sumerians were quite early enough for my purposes.

"In various parts of the world I became a creature analogous to the woman your Judeo-Christian legend calls Lilith. Since only females actually spawn in your world it appeared logical to me that they were the more important. But something was missing. Merely playing goddess to these alien creatures told me little about them. So, in a dozen carefully screened and selected human settlements around your world, I stepped down from my pedestal and became—Eve."

"Good Lord!" said Justin. "You mean that you, an alien...."

"Yes." Ortine's expression was sour. "In at least a half-dozen bodies I conceived! Furthermore, once it had happened, there was no escaping or altering those particular bodies until the child was born."

"I don't quite see how it could happen," said Justin.

"Neither did I at first," said Ortine unhappily. "Mind you, I am in my own universe what could be very roughly compared to a roving social analyst in yours. And here I was, alone, in this situation.

"It took me some time to find the answer. Ultimately, of course, I discovered the reason for my disaster. Despite the vast distortion differences that must occur in any creature or thing that makes a voyage from sub-space to your space, I discovered that I was—in polymorphic form, of course—a highly developed member of a highly developed species corresponding in my universe to yours.

"If I brought a Piltdown woman to Belvoir and induced you to mate with her—don't shudder, I have no intention of doing so—she would ultimately conceive. I could not accept this resemblance at first, any more than you could accept similarity to a Piltdown female. But there I was, mortally chained to beings on your planet through a most elementary process."

Deborah said, her voice shaking, "Charles, he's joking, isn't he?"

Justin shook his head, said to Ortine, "So your strain became inextricably intermixed with ours. But how does that account for your playing Satan?"

"My dear Justin!" Ortine spread his hands wide. "Consider my position. What had originally been a most impersonal mission had become a matter of the deepest personal concern. Confidentially, I have never since—or at least within the past few hundred generations—been able to materialize on Earth itself."

"Why not?" Justin asked him.

"Because of the risk," replied Ortine. "Suppose, as a man, I were killed accidentally or murdered. Suppose, as a woman, I conceived again—I can assure you my desires in such matters are perhaps even stronger than those of your species.

"Each such accident—and in the early days I had my share—is weakening. I have only so much life force and no means of replenishing that which is spent—not in this universe. Hence I have had to indulge in what you might term economy of forces."

"Playing the devil...." Justin reminded him.

"Dammit, don't interrupt. I am quite capable of image projections—hallucinations to you. These I have indulged in frequently when I thought such appearances needful or considered them diverting. In some of them, for various reasons, I have assumed some remarkable shapes."

"How about these folk you can influence directly?"

Ortine regarded Justin irritably, said, "Surely you know enough of Mendel's Law to be aware that dominant strains will pop up again and again, even in a recessive capacity. When mine recurs, as it does in every generation, I am able to exercise over them more control than I can over others."

"How much control can you exercise over someone else—say over me?" Justin asked Ortine quietly.

"I think you can answer that for yourself," said Ortine.

Justine thought it out quickly. If Ortine could actually control him, save when he was unconscious or on the rim of sleep, there would have been no need to bring him to Belvoir at all.

Ortine met his gaze frankly—and Justin, from his long experience of judging living beings, some of whom were perhaps as devious as Ortine himself, decided the other was lying—or at any rate revealing but an expedient fraction of the truth.

Why, he wondered, didn't Ortine simply kill Deborah or himself. The answer to that was obvious. If he could have done so he certainly would have—especially after Justin and Deborah had balluxed up his whole scheme.

Which meant that he couldn't, for all the miracle of his ship and his polymorphism and his ability to span time at will. Justin wondered why his host was so helpless, decided he might as well accept the fact.

"All right," he said, "so it's a stalemate—correct?"

"I wouldn't be too sure," said Ortine. His eyes turned toward Deborah but he spoke to Justin. "The matter of inbred belief is or can be a vital factor. I believe you have heard, in your own enlightened era"—there was a trace of irony in the phrase—"of primitive Haitians and Africans who have succumbed to voodoo for no other reason than that they believed in it and thought someone had put a death-curse on them."

"I have heard of them," said Justin. "But I've been thinking of another factor in our first discussion. We discussed your so-called madmen—but what of sane men?"

"What of them?" Ortine looked troubled.

"Let's look at some of the most successful," Justin offered. "For instance, Ghengis Khan. Now there was a sane man—he fought only for self preservation. And each time he won a victory he was forced to preserve it and himself by winning more. So he destroyed a continent and caused the deaths of, say, fifty million innocent people. He left marks on the world that are still with us—the deserts of Central Asia, the fear-psychology of Russia under Czar or Commissar. Do you call him insane?"

Ortine made an impatient gesture, said, "Of course he was sane. It was his time and environment, not himself, that were at fault."

"You're rationalizing," said Justin. "I could name some other sane men of prominence—Timur the Great, Attila, Metternich, Stalin. Find me any saner men."

"Who are these strangers of whom ye speak?" asked Deborah.

The men ignored her. Ortine said, "In the case of each there were extenuating circumstances...."

"And," said Justin, "I can name you some sane men who, for one reason or another, failed—which can only be called a blessing to mankind. Rokh-ud-Din, the last emir of the Assassins, for instance—or Lucullus or Louis Fourteenth or Bismarck or Robespierre. Now certainly no saner, less imaginative, more honorable man than Robespierre ever lived. Yet he virtually destroyed a great revolution by his very sanity."

For the first time Ortine looked seriously annoyed. He said, "On what range of experience do you base your judgment of what is beneficial for humanity or not, my dear Justin? This is ridiculous—why should I argue with you?"

"Because you've got to persuade me to do your will or your entire scheme will collapse," Justin told him calmly.

"You're risking the person you love most," said Ortine.

"Not yet," replied Justin. "And here's something else that has me stopped—if you're so anxious to save our planet from its so-called ruin, why are you taking the very steps that will lead to its speedy destruction?"

"Consider," said Ortine, regaining his self control, "if my plan is followed your planet will suffer a certain retrogression, of course. Now think what such a retrogression will mean—it will mean no A-bomb, no airplanes, none of the modern destructive machinery. In that way your planet will be aeons from self-destruction."

"You'll force us back to the caves!" cried Justin.

"Not quite." Ortine smiled. "Not quite, my dear Justin. Why not enjoy a good dinner before we resume our little chat?"

X

There were a number of small changes in the clothing of the diners in Ortine's incredible restaurant. The eighteenth-century lady had removed her towering headdress to reveal a closely shaved round pate, the white-haired woman from medieval England had managed to don a shift—and of course Dr. Phillips had his trousers. But most of the diners appeared the same.

There was a general air of festivity about the repast. Apparently the bulk of the visitors had expected no return to the paradise of Belvoir and were resolved to enjoy its luxuries to the hilt. But Justin and Deborah said little, barely toyed with their food.

"Darling Charles," said the girl softly, "what d'ye think is going to happen now?"

"I don't know," said Justin honestly. He captured her near hand, added, "Dear Debby, will you go with me no matter what?"

She answered him with her eyes.

When they returned to their cubicle, after a brief walk in the garden, Ortine was awaiting them. He said, "Well?"

Justin studied him. Finally he said, "Ortine, we've made up our minds. We're going back—together. But this time we're going back into my era."

Deborah gave vent to a little cry of joy. Ortine flicked ashes on the floor. "You still don't seem to understand, my dear Justin," he said. "I can't allow that. I might, of course, be willing to make some concessions. I could arrange things for Deborah so that she will succeed without having actually to give herself to James Otis.

"I might even be able to rig some sort of happiness for you, Justin—say a liaison with Corinne Forrester." Reading Justin's expression correctly he added quickly, "No, of course, that would not do now. But I could influence some very likely facsimile of your young lady here and perhaps get you clear of your present unhappy domestic arrangements."

"That I don't doubt," said Justin. "But what guarantee can you give us that you will?" And, as Ortine colored slightly, "We go together or we don't go at all. In either case you're cooked."

"An odd expression to use toward me," said Ortine thoughtfully, "I assure you I can make things extremely unpleasant for Deborah."

"I don't doubt that either," Justin told him. "But to what avail?" He hesitated, then plunged into a statement he had been considering through dinner. "Ortine, I don't think you give a damn what happens to our world. I don't believe you give a damn about our sun going nova."

Ortine said silkily, "Very well, Justin, what do you believe—where I am concerned?"

"I think you'd have taken off from here like a shot if it weren't for your becoming inextricably entangled with the human race through your multiple-Eve disaster. I have no idea of the effect of plural birth upon a polymorphous being but I have a hunch it is serious. I think you've got to destroy all of us to get away. Otherwise none of this makes sense."

"Then why shouldn't I simply stay on?" Ortine inquired caustically.

"I'll tell you why," replied Justin. "You've got to get away because we're beginning to learn too much. Sooner or later the existence of this ship of yours is going to be discovered—you are going to be discovered. And when that happens, you're in the wrong galaxy and your physical weapons will be as useless as your psychological weapons are useless against an educated mind and spirit."

Ortine said, "You have reared quite a structure upon a few involuntary hints, a smidgin of knowledge and a long train of intuition." He smiled ruefully, added, "I might as well confess you are remarkably close to the truth—not a bullseye but close."

"Thank you for that," said Justin ironically.

"You needn't feel too proud of yourself," Ortine told him. "I suppose the indications are there for anyone to read who is able to. You're right about my mission. Mine is merely an experimental flight to crash the barrier between your space and mine—incidentally, I believe, the first to do so successfully.

"Unfortunately my ship emerged into this galaxy on a collision course for a planet of your system, shattering it into what you know as the asteroids. As a result of the damage it caused I was forced to moor to Earth in an effort to effect repairs.

"I could not make such repairs alone—hence I was forced to develop the dominant species to a point where its members could actually do some of the heavy work. The construction needed, while minuscule in comparison to my ship, was immense in relation to men—immense and generally senseless."

"The Tower of Babel," mused Justin, "and the pyramids...."

"And the basalt water city of Ponape and scores of other structures whose size has always seemed to exceed the needs of their purpose," Ortine affirmed. "Call them jacks if you wish—that was their primary function. At any rate, thanks to the labor of humans, my ship has at last been readied for its return flight."

"And if you should return successfully what will happen?"

Ortine shrugged. "I belong to an aggressive race," he said simply. "We have already conquered one universe. Need I say more?"

"And your communications are ineffective?" Justin asked.

"Yes, thanks to the crash. But don't let your hopes rise too high, Justin. When my plans are complete human science and knowledge will be irreparably set back."

"So you are afraid of what we're beginning to learn."

"Afraid? That is an emotional word but I suppose in a parallel way I am." Ortine paused, added, "Your species is aggressive too. As I have already told you, we are very similar."

"Why not simply cut and run and then come back in force and destroy us?" countered Justin.

"Time is much less simple than you people seem to think," said Ortine. "The few months it would require us to organize such an expedition in my universe would be the equivalent of several centuries in this one. And by that time, if you have not destroyed yourselves, you may know as much as we."

"So you plan to destroy us," said Justin.

Ortine replied, "You should know better than that, Justin. Why should I trouble to bring all of you here, why should I have spent the time and labor I have on this experiment—when I could blast your planet out of hand?"

Justin studied him for a moment, then said, "I can think of a pair of possible reasons, Ortine. One—your extra-space weapons might not be effective in this universe. Two—from some of the things you have dropped about polymorphous conception and birth, you may not be able to dis-ally yourself from humanity so easily."

Ortine studied Justin in turn, then said, "You're wrong about my weapons—they have long since been adjusted to operate in your space. But I am saddled with you—all of you. I am like a man with a diseased appendix—save that in this instance my appendix numbers three to four billion."

"You mean you are actually part of us—and we of you?" asked Justin, appalled at the thought.

"Unfortunately, yes—in what you would call a physiological sense but one which is painfully physical to me," Ortine replied. "Now consider my plight in terms of your own appendicitis. Such major disasters as battles and natural catastrophes are like recurring attacks. An atomic war might well rupture my very fabric.

"Naturally deaths in smaller quantities or lesser disasters do not noticeably affect me—but the destruction for which your world may be heading is more than I can risk. Therefore I have had to take steps, first to obviate the possibility of atomic war, secondly to lower the population. These are the twin purposes toward which I have conducted my experiment. If I were to wipe out humanity, as I easily could, I should myself die."

"I think I understand," Justin told him, frowning. "By removing human imagination—you call it madness—you plan not only to reduce human population to a nubbin but to rig things so that the remnants will eliminate themselves in a manner practically painless to yourself. Am I right?"

Ortine hesitated, then said, "Consider again the man with appendicitis. If it bursts and he has no proper medical care he will die. But if it withers away, then he is free of the diseased organ."

"And for that purpose you expect me to go through with your assignment?" asked Justin. "You're the one who's mad!"

"I think not," said Ortine, rising. "I happen to know how all-powerful the peculiar form of insanity you humans call love can be. For instance...."

He extended a hand casually toward Deborah. At once a wall of flame sprang up around the cot on which she was sitting. She screamed and shrank back, cowering and covering her eyes. Justin sprang toward her, stood in the midst of the fire.

"Come," he told her but she refused to believe the fire was illusory. She screamed again, said, "Ye'r a de'il too, Charles!"

"Stop it!" cried Justin to Ortine.

"Certainly." At once the flames vanished. Deborah looked at Charles piteously. "Charles, he's going to burn us alive. He is Satan!"

"You want to go back to your own time alone, my dear?" Ortine had strolled casually to the other side of the bed.

Deborah gave him a long look, replied, "Nay, I'll take my chances wi' ye'r hellfire, Master Devil."

"I can ensure that the importunities of Master Otis will meet with no success," offered Ortine. "I can see that you wed a fine young man of family with a mansion near North Square."

"Ye cannot give me Charles," Deborah said fiercely.

Ortine lifted a sardonic eyebrow at Justin. He said, "I'll give you a few minutes alone with her, my dear fellow. For her own sake and yours I hope you can talk some sense into her."

He strolled out and Deborah flung herself on Charles, sobbing her fear. He said when she had calmed a little, "Dear Deborah, you've got to understand. Ortine's fire is real only if you believe it. You saw me standing in it unsinged."

"I know!" she sobbed. "My eyes saw and my poor brain understood but the rest of me couldn't believe."

"You can thank your preachers for that," said Justin. "They've been playing right into the hands of Ortine all along. Now that you've seen I can't be hurt you've got to believe yourself. Otherwise I'm afraid...."

"Else what?" she asked tremulously.

"Otherwise there's no hope for us, honey. If we can't stand together against him we might as well both be dead. It will mean the death of the world as we know it." He looked close into the depths of her blue eyes. "Do you think you're strong enough—with me at your side?"

"I—don't—know," she replied. "Darling Charles, can't ye see how much I want to be strong? But can't ye understand how little it will avail us if, after I promise, I fail?"

He sighed, automatically patted his pockets for a cigarette.

The spider! It was still there. Justin pulled it out, looked at it. When Corinne Forrester had questioned him about its uses other than as a waterproofer, he had not given her an answer.

Deborah touched the odd little sprayer with a forefinger, said, "I found this in ye'r nightdress when I put it away. What is it, Charles?"

He hesitated, made up his mind, said, "It's an invention from my own time, honey. It shelters against cold—and against heat. Providence must be with us."

"Against heat? How does it work, Charles?"

"Here—I'll show you." He pressed a tiny button, spraying some of the transparent plastic across the palm of his left hand.

"'Tis as magical as Master Ortine's devices," cried the girl.

"Perhaps," replied Justin. "Now stand very still, honey—I'm going to give you a coat of this stuff. Then you'll have nothing to fear from Ortine's flame illusions."

"Ye'r a very wonderful man, Charles," she told him proudly.

"We'll soon know," he replied, then got busy and sprayed her with it all over, not sparing even her hair and lashes.

Finished, he returned the spider to his pocket, said, "Now let him do his worst. Are ye—are you sure you want to come back with me, honey? There's going to be one hell of a row over you."

"I'll be with ye," she said simply.

Ortine returned. He bowed to his guests, said, "Well, I hope this is our last session."

"We've reached an agreement," Justin told him.

"An intelligent agreement?"

"Quite. We're going back together—to my time."

Ortine's smile was not pleasant. He said, "This may sound a trifle trite but don't say I didn't warn you." Then, to Deborah, "For your information this may be quite painful while it lasts—or while you last."

"Don't be afraid, honey," Justin told her.

"I'm not." The countenance she lifted to his was radiantly assured. "Not any more."

Ortine hesitated, his hand half outstretched, and said, "I truly hate to disillusion you, Justin."

"We'll see how your tricks prevail against love," said Justin.

"Love!" The word seemed to infuriate Ortine. He gestured at them and the room became a cubicle of fire. For a fraction of a second Justin flinched involuntarily and during that time he could actually feel the heat. Then, once more in control of himself, he stood quietly amid flames that neither seared nor burned.

Deborah locked up at him and smiled, the blaze flickering against her face. Her hand found his, pressed it tightly, and she smiled.

The flames vanished. A weary Ortine shook his head in bafflement. He said, "All right, you two—you win. I'll do anything you wish. Anything to get you out of here."

XI

When Justin came to he felt as if he had been wrapped in several layers of flour sacking. Then, with returning consciousness, he discovered himself to be lying in his own bed in the house on Louisburg Square, wearing the coarse heavy clothes Deborah had given him.

Deborah! A quick glance to his left revealed her lying beside him. He put out a reassuring hand to stroke her face, felt its plastic coating, got out of bed in a hurry.

"Come on," he said, "let's get that stuff off of you."

She moved like a girl in a trance. Her eyes ranged from the bed itself to the electric light on the bedside table, to the telephone, to the carpet, to the walls—then at last to Justin.

"Don't let it throw you, honey," he told her. "Think how I felt when I woke up in your bed."

She said in a near-whisper, "But this—this is more wonderful than Belvoir itself!"

"Prepare yourself for another shock, honey—a twentieth-century bathroom. We're going to get you cleaned up."

It was like showing a child its first Christmas tree. It took Justin a full fifteen minutes to get Deborah safely ensconced in a hot tub. He emerged, perspiring, carrying her clothes, and deposited them on a chair, then began to strip off his own ill-fitting garments.

He stopped in the process of disrobing, picked up the phone, dialed the Ritz and reserved a suite. He had no intention of having Marie walk in to find Deborah there with him.

He found the spider again in his pocket, sat down on the bed to examine it once more. On impulse he squirted some of the remaining plastic on his hand, picked up a lighter, ran the flame beneath it. The stuff flamed up like benzine, blistering his palm before he could extinguish it. Justin shook his head and tossed it onto the table, feeling more sweat bead his forehead.

This, he decided, was one invention he was definitely going to turn down—if he still had his job with the Ninth of Boston, come the morning. He got out of his absurd clothes, scratched his flanks with relief, rummaged in the wardrobe for an extra robe.

Deborah called for help. She was having difficulty getting the plastic out of her hair. Justin stood her under the shower, soaped her head and turned on the warm water. "We'll get you a decent shampoo at a beautician's tomorrow, honey," he told her.

It was at that moment that Marie appeared in the doorway. She looked at Justin, then at Deborah incredulously. She was carrying the blue-and-white dress of the girl from Old Boston in her hand. She said, "I was going to ask you what this was, Justin—but I see there's no need."

Justin turned off the water, tossed the girl a towel, escorted his wife to the bedroom, shutting the bathroom door behind them. He glanced for the first time at the clock beside the telephone, discovered it was past two A.M. Ortine had had his little joke—instead of returning them to the banker's house at the moment of his first summons, he had allowed a few hours to elapse.

"What are you smiling about?" Marie asked him sharply. "I was coming in to tell you I met a rather fascinating friend of yours—a Mrs. Forrester—tonight. She suggested I drop in to give you her regards before I turned in. And here I find you...."

"Did she give you a Cuban cigarette?" Justin asked mildly.

"Don't joke—your taste is sufficiently bad as it is."

"Well," said Justin, feeling almost grateful to Ortine for forcing the issue into the open, "I suppose it had to happen sometime. We haven't been of much use to each other lately."

"I wouldn't exactly say that," replied Marie, sitting down and tilting a cigarette for him to light. "After all, I wonder just how far you'd have got without me, Charles."

"And that makes a marriage?" Justin asked sharply.

Marie shrugged disinterestedly. "There are all kinds of marriages." She yawned, added, "Where'd you pick her up? At a servants' costume ball?"

"Not exactly," Justin told her. "Actually it's been a rather remarkable evening."

"I bet it has!" Marie's tone was sharp. "Well, what are you going to do about it, Charles?"

"I've already made reservations at the Ritz," he told her. "We'll both be out of here in a few minutes. By the way, could you loan Debby something to wear?"

She regarded him with amusement. "Do you really think I should?" she countered. "Perhaps the maid has something. I'll go and see. The Ritz—hmmm. Well, gather ye rosebuds and all that, sweetheart. You know I'll have your hide for this, don't you?"

"I never for a moment doubted it," he replied.

She rose, looked as puzzled as had Ortine. Love, pure love between man and woman, was apparently as implausible to Marie as it was to the master of Belvoir. She said, "Charles, you know that's rather sweet. I'll see what I can do for your little friend. Better let me have a look at her though—just for size."

Obeying an unexpected impulse, Justin kissed his wife on the forehead and told her, "You know, Marie, that's the nicest thing you've said since we've been married."

"Don't crowd your luck, Charles," Marie warned. "Call out the concubine."

Deborah emerged hesitantly, her brown hair an uncontrolled mess, Justin's robe flopping about her. She looked at Marie, then at Justin, said, "Is this Mistress Justin, Charles?"

One of Marie's pale eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. She looked at Justin, shocked, then blinked groggily and managed to say, "I don't know who's whose mistress around here but I think I have an outfit that will fit her fairly well. And, Charles, I don't know what she's done to her hair but I'll bring along a snood."

Justin was late in reaching the office the following morning. Devereux Chandler was there ahead of him, practicing chip shots on the carpet with his cane.

Steeled for the worst, Justin was surprised at the half-mocking grin with which Chandler greeted him. "I don't know what you did to my niece last night, Charles," he said, "but you've been the devil of a long time getting to it. She was on the phone this morning, demanding I have you fired."

"I rather expected that, Dev," said Justin. "Drink?"

"Not now," said Chandler. He sank into an armchair, looked at Justin quizzically. "I don't know what got into you, but then I don't know how you could stand Marie this long. She's used you for all you were worth."

"That's not quite her story," said Justin, sitting on a corner of his desk. "She seems to think that without you and her connection with you I'd be counting change in a teller's cage out in Melrose."

"Possibly—but we'd be the losers, Charles," Chandler told him. "I don't like to crowd your business hours but I thought it only proper to set your mind at rest."

"Thanks—I appreciate it," said Justin.

There was a long, rather awkward pause. Then Chandler cleared his throat and said, "I suppose Marie will trap Jack Fellowes next. Too bad—he's not a bad apple."

"There are worse around."

Chandler stood up, cut at the carpet with his cane. He remarked without looking up, "From what Marie tells me you seem to have come up with a rather remarkable young woman. You wouldn't mind telling me how it happened?"

"If I hadn't decided to turn in early," said Justin, "and if I hadn't used a certain mental device to go back to sleep after you woke me up with your call from the party...." He stopped and shook his head helplessly. "You wouldn't believe me if I did explain it."

"Eh? Well, probably not—but I hope you'll ask me around for a drink when you get settled."

"You'll be the very first," Justin assured him warmly.

Henri Dubois was ushered in shortly after Devereux Chandler left. This time he came alone. Justin asked him where Miss Forrester was as he got his visitor seated. Dubois replied, "She had to go away this morning on a long trip."

"A very fascinating woman," said Justin, lighting a smoke. Then, "Mr. Dubois, I can't offer any assurance that we'll be able to give you and your movement the backing you want. But I can tell you this—I shall do everything in my power to see that you get it."

Henri Dubois extended a warm hand across the desk, said, "Mr. Justin, that's good enough for me."

Justin left early that afternoon. With his job safe and Dubois taken care of there was nothing to keep him at his desk. He paused briefly by the entrance to the Park Street Subway station to eye the vast expanse of the modern city and compare it with the snowbound panorama he had viewed from almost the same spot a few hours—or was it two centuries?—earlier.

It seemed strangely like the dream he had, for awhile, believed it to be. But Deborah was awaiting him at the Ritz. He began to walk faster.

So it hadn't been a dream at all. And, perhaps, he really had saved the world from a savage and sudden retrogression from which it could scarcely have recovered. He had had to lose his sanity to do it—for no man in love is sane, he told himself.

But Deborah was awaiting him at the Ritz.

He crossed Charles Street, entered the Public Gardens. And it occurred to him that perhaps he hadn't outwitted Ortine. Perhaps his behavior was carefully plotted as part of some far subtler scheme. He wondered.

But Deborah was awaiting him at the Ritz.

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- the sane men of satan

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