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People Minus X

<h2>X</h2> Consciousness came back to him, bringing a cloudy surprise. Rough rocky walls were around him. This was an artificial cavern crowded with neo-biological equipment, most of which he could recognize. He lay firmly on a hard couch contrived of planks and a folded blanket, part of the latter covering him. A pair of dungarees and a mended shirt had been tossed casually across his bare torso. Someone who looked like a young medico laughed near him. "One week's time, Dukas—that's all we need now for a major transformation," he said. "You must have thought that we were all goners; it would have seemed like that to you. But it was just a freak attempt at sniping from the hills, with a Midas Touch focused to a thin beam. Whoever tried it must have been aiming at our chief's shelter. Only he wasn't there! Still down in miniature, you were caught in the backlash of the blast. But it only knocked you out and singed you a little. You kept holding onto some solid object. Your wife and the equipment were scarcely hurt at all. Then Prell showed up again. They talked with our chief the way you did before. They engineered the transformation. I thought you'd want to know all this quickly." The youthful android looked good-humoredly awed. "They just stepped out," he added. "They'll be back in a minute." Ed began to slide into his dungarees. He was grateful for his return to something like what he had been. His memories of an interlude when people were mountain tall were clear, yet they didn't seem quite to belong to himself. He thought briefly of how he must have been brought back to normal size—his micro-form in one of the vats of similar proportions acting as a pattern, electronic brain and all. In another vat, which Freeman's specialists had connected, the gelatins must have filmed and solidified slowly, taking shape, while in brain cells and filaments—different from electronic swirls but capable of assuming the same connecting arrangements—a personality was reproduced without destroying the pattern. With Barbara and Prell it had been the same. "The world goes on, I see," Ed remarked. The android biologist smiled wryly. "Some of that is your fault, Dukas," he said. "A matter of advertising. You made enough old-timers half believe that the Earth will go on being theirs. That cooled them off some. As for our kind, what you said started lots of them thinking again along what ought to be a natural track. Certainly the prompt departure of almost all of us is the only answer that can really solve anything. Yes, if that isn't far too large an order! Though I rather wish it were possible.... Here come Prell and your lady. I'll disappear." They looked almost as they used to look—before anything about them was changed. Blame the loss of some trifling birthmark or scar here and there on the simplification of details that had occurred during a step down to smallness. Yet Mitchell Prell's china-blue eyes were as good-humored as ever and Barbara's smile as bright and warm. "So here we are, Eddie," she said gaily. "And what we recently were are still around somewhere—alive and aware, and the same as we were, though not quite us any more. Separate, but still helping, I'm sure. And if we all get through all right, well, their universe is as wonderful and even vaster than ours." Prell scowled for a moment, as if he envied his lesser likeness the continued chance to study the structure of matter, down where molecules themselves seemed bigger and nearer. But then his shoulders jerked almost angrily, as if to shake off the scientist's woolgathering. "Come on, Ed," he snapped. "Abel Freeman has been pushing the idea you expressed, talking it around the world to all the androids. He says that, crazy though it is, he'll encourage it." They emerged from the cavern into the afternoon sunshine of the camp. A sudden quiet had come over it. Eyes were staring up toward the east, while bodies tensed for a dive for whatever shelter was at hand. Something moved there with seeming slowness, though its gray hue, like a distant mountain peak, told that it was seen through all the murky heights of the atmosphere and was in free space beyond. Its motors were inactive. High sunshine brought metallic glints from its prow. It was certainly miles in length. Its presence could mean doomsday. But it was magnificent! If it could set human blood to coursing more swiftly, how must it affect an android? "The star ship!" someone shouted. Others took up the cry: "The star ship.... The star ship...." Now Abel Freeman's voice boomed from a sound system: "Yep, you're right. I sent a call for it to come in from the asteroids. Figured it would be good for all our tough-gutted breed to look at! Uh-huh, tough gutted, I said, but might be I'll have to take that back. Anyhow, a man made for a mule loves a mule on sight. So how about men and a ship made for the stars? But might be you ain't that kind of folks—you only seem that way. Might be you can only see the mud on the ground and not the sky. I dunno. Moving all of us fast would take an awful lot of insides. But ain't she a beauty? I figure that the folks that brought her here didn't like to disobey orders, but they figured that letting us see was necessary. Maybe they're Phonies, too. I figure that Harwell, who bossed her construction, would be that now. Her kind of purpose demands it. But maybe you ain't up to what she's for. And you folks of the old kind, what do you say? What if we did leave you alone on Earth? What if you gave us this first star ship and let us build more, out on a moon of Saturn where you don't go much? Let's hear some answers!" Obviously, Abel Freeman's words were also being broadcast. Meanwhile the star ship glided into the sunset. Someone spoke briefly from her by radio. Harwell? "I hope you convince everybody, Freeman. I believe it does make sense. Not a cinch, though, even for us." That, too, came out of the address system, as the ship headed back toward its base. In his newer self, here on Earth, Ed breathed again, and his breathing was rapid. Once more the unseen future was a thrill. Yet he must not let glamour gild harsh uncertainties too much. He looked at the faces around him. Some were stern, some grinned in bravado under Abel Freeman's challenging sarcasm, but in most of them there was a special, eager light, almost avid. It looked as if Freeman's talk and the great craft that had come with it were turning the trick. But these were trivial dramatics, too. The real source of success—if it was that—was in a basic kinship of android vigor with the stars. Awakened, it could relinquish the Earth without regret. These people could feel a little like lesser gods now. Their strength and endurance matched the next step of progress. Now the fantastic gulf of distance didn't seem as wide as Freeman had once thought. From scattered android camps, messages came in, pointing generally toward deeper space. Yes, doubts were expressed. "Shall we leave our homes without even an argument? Are we complete fools?" "Yes, fools if we don't leave. We can make a mass departure. And remember that this is the only solution. Are they still too primitive for us to live with? The same fault might be ours. I wonder what they will say to our proposition?" Communications also flashed back and forth among the old race: "... They look like us but aren't. Their disguise and their powers hold a warning. No wonder so many of us think of them as something like medieval demons. Can we trust what they say? Or is it a trick to disarm us? How can we know? Yet they intrigue us. Man has always sought to borrow strength and permanence from the rocks and hills. Are they that achievement? And we ourselves have wanted the stars." Crouched over the small receiver in Freeman's restored shelter during that still-ominous afternoon, Ed and Barbara listened and waited. Around them they found both humor and pathos. In another shelter, dug into the rocks and soil, they located Les Payten, whose misfortunes with the Phonies had been many. His bitter frankness had won him dislike here. He had been put under restraint. There was the bearish tenderness and nursing of the gorgeous and powerful Nancy, Freeman's daughter, who stood beside him now, her big blue eyes expressing a mixture of soulful devotion and hunger about as rapacious as that of a starved hound-dog six inches from a fat rabbit. Les didn't seem to appreciate it at all. But he still tried to be a friend to his companions of a lost youth. "Babs! Ed!" he exclaimed at sight of them. "So you got back—to size, anyhow! But you could go back to where you began, as natural creatures! Damn, once we were young idiots, dazzled by a sense of wonder into too much tolerance. I don't want to be something synthetic! Can't you two realize the fundamental truth of that—for yourselves? Good Glory! Wake up!" Ed's grin was one-sided. "For one thing, I suspect that going back all the way wouldn't quite work, Les," he said mildly. "We are what we are now, that's all. There's a cloudy sort of limit on switching bodies. There can never truly be two of anyone. Besides, we like being what we are. And should I remind you that, in common with all animals, man is a natural machine? As for being synthetic, I assure you that both love and poetry are there as well. So what do you imagine that we lack that the old timers always had? A taste for turkey or cake? Just lead us to it! We're human, Les—our forms and ideals and feelings are as they always were. We're not devils. We're not truly separated from the old race in any part of sympathy. We're just people gone on—I hope!—a little further." Ed spoke gently, as he must to a tired, confused friend. Or was it to a whole, vast section of humanity, dumfounded by hurtling technology, proud and stubborn about what had seemed its eternal self, and dreading any change which could seem so darkly drastic? Barbara tried, too. "Why don't you join us, Les?" she urged. "If you became like us, you would know! Besides, even if all the androids leave the Earth, the knowledge of how to mold vitaplasm won't be taken away with us. People here will continue to be destroyed in accidents, as has always happened. So that knowledge will be needed and used. Besides, some persons will change willingly. Some people may want to shut themselves away from such realities. But I don't think that they can. They'll have to learn to accept facts." Les Payten looked at his old companions oddly, as if tempted by an old soaring of the fancy. Then the light died in his eyes. "Nice logic," he said coldly. "I could almost trust it if I didn't remind myself. A mechanical treachery. My Ed Dukas and Barbara Day are dead." His tone was calm, yet there was a quiver in it—perhaps of revulsion for these imponderable likenesses before him, whose hearts he thought he could not—or did not—want to see. Ed was exasperated before a stubbornness of thought habit which was partly fear, though Les Payten was no coward. Some human minds were quick to adjust, taking even the radical newness of the last half century in their stride. But there had always been many others who were slow. Perhaps it was a childish taint, a resisting of maturity. And how could they keep pace now? But right there, Ed had to remind himself not to be too sure of himself. The next day or minute might trip him up. There seemed no further way to argue with Les. Ed could only express his sincere thanks for a favor, offer good wishes, and shrug lightly and in some mockery, for one who refused what seemed a simple truth. If that shrug was superficially unkind, perhaps it was also a goad in the right direction. A favor to a pal. An hour later, when Ed told Freeman of Les Payten's reactions, the colorful android leader had a similar comment: "There's maybe billions like that—one reason why we got to leave. They'll change. But right now, who cares to take the ornery kid brothers fishing? Give 'em time to grow up a little more, first. It won't be so long. Just now we got our own problems and jobs. They ain't small, and nothing's certain. There's no hole to jump into that's as deep as deep space! I thought once that it couldn't happen. But now it looks as if we're gonna get the chance to try!" Abel Freeman was right. That evening a message came from the World Capital: "Let us meet and confer with android representatives and earnestly apply ourselves to a binding solution." That was the beginning. It seemed that reason had won out after all. Freeman and Prell were flown to the Capital. Ed did not go, for he foresaw a bleak conference with the single purpose of getting an arrangement made as soon as possible. This proved to be true. To the androids went the first star ship, its asteroid base, provisions to be delivered regularly over a ten-year period, supplies and equipment of all kinds, and the use of Titan, largest of distant Saturn's moons. To the vast majority of the androids this was enough. To the few grumblers there would be scant choice. Let them view themselves as exiles, borne along by the eager mass of their kind. When Freeman and Prell returned to camp after the signing of the treaty, Les Payten had already left for the City. For a while Nancy Freeman would look wistful. She was strong and beautiful, and perhaps not as wild as her personal legend. Briefly, Mitchell Prell's eyes rested on her. Then he chuckled. "Sirius," he said. "Nine light-years away. Not the nearest star, and not perfect. But the best bet of the nearest. Alpha Centauri is a binary, too. Bad for stable planetary orbits. But in the Sirian System, at least we know now that there are many planets. Come on, Freeman. There are more plans to straighten out." Preparations began, and the weeks passed. Once Ed even went shopping with his wife—for the pretty things, symbols of the luxury and sophistication of Earth, that she wanted to take with her into the unknown. Was that the crassest kind of optimism before the harshness that could be imagined? Ed, Barbara and Prell would be among the many thousands to be packed into the first star ship for the first long jump. They had earned the privilege of choice. Abel Freeman had elected to stay behind, to help direct operations on Titan. Interplanetary craft were moving out in a steady stream, transporting migrants and the prefabricated parts needed to set up a vast glassed-in camp that few of the old blood could ever have tried to build. The androids might even have endured the cold poison of Titan's methane atmosphere without protection. But they had inherited, and could not easily throw off, earthly conceptions of comfort. And they had their rights. The countless things needed to build other star ships would soon begin to follow them. The first group of interstellar migrants didn't have to go anywhere near Titan. The star ship came to Earth again, to orbit around it. Small rocket tenders were there to bring the passengers up to the boarding locks. At the take-off platforms, Ed Dukas saw his parents for the last time. Jack Dukas, who had chosen to remain on Earth with his wife, shook Ed's hand warmly. Let them try their simple life of thatched stone houses on hillsides, Ed thought, let them defy what seemed a too involved civilization. Perhaps after the android exodus, some few would even make it work—on Venus, if not at home. Ed hugged his mother. They had memories. Now Ed stretched optimism considerably. "At last there can be a lot of time, Mom," he said. "Enough so that we might even see each other again, someplace...." Soon he and Barbara were up there in the great ship. To his touch, her arm was as smooth and soft as ever. Her hair was dark and thick, her eyes were bright with adventure, her skin a golden tan. And was it a loss that she could have bent crowbar with her bare hands, or have braved a vacuum at near absolute-zero temperature without harm? "You're insulting me in your mind, Ed," she joshed gaily. "Not that I'm much bothered. So the robot stoops to conquer, eh? Of course we have no souls, Eddie." "Certainly not!" he responded in the same manner. "All our hopes spring from human sources. Even our firmer flesh was a human dream. Yet you can practically hear our mechanical joints creak. The old race was created perfect. Who could ever dare to make it any better?" Ed's sarcasm was honest. Yet he knew that before the unprobed distance, even the ruggedest of his kind were disposed to do a little whistling in the dark. Around them in the ship's huge assembly room, there were shouts, greetings, jokes and laughter. A young couple chatted brightly. A child studied a toy with serious petulance. A man consulted a notebook. Perhaps few here yet realized their range, power and freedom or just what they faced. Their environment had been narrow, like all earthly history. No doubt many were afraid of the strangeness and time and distance ahead. They had reason to be. Out there in the black pit of the galaxy, even giant stars could perish. Mitchell Prell had not yet come aboard. Abel Freeman had already left for Titan—without his willful daughter. Schaeffer, the scientist, had gone with him. Under Harwell's commands, the colossal craft kept taking on migrants at top speed for thirty hours. They boarded in numbers out of all proportion to the available living space. Meanwhile there were needles to submit to. Vitaplasm could be more rugged and adaptable now than when it was first used. The fluids from hollow needles were the means of imparting the improvements. At last the ship quivered slightly. In contact with the heat of fusion of hydrogen and lithium to form the gaseous stellar ash called helium, any material rocket chamber would have been scattered instantly as incandescent vapor. But space warps stood firm in their place, squeezing with an atom-crushing pressure of their own, natural only at the centers of stars. And now there was no secondary arrangement for the conversion of such power as was released into electricity. Even the helium became pure radiation that emerged in a stream. It was a continuous, directed explosion of light, far stronger within its narrow limits than the outburst of a supernova. It had been known for centuries that light had both mass and pressure, and here it was concentrated matter—the ultimate in propulsive thrust—changed completely to energy. On the sullen Earth, neither man nor android dared watch that thin thread of fury, while slowly the ship began to accelerate toward a five-figure number of miles per second. It was the start of the departure of fear from an ancient race. Or so it was meant to be. From Earth, curses no doubt followed the ship—and sighs of relief, and regrets, and good wishes. This setting forth should have been a human triumph. Many would insist that it was not that. Others knew that it was. Braced in a cubicle two meters long, one wide and half a meter high, Ed Dukas held his wife's hand. Tiered rows of other cubicles were around them. Mitchell Prell had been with them minutes ago, and he had simply said, "Good night," half jokingly. Or was it more whistling in the dark? "Just good night. That's how it'll be, sweet," Ed whispered now. "The years won't mean anything. In the old mythology, the demigods could sleep for a millennium." So the small spark of dread flickered out in them, as they invoked a power which they had used before, in smaller android bodies, and for a much shorter interval. No drug was needed. Their sleep became suspended animation. Fine dust began to settle on them. But after forty years, measured by the ship's chronometers—on the basis of a retarded time imparted to objects moving at high velocity, a somewhat longer interval must have passed on Earth—Ed was awakened to help patrol the vessel. With a few other silent men, he moved through its ghostly, dimly lighted corridors and compartments inhabited by the living dead. The stillness was all around, and outside only the stars burned in the void. The decades had been like the passing of a night of sleep; yet now awake, Ed was aware that the time had gone, building up an unimaginable distance. Here was the abyss. It was a cold awareness which made him neither confident nor happy. Sometimes he looked down at Barbara's quiet face, but he did not wish her to awaken now. Ahead was Sirius, brighter than before. Beside it, visible at least to the unaided eye, was the dim speck of its companion star, a white dwarf, shrunken and old, little larger than the Earth, but incredibly massive, the very atoms at its core compressed by its fearsome gravity and the weight of material above them. This dwarf's internal substance, largely pure nuclear matter, would have weighed tons per cubic inch. Instruments, brought nearer to a destination, now showed more clearly, by the irregularities in the movements of this binary system, the existence of planets pursuing changing paths in the complicated cross drags of two stellar bodies revolving around a common center. Those worlds, known of on Earth for a quarter century, were still out of telescopic view. Their seasons must be crazy—hot, cold, uncertain. Yet other, nearer star systems had the same, and worse, drawbacks. And Sirius was relatively near, too. Besides, need an android worry about the fluctuations of mad climates so much? After a month, Ed Dukas relinquished his duties to others who were aroused briefly. He slept again, for more decades, and on through the first contact with a Sirian world. His mind still slightly blurred, he came down in a tender from the orbiting star ship, after others had landed. Barbara was with him. Somewhere far ahead, among hills rapidly shedding their glacial coat under hot sunshine, was Mitchell Prell. The sunshine came from Sirius itself, farther away than the distance from Earth to Uranus; hence its size and brilliance were counteracted. Yet this world did not attend Sirius directly. It belonged to the white-hot speck at zenith—the dwarf with an almost equal attraction—tiny, but much closer. The planet hurried like a moon around this miniature sun. Ed looked up at thin fish-scale clouds that were rose-tinted. Before him was a prairie covered with waving stalks bearing white plumes. Might you call them flowers blown by the wind? High up among the melting ice he saw a tower and maybe a roadway. Later he beheld two shapes, brown and rough, with four tapered, flexible limbs radiating from a central lump. Man, with his arms and legs, also has vaguely the form of a cross. But these were different, though sometimes they almost walked, and metal devices glinted in the equipment they wore. Had he dreamed all this somewhere years ago?... Sometimes they rolled quickly like wheels, or they crept along, their limbs coiling. Once they flew, with bright flashes and without wings. But that was artificial. They moved off at last beside a shallow, salt-rimmed sea. "We can't stay here, Eddie," Barbara stated. "It could be fascinating, but it would be worse than on Earth." "As everyone will realize," Ed Dukas answered. So the explorers came back to the tender. Nearer to the dwarf sun they found a world with a more stable orbit and less extremes of cold and heat. If it was nearer the dwarf with its almost negligible radiance, it also did not approach as close to Sirius, nor swing so far away. It was a chilly little planet that had once been inhabited, too; but now there were only shattered stone and glass and rusted steel. Much of it was desert. But there were forests here and there, and high glaciers. High on a clifftop in the thin, cold atmosphere, the refugees built their first city. It began with houses of rough logs and stone. But as time passed and the population increased, its metal-sheathed towers began to soar. In its glassed-in gardens, terrestrial flowers and trees thrived, while out of doors beautiful plants of a neo-biology easily surpassed in vigor the hardy local growths. There were theaters, stores and libraries. There was feminine fashion. Thus, nostalgically, an old earthly way was copied, though Earth was lost. There was no method to speak across the light-years. Earth might even belong to a somewhat different branch of time. But all this did not include the major point of separation. That was expressed in the way these people climbed the highest mountains without tiring and let the hoarfrost of fearsome cold gather on their bare faces without discomfort. Sometimes, on blizzard nights, while they took the sleep that they did not need for more than the pleasure of it, Barbara and Ed would leave the windows open to the storm. "Roofs, buildings—why do we even bother with them?" Ed would say jokingly. His wife would look at him somewhat worriedly, as if he meant it. As if here there were a bitter strangeness that lowered all earthly art and charm and comfort and sense of home to a futility. But then she'd manage to laugh lightly, though often she didn't quite feel that way. "You know why we bother, Ed," she'd answer. "Because we want to stay somewhat as we once were. Didn't you always agree to that? Because it's hard to change old habits and limitations, and grasp the freedom you're thinking about, Eddie. Sometimes I even suspect that we try to hide from that freedom." Ed would scowl, feeling all of these thoughts, too. They had all the freedom that men had envisioned long ago: practical freedom from death, except from extreme violence; freedom from aging, freedom of mind, of action, of shape and size; the freedom of peace and plenty, and boundless energy. But beyond all this, like a goad, there often was, already, much more than a ghost of that ancient human restlessness that always had thrived on strength. "Are you happy here, Babs?" Ed asked once when there had been time to doubt. By then they already had two young sons, born of new flesh in an old way. "Of course—reasonably," she chuckled. "Though I have my moods. Then I don't quite know.... But, Eddie, this is the great, marvelous future, isn't it—the one we looked forward to with longing and wonder? We ought to appreciate it completely." "It is that future. But now, sweetheart, it's also just the present." There were incidents to match such restless talk and thinking. There was Mitchell Prell, always groping for new things, shouting down from a cragtop, or from his laboratory, "Hey, Ed! Barbara! Come here!" Maybe he'd discovered a vein of ore that might be mined, or a strange specimen of hitherto unnoticed local fauna or flora. He remained a scientist, while Ed had become a mere builder of buildings. More than likely, the woman Prell had married would be with him—she had been Nancy Freeman of a fantastic origin. That he had separated himself enough from his studies to take a wife was a minor miracle. That these so-different two should be together was certainly another. That she had learned to be both tasteful and poised, though no less vigorous than ever, had perhaps been hoped for by the first romancing thought that had given her real being on Earth. To live in peace, comfort and beauty, Ed now realized, was not a final goal. The wild nomad, like Prell, shouting down from mountaintops, always seeking the unknown and straining to be bigger than his powers—however great they might have become—still had to be served. Otherwise pride was insulted, the urge to learn and progress was defeated; boredom set in, and centuries of life were not worth living. Besides, belatedly, after years, there were voices, speaking out of wireless equipment in a way that Ed and Barbara Dukas and Mitchell Prell had reason to remember. That this world was now haunted by beings that floated with the dust in the air was a fact which in itself had an eerie, nomadic charm. Three tiny beings. No, now there were four. "Hello! Did you guess that we came with you on the star ship?... But we stayed on that first planet. Then we visited others. Once we slept under a glacier—we don't know how long. Now we have built another biological workshop. So we will not be lonely. There will be many of us. I see you have done well. What comes next?" Ed had the odd and startling impression of having been spoken to by himself. But he and a tiny speck of the clay of the half-gods were entirely distinct, even if their names were the same. The vast difference in size, enforcing separate thought patterns to meet the problems of different environment, had widened the gap further. "It's us!" Barbara said. Mitchell Prell and Nancy were also present just then, in the Dukas house. Perhaps the visitors had waited for them to be there. "I know who you mean," Nancy remarked. "Your little folk, Mitch. Tell them something. Or do they embarrass you by being so strange? Have you forgotten?" Prell laughed somewhat unsteadily. Other interests had long ago taken his attention away from the small regions that were within the reach of android powers. "They're special friends," he said. "We won't have any trouble talking to them. Hello yourselves!" So it was, for an hour. There was a mood of elfin charm, of expanded dimensions, of soft, rich colors; of physical laws wonderfully different in effect. The memory was haunting. But the larger Ed and Barbara had no present wish to return to that fantastic land. It was not their destiny. "So long for now...." The voices faded away playfully. But as Sirian time built Terran years, they were occasionally heard again, bearing a note of challenge. The new city had grown huge. The surrounding country was becoming populous. And the inevitable happened, like part of a plan implanted in the nature of man from the beginning—to grow, to reach out, to be bigger in all things than he was before, though perhaps even to imagine the final goal itself was still beyond his intelligence and his experience. Now a more rugged body only made the drives stronger and the outcome more sure. Still orbiting around this first colonial world, outside the old solar system and linked to the history of Earth, was the star ship, kept always in careful order. But on a small, jagged moon, a larger, better craft was under construction. It would have thrilled ancient blood; it could stir an android more. Something sultry began to ache in Ed Dukas's mind at the thought of restraint. "Some of us will have to go on, Babs," he said one dwarf-lit half-night. "Blame it on fundamental biological law—in me, and the boys, too. Call it building an empire too big for any government. Maybe it's an intended step—toward some other condition still out of sight. No doubt we're far from the end of what we can become. I don't know. I don't really care. I'm just a man and glad of it. I only know how I feel, and I suspect that, deep down, you feel the same!" For a moment Barbara was angry and sad. She still had a woman's wish for permanence. She knew that Ed was thinking of other stars and their systems—red giants, flickering variables, bursting novae—a whole universe of mystery beckoning to a new kind of human. Even the ugly coal-sack clouds of cosmic dust could have their appeal. She herself was not beyond being intrigued by such things. She walked across her pleasant room, which had begun to bore her a little, as Ed knew. "I'm game," she said mildly. Inconceivably far off were other galaxies. Maybe Ed read her mind a little, as she thought of the vast, tilted swirl of the one in Andromeda, almost as big as their native Milky Way. It was the nearest, but so distant that all the light-years they had crossed could seem a mile by comparison. As a child she used to look at a picture of it and think that everything she could imagine, and much more, was there: books, musical instruments, summer nights, dark horror. Ed and she were like the pagan divinities dreamed up wistfully long ago. Yet now she felt very humble. "Ed—" "Yes?" "I was just wondering where God lives," she said. <hr class="tb" /> ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ray Gallun's stories have appeared in virtually every science-fiction magazine known to English-speaking man—Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales, Startling Stories, etc., etc., plus Collier's, Family Circle, Utopia (Germany), and various anthologies. He was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in 1910, attended the University of Wisconsin, and has since spent most of his time, when not writing, traveling through the U. S., Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently a resident of New York City. <hr class="tb" /> "AMONG THE BETTER SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS."—Wilmington News "Scientific experiments on the moon and an accidental lunar explosion that seared the earth triggers another tale from the imaginative pen of Raymond Z. Gallun, a familiar name to science-fiction readers. "The secret of life and the restoring to the living of victims of the holocaust initiate a conflict for Ed Dukas, Gallun's scientific pioneer of the future. Restoring persons through scientific methods, personality records and the memories of near kin, leaves one fatal flaw. They lack one indefinable quality—a divine spark, perhaps a soul. "Gallun depicts a struggle between the restored people and the natural living. Life on the asteroids, thought machines, a journey to Mars and a star ship expedition to Sirius are woven into the plot. "PEOPLE MINUS X is packed with action, science-fiction style."—Detroit Times <hr class="tb" /> Of special interest to science-fiction readers— ACE BOOKS recommends these exciting new volumes: D-223 THE 13TH IMMORTAL by Robert Silverberg Was he a fugitive from Utopia? and THIS FORTRESS WORLD by James E. Gunn He brought the skies down upon him. D-255 CITY UNDER THE SEA by Kenneth Bulmer Despots of the ocean bottom. and STAR WAYS by Poul Anderson "Enjoyable, fast-moving, convincing."—Astounding S.F. D-261 THE VARIABLE MAN AND OTHER STORIES by Philip K. Dick Five exciting adventures in the future. D-277 CITY ON THE MOON by Murray Leinster A novel of the first lunar colonists and MEN ON THE MOON Edited by Donald A. Wollheim A new anthology of lunar exploration. D-286 ACROSS TIME by David Grinnell Kidnapped into the future! and INVADERS FROM EARTH by Robert Silverberg His lies decided the fate of two worlds. 35¢ If not available at your newsdealer, any of these books may be bought by sending 35¢ (plus 5¢ handling fee) for each number to Ace Books, Inc. (Sales Dept.), 23 W. 47th St., New York 36, N. Y. Order by book number <hr class="tb" /> If you've enjoyed this book, you will not want to miss these ACE SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS D-266 TWICE UPON A TIME by Charles L. Fontenay Eternal guardians of the star circuit and THE MECHANICAL MONARCH by E. C. Tubb One extra man could unbalance the world. D-205 THE EARTH IN PERIL Edited by Donald A. Wollheim Exciting stories of invaders from space. and WHO SPEAKS OF CONQUEST? by Lan Wright The galaxy said: "Earthmen, go home!" D-215 THREE TO CONQUER by Eric Frank Russell Only one man knew the Earth was invaded! and DOOMSDAY EVE by Robert Moore Williams Were the strangers impervious to H-Bombs? D-199 STAR GUARD by Andre Norton "Fast-paced and good reading."—Saturday Review and THE PLANET OF NO RETURN by Poul Anderson The first—or the last—on that new world? D-193 THE MAN WHO JAPED by Philip K. Dick In the days of the robot peeping toms! and THE SPACE-BORN by E. C. Tubb Their world was entirely man-made! Two Complete Novels for 35¢ If your newsdealer is sold out, send 35¢ per book number (plus 5¢ handling charges) directly to Ace Books (Sales Dept.), 23 W. 47th St., New York 36, N. Y. 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