Cargo to Callisto

                           By JAY B. DREXEL

                 Four _Aarnian_ criminals--vicious and
             deadly--fled silently into the Martian night;
              and grimly the Patrol threw out an airtight
             dragnet. Nothing human could have escaped ...
                 but what's human about an _Aarnian_?

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                     Planet Stories November 1950.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Sarah emerged from the surface of the Great Canal as sleek and brown
as a seal. Laughing and sputtering, she jerked her head once over each
round shoulder, parting her soaked hair and revealing her face.

"Try that once again!" she flung at Joe.

Joe Caradac ducked her again, and Kent shouted something from the bank
that wasn't quite audible over the squeals and splashes.

"What?" Joe held his wife's head firmly between his knees. "What'd you
say, Kent?"

His Senior Intendant's grin widened as he cupped his hands over it to
shout again:

"I said--you'll drown the poor thing!"

Joe grunted as Sarah cold-bloodedly located a nerve-center in his
thigh and bit it. "Not this thing--" he released her and she bobbed up
swearing in sand-coast Martian--"they had to rope it out of a canal to
teach it to walk!"

He narrowed his grey eyes humorously and poised for the attack, but
Sarah had conceded and was swimming toward the bank. The setting sun
struck a series of glowing V's in her wake. Joe rubbed his tingling leg
and followed. They reached the green slope at the same time and big
Kent handed them up with ease.

"Ray's watching the franks," he said, "and I've been watching Ray and
I think we'd better get up there or he won't be able to hold off much
longer. His inner man is showing through."

       *       *       *       *       *

The pianist's dark, saturnine face peered at them over the fire as they
came up and he rose, wiping his hands carelessly on his sport tunic.
He had evidently gone into the canal-skimmer and changed out of his
bathing suit.

"How do," he greeted dourly; "the damned thing itched so I took it off."

[illus2]

Joe gave himself a last swipe with the towel and tossed it through
the open hatch of the skimmer. Sarah carried her towel into the boat
and came out presently in a suede skirt and bolero, looking rubbed
down and delectable. Joe's wife was half Martian, and it showed in her
long, slender eyebrows and delicately cleft nose and chin. She looked
worriedly at the three men busy with the frankfurters.

"There's something on the telaudio," she said. "Come in and listen."

"What is it?" Joe asked.

"Something about somebody escaping from Mars Detain."

Ray's humming stopped. He'd been practicing wrist octaves on a flat
rock and his long hand hung motionless for a moment as if he were
reaching for something. Kent set his frank across the top of his coffee
cup--he was always careful about everything--and stood up.

Joe looked at his wife, looked at her eyes. They were frightened.

"That's pretty near here, isn't it?" Sarah said. She moved back to let
the three men into the boat. They grouped around the telaudio.

"I don't think there's anything to worry about," Kent said slowly.
"They're bound to catch the men--"

"They aren't men."

The four listened.

"--ruthless _Aarnians_. This warning cannot be taken too seriously.
Detain is doing everything in its power to recapture the four criminals
but, as is known, the _Aarnian_ psyche is able to leave its body at
will and inhabit the body of another entity, subjugating the mind of
its host and contro--"

"My God," Ray whispered, "I've heard of those devils!"

"--in all likelihood will seek to escape from Mars. To prevent this,
all persons now holding tickets for interworld travel must submit to
being psycho-screened before entering liners. No more tickets will be
sold--"

Sarah's eyes were wide and round. "They'd have to leave their bodies
behind--here on Mars!"

Big Kent--because he was one of the Caradacs' oldest friends and could
do such things--put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. She was
shivering.

"--tenant Smith of Detain informs us that the _Aarnians_ are unable to
pronounce certain consonantal diphthongs such as jee and jay--even if
occupying bodies that can normally pronounce such sounds. This is very
important, as it may be an only possible means of identification, for
the _Aarnians_ will undoubtedly seek new bod--"

Sarah switched off the telaudio, her brown face openly sick. She bit
her lip and looked at each of the three men surrounding her.

"That gives me the shivers," she said. "Let's go home."

After that they didn't talk much. Under the red twilight, they packed
up the pots and pans, leaving the unwanted food for the night-crawling
_nolls_. They spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders as they
did this, although each tried to conceal it from the others. At last
the skimmer moved silently away from the bank and pointed its nose at
the distant haze that was Ofei, By the Great Canal.

       *       *       *       *       *

At precisely seven o'clock the telaudio on the headboard of Joe's
bed turned itself on. Sounds pricked the balloon of his disturbed
slumber, tugged his mind out to wakefulness. He rolled over and sat up,
listening, rubbing his lanky legs.

Instead of the usual symphonic music, he heard an urgent voice,
obviously ad-libbing:

"--be very, _very_ careful. The criminals--the _Aarnians_--have still
not been found. All residents of Ofei and vicinity are warned--this
warning cannot be overemphasized--"

Joe reached out and clicked on the screen. The announcer's tunic was
wrinkled, his sash was awry. He looked as if he'd been up all night.

"--are advised to stay within the city limi--"

Joe snapped off the telaudio and glanced over at Sarah's bed. She was
snoring delicately, one smooth arm pillowing her mass of blue-black
hair. Better that she doesn't hear any more about that business, he
decided firmly.

Joe liked the simple life. No servants, no flunkies, although he could
have afforded a dozen. Five sunshiny rooms on the Great Canal, with a
nice view of Mars Memorial Park on the bank opposite. He robed himself
against the early morning chill and headed for the kitchen. His head
ached faintly and, to judge by what little he could remember of it,
he'd had a dilly of a nightmare. Something about ... being chased, or
something? Or smothered by a....

Even as he stopped in his tracks to try to pin it down, the memory
broke, dissolved as if in flight. Frowning, he pushed through the
kitchen door and crossed to the deep-freeze, slid it open and rummaged
in it.

The nightmare wasn't important surely, but he mulled it over with
interest as he prepared breakfast, for Joe, being rather well adjusted,
dreamed rarely, and then mostly about Iowa, back on Earth ... a
long-ago picture of a twelve-year-old boy, his first day in college;
the boy sitting under his shining Projector, surrounded by a group
of thunderstruck Psychologists; the quick death of their initial
skepticism, and in its place a growing wonder as it became evident
that, although a History spool was whirling in the scanner and the
thought-helmet functioning to perfection, the boy's mind was receiving
neither spoken text nor images....

"You don't feel anything?" a Psychologist asked skeptically.

Joe closed his eyes. There was a low, unmusical humming in his ears and
that was all. He tried to shake his head and couldn't, so he said: "No,
I don't."

"When was the World Federation formed?"

"I don't know."

"Are you lying?"

"No."

One of the other Psychologists standing nearby looked up from the
little box he held in his hand and said that Joe wasn't lying.

The first Psychologist raised his eyebrows. "We'll try another
Projector."

While Technicians dismantled Joe's Projector and examined it for shorts
or haywire, the Psychologists had Joe sit down under all the other
Projectors in 1stY-Cubicle 149. Then they tried 148 and 150.

"It's some kind of block," the first Psychologist said finally, looking
profound to cover up his tizzy. "There's some kind of barrier in his
mind."

Joe Caradac clenched his fists. "That's not true--I want to learn!"

"Then you probably will, boy--" the Psychologist sat down to fill in
some forms--"but you'll have to go back three hundred years to do it.
You'll have to learn from books!"

There the dream would simply end, for no fantasy of wish-fulfillment
could have exceeded in satisfaction Joe's actual conquest of this
problem. At eighteen he wore thick glasses--he preferred them to
contacts or artificial irises. At twenty he took tests contrived
especially for him by the members of Central Education assigned to his
case. He was awarded equivalence degrees in Business Administration,
Metatomics and Interplanetary Law. His marks were the highest of the
year and Joe Caradac's name was briefly in the newsphones.

He started with the New Chicago offices of Mars Imports and Exports
as a mercury. After six weeks of flying back and forth with memos he
traded his anti-gravs for a desk.

And on June 32, 2401, the newly appointed Regional Buyer for M. I. and
E. got married and was flown to Mars by a chartered spacer to take
command of the regional office at Ofei, By the Great Canal....

       *       *       *       *       *

He was putting the finishing touches on breakfast when he heard a groan
and the sound of a stretch from the bedroom. When he turned around,
Sarah was standing in the doorway.

Joe's sandy eyebrows went up. His wife was certainly not a modest
woman, but considering even that, this morning was an agreeable
surprise. Her eyes were still dull--he guessed that she'd worried about
those whatyoucallits after going to bed--but she was smiling broadly.
Joe began to have visions of missing work for half a day. He smiled
back at her and she laughed a little.

"_Hohn, Uarnl!_" she said.

Joe was thrusting halved oranges into the juicer. He turned off the
machine and grinned.

"You'll have to talk plainer than that, little monkey," he said. He
held out a glass of juice. "Drink this--it'll wake you--up--" The last
word faded into an astonished silence.

Then Joe said, "Hey--come back!" He set down the glass and went into
the bedroom.

She was lying on her bed, her face hidden. Joe dropped onto the edge of
the bed and put a tentative hand on her back.

"Hey now," he said softly, "if that's the way you feel about it I'll
juice up some grapefruit." He moved his hand down and spanked lightly.
"Hein?"

She didn't look up. She had turned her head and was looking at the
corner of the room by Joe's bed.

"I do not feel well. Go away."

Joe's face was immediately concerned. He bent over her, reached for a
wrist. "What's the matter, Sarah? Can I get you anything?" The wrist
hung limply in his hand.

"No. Go away."

Joe straightened up and drew his eyebrows together in thought. Sarah
was usually tearful and pretty much of a leech when she wasn't feeling
well. Excessive commiserations and breakfast in bed were the rule at
such times.

"Do you want me to get Doc Halprin?"

The blue-black head shook from side to side.

"So what am I supposed to do, monkey? I hate to leave you this way."

"Go away."

"But can't I--"

"Go away, damn you!"

Joe stood up abruptly. He clenched his fists and looked at his wife's
still form and gradually the anger dulled and left him. He had no
right to be angry. Everybody got tempermental once in a while.

But this was the first time she had ever cursed him.

"O.K.," he said softly. "I'll see you tonight."

       *       *       *       *       *

The regional offices of Mars Imports and Exports sat upon a hill at
the end--or the beginning--of Ila Boulevard, depending upon which
way you were going. It was twenty-five-hundred feet of silver and
native marble, and covered four city blocks, and Joe Caradac was top
man--literally--since his office and personal staff took up the whole
two-hundred and fifty-first floor.

His morning mail--about twelve letters weeded out of the daily
thousands--was gotten out of the way with skill and dispatch. Grinning,
he propped his feet on the low, curving window sill and said: "Miss
Kal--take an audiogram."

Miss Kal used two of her arms to adjust pad and stylus, looking up
expectantly. Her other arms were busy transcribing a previously
dictated letter into Venusian--her native tongue, although she spoke
sixty-eight--and tugging at a humidified legging that had somehow
worked down almost to the floor.

"My dearest, darling monkey--" Joe began. Miss Kal looked up again in
amazement. Joe grinned at her and said, "It's to my wife."

Miss Kal nodded wisely and began to write.

"--I am sending this from my dark and dismal office," Joe went on. It
was a habit they had when anything went wrong at breakfast. Joe had
first proposed by audiogram.

He casually watched a skimmer that was in danger of creating a honey of
a traffic jam down below. Didn't that schlemiel know his left from his
right?

"--Where was I? Oh, yes--my dark and dismal office." Joe scratched a
cigarette alight, blew a happy smoke ring. "I hope that you are feeling
much, _much_ better and that you will take luncheon with me in the
Pluto Room of the you-know-what Hotel--" His mind went back to those
honeymoon days and he lost track of his dictation again. Another smoke
ring, a somewhat more thoughtful one.

"You-know-what Hotel--" said Miss Kal phlegmatically.

"Yes--ah--just end it 'at one fifteen sharp, your everloving Joe.'"

There was a knock on the door and Miss Kal set down her pad and stylus
and started to get up. Joe was on his feet and around the desk in a
second.

"Stay right where you are," he smiled; "I need the exercise."

Miss Kal smiled also and settled back into her specially built chair
with its temperature and humidity controls. A present from Mr. Caradac.
He was such a nice being to work for.

Joe opened the door, and said, "Oh, hullo, Kent. Since when are you
knocking?"

Big Kent nodded formally to Miss Kal and winked at Joe. He said, "Yoe,
there's something I'd like to talk over with you in private."

With a sigh, Miss Kal rose again and made her way through the other
door into her little office. The door closed behind her.

Kent let out a long breath. He smiled at Joe and the smile turned into
a laugh that had an odd sound of triumph.

"_Hohn, Uarnl_," he said, and laughed again. "_Ut sinna d'yonlwar?_"

Joe sat down behind his desk and looked at the big man. Hone you-arnel.
Wasn't that what Sarah had said--or something very much like it? He
shook his head.

"You wanted to talk to me about something, Kent? What are you and Sarah
cooking up with this gibberish?"

The brilliant Martian sunlight--not as dim as had been anticipated in
the days before space travel--came through the ceiling-high windows,
struck little lights here and there from the bouquet of Venusian
Glass-moss that Miss Kal tended so carefully. It slanted across Kent's
big face as he looked at Joe for a long moment, giving his left eye a
pale, shallow lustre and throwing the shadow of his jutting nose down
over his mouth. He opened and closed his hands, and said:

"Nothing. It'll wait, I guess." His gaze wandered over the room and
settled on a corner that was empty save for a throw rug--a relic of
Caradac's Iowa past. Kent's mouth tightened into a thin line. He stared
at the corner.

"It'll wait--for a while," he said stiffly and opened the door and went
into the outer office. Bone-faced, he walked toward the transveyor belt.

"Mr. Kent--Mr. Kent!" The big man's Mercurian secretary rose out of a
chair near the door, his voice quacking from the speaker set into his
fishbowl helmet.

"Yes?"

"They tolt me that you hat gone to Mr. Caradac's office, sir. I've been
trying to finte you all morning, sir. A laty, sir, on the visiphone.
She has callt many times--many times--"

"Thank you," Kent said tonelessly. "I know who it is."

       *       *       *       *       *

Joe Caradac stared in astonishment at the door. First Sarah--now Kent.
This seemed to be the day for everybody to blast in orbits ... well,
hell ... he shrugged his shoulders and called Miss Kal back out of her
office. She dropped into her chair with a sigh and they picked up the
day's business from where it had fallen.

San-Vika of Saturn Enterprises was threatening all kinds of things if
he didn't receive his shipment of ato-rotors on the very next flight.
Joe didn't waste much time with that. One of the many things that made
him a top executive was that he knew how to deal with phonies. He told
San-Vika--via spacephone--that he could go stick his heads in a waste
eliminator and push the button, and that if he wanted to get nasty, M.
I. and E. had an army of lawyers hanging around just itching to get
their teeth into last year's insurance double-deal.

"We let everybody get away with it--once!" Joe told him and cut the
suddenly fawning image off the screen. M. I. and E.'s investigators, he
thought absently, could certainly give the Sol Secret Service a run for
their credits. Now that he had tactfully gotten San-Vika straightened
out, he might as well release those ato-rotors to be shipped.

At twelve fifteen an audiogram came from Sarah. _I don't feel well
enough to come. Love, S._ Well, at least it was an improvement in tone.

At one o'clock, Miss Kal went into her office to open the mysterious
little package of lunch that she brought with her every day. Joe
stretched out his legs on the window sill and looked at the traffic jam
below. That driver had really done a fine job. There were three Patrol
skimmers circling the mess, darting to and fro like angry wasps.

He didn't feel much like eating. Breakfast and supper were his big
meals--the habit was a long-standing one. However, he thought, this
morning's breakfast hadn't been much to rave about. Orange juice, some
burned Pohl, some undercooked sand-hoppers.

He switched on the inter-office visiphone.

"I would save you the trouble," he said, when Miss Kal's face appeared,
"but they built this place so that all of my inside calls have to be
routed through your selective tentacles."

"The usual, Mr. Caradac?"

"The usual."

Joe was rather proud of the fact that everything in his division of
M. I. and E. worked smoothly and efficiently--even the kitchens. In a
little less than forty seconds a portion of his desk folded back and
the "usual" appeared on an elevator tray. A pot of light coffee and
some doughnuts with powdered brown sugar.

Joe dunked the solid portion of his lunch and considered the morning's
peculiar happenings. Apparently unrelated incidents that were related
in part always intrigued him. There was usually a logical reason
for parallels. The trick, he thought, was to concentrate not on the
"coincidences" themselves but to examine the circumstances under which
they occurred.

Sarah's illness--Kent's queer behavior. Not obviously connected.
Separately neurotic. Yet what was it Kent had said that had reminded
him of Sarah's strange greeting?

Hone you-arnel?

The two had played practical jokes on him before. He grinned. This was
probably one of their special five-day jobs, designed to make him into
a shattered wreck by Friday so Sarah could duck him on Saturday and get
by with it.

Joe repeated the syllables aloud, trying to make some sense out of them:

"Hone you-arnel."

       *       *       *       *       *

Instantly he was on his feet fighting, his lips raving silently. His
big chair tipped back and fell over to the floor.

A furious, icily cold intrusion was being made upon his mind. He stood
with feet planted on either side of the overturned chair and threw the
force off but it came back again and again. The office was suddenly
oppressive and stifling, and the objects about him were small and
crystal clear, as if seen through the wrong end of a hand galaxiscope.
The churning, utterly loathsome invasion surged up like a wave roaring
against a reef--and fell back and away in horrible desperation.

From a million miles away he heard--or felt--a voice. It said:
"_Uarnl--yes, Uarnl!_" and it said other things, raging things, that
Joe could not understand.

Then it was gone. As suddenly as it had come. The office regained its
normal perspective. The bright sunlight, reflected now from the tall
buildings across the Great Canal, erased the ragged, black hole out of
his consciousness.

Painfully he righted the chair and sank into it. His lungs felt pressed
in and stale, like the inside of a folded blanket. He took a deep
breath, shoved his wet palms hard at the top of the desk.

_Uarnl._ The nightmare.

It came back to him as dreams rarely do: down to its last beastly
detail. A dream of fear and peril--a running dream--and not a dream,
after all. _Uarnl._ He looked at the corner of the room, at the
colorful throw rug. It lay there under the sun, brighter than it had
been, as if a pane of glass had been lifted from it.

After a while he got up and went to the door of Miss Kal's office. She
looked up vaguely, concealing a small, resigned lizard under her jacket.

"Miss Kal," Joe said blindly, "do you have my morning papers?"

He took the facsimiles back to his desk, walking slowly, afraid to
get there and sit down and open them. The nightmare; the first aborted
attempt. Sarah and Kent--approaching him separately--yet similarly.
Allies. Each had been confident that during the night _Uarnl_--had--

There was nothing else on the front sheets but the names _Ih_, _Lof_,
_Dir_, and _Uarnl_ and the story of their possessors' escape from Mars
Detain. A power breakdown had weakened the energy barrier that kept
their elusive minds, and hence their bodies, in confinement. By the
time armed replacements could be sent to the _Aarnians'_ isolated cell
the beings had vanished. The guards had been strangled. Energy barriers
had been set up at all space and canal ports. Other barriers had been
formed into a hundred mile noose that was being carefully drawn in
toward Detain.

Joe folded the last paper over the cruel three-eyed faces that seemed
to mock him. He fumbled at the visiphone. Miss Kal was wiping her lips
cheerfully.

"Miss Kal," Joe said, "get me Mr. Reader in Shipping." He leaned his
elbows wearily on the desk and waited until Reader's puritanical face
appeared on the screen.

"Yeah, boss?"

"Reader, has anyone consigned four large crates to go off-world
tomorrow night?"

"Yeah," Reader replied promptly; "Mr. Kent. B-type mobile spacesuits.
Had me alter the manifest this morn--"

"Do you have the crates down there?"

"Uh-uh. Mr. Kent said he'd skim them in sometime tomorrow. He was
coming up to get the switch O.K.'d by you. Why? Anything wrong?"

Joe opened the center drawer of his desk.

"No. Nothing's wrong. Listen carefully, Reader. I'm going to take care
of those crates myself. If I'm--not in my office tomorrow you are _not_
to load them on-ship! No matter what Mr. Ke--_anyone_ says or does! If
the crates come in refrigerate them and call the Patrol and send the
name of the addressee to Detain immediately!"

Reader came as near as he ever had to looking surprised. Nothing
wrong? His right eyebrow shot up several millimeters. Joe added, "Keep
this in your cheek and there'll be double credits for you pay-day."

Reader nodded. "Yeah, boss. Don't I always?"

Joe took his atom pistol out of the drawer, handling it with unfamiliar
fingers. It had been a long time since those target shooting days in
Iowa. He checked the gun quickly, reloaded it with fresh pellets.

He had left the visiphone on, and when Reader had broken his
connection, the interior of Miss Kal's office and the surprised face of
that eavesdropper had automatically returned. She stared at the atom
pistol.

"Miss Kal," Joe said softly. "Get me a canal-cab."

       *       *       *       *       *

The bodies were lying in a row beneath an overhanging ledge of
sandstone. They had burrowed deep into a miniature jungle of thick
leaved canal weeds, and it had taken him a long time to find them. The
gleam of four shiny new B-type spacesuits, less carefully concealed,
had finally ended the search. Kent and Ray had been busy this morning.

Standing where he was, Joe could look down the green and red dotted
slope and see the ashes of the picnic fire, the scatterings of food
that the night-crawling _nolls_ had found unpalatable. And, blown by
Mars' occasional winds--or taken by alien hands--to a spot only a few
feet from where it had been thrown away, was the scrap of paper with
his letterhead on it. The paper that he and Kent had marked up during
their discussion of tomorrow night's flight to _Aarn_, Callisto.

_If they didn't actually hear us talking_, Joe thought, _it was that
paper that started the whole thing._

He said loudly: "Are you here, _Uarnl_? You thought it was perfect,
didn't you? You thought you could repossess your bodies as the liner
went off-world. Well, look at this!"

With executival thoroughness, he blasted the four bodies into cinders.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sarah came out of the kitchen as Joe opened the canal door and let
himself in. He turned and paid the cabby and the skimmer moved off.

"Hello, darling," she said, and tugged at his arm. "I've got a swell
supper fixed!"

Joe smiled at her as he shrugged out of his tunic. He flung it casually
over her favorite potted _Zinhaeat_. She didn't grab it off. _I should
have been a detective_, he thought. He followed her into the kitchen.

"Anything interesting happen today?" Sarah began to arrange the table,
moving things here and there fussily. She looked at Joe from the corner
of her eye. "That's about how you like it, isn't it?" she asked.

Joe said, "That's fine." He ground out his cigarette on a clean plate.
Sarah would have taken his head off if he had ever done that.

"No," he went on, "nothing happened. Same old stuff."

They sat down to eat. Joe tasted his soup. It was rotten. He wondered
if they cooked like that all over Callisto, or only in _Aarn_.

"Is it all right, darling?" Sarah was looking at him brightly, her
fingers twined under her chin with the left pinkie extended, her head
cocked to one side. It was all so cute that it made Joe sick. He
decided that if the showdown were put off much longer he'd never be
able to stand the sight of her again.

"You haven't called me 'darling' since our days of stardust and
chivalry," he said. "Call me Joe."

"What?"

"I said--call--me--Joe."

Sarah pushed her plate away. Her brown eyes were muddy.

"I wasn't hungry anyway," she said coldly.

Big Kent and Ray came through the door that led into the living room.
Kent leaned against the wall and folded his massive arms. He grinned
mockingly at Joe. "We never give up," he said. Ray stared nervously and
wet his lips.

Joe shoved back his chair inch by inch.

"_Uarnl's_ dead," he said. "He blundered things in my office and got
scared and tried to get off-world in a passenger. The Patrol blasted
him."

Sarah rose calmly and looked at Ray and Kent. Their faces were stony.
She said: "_Lof--Dir_--I think the four of us together can break down
his resistance to Occupancy." Her eyes traveled to an empty corner of
the kitchen. "Are you ready, _Uarnl_?"

She faced Joe again, a sly smile on her lips.

"_Uarnl_ wasn't killed, Yoe--atomics don't kill us. The passenyer was."

Joe wasn't surprised when she floated away from the chair and toward
him, her slippers hardly seeming to touch the floor. He'd been
expecting to be attacked.

But what almost broke him into little pieces was her third eye--the
one that blinked open in the middle of her forehead, brushing aside a
brittle shell of skin and glaring at him with its wide, unhuman hunger.
Then, for one terrible second, his brain felt packed in ice; the room
was grotesque, filled with alien contrivances. The only sensible thing
in it was _Ih's_ warm, familiar third eye.

With all his melting strength, Joe thought, "_I destroyed the bodies!_"
and the whole scene dangled unmoving before him, the weird, distant
setting for the climax of a play, as he heard his own voice in a
wrenching groan:

"Our bodies--destroyed!"

Appalling misery and hatred for _himself_ rocked Joe's brain. Then
_Uarnl_ recoiled, as the _Aarnians'_ rapport was broken.

Joe cried chokingly, "Lieutenant--Lieutenant Smith!"

The canal door burst open and Lieutenant Smith of Mars Detain, who
had been hugging the narrow metal landing ledge, came in like the
proverbial tornado. What he'd heard had more than convinced him. The
deadly little sphere in his hands started to make sharp spitting sounds.

Sarah and Kent and Ray and the invisible _Uarnl_ screamed. All
together, in a dissonance of agony and fear and death.

[Illustration: They screamed, in a dissonance of agony and fear and
death....]

       *       *       *       *       *

Then, three of them stood loosely, in puzzled silence.

Big Kent brushed a hand across his eyes. "Ray," he muttered, "what in
hell were you yelling about?"

Ray looked at him and sank into the nearest chair.

"Yelling?" he said bewilderedly. His fingers began to unconsciously
perform on the chair arm. "I don't know. Was I yelling?"

Sarah was in Joe's arms, her blue-black hair sending its aching
fragrance into his nostrils. "Joe," she whispered, "Joe, what happened?"

He tipped back her head, ran a finger over her smooth, brown forehead.
Hypnosis--to paralyze and freeze him, to weaken him. He drew her face
against his shoulder again.

What _had_ happened? What would those Psychologists back in Iowa say
if this story ever reached their ears? _The barrier?--the "some sort
of block" in my mind, my freakish mind, that keeps out Projectors--and
Aarnians?_

"Kent," he said, "fix us all some drinks. Lieutenant Smith's got a
story to tell us--about that picnic."