
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Drunkboat
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: October 1963
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Amazing Stories, October 1963
   [New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 21 July 2017
Date last updated: 21 July 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1454

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






DRUNKBOAT

By CORDWAINER SMITH



  _To follow Elizabeth he went where no man
  had ever gone before.
  He left light itself behind like a shrivelled leaf.
  Space itself curled up behind him._




Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long
history of space.  It is true that no one else had ever done anything
like it before, to travel at such a distance, and at such speeds, and
by such means.  The hero looked like such an ordinary man--when people
looked at him for the first time.  The second time, ah! that was
different.  And the heroine.  Small she was, and ash-blonde,
intelligent, perky, and hurt.  Hurt--yes, that's the right word.  She
looked as though she needed comforting or helping, even when she was
perfectly all right.  Men felt more like men when she was near.  Her
name was Elizabeth.

Who would have thought that her name would ring loud and clear in the
wild vomiting nothing which made up space3?

He took an old, old rocket, of an ancient design.  With it he outflew,
outfled, outjumped all the machines which had ever existed before.  You
might almost think that he went so fast that he shocked the great
vaults of the sky, so that the ancient poem might have been written for
him alone.  "All the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven
with their tears."

Go he did, so fast, so far that people simply did not believe it at
first.  They thought it was a joke told by men, a farce spun forth by
rumor, a wild story to while away the summer afternoon.

We know his name now.

And our children and their children will know it for always.

Rambo.  Artyr Rambo of Earth Four.

But he followed his Elizabeth where no space was.  He went where men
could not go, had not been, did not dare, would not think.

He did all this of his own free will.

Of course people thought it was a joke at first, and got to making up
silly songs about the reported trip.

"Dig me a hole for that reeling feeling...!" sang one.

"Push me the call for the umber number...!" sang another.

"Where is the ship of the ochre joker...?" sang a third.

Then people everywhere found it was true.  Some stood stock still and
got gooseflesh.  Others turned quickly to everyday things.  Space3 had
been found, and it had been pierced.  Their world would never be the
same again.  The solid rock had become an open door.

Space itself, so clean, so empty, so tidy, now looked like a million
million light-years of tapioca pudding--gummy, mushy, sticky, not fit
to breathe, not fit to swim in.

How did it happen?

Everybody took the credit, each in his own different way.




1

"He came for me," said Elizabeth.  "I died and he came for me because
the machines were making a mess of my life when they tried to heal my
terrible, useless death."




2

"I went myself," said Rambo.  "They tricked me and lied to me and
fooled me, but I took the boat and I became the boat and I got there.
Nobody made me do it.  I was angry, but I went.  And I came back,
didn't I?"

He too was right, even when he twisted and whined on the green grass of
earth, his ship lost in a space so terribly far and strange that it
might have been beneath his living hand, or might have been half a
galaxy away.

How can anybody tell, with space-three?

It was Rambo who got back, looking for his Elizabeth.  He loved her.
So the trip was his, and the credit his.




3

But the Lord Crudelta said, many years later, when he spoke in a soft
voice and talked confidentially among friends, "The experiment was
mine.  I designed it.  I picked Rambo.  I drove the selectors mad,
trying to find a man who would meet those specifications.  And I had
that rocket built to the old, old plans.  It was the sort of thing
which human beings first used when they jumped out of the air a little
bit, leaping like flying fish from one wave to the next and already
thinking that they were eagles.  If I had used one of the regular
planoform ships, it would have disappeared with a sort of reverse
gurgle, leaving space milky for a little bit while it faded into
nastiness and obliteration.  But I did not risk that.  I put the rocket
on a launching pad.  _And the launching pad itself was an interstellar
ship_!  Since we were using an ancient rocket, we did it up right, with
the old, old writing, mysterious letters printed all over the machine.
We even had the name of our Organization--I and O and M--for 'the
Instrumentality of Mankind' written on it good and sharp.

"How would I know," went on the Lord Crudelta, "that we would succeed
more than we wanted to succeed, that Rambo would tear space itself
loose from its hinges and leave that ship behind, just because he loved
Elizabeth so sharply much, so fiercely much?"

Crudelta sighed.

"I know it and I don't know it.  I'm like that ancient man who tried to
take a water boat the wrong way around the planet Earth and found a new
world instead.  Columbus, he was called.  And the land, that was
Australia or America or something like that.  That's what I did.  I
sent Rambo out in that ancient rocket and he found a way through
space3.  Now none of us will ever know who might come bulking through
the floor or take shape out of the air in front of us."

Crudelta added, almost wistfully: "What's the use of telling the story?
Everybody knows it, anyhow.  My part in it isn't very glorious.  Now
the end of it, that's pretty.  The bungalow by the waterfall and all
the wonderful children that other people gave to them, you could write
a poem about that.  But the next to the end, how he showed up at the
hospital helpless and insane, looking for his own Elizabeth.  That was
sad and eerie, that was frightening.  I'm glad it all came to the happy
ending with the bungalow by the waterfall, but it took a crashing long
time to get there.  And there are parts of it that we will never quite
understand, the naked skin against naked space, the eyeballs riding
something much faster than light ever was.  Do you know what an
_aoudad_ is?  It's an ancient sheep that used to live on Old Earth, and
here we are, thousands of years later, with a children's nonsense rhyme
about it.  The animals are gone but the rhyme remains.  It'll be like
that with Rambo someday.  Everybody will know his name and all about
his drunkboat, but they will forget the scientific milestone that he
crossed, hunting for Elizabeth in an ancient rocket that couldn't fly
from peetle to pootle....  Oh, the rhyme?  Don't you know that?  It's a
silly thing.  It goes,

  Point your gun at a murky lurky.
  (_Now you're talking ham or turkey!_)
  Shoot a shot at a dying aoudad.
  (_Don't ask the lady why or how, dad!_)

Don't ask me what 'ham' and 'turkey' are.  Probably parts of ancient
animals, like beefsteak or sirloin.  But the children still say the
words.  They'll do that with Rambo and his drunken boat some day.  They
may even tell the story of Elizabeth.  But they will never tell the
part about how he got to the hospital.  That part is too terrible, too
real, too sad and wonderful at the end.  They found him on the grass.
Mind you, naked on the grass, and nobody knew where he had come from!"




4

They found him naked on the grass and nobody knew where he had come
from.  They did not even know about the ancient rocket which the Lord
Crudelta had sent beyond the end of nowhere with the letters I, O and M
written on it.  They did not know that this was Rambo, who had gone
through space-three.  The robots noticed him first and brought him in,
photographing everything that they did.  They had been programmed that
way, to make sure that anything unusual was kept in the records.

Then the nurses found him in an outside room.

They assumed that he was alive, since he was not dead, but they could
not prove that he was alive, either.

That heightened the puzzle.

The doctors were called in.  Real doctors, not machines.  They were
very important men.  Citizen Doctor Timofeyev, Citizen Doctor Grosbeck
and the director himself, Sir and Doctor Vomact.  They took the case.

(_Over on the other side of the hospital Elizabeth waited, unconscious,
and nobody knew it at all.  Elizabeth, for whom he had jumped space,
and pierced the stars, but nobody knew it yet!_)

The young man could not speak.  When they ran eye-prints and
fingerprints through the Population Machine, they found that he had
been bred on earth itself, but had been shipped out as a frozen and
unborn baby to Earth Four.  At tremendous cost, they queried Earth Four
with an "instant message," only to discover that the young man who lay
before them in the hospital had been lost from an experimental ship on
an intergalactic trip.

Lost.

No ship and no sign of ship.

And here he was.

They stood at the edge of space, and did not know what they were
looking at.  They were doctors and it was their business to repair or
rebuild people, not to ship them around.  How should such men know
about space, when they did not even know about space, except for the
fact that people got on the planoform ships and made trips through it?
They were looking for sickness when their eyes saw engineering.  They
treated him when he was well.

All he needed was time, to get over the shock of the most tremendous
trip ever made by a human being, but the doctors did not know that and
they tried to rush his recovery.



When they put clothes on him, he moved from coma to a kind of
mechanical spasm and tore the clothing off.  Once again stripped, he
lay himself roughly on the floor and refused food or speech.

They fed him with needles while the whole energy of space, had they
only known it, was radiating out of his body in new forms.

They put him all by himself in a locked room and watched him through
the peephole.

He was a nice-looking young man, even though his mind was blank and his
body was rigid and unconscious.  His hair was very fair and his eyes
were light blue but his face showed character--a square chin; a
handsome, resolute sullen mouth; old lines in the face which looked as
though, when conscious, he must have lived many days or months on the
edge of rage.

When they studied him the third day in the hospital, their patient had
not changed at all.

He had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked, face down, on the
floor.

His body was as immobile and tense as it had been on the day before.

(_One year later, this room was going to be a museum with a bronze sign
reading, "Here lay Rambo after he left the Old Rocket for Space Three,"
but the doctors still had no idea of what they were dealing with._)

His face was turned so sharply to the left that the neck muscles
showed.  His right arm stuck out straight from the body.  The left arm
formed an exact right angle from the body, with the left forearm and
hand pointing rigidly upward at 90 from the upper arm.  The legs were
in the grotesque parody of a running position.

Doctor Grosbeck said, "It looks to me like he's swimming.  Let's drop
him in a tank of water and see if he moves."  Grosbeck sometimes went
in for drastic solutions to problems.

Timofeyev took his place at the peephole.  "Spasm, still," he murmured.
"I hope the poor fellow is not feeling pain when his cortical defenses
are down.  How can a man fight pain if he does not even know what he is
experiencing?"

"And you, sir and doctor," said Grosbeck to Vomact, "what do you see?"

Vomact did not need to look.  He had come early and had looked long and
quietly at the patient through the peephole before the other doctors
arrived.  Vomact was a wise man, with good insight and rich intuitions.
He could guess in an hour more than a machine could diagnose in a year;
he was already beginning to understand that this was a sickness which
no man had ever had before.  Still, there were remedies waiting.

The three doctors tried them.

They tried hypnosis, electro-therapy, massage, subsonics, atropine,
surgital, a whole family of the digitalinids, and some quasi-narcotic
viruses which had been grown in orbit where they mutated fast.  They
got the beginning of a response when they tried gas hypnosis combined
with an electronically amplified telepath; this showed that something
still went on inside the patient's mind.  Otherwise the brain might
have seemed to be mere fatty tissue, without a nerve in it.  The other
attempts had shown nothing.  The gas showed a faint stirring away from
fear and pain.  The telepath reported glimpses of unknown skies.  (The
doctors turned the telepath over to the Space Police promptly, so they
could try to code the star patterns which he had seen in a patient's
mind, but the patterns did not fit.  The telepath, though a keen-witted
man, could not remember them in enough detail for them to be scanned
against the samples of piloting sheets.)

The doctors went back to their drugs and tried ancient, simple
remedies--morphine and caffeine to counteract each other, and a rough
massage to make him dream again, so that the telepath could pick it up.

There was no further result that day, or the next.


Meanwhile the Earth authorities were getting restless.  They thought,
quite rightly, that the hospital had done a good job of proving that
the patient had not been on Earth until a few moments before the robots
found him on the grass.  How had he gotten on the grass?

The airspace of earth reported no intrusion at all, no vehicle marking
a blazing arc of air incandescing against metal, no whisper of the
great forces which drove a planoform ship through space3.

(_Crudelta, using faster-than-light ships, was creeping slow as a snail
back toward Earth, racing his best to see if Rambo had gotten there
first._)

On the fifth day, there was the beginning of a breakthrough.




5

_Elizabeth had passed_.

This was found out only much later, by a careful check of the hospital
records.

The doctors only knew this much:

Patients had been moved down the corridor, sheet-covered figures
immobile on wheeled beds.

Suddenly the beds stopped rolling.

A nurse screamed.

The heavy steel-and-plastic wall was bending inward.  Some slow, silent
force was pushing the wall into the corridor itself.

The wall ripped.

A human hand emerged.

One of the quick-witted nurses screamed,

"_Push_ those beds!  _Push_ them out of the way."

The nurses and robots obeyed.

The beds rocked like a group of boats crossing a wave when they came to
the place where the floor, bonded to the wall, had bent upward to meet
the wall as it tore inward.  The peach-colored glow of the lights
flicked.  Robots appeared.

A second human hand came through the wall.  Pushing in opposite
directions, the hands tore the wall as though it had been wet paper.

The patient from the grass put his head through.

He looked blindly up and down the corridor, his eyes not quite
focussing, his skin glowing a strange red-brown from the burns of open
space.

"No," he said.  Just that one word.

But that "No" was heard.  Though the volume was not loud, it carried
throughout the hospital.  The internal telecommunications system
relayed it.  Every switch in the place went negative.  Frantic nurses
and robots, with even the doctors helping them, rushed to turn all the
machines back on--the pumps, the ventilators, the artificial kidneys,
the brain re-recorders, even the simple air engines which kept the
atmosphere clean.

Far overhead an aircraft spun giddily.  Its "off" switch, surrounded by
triple safeguards, had suddenly been thrown into the negative position.
Fortunately the robot-pilot got it going again before crashing into
earth.

The patient did not seem to know that his word had this effect.

(_Later the world knew that this was part of the "drunkboat effect."
The man himself had developed the capacity for using his neurophysical
system as a machine control._)

In the corridor, the machine robot who served as policeman arrived.  He
wore sterile, padded velvet gloves with a grip of sixty metric tons
inside his hands.  He approached the patient.  The robot had been
carefully training to recognize all kinds of danger from delirious or
psychotic humans; later he reported that he had an input of "danger,
extreme" on every band of sensation.  He had been expecting to seize
the prisoner with irreversible firmness and to return him to his bed,
but with this kind of danger sizzling in the air, the robot took no
chances.  His wrist itself contained a hypodermic pistol which operated
on compressed argon.

He reached out toward the unknown, naked man, who stood in the big torn
gap of the wall.  The wrist-weapon hissed and a sizeable injection of
condamine, the most powerful narcotic in the known universe, spat its
way through the skin of Rambo's neck.  The patient collapsed.

The robot picked him up gently and tenderly, lifted him through the
torn wall, pushed the door open with a kick which broke the lock and
put the patient back on his bed.  The robot could hear doctors coming,
so he used his enormous hands to pat the steel wall back into its
proper shape.  Work-robots or underpeople could finish the job later,
but meanwhile it looked better to have that part of the building set at
right angles again.

Doctor Vomact arrived, followed closely by Grosbeck.

"What happened?" he yelled, shaken out of a life-long calm.  The robot
pointed at the ripped wall.

"He tore it open, I put it back," said the robot.

The doctors turned to look at the patient.  He had crawled off his bed
again and was on the floor, but his breathing was light and natural.

"What did you give him?" cried Vomact to the robot.

"Condamine," said the robot, "according to rule 47-B.  The drug is not
to be mentioned outside the hospital."

"I know that," said Vomact absent-mindedly and a little crossly.  "You
can go along now.  Thank you."

"It is not usual to thank robots," said the robot, "but you can read a
commendation into my record if you want to."

"Get the blazes out of here!" shouted Vomact at the officious robot.

The robot blinked.  "There are no blazes but I have the impression you
mean me.  I shall leave, with your permission."  He jumped with odd
gracefulness around the two doctors, fingered the broken doorlock
absentmindedly, as though he might have wished to repair it and then,
seeing Vomact glare at him, left the room completely.



A moment later soft muted thuds began.  Both doctors listened a moment
and then gave up.  The robot was out in the corridor, gently patting
the steel floor back into shape.  He was a tidy robot, probably
animated by an amplified chicken-brain, and when he got tidy he became
obstinate.

"Two questions, Grosbeck," said the sir and doctor Vomact.

"Your service, sir!"

"Where was the patient standing when he pushed the wall into the
corridor, and how did he get the leverage to do it?"

Grosbeck narrowed his eyes in puzzlement.  "Now that you mention it, I
have no idea of how he did it.  In fact, he could not have done it.
But he has.  And the other question?"

"What do you think of condamine?"

"Dangerous, of course, as always.  Addiction can--"

"Can you have addiction with no cortical activity?" interrupted Vomact.

"Of course," said Grosbeck promptly.  "Tissue addiction."

"Look for it, then," said Vomact.

Grosbeck knelt beside the patient and felt with his fingertips for the
muscle endings.  He felt where they knotted themselves into the base of
the skull, the lips of the shoulders, the striped area of the back.

When he stood up there was a look of puzzlement on his face.  "I never
felt a human body like this one before.  I am not even sure that it
_is_ human any longer."

Vomact said nothing.  The two doctors confronted one another.  Grosbeck
fidgeted under the calm stare of the senior man.  Finally he blurted
out,

"Sir and Doctor, I know what we _could_ do."

"And that," said Vomact levelly, without the faintest hint of
encouragement or of warning, "is what?"

"It wouldn't be the first time that it's been done in a hospital."

"What?" said Vomact, his eyes--those dreaded eyes!--making Grosbeck say
what he did not want to say.

Grosbeck flushed.  He leaned toward Vomact so as to whisper, even
though there was no one standing near them.  His words, when they came,
had the hasty indecency of a lover's improper suggestion,

"Kill the patient, Sir and Doctor.  Kill him.  We have plenty of
records of him.  We can get a cadaver out of the basement and make it
into a good simulacrum.  Who knows what we will turn loose among
mankind if we let him get well?"

"Who knows?" said Vomact without tone or quality to his voice.  "But
citizen and doctor, what is the twelfth duty of a physician?"

"'Not to take the law into his own hands, keeping healing for the
healers and giving to the state or the Instrumentality whatever
properly belongs to the state or the Instrumentality.'"  Grosbeck
sighed as he retracted his own suggestion.  "Sir and doctor, I take it
back.  It wasn't medicine which I was talking about.  It was government
and politics which were really in my mind."

"And now...?" asked Vomact.

"Heal him, or let him be until he heals himself."

"And which would you do?"

"I'd try to heal him."

"How?" said Vomact.

"Sir and doctor," cried Grosbeck, "do not ride my weaknesses in this
case!  I know that you like me because I am a bold, confident sort of
man.  Do not ask me to be myself when we do not even know where this
body came from.  If I were bold as usual, I would give him typhoid and
condamine, stationing telepaths nearby.  But this is something new in
the history of man.  We are people and perhaps he is not a person any
more.  Perhaps he represents the combination of people with some kind
of a new force.  How did he get here from the far side of nowhere?  How
many million times has he been enlarged or reduced?  We do not know
what he is or what has happened to him.  How can we treat a man when we
are treating the cold of space, the heat of suns, the frigidity of
distance?  We know what to do with flesh, but this is not quite flesh
any more.  Feel him yourself, sir and doctor!  You will touch something
which nobody has ever touched before."

"I have," Vomact declared, "already felt him.  You are right.  We will
try typhoid and condamine for half a day.  Twelve hours from now let us
meet each other at this place.  I will tell the nurses and the robots
what to do in the interim."

They both gave the red-tanned spread-eagled figure on the floor a
parting glance.  Grosbeck looked at the body with something like
distaste mingled with fear; Vomact was expressionless, save for a wry
wan smile of pity.

At the door the head nurse awaited them.  Grosbeck was surprised at his
chief's orders.

"Ma'am and nurse, do you have a weapon-proof vault in this hospital?"

"Yes, sir," she said.  "We used to keep our records in it until we
telemetered all our records into Computer Orbit.  Now it is dirty and
empty."

"Clean it out.  Run a ventilator tube into it.  Who is your military
protector?"

"My what?" she cried, in surprise.

"Everyone on Earth has military protection.  Where are the forces, the
soldiers, who protect this hospital of yours?"

"My sir and doctor!" she called out, "my sir and doctor!  I'm an old
woman and I have been allowed to work here for three hundred years.
But I never thought of that idea before.  Why would I need soldiers?"

"Find who they are and ask them to stand by.  They are specialists too,
with a different kind of art from ours.  Let them stand by.  They may
be needed before this day is out.  Give my name as authority to their
lieutenant or sergeant.  Now here is the medication which I want you to
apply to this patient."


Her eyes widened as he went on talking, but she was a disciplined woman
and she nodded as she heard him out, point by point.  Her eyes looked
very sad and weary at the end but she was a trained expert herself and
she had enormous respect for the skill and wisdom of the Sir and Doctor
Vomact.  She also had a warm, feminine pity for the motionless young
male figure on the floor, swimming forever on the heavy floor, swimming
between archipelagoes which no man living had ever dreamed before.




6

Crisis came that night.

The patient had worn hand-prints into the inner wall of the vault, but
he had not escaped.

The soldiers, looking oddly alert with their weapons gleaming in the
bright corridor of the hospital, were really very bored, as soldiers
always become when they are on duty with no action.

Their lieutenant was keyed up.  The wirepoint in his hand buzzed like a
dangerous insect.  Sir and Doctor Vomact, who knew more about weapons
than the soldiers thought he knew, saw that the wirepoint was set to
HIGH, with a capacity of paralyzing people five stories up, five
stories down or a kilometer sideways.  He said nothing.  He merely
thanked the lieutenant and entered the vault, closely followed by
Grosbeck and Timofeyev.

The patient swam here too.

He had changed to an arm-over-arm motion, kicking his legs against the
floor.  It was as though he had swum on the other floor with the sole
purpose of staying afloat, and had now discovered some direction in
which to go, albeit very slowly.  His motions were deliberate, tense,
rigid, and so reduced in time that it seemed as though he hardly moved
at all.  The ripped pajamas lay on the floor beside him.

Vomact glanced around, wondering what forces the man could have used to
make those hand-prints on the steel wall.  He remembered Grosbeck's
warning that the patient should die, rather than subject all mankind to
new and unthought risks, but though he shared the feeling, he could not
condone the recommendation.

Almost irritably, the great doctor thought to himself--where could the
man be going?

(_To Elizabeth, the truth was, to Elizabeth, now only sixty meters
away.  Not till much later did people understand what Rambo had been
trying to do--crossing sixty mere meters to reach his Elizabeth when he
had already jumped an un-count of light-years to return to her.  To his
own, his dear, his well-beloved who needed him!_)

The condamine did not leave its characteristic mark of deep lassitude
and glowing skin: perhaps the typhoid was successfully contradicting
it.  Rambo did seem more lively than before.  The name had come through
on the regular message system, but it still did not mean anything to
the Sir and Doctor Vomact.  It would.  It would.

Meanwhile the other two doctors, briefed ahead of time, got busy with
the apparatus which the robots and the nurses had installed.

Vomact murmured to the others, "I think he's better off.  Looser all
around.  I'll try shouting."

So busy were they that they just nodded.

Vomact screamed at the patient, "Who are you?  What are you?  Where do
you come from?"

The sad blue eyes of the man on the floor glanced at him with a
surprisingly quick glance, but there was no other real sign of
communication.  The limbs kept up their swim against the rough concrete
floor of the vault.  Two of the bandages which the hospital staff had
put on him had worn off again.  The right knee, scraped and bruised,
deposited a sixty-centimeter trail of blood--some old and black and
coagulated, some fresh, new and liquid--on the floor as it moved back
and forth.

Vomact stood up and spoke to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.  "Now," he said,
"let us see what happens when we apply the pain."

The two stepped back without being told to do so.

Timofeyev waved his hand at a small white-enamelled orderly-robot who
stood in the doorway.

The pain net, a fragile cage of wires, dropped down from the ceiling.

It was Vomact's duty, as senior doctor, to take the greatest risk.  The
patient was wholly encased by the net of wires, but Vomact dropped to
his hands and knees, lifted the net at one corner with his right hand,
thrust his own head into it next to the head of the patient.  Doctor
Vomact's robe trailed on the clean concrete, touching the black old
stains of blood left from the patient's "swim" throughout the night.

Now Vomact's mouth was centimeters from the patient's ear.

Said Vomact, "Oh."

The net hummed.

The patient stopped his slow motion, arched his back, looked
steadfastly at the doctor.

Doctors Grosbeck and Timofeyev could see Vomact's face go white with
the impact of the pain machine, but Vomact kept his voice under control
and said evenly and loudly to the patient.

"_Who--are--you?_"

The patient said flatly, "Elizabeth."

The answer was foolish but the tone was rational.

Vomact pulled his head out from under the net, shouting again at the
patient, "Who--are--you?"

The naked man replied, speaking very clearly:

  "Chwinkle, chwinkle, little chweeble,
  I am feeling very feeble!"


Vomact frowned and murmured to the robot, "More pain, Turn it up to
pain ultimate."

The body threshed under the net, trying to resume its swim on the
concrete.

A loud wild braying cry came from the victim under the net.  It sounded
like a screamed distortion of the name Elizabeth, echoing out from
endless remoteness.

It did not make sense.

Vomact screamed back, "_Who--are--you?_"



With unexpected clarity and resonance, the voice came back to the three
doctors from the twisting body under the net of pain:

"I'm the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man,
the hipped man, the tripped man, the tipped man, the slipped man, the
flipped man, the nipped man, the ripped man, the clipped man--aah!"
His voice choked off with a cry and he went back to swimming on the
floor, despite the intensity of the pain net immediately above him.

The doctor lifted his hand.  The pain net stopped buzzing and lifted
high into the air.

He felt the patient's pulse.  It was quick.  He lifted an eyelid.  The
reactions were much closer to normal.

"Stand back," he said to the others.

"Pain on both of us," he said to the robot.

The net came down on the two of them.

"_Who are you?_" shrieked Vomact, right into the patient's ear, holding
the man halfway off the floor and not quite knowing whether the body
which tore steel walls might not, somehow, tear both of them apart as
they stood.

The man babbled back at him: "I'm the most man, the post man, the host
man, the ghost man, the coast man, the boast man, the dosed man, the
grossed man, the toast man, the roast man, no! no! no!"

He struggled in Vomact's arms.  Grosbeck and Timofeyev stepped forward
to rescue their chief when the patient added, very calmly and clearly,

"Your procedure is all right, doctor, whoever you are.  More fever,
please.  More pain, please.  Some of that dope to fight the pain.
You're pulling me back.  I know I am on Earth.  Elizabeth is near.  For
the love of God, get me Elizabeth!  But don't rush me.  I need days and
days to get well."

The rationality was so startling that Grosbeck, without waiting for
orders from Vomact, as chief doctor, ordered the pain net lifted.

The patient began babbling again: "I'm the three man, the he man, the
tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man...."  His voice
faded and he slumped unconscious.

Vomact walked out of the vault.  He was a little unsteady.

His colleagues took him by the elbows.

He smiled wanly at them: "I wish it were lawful....  I could use some
of that condamine myself.  No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up
and even make dead people do twitches!  Get me some liquor.  My heart
is old."

Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search
of medicinal liquor.

Vomact murmured, "How are we going to find _his_ Elizabeth?  There must
be millions of them.  And he's from Earth Four too."

"Sir and doctor, you have worked wonders," said Grosbeck.  "To go under
the net.  To take those chances.  To bring him to speech.  I will never
see anything like it again.  It's enough for any one lifetime, to have
seen this day."

"But what do we do next?" asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.

That particular question needed no answer.




7

The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.

His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer
exhaustion.

Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the
miniature space-ships, three were dead, one was comatose and the fourth
was spitting and raving.

When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to
ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the
command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested everyone
in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander
to take him to the hospital.  The computers at the port had told him
that one Rambo, "sans origine," had arrived mysteriously on the grass
of a designated hospital.

Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again,
placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor
to cover all his actions if he should later be channeled into a
court-martial, and arrested everyone in sight.

The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook
Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink.  The men were
jogging along on the double.  All of them had live helmets and their
wirepoints were buzzing.

Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the
sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them.  The whole hospital
was in an uproar.

The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.

The Two Minutes' War broke out immediately.

You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it
happened.  The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with
enormous powers and a strict code.  Each was a plenum of the low, the
middle and the high justice.  Each could do anything he found necessary
or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between
the worlds.  But if he made a mistake or committed a wrong--ah, then,
it was suddenly different.  Any Lord could put another Lord to death in
an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he
assumed this responsibility.  The only difference between ratification
and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency
and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while
those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove)
were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.

With three Lords, the situation was different.  Three lords made an
emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and
reported to the computers of the Intrumentality, they were exempt from
punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status.
Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were
beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their
actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.

This was all the business of the Instrumentality.  The Instrumentality
had the perpetual slogan: "Watch, but do not govern; stop war but do
not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"

The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops--not his troops, but the light
regular troops of Manhome Government--because he feared that the
greatest danger in the history of man might come from the person whom
he himself had sent through Space.

He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his
command--an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the
incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by
thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer
experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged
from the Ancient Wars.

_Overriding, overridden!_

These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before
recorded time began.  Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on
points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons,
most often by cutting in on other peoples' mechanical and social
controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as
they had taken them.

But not Crudelta's hastily-called troops.




8

The war broke out with a change of pace.

Two squads of men were moving into that part of the hospital where
Elizabeth lay, waiting the endless returns to the jelly-baths which
would rebuild her poor ruined body.

The squads changed pace.

The survivors could not account for what happened.

They all admitted to great mental confusion--afterward.

At the time it seemed that they had received a clear, logical command
to turn and to defend the women's section by counterattacking their own
main battalion right in their rear.

The hospital was a very strong building.  Otherwise it would have
melted to the ground or shot up in flame.

The leading soldiers suddenly turned around, dropped for cover and
blazed their wirepoints at the comrades who followed them.  The
wirepoints were cued to organic material, though fairly harmless to
inorganic.  They were powered by the power relays which every soldier
wore on his back.

In the first ten seconds of the turnaround, twenty-seven soldiers, two
nurses, three patients and one orderly were killed.  One hundred and
nine other people were wounded in that first exchange of fire.

The troop commander had never seen battle, but he had been well
trained.  He immediately deployed his reserves around the external
exits of the building and sent his favorite squad, commanded by a
Sergeant Lansdale whom he trusted well, down into the basement, so that
it could rise vertically from the basement into the women's quarters
and find out who the enemy was.

As yet, he had no idea that it was his own leading troops turning and
fighting their comrades.

He testified later, at the trial, that he personally had no sensations
of eerie interference with his own mind.  He merely knew that his men
had unexpectedly come upon armed resistance from antagonists--identity
unknown!--who had weapons identical with theirs.  Since the Lord
Crudelta had brought them along in case there might be a fight with
unspecified antagonists, he felt right in assuming that a Lord of the
Instrumentality knew what he was doing.  This was the enemy all right.

In less than a minute, the two sides had balanced out.  The line of
fire had moved right into his own force.  The lead men, some of whom
were wounded, simply turned around and began defending themselves
against the men immediately behind them.  It was as though an invisible
line, moving rapidly, had parted the two sections of the military force.

The oily black smoke of dissolving bodies began to glut the ventilators.

Patients were screaming, doctors cursing, robots stamping around and
nurses trying to call each other.

The war ended when the troop commander saw Sergeant Lansdale, whom he
himself had sent upstairs, leading a charge out of the women's
quarters--directly at his own commander!

The officer kept his head.

He dropped to the floor and rolled sidewise as the air chittered at
him, the emanations of Lansdale's wirepoint killing all the tiny
bacteria in the air.  On his helmet phone he pushed the manual controls
to TOP VOLUME and to NONCOMS ONLY and he commanded, with a sudden flash
of brilliant mother-wit,

"Good job, Landsdale!"

Lansdale's voice came back as weak as if it had been off-planet, "We'll
keep them out of this section yet, sir!"



The troop commander called back very loudly but calmly, not letting on
that he thought his sergeant was psychotic.

"Easy now.  Hold on.  I'll be with you."

He changed to the other channel and said to his nearby men, "Cease
fire.  Take cover and wait."

A wild scream came to him from the phones.

It was Lansdale.  "Sir!  Sir!  I'm fighting _you_, sir.  I just caught
on.  It's getting me again.  Watch out."

The buzz and burr of the weapons suddenly stopped.

The wild human uproar of the hospital continued.

A tall doctor, with the insignia of high seniority, came gently to the
troop commander and said,

"You can stand up and take your soldiers out now, young fellow.  The
fight was a mistake."

"I'm not under your orders," snapped the young officer.  "I'm under the
Lord Crudelta.  He requisitioned this force from the Manhome
Government.  Who are you?"

"You may salute me, captain," said the doctor, "I am Colonel General
Vomact of the Earth Medical Reserve.  But you had better not wait for
the Lord Crudelta."

"But _where_ is he?"

"In my bed," said Vomact.

"Your _bed_?" cried the young officer in complete amazement.

"In bed.  Doped to the teeth.  I fixed him up.  He was excited.  Take
your men out.  We'll treat the wounded on the lawn.  You can see the
dead in the refrigerators downstairs in a few minutes, except for the
ones that went smoky from direct hits."

"But the fight...?"

"A mistake, young man, or else--"

"Or else what?" shouted the young officer, horrified at the utter mess
of his own combat experience.

"Or else a weapon no man has ever seen before.  Your troops fought each
other.  Your command was intercepted."

"I could see that," snapped the officer, "as soon as I saw Lansdale
coming at me."

"But do you know what took him over?" said Vomact gently, while taking
the officer by the arm and beginning to lead him out of the hospital.
The captain went willingly, not noticing where he was going, so eagerly
did he watch for the other man's words.

"I think I know," said Vomact.  "Another man's dreams.  Dreams which
have learned how to turn themselves into electricity or plastic or
stone.  Or anything else.  Dreams coming to us out of space three."

The young officer nodded dumbly.  This was too much.

"Space three?" he murmured.  It was like being told that the really
alien invaders, whom men had been expecting for thirteen thousand years
and had never met, were waiting for him on the grass.  Until now space
three had been a mathematical idea, a romancer's day-dream, but not a
fact.


The sir and doctor Vomact did not even ask the young officer.  He
brushed the young man gently at the nape of the neck and shot him
through with tranquilizer.  Vomact then led him out to the grass.  The
young captain stood alone and whistled happily at the stars in the sky.
Behind him, his sergeants and corporals were sorting out the survivors
and getting treatment for the wounded.

The two minutes' war was over.

Rambo had stopped dreaming that his Elizabeth was in danger.  He had
recognized, even in his deep sick sleep, that the tramping in the
corridor was the movement of armed men.  His mind had set up defenses
to protect Elizabeth.  He took over command of the forward troops and
set them to stopping the main body.  The powers which space3 had worked
into him made this easy for him to do, even though he did not know that
he was doing it.




9

"How many dead?" said Vomact to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.

"About two hundred."

"And how many irrecoverable dead?"

"The ones that got turned into smoke.  A dozen, maybe fourteen.  The
other dead can be fixed up, but most of them will have to get new
personality prints."

"Do you know what happened?" asked Vomact.

"No, Sir and Doctor," they both chorused.

"I do.  I think I do.  No, I _know_ I do.  It's the wildest story in
the history of man.  Our patient did it--Rambo.  He took over the
troops and set them against each other.  That Lord of the
Instrumentality who came charging in--Crudelta.  I've known him for a
long long time.  He's behind this case.  He thought that troops would
help, not sensing that troops would invite attack upon themselves.  And
there is something else."

"Yes?" they said, in unison.

"Rambo's woman--the one he's looking for.  She must be here."

"Why?" said Timofeyev.

"Because _he's_ here."

"You're assuming that he came here because of his own will, Sir and
Doctor."

Vomact smiled the wise crafty smile of his family; it was almost a
trademark of the Vomact house.

"I am assuming all the things which I cannot otherwise prove.

"First, I assume that he came _here_ naked out of space itself, driven
by some kind of force which we cannot even guess.

"Second, I assume he came here because he wanted something.  A woman
named Elizabeth, who must already be here.  In a moment we can go
inventory all our Elizabeths.

"Third, I assume that the Lord Crudelta knew something about it.  He
has led troops into the building.  He began raving when he saw me.  I
know hysterical fatigue, as do you, my brothers, so I condamined him
for a night's sleep.

"Fourth, let's leave our man alone.  There'll be hearings and trials
enough, Space knows, when all these events get scrambled out."


Vomact was right.

He was usually was.

Trials did follow.

It was lucky that Old Earth no longer permitted newspapers or
television news.  The population would have been frothed up to riot and
terror if they had ever found out what happened at the Old Main
Hospital just to the West of Meeya Meefla.




10

Twenty-one days later, Vomact, Timofeyev and Grosbeck were summoned to
the trial of the Lord Crudelta.  A full panel of seven Lords of the
Instrumentality were there to give Crudelta an ample hearing and, if
required, a sudden death.  The doctors were present both as doctors for
Elizabeth and Rambo and as witnesses for the Investigating Lord.

Elizabeth, fresh up from being dead, was as beautiful as a new-born
baby in exquisite, adult feminine form.  Rambo could not take his eyes
off her, but a look of bewilderment went over his face every time she
gave him a friendly, calm remote little smile.  (She had been told that
she was his girl, and she was prepared to believe it, but she had no
memory of him or of anything else more than sixty hours back, when
speech had been reinstalled in her mind; and he, for his part, was
still thick of speech and subject to strains which the doctors could
not quite figure out.)

The Investigating Lord was a man named Starmount.

He asked the panel to rise.

They did so.

He faced the Lord Crudelta with great solemnity, "You are obliged, my
Lord Crudelta, to speak quickly and clearly to this court."

"Yes, my Lord," he answered.

"We have the summary power."

"You have the summary power.  I recognize it."

"You will tell the truth or else you will lie."

"I shall tell the truth or I will lie."

"You may lie, if you wish, about matters of fact and opinion, but you
will in no case lie about human relationships.  If you do lie,
nevertheless, you will ask that your name be entered in the Roster of
Dishonor."

"I understand the panel and the rights of this panel.  I will lie if I
wish--though I don't think I will need to do so--" and here Crudelta
flashed a weary intelligent smile at all of them--"but I will not lie
about matters of relationship.  If I do, I will ask for dishonor."

"You have yourself been well trained as a Lord of the Instrumentality?"

"I have been so trained and I love the Instrumentality well.  In fact,
I am myself the Instrumentality, as are you, and as are the honorable
Lords beside you.  I shall behave well, for as long as I live this
afternoon."

"Do you credit him, my Lords?" asked Starmount.

The members of the panel nodded their mitred heads.  They had dressed
ceremonially for the occasion.

"Do you have a relationship to the woman Elizabeth?"

The members of the trial panel caught their breath as they saw Crudelta
turn white: "My Lords!" he cried, and answered no further.

"It is the custom," said Starmount firmly, "that you answer promptly or
that you die."

The Lord Crudelta got control of himself.  "I am answering.  I did not
know who she was, except for the fact that Rambo loved her.  I sent her
to Earth from Earth Four, where I then was.  Then I told Rambo that she
had been murdered and hung desperately at the edge of death, wanting
only his help to return to the green fields of life."

Said Starmount: "Was that the truth?"

"My Lord and Lords, it was a lie."

"Why did you tell it?"

"To induce rage in Rambo and to give him an overriding reason for
wanting to come to Earth faster than any man has ever come before."

"A-a-ah!  A-a-ah!"  Two wild cries came from Rambo, more like the call
of an animal than like the sound of a man.



Vomact looked at his patient, felt himself beginning to growl with a
deep internal rage.  Rambo's powers, generated in the depths of space3,
had begun to operate again.  Vomact made a sign.  The robot behind
Rambo had been coded to keep Rambo calm.  Though the robot had been
enamelled to look like a white gleaming hospital orderly, he was
actually a police-robot of high powers, built up with an electronic
cortex based on the frozen midbrain of an old wolf.  (A wolf was a rare
animal, something like a dog.)  The robot touched Rambo, who dropped
off to sleep.  Doctor Vomact felt the anger in his own mind fade away.
He lifted his hand gently; the robot caught the signal and stopped
applying the narcoleptic radiation.  Rambo slept normally; Elizabeth
looked worriedly at the man whom she had been told was her own.

The Lords turned back from the glances at Rambo.

Said Starmount, icily: "And why did you do that?"

"Because I wanted him to travel through space-three."

"Why?"

"To show it could be done."

"And do you, my Lord Crudelta, affirm that this man has in fact
travelled through space-three?"

"I do."

"Are you lying?"

"I have the right to lie, but I have no wish to do so.  In the name of
the Instrumentality itself, I tell you that this is the truth."

The panel members gasped.  Now there was no way out.  Either the Lord
Crudelta was telling the truth, _which meant that all former times had
come to an end and that a new age had begun for all the kinds of
mankind_, or else he was lying in the face of the most powerful form of
affirmation which any of them knew.

Even Starmount himself took a different tone.  His teasing, restless,
intelligent voice took on a new timbre of kindness.

"You do therefore assert that this man has come back from outside our
galaxy with nothing more than his own natural skin to cover him?  No
instruments?  No power?"

"I did not say that," said Crudelta.  "Other people have begun to
pretend I used such words.  I tell you, my Lords that I planoformed for
twelve consecutive Earth Days and nights.  Some of you may remember
where Outpost Baiter Gator is.  Well, I had a good Go-captain, and he
took me four long jumps beyond there, out into intergalactic space.  I
left this man there.  When I reached Earth, he had been here twelve
days, more or less.  I have assumed, therefore, that his trip was more
or less instantaneous.  I was on my way back to Baiter Gator, counting
by Earth time, when the doctor here found this man on the grass outside
the hospital."

Vomact raised his hand.  The Lord Starmount gave him the right to
speak, "My sirs and Lords, we did not find this man on the grass.  The
robots did, and made a record.  But even the robots did not see or
photograph his arrival."

"We know that," said Starmount angrily, "and we know that we have been
told that nothing came to Earth by any means whatever, in that
particular quarter hour.  Go on, my Lord Crudelta.  What relation are
you to Rambo?"

"He is my victim."

"Explain yourself!"



"I computered him out.  I asked the machines where I would be most apt
to find a man with a tremendous lot of rage in him, and was informed
that on Earth Four the rage level had been left high because that
particular planet had a considerable need for explorers and
adventurers, in whom rage was a strong survival trait.  When I got to
Earth Four, I commanded the authorities to find out which border cases
had exceeded the limits of allowable rage.  They gave me four men.  One
was much too large.  Two were old.  This man was the only candidate for
my excitement.  I chose him."

"What did you tell him?"

"Tell him?  I told him his sweetheart was dead or dying."

"No, no," said Starmount.  "Not at the moment of crisis.  What did you
tell him to make him cooperate in the first place?"

"I told him," said the Lord Crudelta evenly, "that I was myself a Lord
of the Instrumentality and that I would kill him myself if he did not
obey, and obey promptly."

"And under what custom or law did you act?"

"Reserved material," said the Lord Crudelta promptly.  "There are
telepaths here who are not a part of the Instrumentality.  I beg leave
to defer until we have a shielded place."

Several members of the panel nodded and Starmount agreed with them.  He
changed the line of questioning.

"You forced this man, therefore, to do something which he did not wish
to do?"

"That is right," said the Lord Crudelta.

"Why didn't you go yourself, if it is that dangerous?"

"My Lords and honorables, it was the nature of the experiment that the
experimenter himself should not be expended in the first try.  Artyr
Rambo has indeed travelled through space-three.  I shall follow him
myself, in due course."  (How the Lord Crudelta did do so is another
tale, told about another time.)  "If I had gone and if I had been lost,
that would have been the end of the space-three trials.  At least for
our time."

"Tell us the exact circumstances under which you last saw Artyr Rambo
before you met after the battle in the old Main Hospital."

"We had put him in a rocket of the most ancient style.  We also wrote
writing on the outside of it, just the way the Ancients did when they
first ventured into space.  Ah, that was a beautiful piece of
engineering and archeology!  We copied everything right down to the
correct models of fourteen thousand years ago, when the Paroskii and
Murkins were racing each other into space.  The rocket was white, with
a red and white gantry beside it.  The letters IOM were on the rocket,
not that the words mattered.  The rocket has gone into nowhere, but the
passenger sits here.  It rose on a stool of fire.  The stool became a
column.  Then the landing field disappeared."

"And the landing field," said Starmount quietly, "what was that?"

"A modified planoform ship.  We have had ships go milky in space
because they faded molecule by molecule.  We have had others disappear
utterly.  The engineers had changed this around.  We took out all the
machinery needed for circumnavigation, for survival or for comfort.
The landing field was to last three or four seconds, no more.  Instead,
we put in fourteen planoform devices, all operating in tandem, so that
the ship would do what other ships do when they planoform--namely, drop
one of our familiar dimensions and pick up a new dimension from some
unknown category of space--but do it with such force as to get out of
what people call space-two and move over into space-three."

"And space-three, what did you expect of that?"

"I thought that it was universal and instantaneous, in relation to our
universe.  That everything was equally distant from everything else.
That Rambo, wanting to see his girl again, would move in a thousandth
of a second from the empty space beyond Outpost Baiter Gator into the
hospital where she was."

"And, my Lord Crudelta, what made you think so?"

"A hunch, my Lord, for which you are welcome to kill me."

Starmount turned to the panel.  "I suspect, my Lords, that you are more
likely to doom him to long life, great responsibility, immense rewards,
and the fatigue of being his own difficult and complicated self."

The mitres moved gently and the members of the panel rose.

"You, my Lord Crudelta, will sleep till the trial is finished."

A robot stroked him and he fell asleep.

"Next witness," said the Lord Starmount, "in five minutes."




11

Vomact tried to keep Rambo from being heard as a witness.  He argued
fiercely with the Lord Starmount in the intermission.  "You Lords have
shot up my hospital, abducted two of my patients and now you are going
to torment both Rambo and Elizabeth.  Can't you leave them alone?
Rambo is in no condition to give coherent answers and Elizabeth may be
damaged if she sees him suffer."

The Lord Starmount said to him, "You have your rules, doctor, and we
have ours.  This trial is being recorded, inch by inch and moment by
moment.  Nothing is going to be done to Rambo unless we find that he
has planet-killing powers.  If that is true, of course, we will ask you
to take him back to the hospital and to put him to death very
pleasantly.  But I don't think it will happen.  We want his story so
that we can judge my colleague Crudelta.  Do you think that the
Instrumentality would survive if it did not have fierce internal
discipline?"

Vomact nodded sadly; he went back to Grosbeck and Timofeyev, murmuring
sadly to them, "Rambo's in for it.  There's nothing we could do."

The panel reassembled.  They put on their judicial mitres.  The lights
of the room darkened and the weird blue light of justice was turned on.

The robot orderly helped Rambo to the witness chair.

"You are obliged," said Starmount, "to speak quickly and clearly to
this court."

"You're not Elizabeth," said Rambo.

"I am the Lord Starmount," said the investigating lord, quickly
deciding to dispense with the formalities.  "Do you know me?"

"No," said Rambo.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Earth," said Rambo.

"Do you wish to lie or to tell the truth?"

"A lie," said Rambo, "is the only truth which men can share with each
other, so I will tell you lies, the way we always do."

"Can you report your trip?"

"No."

"Why not, citizen Rambo?"

"Words won't describe it."

"Do you remember your trip?"

"Do you remember your pulse of two minutes ago?" countered Rambo.

"I am not playing with you," said Starmount.  "We think you have been
in space-three and we want you to testify about the Lord Crudelta?"

"Oh!" said Rambo.  "I don't like him.  I never did like him."

"Will you nevertheless try to tell us what happened to you?"

"Should I, Elizabeth?" asked Rambo of the girl, who sat in the audience.

She did not stammer.  "Yes," she said, in a clear voice which rang
through the big room.  "Tell them, so that we can find our lives again."

"I will tell you," said Rambo.

"When did you last see the Lord Crudelta?"

"When I was stripped and fitted to the rocket, four jumps out beyond
Outpost Baiter Gator.  He was on the ground.  He waved goodbye to me."

"And then what happened?"

"The rocket rose.  It felt very strange, like no craft I had ever been
in before.  I weighed many, many gravities."

"And then?"

"The engines went on.  I was thrown out of space itself."

"What did it seem like?"

"Behind me I left the working ships, the cloth and the food which goes
through space.  I went down rivers which did not exist.  I felt people
around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at
live bodies."

"_Where_ were you?" asked a panel member.

"In the winter time where there is no summer.  In an emptiness like a
child's mind.  In peninsulas which had torn loose from the land.  And I
_was_ the ship."

"You were what?" asked the same panel member.

"The rocket nose.  The cone.  The boat.  I was drunk.  It was drunk.  I
was the drunkboat myself," said Rambo.

"And where did you go?" resumed Starmount.

"Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes.  Where the waves washed
back and forth with the dead of all the ages.  Where the stars became a
pool, and I swam in it.  Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than
alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the _red red reds_ of love.
I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me
who really saw them.  I've heard phosphorescence singing and tides that
seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their
hooves beating the reefs.  You will not believe me, but I found
Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes
like big cats."

"What are you talking about?" asked the Lord Starmount.

"What I found in space3," snapped Artyr Rambo.  "Believe it or not.
This is what I now remember.  Maybe it's a dream, but it's all I have.
It was years and years and it was the blink of an eye.  I dreamed green
nights.  I felt places where the whole horizon became one big
waterfall.  The boat that was me met children and I showed them El
Dorado, where the gold men live.  The people drowned in space washed
gently past me.  I was a boat where all the lost space ships lay
drowned and still.  Sea-horses which were not real ran beside me.  The
summer month came and hammered down the sun.  I went past archipelagoes
of stars, where the delirious skies opened up for wanderers.  I cried
for me.  I wept for man.  I wanted to be the drunkboat sinking.  I
sank.  I fell.  It seemed to me that the grass was a lake, where a sad
child, on hands and knees, sailed a toy boat as fragile as a butterfly
in spring.  I can't forget the pride of unremembered flags, the
arrogance of prisons which I suspected, the swimming of the
businessmen!  Then I was on the grass."

"This may have scientific value," said the Lord Starmount, "but it is
not of judicial importance.  Do you have any comment on what you did
during the battle in the hospital?"

Rambo was quick and looked sane: "What I did, I did not do.  What I did
not do, I cannot tell.  Let me go, because I am tired of you and space,
big men and big things.  Let me sleep and let me get well."

Starmount lifted his hand for silence.

The panel members stared at him.

Only the few telepaths present knew that they had all said, "_Aye.  Let
the man go.  Let the girl go.  Let the doctors go_.  But bring back the
Lord Crudelta later on.  He has many troubles ahead of him, and we wish
to add to them."




12

Between the Instrumentality, the Manhome Government and the authorities
at the Old Main Hospital, everyone wished to give Rambo and Elizabeth
happiness.

As Rambo got well, much of his Earth Four memory returned.  The trip
faded from his mind.

When he came to know Elizabeth, he hated the girl.

This was not his girl--his bold, saucy, Elizabeth of the markets and
the valleys, of the snowy hills and the long boat rides.  This was
somebody meek, sweet, sad and hopelessly loving.

Vomact cured that.

He sent Rambo to the Pleasure City of the Herperides, where bold and
talkative women pursued him because he was rich and famous.

In a few weeks--a very few indeed--he wanted _his_ Elizabeth, this
strange shy girl who had been cooked back from the dead while he rode
space with his own fragile bones.

"Tell the truth, darling."  He spoke to her once gravely and seriously.
"The Lord Crudelta did not arrange the accident which killed you?"

"They say he wasn't there," said Elizabeth.  "They say it was an actual
accident.  I don't know.  I will never know."

"It doesn't matter now," said Rambo.  "Crudelta's off among the stars,
looking for trouble and finding it.  We have our bungalow, and our
waterfall, and each other."

"Yes, my darling," she said, "each other.  And no fantastic Floridas
for us."

He blinked at this reference to the past, but he said nothing.  A man
who has been through space3 needs very little in life, outside of _not_
going back to space3.  Sometimes he dreamed he was the rocket again,
the old rocket taking off on an impossible trip.  Let other men follow!
he thought, let other men go!  I have Elizabeth and I am here.



THE END






[End of Drunkboat, by Cordwainer Smith]
