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At their evening meal, the water was strictly measured out, and the brandy was increased in quantity in the punch they drank. But they had to be careful with the spirits, the latter being more likely to produce than to quench thirst. The car rested, during the night, upon an immense plateau, in which there was a deep hollow; its height was scarcely eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. This circumstance gave the doctor some hope, since it recalled to his mind the conjectures of geographers concerning the existence of a vast stretch of water in the centre of Africa. But, if such a lake really existed, the point was to reach it, and not a sign of change was visible in the motionless sky. To the tranquil night and its starry magnificence succeeded the unchanging daylight and the blazing rays of the sun; and, from the earliest dawn, the temperature became scorching. At five o'clock in the morning, the doctor gave the signal for departure, and, for a considerable time, the balloon remained immovable in the leaden atmosphere. The doctor might have escaped this intense heat by rising into a higher range, but, in order to do so, he would have had to consume a large quantity of water, a thing that had now become impossible. He contented himself, therefore, with keeping the balloon at one hundred feet from the ground, and, at that elevation, a feeble current drove it toward the western horizon. The breakfast consisted of a little dried meat and pemmican. By noon, the Victoria had advanced only a few miles. "We cannot go any faster," said the doctor; "we no longer command--we have to obey." "Ah! doctor, here is one of those occasions when a propeller would not be a thing to be despised." "Undoubtedly so, Dick, provided it would not require an expenditure of water to put it in motion, for, in that case, the situation would be precisely the same; moreover, up to this time, nothing practical of the sort has been invented. Balloons are still at that point where ships were before the invention of steam. It took six thousand years to invent propellers and screws; so we have time enough yet." "Confounded heat!" said Joe, wiping away the perspiration that was streaming from his forehead. "If we had water, this heat would be of service to us, for it dilates the hydrogen in the balloon, and diminishes the amount required in the spiral, although it is true that, if we were not short of the useful liquid, we should not have to economize it. Ah! that rascally savage who cost us the tank!"* * The water-tank had been thrown overboard when the native clung to the car. "You don't regret, though, what you did, doctor?" "No, Dick, since it was in our power to save that unfortunate missionary from a horrible death. But, the hundred pounds of water that we threw overboard would be very useful to us now; it would be thirteen or fourteen days more of progress secured, or quite enough to carry us over this desert." "We've made at least half the journey, haven't we?" asked Joe. "In distance, yes; but in duration, no, should the wind leave us; and it, even now, has a tendency to die away altogether." "Come, sir," said Joe, again, "we must not complain; we've got along pretty well, thus far, and whatever happens to me, I can't get desperate. We'll find water; mind, I tell you so."

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The Wind dies away.--The Vicinity of the Desert.--The Mistake in the Water-Supply.--The Nights of the Equator.--Dr. Ferguson's Anxieties. --The Situation flatly stated.--Energetic Replies of Kennedy and Joe. --One Night more. The balloon, having been made fast to a solitary tree, almost completely dried up by the aridity of the region in which it stood, passed the night in perfect quietness; and the travellers were enabled to enjoy a little of the repose which they so greatly needed. The emotions of the day had left sad impressions on their minds. Toward morning, the sky had resumed its brilliant purity and its heat. The balloon ascended, and, after several ineffectual attempts, fell into a current that, although not rapid, bore them toward the northwest. "We are not making progress," said the doctor. "If I am not mistaken, we have accomplished nearly half of our journey in ten days; but, at the rate at which we are going, it would take months to end it; and that is all the more vexatious, that we are threatened with a lack of water." "But we'll find some," said Joe. "It is not to be thought of that we shouldn't discover some river, some stream, or pond, in all this vast extent of country." "I hope so." "Now don't you think that it's Joe's cargo of stone that is keeping us back?" Kennedy asked this question only to tease Joe; and he did so the more willingly because he had, for a moment, shared the poor lad's hallucinations; but, not finding any thing in them, he had fallen back into the attitude of a strong-minded looker-on, and turned the affair off with a laugh. Joe cast a mournful glance at him; but the doctor made no reply. He was thinking, not without secret terror, probably, of the vast solitudes of Sahara--for there whole weeks sometimes pass without the caravans meeting with a single spring of water. Occupied with these thoughts, he scrutinized every depression of the soil with the closest attention. These anxieties, and the incidents recently occurring, had not been without their effect upon the spirits of our three travellers. They conversed less, and were more wrapt in their own thoughts. Joe, clever lad as he was, seemed no longer the same person since his gaze had plunged into that ocean of gold. He kept entirely silent, and gazed incessantly upon the stony fragments heaped up in the car--worthless to-day, but of inestimable value to-morrow. The appearance of this part of Africa was, moreover, quite calculated to inspire alarm: the desert was gradually expanding around them; not another village was to be seen--not even a collection of a few huts; and vegetation also was disappearing. Barely a few dwarf plants could now be noticed, like those on the wild heaths of Scotland; then came the first tract of grayish sand and flint, with here and there a lentisk tree and brambles. In the midst of this sterility, the rudimental carcass of the Globe appeared in ridges of sharply-jutting rock. These symptoms of a totally dry and barren region greatly disquieted Dr. Ferguson. It seemed as though no caravan had ever braved this desert expanse, or it would have left visible traces of its encampments, or the whitened bones of men and animals. But nothing of the kind was to be seen, and the aeronauts felt that, ere long, an immensity of sand would cover the whole of this desolate region. However, there was no going back; they must go forward; and, indeed, the doctor asked for nothing better; he would even have welcomed a tempest to carry him beyond this country. But, there was not a cloud in the sky. At the close of the day, the balloon had not made thirty miles. If there had been no lack of water! But, there remained only three gallons in all! The doctor put aside one gallon, destined to quench the burning thirst that a heat of ninety degrees rendered intolerable. Two gallons only then remained to supply the cylinder. Hence, they could produce no more than four hundred and eighty cubic feet of gas; yet the cylinder consumed about nine cubic feet per hour. Consequently, they could not keep on longer than fifty-four hours--and all this was a mathematical calculation! "Fifty-four hours!" said the doctor to his companions. "Therefore, as I am determined not to travel by night, for fear of passing some stream or pool, we have but three days and a half of journeying during which we must find water, at all hazards. I have thought it my duty to make you aware of the real state of the case, as I have retained only one gallon for drinking, and we shall have to put ourselves on the shortest allowance." "Put us on short allowance, then, doctor," responded Kennedy, "but we must not despair. We have three days left, you say?" "Yes, my dear Dick!" "Well, as grieving over the matter won't help us, in three days there will be time enough to decide upon what is to be done; in the meanwhile, let us redouble our vigilance!"

Well! if that tree has produced such flowers as those, for the last four thousand years, I have to offer it my compliments, anyhow," and he pointed to a gigantic sycamore, whose whole trunk was covered with human bones. The flowers of which Joe spoke were heads freshly severed from the bodies, and suspended by daggers thrust into the bark of the tree. "The war-tree of these cannibals!" said the doctor; "the Indians merely carry off the scalp, but these negroes take the whole head." "A mere matter of fashion!" said Joe. But, already, the village and the bleeding heads were disappearing on the horizon. Another place offered a still more revolting spectacle--half-devoured corpses; skeletons mouldering to dust; human limbs scattered here and there, and left to feed the jackals and hyenas. "No doubt, these are the bodies of criminals; according to the custom in Abyssinia, these people have left them a prey to the wild beasts, who kill them with their terrible teeth and claws, and then devour them at their leisure. "Not a whit more cruel than hanging!" said the Scot; "filthier, that's all!" "In the southern regions of Africa, they content themselves," resumed the doctor, "with shutting up the criminal in his own hut with his cattle, and sometimes with his family. They then set fire to the hut, and the whole party are burned together. I call that cruel; but, like friend Kennedy, I think that the gallows is quite as cruel, quite as barbarous." Joe, by the aid of his keen sight, which he did not fail to use continually, noticed some flocks of birds of prey flitting about the horizon. "They are eagles!" exclaimed Kennedy, after reconnoitring them through the glass, "magnificent birds, whose flight is as rapid as ours." "Heaven preserve us from their attacks!" said the doctor, "they are more to be feared by us than wild beasts or savage tribes." "Bah!" said the hunter, "we can drive them off with a few rifle-shots." "Nevertheless, I would prefer, dear Dick, not having to rely upon your skill, this time, for the silk of our balloon could not resist their sharp beaks; fortunately, the huge birds will, I believe, be more frightened than attracted by our machine." "Yes! but a new idea, and I have dozens of them," said Joe; "if we could only manage to capture a team of live eagles, we could hitch them to the balloon, and they'd haul us through the air!" "The thing has been seriously proposed," replied the doctor, "but I think it hardly practicable with creatures naturally so restive." "Oh! we'd tame them," said Joe. "Instead of driving them with bits, we'd do it with eye-blinkers that would cover their eyes. Half blinded in that way, they'd go to the right or to the left, as we desired; when blinded completely, they would stop." "Allow me, Joe, to prefer a favorable wind to your team of eagles. It costs less for fodder, and is more reliable." "Well, you may have your choice, master, but I stick to my idea." It now was noon. The Victoria had been going at a more moderate speed for some time; the country merely passed below it; it no longer flew. Suddenly, shouts and whistlings were heard by our aeronauts, and, leaning over the edge of the car, they saw on the open plain below them an exciting spectacle.

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The sun was at the zenith as the balloon approached the island. The blacks, who were members of the Makado tribe, were howling lustily, and one of them waved his bark hat in the air. Kennedy took aim at him, fired, and his hat flew about him in pieces. Thereupon there was a general scamper. The natives plunged headlong into the river, and swam to the opposite bank. Immediately, there came a shower of balls from both banks, along with a perfect cloud of arrows, but without doing the balloon any damage, where it rested with its anchor snugly secured in the fissure of a rock. Joe lost no time in sliding to the ground. "The ladder!" cried the doctor. "Follow me, Kennedy." "What do you wish, sir?" "Let us alight. I want a witness." "Here I am!" "Mind your post, Joe, and keep a good lookout." "Never fear, doctor; I'll answer for all that." "Come, Dick," said the doctor, as he touched the ground. So saying, he drew his companion along toward a group of rocks that rose upon one point of the island; there, after searching for some time, he began to rummage among the brambles, and, in so doing, scratched his hands until they bled. Suddenly he grasped Kennedy's arm, exclaiming: "Look! look!" "Letters!" Yes; there, indeed, could be descried, with perfect precision of outline, some letters carved on the rock. It was quite easy to make them out: "A. D." The Celestial Bottle.--The Fig-Palms.--The Mammoth Trees.--The Tree of War.--The Winged Team.--Two Native Tribes in Battle.--A Massacre.--An Intervention from above. The wind had become violent and irregular; the balloon was running the gantlet through the air. Tossed at one moment toward the north, at another toward the south, it could not find one steady current. "We are moving very swiftly without advancing much," said Kennedy, remarking the frequent oscillations of the needle of the compass. "The balloon is rushing at the rate of at least thirty miles an hour. Lean over, and see how the country is gliding away beneath us!" said the doctor. "See! that forest looks as though it were precipitating itself upon us!" "The forest has become a clearing!" added the other. "And the clearing a village!" continued Joe, a moment or two later. "Look at the faces of those astonished darkys!" "Oh! it's natural enough that they should be astonished," said the doctor. "The French peasants, when they first saw a balloon, fired at it, thinking that it was an aerial monster. A Soudan negro may be excused, then, for opening his eyes VERY wide!" "Faith!" said Joe, as the Victoria skimmed closely along the ground, at scarcely the elevation of one hundred feet, and immediately over a village, "I'll throw them an empty bottle, with your leave, doctor, and if it reaches them safe and sound, they'll worship it; if it breaks, they'll make talismans of the pieces." So saying, he flung out a bottle, which, of course, was broken into a thousand fragments, while the negroes scampered into their round huts, uttering shrill cries. A little farther on, Kennedy called out: "Look at that strange tree! The upper part is of one kind and the lower part of another!" "Well!" said Joe, "here's a country where the trees grow on top of each other." "It's simply the trunk of a fig-tree," replied the doctor, "on which there is a little vegetating earth. Some fine day, the wind left the seed of a palm on it, and the seed has taken root and grown as though it were on the plain ground." "A fine new style of gardening," said Joe, "and I'll import the idea to England. It would be just the thing in the London parks; without counting that it would be another way to increase the number of fruit-trees. We could have gardens up in the air; and the small house-owners would like that!" At this moment, they had to raise the balloon so as to pass over a forest of trees that were more than three hundred feet in height--a kind of ancient banyan. "What magnificent trees!" exclaimed Kennedy. "I never saw any thing so fine as the appearance of these venerable forests. Look, doctor!" "The height of these banyans is really remarkable, my dear Dick; and yet, they would be nothing astonishing in the New World." "Why, are there still loftier trees in existence?" "Undoubtedly; among the 'mammoth trees' of California, there is a cedar four hundred and eighty feet in height. It would overtop the Houses of Parliament, and even the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The trunk at the surface of the ground was one hundred and twenty feet in circumference, and the concentric layers of the wood disclosed an age of more than four thousand years." "But then, sir, there was nothing wonderful in it! When one has lived four thousand years, one ought to be pretty tall!" was Joe's remark. Meanwhile, during the doctor's recital and Joe's response, the forest had given place to a large collection of huts surrounding an open space. In the middle of this grew a solitary tree, and Joe exclaimed, as he caught sight of it: "A.D.!" repeated Dr. Ferguson. "Andrea Debono-- the very signature of the traveller who farthest ascended the current of the Nile." "No doubt of that, friend Samuel," assented Kennedy. "Are you now convinced?" "It is the Nile! We cannot entertain a doubt on that score now," was the reply. The doctor, for the last time, examined those precious initials, the exact form and size of which he carefully noted. "And now," said he--"now for the balloon!" "Quickly, then, for I see some of the natives getting ready to recross the river." "That matters little to us now. Let the wind but send us northward for a few hours, and we shall reach Gondokoro, and press the hands of some of our countrymen." Ten minutes more, and the balloon was majestically ascending, while Dr. Ferguson, in token of success, waved the English flag triumphantly from his car.

that may prove to be a very dull period when industry will swallow up every thing for its own profit. By dint of inventing machinery, men will end in being eaten up by it! I have always fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up our Globe!" "And I add that the Americans," said Joe, "will not have been the last to work at the machine!" "In fact," assented the doctor, "they are great boiler-makers! But, without allowing ourselves to be carried away by such speculations, let us rest content with enjoying the beauties of this country of the Moon, since we have been permitted to see it." The sun, darting his last rays beneath the masses of heaped-up cloud, adorned with a crest of gold the slightest inequalities of the ground below; gigantic trees, arborescent bushes, mosses on the even surface--all had their share of this luminous effulgence. The soil, slightly undulating, here and there rose into little conical hills; there were no mountains visible on the horizon; immense brambly palisades, impenetrable hedges of thorny jungle, separated the clearings dotted with numerous villages, and immense euphorbiae surrounded them with natural fortifications, interlacing their trunks with the coral-shaped branches of the shrubbery and undergrowth. Ere long, the Malagazeri, the chief tributary of Lake Tanganayika, was seen winding between heavy thickets of verdure, offering an asylum to many water-courses that spring from the torrents formed in the season of freshets, or from ponds hollowed in the clayey soil. To observers looking from a height, it was a chain of waterfalls thrown across the whole western face of the country. Animals with huge humps were feeding in the luxuriant prairies, and were half hidden, sometimes, in the tall grass; spreading forests in bloom redolent of spicy perfumes presented themselves to the gaze like immense bouquets; but, in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas, and tigers, were then crouching for shelter from the last hot rays of the setting sun. From time to time, an elephant made the tall tops of the undergrowth sway to and fro, and you could hear the crackling of huge branches as his ponderous ivory tusks broke them in his way. "What a sporting country!" exclaimed Dick, unable longer to restrain his enthusiasm; "why, a single ball fired at random into those forests would bring down game worthy of it. Suppose we try it once!" "No, my dear Dick; the night is close at hand--a threatening night with a tempest in the background--and the storms are awful in this country, where the heated soil is like one vast electric battery." "You are right, sir," said Joe, "the heat has got to be enough to choke one, and the breeze has died away. One can feel that something's coming." "The atmosphere is saturated with electricity," replied the doctor; "every living creature is sensible that this state of the air portends a struggle of the elements, and I confess that I never before was so full of the fluid myself." "Well, then," suggested Dick, "would it not be advisable to alight?"

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Oh! that won't take long," said Kennedy, going to work on the fireplace, where he had a brisk flame crackling and sparkling in a minute or two. Joe had cut some of the nicest steaks and the best parts of the tenderloin from the carcass of the antelope, and these were quickly transformed to the most savory of broils. "There, those will tickle the doctor!" said Kennedy. "Do you know what I was thinking about?" said Joe. "Why, about the steaks you're broiling, to be sure!" replied Dick. "Not the least in the world. I was thinking what a figure we'd cut if we couldn't find the balloon again." "By George, what an idea! Why, do you think the doctor would desert us?" "No; but suppose his anchor were to slip!" "Impossible! and, besides, the doctor would find no difficulty in coming down again with his balloon; he handles it at his ease." "But suppose the wind were to sweep it off, so that he couldn't come back toward us?" "Come, come, Joe! a truce to your suppositions; they're any thing but pleasant." "Ah! sir, every thing that happens in this world is natural, of course; but, then, any thing may happen, and we ought to look out beforehand." At this moment the report of a gun rang out upon the air. "What's that?" exclaimed Joe. "It's my rifle, I know the ring of her!" said Kennedy. "A signal!" "Yes; danger for us!" "For him, too, perhaps." "Let's be off!" And the hunters, having gathered up the product of their expedition, rapidly made their way back along the path that they had marked by breaking boughs and bushes when they came. The density of the underbrush prevented their seeing the balloon, although they could not be far from it. A second shot was heard. "We must hurry!" said Joe. "There! a third report!" "Why, it sounds to me as if he was defending himself against something." "Let us make haste!" They now began to run at the top of their speed. When they reached the outskirts of the forest, they, at first glance, saw the balloon in its place and the doctor in the car. "What's the matter?" shouted Kennedy. "Good God!" suddenly exclaimed Joe. "What do you see?" "Down there! look! a crowd of blacks surrounding the balloon!" And, in fact, there, two miles from where they were, they saw some thirty wild natives close together, yelling, gesticulating, and cutting all kinds of antics at the foot of the sycamore. Some, climbing into the tree itself, were making their way to the topmost branches. The danger seemed pressing. "My master is lost!" cried Joe. "Come! a little more coolness, Joe, and let us see how we stand. We hold the lives of four of those villains in our hands. Forward, then!" They had made a mile with headlong speed, when another report was heard from the car. The shot had, evidently, told upon a huge black demon, who had been hoisting himself up by the anchor-rope. A lifeless body fell from bough to bough, and hung about twenty feet from the ground, its arms and legs swaying to and fro in the air. "Ha!" said Joe, halting, "what does that fellow hold by?" "No matter what!" said Kennedy; "let us run! let us run!" "Ah! Mr. Kennedy," said Joe, again, in a roar of laughter, "by his tail! by his tail! it's an ape! They're all apes!" "Well, they're worse than men!" said Kennedy, as he dashed into the midst of the howling crowd. It was, indeed, a troop of very formidable baboons of the dog-faced species. These creatures are brutal, ferocious, and horrible to look upon, with their dog-like muzzles and savage expression. However, a few shots scattered them, and the chattering horde scampered off, leaving several of their number on the ground. In a moment Kennedy was on the ladder, and Joe, clambering up the branches, detached the anchor; the car then dipped to where he was, and he got into it without difficulty. A few minutes later, the Victoria slowly ascended and soared away to the eastward, wafted by a moderate wind. "That was an attack for you!" said Joe. "We thought you were surrounded by natives." "Well, fortunately, they were only apes," said the doctor. "At a distance there's no great difference," remarked Kennedy. "Nor close at hand, either," added Joe. "Well, however that may be," resumed Ferguson, "this attack of apes might have had the most serious consequences. Had the anchor yielded to their repeated efforts, who knows whither the wind would have carried me?" "What did I tell you, Mr. Kennedy?" "You were right, Joe; but, even right as you may have been, you were, at that moment, preparing some antelope-steaks, the very sight of which gave me a monstrous appetite." "I believe you!" said the doctor; "the flesh of the antelope is exquisite." "You may judge of that yourself, now, sir, for supper's ready." "Upon my word as a sportsman, those venison-steaks have a gamy flavor that's not to be sneezed at, I tell you." "Good!" said Joe, with his mouth full, "I could live on antelope all the days of my life; and all the better with a glass of grog to wash it down." So saying, the good fellow went to work to prepare a jorum of that fragrant beverage, and all hands tasted it with satisfaction. "Every thing has gone well thus far," said he. "Very well indeed!" assented Kennedy. "Come, now, Mr. Kennedy, are you sorry that you came with us?" "I'd like to see anybody prevent my coming!" It was now four o'clock in the afternoon. The Victoria had struck a more rapid current. The face of the country was gradually rising, and, ere long, the barometer indicated a height of fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. The doctor was, therefore, obliged to keep his balloon up by a quite considerable dilation of gas, and the cylinder was hard at work all the time. Toward seven o'clock, the balloon was sailing over the basin of Kanyeme. The doctor immediately recognized that immense clearing, ten miles in extent, with its villages buried in the midst of baobab and calabash trees. It is the residence of one of the sultans of the Ugogo country, where civilization is, perhaps, the least backward. The natives there are less addicted to selling members of their own families, but still, men and animals all live together in round huts, without frames, that look like haystacks. Beyond Kanyeme the soil becomes arid and stony, but in an hour's journey, in a fertile dip of the soil, vegetation had resumed all its vigor at some distance from Mdaburu. The wind fell with the close of the day, and the atmosphere seemed to sleep. The doctor vainly sought for a current of air at different heights, and, at last, seeing this calm of all nature, he resolved to pass the night afloat, and, for greater safety, rose to the height of one thousand feet, where the balloon remained motionless. The night was magnificent, the heavens glittering with stars, and profoundly silent in the upper air. Dick and Joe stretched themselves on their peaceful couch, and were soon sound asleep, the doctor keeping the first watch. At twelve o'clock the latter was relieved by Kennedy. "Should the slightest accident happen, waken me," said Ferguson, "and, above all things, don't lose sight of the barometer. To us it is the compass!" The night was cold. There were twenty-seven degrees of difference between its temperature and that of the daytime. With nightfall had begun the nocturnal concert of animals driven from their hiding-places by hunger and thirst. The frogs struck in their guttural soprano, redoubled by the yelping of the jackals, while the imposing bass of the African lion sustained the accords of this living orchestra. Upon resuming his post, in the morning, the doctor consulted his compass, and found that the wind had changed during the night. The balloon had been bearing about thirty miles to the northwest during the last two hours. It was then passing over Mabunguru, a stony country, strewn with blocks of syenite of a fine polish, and knobbed with huge bowlders and angular ridges of rock; conic masses, like the rocks of Karnak, studded the soil like so many Druidic dolmens; the bones of buffaloes and elephants whitened it here and there; but few trees could be seen, excepting in the east, where there were dense woods, among which a few villages lay half concealed. Toward seven o'clock they saw a huge round rock nearly two miles in extent, like an immense tortoise. "We are on the right track," said Dr. Ferguson. "There's Jihoue-la-Mkoa, where we must halt for a few minutes. I am going to renew the supply of water necessary for my cylinder, and so let us try to anchor somewhere." "There are very few trees," replied the hunger. "Never mind, let us try. Joe, throw out the anchors!" The balloon, gradually losing its ascensional force, approached the ground; the anchors ran along until, at last, one of them caught in the fissure of a rock, and the balloon remained motionless. It must not be supposed that the doctor could entirely extinguish his cylinder, during these halts. The equilibrium of the balloon had been calculated at the level of the sea; and, as the country was continually ascending, and had reached an elevation of from six to seven hundred feet, the balloon would have had a tendency to go lower than the surface of the soil itself. It was, therefore, necessary to sustain it by a certain dilation of the gas. But, in case the doctor, in the absence of all wind, had let the car rest upon the ground, the balloon, thus relieved of a considerable weight, would have kept up of itself, without the aid of the cylinder. The maps indicated extensive ponds on the western slope of the Jihoue-la-Mkoa. Joe went thither alone with a cask that would hold about ten gallons. He found the place pointed out to him, without difficulty, near to a deserted village; got his stock of water, and returned in less than three-quarters of an hour. He had seen nothing particular excepting some immense elephant-pits. In fact, he came very near falling into one of them, at the bottom of which lay a half-eaten carcass. He brought back with him a sort of clover which the apes eat with avidity. The doctor recognized the fruit of the "mbenbu"-tree which grows in profusion, on the western part of Jihoue-la-Mkoa. Ferguson waited for Joe with a certain feeling of impatience, for even a short halt in this inhospitable region always inspires a degree of fear. The water was got aboard without trouble, as the car was nearly resting on the ground. Joe then found it easy to loosen the anchor and leaped lightly to his place beside the doctor. The latter then replenished the flame in the cylinder, and the balloon majestically soared into the air. It was then about one hundred miles from Kazeh, an important establishment in the interior of Africa, where, thanks to a south-southeasterly current, the travellers might hope to arrive on that same day. They were moving at the rate of fourteen miles per hour, and the guidance of the balloon was becoming difficult, as they dared not rise very high without extreme dilation of the gas, the country itself being at an average height of three thousand feet. Hence, the doctor preferred not to force the dilation, and so adroitly followed the sinuosities of a pretty sharply-inclined plane, and swept very close to the villages of Thembo and Tura-Wels. The latter forms part of the Unyamwezy, a magnificent country, where the trees attain enormous dimensions; among them the cactus, which grows to gigantic size. About two o'clock, in magnificent weather, but under a fiery sun that devoured the least breath of air, the balloon was floating over the town of Kazeh, situated about three hundred and fifty miles from the coast. "We left Zanzibar at nine o'clock in the morning," said the doctor, consulting his notes, "and, after two days' passage, we have, including our deviations, travelled nearly five hundred geographical miles. Captains Burton and Speke took four months and a half to make the same distance!"

The camera, featuring advanced night-vision technology, provided a high-resolution picture in spite of the darkness and foul weather. For a moment, Camera 01 continued panning away from the Honda—then halted its programmed sweep and returned to the car. Dave Ladman had been on a routine foot patrol of the estate grounds at that time. Tom Mack, manning the security office, had recognized the presence of a suspicious vehicle and had overridden O1’s automatic function. [14] Rain had been falling heavily. Ceaseless barrages of raindrops shattered against the blacktop with force, creating such a froth and dancing spray that the street appeared to be aboil. The driver’s door opened, and Camera 01 zoomed in for a close-up as a tall, solidly built man got out of the car. He wore a black waterproof windbreaker. His face was hidden in the shadow of a hood. Unless Rolf Reynerd had loaned his car to a friend, this was the famous wolf. He fit the physical profile on Reynerd’s license. He closed the driver’s door, opened the rear door, and took a large white ball from the backseat. This appeared to be the garbage bag containing the gift of the sutured apple. Reynerd closed the door and started toward the front of the car, toward the driveway gate a hundred yards away. Abruptly he halted and turned to peer along the dark rain-swept lane, poised for flight. Perhaps he thought that he’d heard an approaching engine above the rushing rustle of the rain racing down through the trees. The security tape provided no sound. At that lonely hour, if another vehicle had arrived on the scene, chances were good that it would have been a cruiser belonging to the Bel Air Patrol, the private-security force that assisted in the policing of this extremely wealthy community. When neither a cruiser nor a less-official vehicle appeared, the hooded man regained his confidence. He hurried eastward to the gate. Camera 02 followed him as he stepped beyond the panning arc of Camera 01. As he neared the gate, Camera 03 watched him from across the street, zooming in for an intimate appraisal. Immediately upon arrival at the entrance gate, Reynerd threw the white bag toward the top of that bronze barrier. Failing to clear the highest scrollwork, the package bounced back at him. On his second attempt, he succeeded. When he turned away from the gate, his hood slipped half off, and Camera 03 captured a clear image of his face in the glow of the flanking gate lamps. [15] He had the chiseled features needed to be a successful waiter in the trendiest of L.A. restaurants, where both the service staff and the customers enjoyed the fantasy that any guy or gal ferrying plates of overpriced swordfish from kitchen to table during the Tuesday dinner shift might be offered, on Wednesday, a coveted role in Tom Cruise’s next hundred-fifty-million-dollar picture. Turning from the gate, having delivered the apple, Rolf Reynerd was grinning. Perhaps if Ethan hadn’t known the meaning of the man’s first name, the grin wouldn’t have seemed wolfish. Then he might have been reminded instead of a crocodile or a hyena. In any case, this was not the merry expression of a prankster. Captured on videotape, this curve of lips and bared teeth suggested a lunatic glee that required a full moon and medication. Splashing through black puddles filigreed with silver by the headlights, Reynerd returned to the car. As the Honda pulled off the shoulder and onto the eastbound lane once more, Camera 01 executed a swivel and zoom, then Camera 02. Both delivered readable shots of the rear license plate. Dwindling into the night, the car conjured briefly lingering ghosts from its tailpipe. Then the narrow street lay deserted, in wet gloom except for the lamps at the Manheim gate. Black rain, as if from a dissolving night sky, poured down, poured down, driving the darkness of the universe into the universally coveted Bel Air real estate. Before leaving his quarters in the west wing, Ethan called the housekeeper, Mrs. McBee, to report that he’d be out most of the day. More efficient than any machine, more dependable than the laws of physics, as trustworthy as any archangel, Mrs. McBee would within minutes dispatch one of the six maids under her command to Ethan’s [16] apartment. Seven days a week, a maid collected the trash and provided fresh towels. Twice weekly, his rooms were dusted, vacuumed, and left immaculate. Windows were washed twice a month. There were advantages to living in a mansion attended by a staff of twenty-five. As the chief of security overseeing both the Face’s personal protection and the safeguarding of the estate, Ethan enjoyed many benefits, including free meals prepared by either Mr. Hachette, the household chef, or by Mr. Baptiste, the household cook. Mr. Baptiste lacked his boss’s training in the finest culinary schools; but no one with taste buds ever complained about any dish he put on the table.

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AFTER THE APPLE HAD BEEN CUT IN HALF, the halves had been sewn together with coarse black thread. Ten bold stitches were uniformly spaced. Each knot had been tied with a surgeon’s precision. The variety of apple, a red delicious, might have significance. Considering that these messages had been delivered in the form of objects and images, never in words, every detail might refine the sender’s meaning, as adjectives and punctuation refined prose. More likely, however, this apple had been selected because it wasn’t ripe. Softer flesh would have crumbled even if the needle had been used with care and if each stitch had been gently cinched. Awaiting further examination, the apple stood on the desk in Ethan Truman’s study. The black box in which the apple had been packed also stood on the desk, bristling with shredded black tissue paper. The box had already yielded what clues it contained: none. Here in the west wing of the mansion, Ethan’s ground-floor apartment was comprised of this study, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Tall French windows provided a clear view of nothing real. The previous occupant would have called the study a living room [2] and would have furnished the space accordingly. Ethan did too little living to devote an entire room to it. With a digital camera, he had photographed the black box before opening it. He had also taken shots of the red delicious from three angles. He assumed that the apple had been sliced open in order to allow for the insertion of an object into the core. He was reluctant to snip the stitches and to take a look at what might lie within. Years as a homicide detective had hardened him in some respects. In other ways, too much experience of extreme violence had made him vulnerable. He was only thirty-seven, but his police career was over. His instincts remained sharp, however, and his darkest expectations were undiminished. A sough of wind insisted at the French panes. A soft tapping of blown rain. The languid storm gave him excuse enough to leave the apple waiting and to step to the nearest window. Frames, jambs, rails, muntins—every feature of every window in the great house had been crafted in bronze. Exposure to the elements promoted a handsome mottled-green patina on exterior surfaces. Inside, diligent maintenance kept the bronze a dark ruby-brown. The glass in each pane was beveled at every edge. Even in the humblest of service rooms—the scullery, the ground-floor laundry—beveling had been specified. Although the residence had been built for a film mogul during the last years of the Great Depression, no evidence of a construction budget could be seen anywhere from the entrance foyer to the farthest corner of the last back hall. When steel sagged, when clothes grew moth-eaten on haberdashery racks, when cars rusted on showroom floors for want of customers, the film industry nevertheless flourished. In bad times as in good, the only two absolute necessities were food and illusions. [3] From the tall study windows, the view appeared to be a painting of the kind employed in motion-picture matte shots: an exquisitely rendered dimensional scene that, through the deceiving eye of the camera, could serve convincingly as a landscape on an alien planet or as a place on this world perfected as reality never allowed. Greener than Eden’s fields, acres of lawn rolled away from the house, without one weed or blade of blight. The majestic crowns of immense California live oaks and the drooping boughs of melancholy deodar cedars, each a classic specimen, were silvered and diamonded by the December drizzle. Through skeins of rain as fine as angel hair, Ethan could see, in the distance, the final curve of the driveway. The gray-green quartzite cobblestones, polished to a sterling standard by the rain, led to the ornamental bronze gate in the estate wall. During the night, the unwanted visitor had approached the gate on foot. Perhaps suspecting that this barrier had been retrofitted with modern security equipment and that the weight of a climber would trigger an alarm in a monitoring station, he’d slung the package over the high scrolled crest of the gate, onto the driveway. The box containing the apple had been cushioned by bubble wrap and then sealed in a white plastic bag to protect it further from foul weather. A red gift bow, stapled to the bag, ensured that the contents would not be mistaken for garbage. Dave Ladman, one of two guards on the graveyard shift, retrieved the delivery at 3:56 A.M. Handling the bag with care, he had carried it to the security office in the groundskeeper’s building at the back of the estate. Dave and his shift partner, Tom Mack, x-rayed the package with a fluoroscope. They were looking for wires and other metal components of an explosive device or a spring-loaded killing machine. These days, some bombs could be constructed with no metal parts. Consequently, following fluoroscopy, Dave and Tom employed a trace-scent analyzer capable of recognizing thirty-two explosive [4] compounds from as few as three signature molecules per cubic centimeter of air. When the package proved clean, the guards unwrapped it, Upon discovering the black gift box, they had left a message on Ethan’s voice mail and had set the delivery aside for his attention. At 8:35 this morning, one of the two guards on the early shift, Benny Nguyen, had brought the box to Ethan’s apartment in the main house. Benny also arrived with a videocassette containing pertinent segments of tape from perimeter cameras that captured the delivery. In addition, he offered a traditional Vietnamese clay cooking pot full of his mother’s com tay cam, a chicken-and-rice dish of which Ethan was fond. “Mom’s been reading candle drippings again,” Benny said. “She lit a candle in your name, read it, says you need to be fortified.” “For what? The most strenuous thing I do these days is get up in the morning.” “She didn’t say for what. But not just for Christmas shopping. She had that temple-dragon look when she talked about it.” “The one that makes pit bulls bare their bellies?” “That one. She said you need to eat well, say prayers without fail each morning and night, and avoid drinking strong spirits.” “One problem. Drinking strong spirits is how I pray.” “I’ll just tell Mom you poured your whiskey down the drain, and when I left, you were on your knees thanking God for making chickens so she could cook com tay cam.” “Never knew your mom to take no for an answer,” Ethan said. Benny smiled. “She won’t take yes for an answer, either. She doesn’t expect an answer at all. Only dutiful obedience.” Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the thin rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air. Watching weather clarified his thinking. [5] Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams. From his uniform days through his plainclothes career, friends on the force had said that he did too much thinking. Some of them were dead. The apple had come in the sixth black box received in ten days. The contents of the previous five had been disturbing. Courses in criminal psychology, combined with years of street experience, made Ethan hard to impress in matters regarding the human capacity for evil. Yet these gifts provoked his deep concern. In recent years, influenced by the operatically flamboyant villains in films, every common gangbanger and every would-be serial killer, starring in his own mind movie, could not simply do his dirty work and move along. Most seemed to be obsessed with developing a dramatic persona, colorful crime-scene signatures, and ingenious taunts either to torment their victims beforehand or, after a murder, to scoff at the claimed competence of law-enforcement agencies. Their sources of inspiration, however, were all hackneyed. They succeeded only in making fearsome acts of cruelty seem as tiresome as the antics of an unfunny clown. The sender of the black boxes succeeded where others failed. For one thing, his wordless threats were inventive. When his intentions were at last known and the threats could be better understood in light of whatever actions he took, they might also prove to be clever. Even fiendishly so. In addition, he conferred on himself no silly or clumsy name to delight the tabloid press when eventually they became aware of his game. He signed no name at all, which indicated self-assurance and no desperate desire for celebrity. For another thing, his target was the biggest movie star in the world, perhaps the most guarded man in the nation after the President of the United States. Yet instead of stalking in secret, he revealed his [6] intentions in wordless riddles full of menace, ensuring that his quarry would be made even more difficult to reach than usual. Having turned the apple over and over in his mind, examining the details of its packaging and presentation, Ethan fetched a pair of cuticle scissors from the bathroom. At last he returned to the desk. He pulled the chair from the knee space. He sat, pushed aside the empty gift box, and placed the repaired apple at the center of the blotter. The first five black boxes, each a different size, and their contents had been examined for fingerprints. He had dusted three of the deliveries himself, without success.

"That's because you got turkey-turds for brains," Ricky said smugly. "I do not! Daddy, Ricky said - " "Children, don't," Marilys said gently. "Carune pretty much foresaw what has happened," Mark said. "Drone rocket ships programmed to land, first on the moon, then on Mars, then on Venus and the outer moons of Jupiter . . . drones really only programmed to do one thing after they landed - " "Set up a Jaunt station for astronauts," Ricky said. Mark nodded. "And now there are scientific outposts all over the solar system, and maybe someday, long after we're gone, there will even be another planet for us. There are Jaunt-ships on their way to four different star systems with solar systems of their own . . . but it'll be a long, long time before they get there." "I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty said impatiently. "Well, eventually the government got into it," Mark said. "Carune kept them out as long as he could, but finally they got wind of it and landed on him with both feet. Carune was nominal head of the Jaunt project until he died ten years later, but he was never really in charge of it again." "Jeez, the poor guy!" Rick said. "But he got to be a hero," Patricia said. "He's in all the history books, just like President Lincoln and President Hart." I'm sure that's a great comfort to him . . . wherever he is, Mark thought, and then went on, carefully glossing over the rough parts. The government, which had been pushed to the wall by the escalating energy crisis, did indeed come in with both feet. They wanted the Jaunt on a paying basis as soon as possible - like yesterday. Faced with economic chaos and the increasingly probable picture of anarchy and mass starvation in the 1990's, only last-ditch pleading made them put off announcement of the Jaunt before an exhaustive spectrographic analysis of Jaunted articles could be completed. When the analyses were complete - and showed no changes in the makeup of Jaunted artifacts - the existence of the Jaunt was announced with international hoopla. Showing intelligence for once (necessity is, after all, the mother of invention), the U.S. government put Young and Rubicam in charge of the pr. That was where the myth-making around Victor Carune, an elderly, rather peculiar man who showered perhaps twice a week and changed his clothes only when he thought of it, began. Young and Rubicam and the agencies which followed them turned Carune into a combination of Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Pecos Bill, and Flash Gordon. The blackly funny part of all this (and Mark Oates did not pass this on to his family) was that Victor Carune might even then have been dead or insane; art imitates life, they say, and Carune would have been familiar with the Robert Heinlein novel about the doubles who stand in for figures in the public eye. Victor Carune was a problem; a nagging problem that wouldn't go away. He was a loudmouthed foot-dragger, a holdover from the Ecological Sixties - a time when there was still enough energy floating around to allow foot-dragging as a luxury. These, on the other hand, were the Nasty Eighties, with coal clouds befouling the sky and a long section of the California coastline expected to be uninhabitable for perhaps sixty years due to a nuclear "excursion." Victor Carune remained a problem until about 1991 and then he became a rubber stamp, smiling, quiet, grandfatherly; a figure seen waving from podiums in newsfilms. In 1993, three years before he officially died, he rode in the pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade. Puzzling. And a little ominous The results of the announcement of the Jaunt - of working teleportation - on October 19th, 1988, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold at eight hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would bring something less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the announcement of the Jaunt and the first working Jaunt-Stations in New York and L.A., the stock market climbed a little over a thousand points. The price of oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations crisscrossing the U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC had ceased to exist, and the price of oil began to tumble. By 1998, with Stations in most free-world cities and goods routinely Jaunted between Tokyo and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to use the Jaunt on a regular basis, the stock market had levelled off five thousand points above its 1987 levels, oil was selling for six dollars a barrel, and the oil companies had begun to change their names. Texaco became Texaco Oil/Water, and Mobil had become Mobil Hydro-2-Ox.

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Mark hesitated briefly. There would have to be some caution here, if he didn't want to scare his children (not to mention his wife) into hysteria minutes away from their first Jaunt. The major thing was to leave them with the knowledge that everything was all right now, that the problem had been licked. "As I said, there was a slight problem . . ." Yes. Horror, lunacy, and death. How's that for a slight problem, kids? Carune set the box which read I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS down on the shelf and glanced at his watch. Damned if he hadn't put the thing on upside down. He turned it around and saw that it was a quarter of two. He had only an hour and a quarter of computer time left. How the time flies when you're having fun, he thought, and giggled wildly. He opened the box, reached in, and pulled out a squeaking white mouse by the tail. He put it down in front of Portal One and said, "Go on, mouse." The mouse promptly ran down the side of the orange crate on which the portal stood and scattered across the floor. Cursing, Carune chased it, and managed to actually get one hand on it before it squirmed through a crack between two boards and was gone. "SHIT!" Carune screamed, and ran back to the box of mice. He was just in time to knock two potential escapees back into the box. He got a second mouse, holding this one around the body (he was by trade a physicist, and the ways of white mice were foreign to him), and slammed the lid of the box back down. This one he gave the old heave-ho. It clutched at Carune's palm, but to no avail; it went head over ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune heard it immediately land on the crates across the barn. This time he sprinted, remembering how easily the first mouse had eluded him. He need not have worried. The white mouse merely crouched on the crate, its eyes dull, its sides aspirating weakly. Carune slowed down and approached it carefully; he was not a man used to fooling with mice, but you didn't have to be a forty-year veteran to see something was terribly wrong here. ("The mouse didn't feel so good after it went through," Mark Oates told his children with a wide smile that was only noticeably false to his wife.) Carune touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert - packed straw or sawdust, perhaps - except for the aspirating sides. The mouse did not look around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very frisky and alive little animal; here was something that seemed to be a living waxwork likeness of a mouse. Then Carune snapped his fingers in front of the mouse's small pink eyes. It blinked . . . and fell dead on its side. "So Carune decided to try another mouse," Mark said. "What happened to the first mouse?" Ricky asked. Mark produced that wide smile again. "It was retired with full honors," he said. Carune found a paper bag and put the mouse into it. He would take it to Mosconi, the vet, that evening. Mosconi could dissect it and tell him if its inner works had been rearranged. The government would disapprove his bringing a private citizen into a project which would be classified triple top secret as soon as they knew about it. Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have said to the babes who complained about the warmth of the milk. Carune was determined that the Great White Father in Washington would know about this as late in the game as possible. For all the scant help the Great White Father had given him, he could wait. Tough titty. Then he remembered that Mosconi lived way the hell and gone on the other side of New Paltz, and that there wasn't enough gas in the Brat to get even halfway across town . . . let alone back. But it was 2:03 - he had less than an hour of computer time left. He would worry about the goddamn dissection later. Carune constructed a makeshift chute leading to the entrance of Portal One (really the first Jaunt-Slide, Mark told the children, and Patty found the idea of a Jaunt-Slide for mice deliciously funny) and dropped a fresh white mouse into it. He blocked the end with a large book, and after a few moments of aimless pattering and sniffling, the mouse went through the portal and disappeared. Carune ran back across the barn. The mouse was DOA. There was no blood, no bodily swellings to indicate that a radical change in pressure had ruptured something inside. Carune supposed that oxygen starvation might - He shook his head impatiently. It took the white mouse only nanoseconds to go through; his own watch had confirmed that time remained a constant in the process, or damn close to it. The second white mouse joined the first in the paper sack. Carune got a third out (a fourth, if you counted the fortunate mouse that had escaped through the crack), wondering for the first time which would end first - his computer time or his supply of mice. He held this one firmly around the body and forced its haunches through the portal. Across the room he saw the haunches reappear . . . just the haunches. The disembodied little feet were digging frantically at the rough wood of the crate. Carune pulled the mouse back. No catatonia here; it bit the webbing between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to bring blood. Carune dropped the mouse hurriedly back into the I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS box and used the small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his lab first-aid kit to disinfect the bite. He put a Band-Aid over it, then rummaged around until he found a pair of heavy work-gloves. He could feel the time running out, running out, running out. It was 2:11 now. He got another mouse out and pushed it through backward - all the way. He hurried across to Portal Two. This mouse lived for almost two minutes; it even walked a little, after a fashion. It staggered across the Pomona orange crate, fell on its side, struggled weakly to its feet, and then only squatted there. Carune snapped his fingers near its head and it lurched perhaps four steps further before falling on its side again. The aspiration of its sides slowed ... slowed ... stopped. It was dead. Carune felt a chill. He went back, got another mouse, and pushed it halfway through headfirst. He saw it reappear at the other end, just the head . . . then the neck and chest. Cautiously, Carune relaxed his grip on the mouse's body, ready to grab if it got frisky. It didn't. The mouse only stood there, half of it on one side of the barn, half on the other. Carune jogged back to Portal Two. The mouse was alive, but its pink eyes were glazed and dull. Its whiskers didn't move. Going around to the back of the portal, Carune saw an amazing sight; as he had seen the pencil in cutaway, so now he saw the mouse. He saw the vertebrae of its tiny spine ending abruptly in round white circles; he saw its blood moving through the vessels; he saw the tissue moving gently with the tide of life around its minuscule gullet. If nothing else, he thought (and wrote later in his Popular Mechanics article), it would make a wonderful diagnostic tool. Then he noticed that the tidal movement of the tissues had ceased. The mouse had died. Carune pulled the mouse out by the snout, not liking the feel of it, and dropped it into the paper sack with its companions. Enough with the white mice, he decided. The mice die. They die if you put them through all the way, and they die if you put them through halfway headfirst. Put them through halfway butt-first, they stay frisky.

Considering the alternative. "Of course, you know that the Jaunt is teleportation, no more or less," he said. "Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carune Process, but it's really teleportation, and it was Carune himself - if you can believe the stories - who named it Њthe Jaunt.' He was a science-fiction reader, and there's a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it's called, and this fellow Bester made up the word Њjaunte' for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking about it, and we can't really do that." The attendants were fixing a mask to the steel nozzle and handing it to an elderly woman at the far end of the room. She took it, inhaled once, and fell quiet and limp on her couch. Her shirt had pulled up a little, revealing one slack thigh road-mapped with varicose veins. An attendant considerately readjusted for her while the other pulled off the used mask and affixed a fresh one. It was a process that made Mark think of the plastic glasses in motel rooms. He wished to God that Patty would cool out a little bit; he had seen children who had to be held down, and sometimes they screamed as the rubber mask covered their faces. It was not an abnormal reaction in a child, he supposed, but it was nasty to watch and he didn't want to see it happen to Patty. About Rick he felt more confident. "I guess you could say the Jaunt came along at the last possible moment," he resumed. He spoke toward Ricky, but reached across and took his daughter's hand. Her palm was cool and sweating lightly. "The world was running out of oil, and most of what was left belonged to the middle-eastern desert peoples, who were committed to using it as a political weapon. They had formed an oil cartel they called OPEC - " "What's a cartel, Daddy?" Patty asked. "Well, a monopoly," Mark said. "Like a club, honey," Marilys said. "And you could only be in that club if you had lots of oil." "Oh." "I don't have time to sketch the whole mess in for you," Mark said. "You'll study some of it in school, but it was a mess - let's let it go at that. If you owned a car, you could only drive it two days a week, and gasoline cost fifteen oldbucks a gallon - " "Gosh," Ricky said, "it only costs four cents or so a gallon now, doesn't it, Dad?"

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I order her brain shut down!” the spokesperson for the board said; his face was pale, sweat stood out on his forehead. “We should see more first,” I said. I found it highly exciting, this enactment of our own sacrament, our highest sacrament, in which our Savior consumes us. “Agneta,” Elms whispered, “did you see that? Christ ate Travis. There’s nothing left but his gloves and boots.” Oh, God, Agneta Rautavaara thought. What is happening? I don’t understand. She moved away from the figure, over to Elms. Instinctively. “He is my blood,” the figure said as it licked its lips. “I drink of this blood, the blood of eternal life. When I have drunk it, I will live forever. He is my body. I have no body of my own; I am only a plasma. By eating his body, I obtain everlasting life. This is the new truth that I proclaim, that I am eternal.” “He’s going to eat us, too,” Elms said. Yes, Agneta Rautavaara thought. He is. She could see now that the figure was an Approximation. It is a Proxima life form, she realized. He’s right; he has no body of his own. The only way he can get a body is- “I’m going to kill him,” Elms said. He popped the emergency laser rifle from its rack and pointed it at the figure. The figure said, “The hour has come.” “Stay away from me,” Elms said. “Soon you will no longer see me,” the figure said, “unless I drink of your blood and eat of your body. Glorify yourself that I may live.” The figure moved toward Elms. Elms fired the laser rifle. The figure staggered and bled. It was Travis’s blood, Agneta realized. In him. Not his own blood. This is terrible. She put her hands to her face, terrified. “Quick,” she said to Elms. “Say, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood.’ Say it before it’s too late.” “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” Elms whispered hoarsely. The figure fell. Bleeding, it lay dying. It was no longer a bearded man. It was something else, but Agneta Rautavaara could not tell what it was. It said, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” As she and Elms gazed down at it, the figure died. “I killed it,” Elms said. “I killed Christ.” He held the laser rifle pointed at himself, groping for the trigger. “That wasn’t Christ,” Agneta said. “It was something else. The opposite of Christ.” She took the gun from Elms. Elms was weeping. The Earthpersons on the Board of Inquiry possessed the majority vote, and they voted to abolish all activity in Rautavaara’s artificially sustained brain. This disappointed us, but there was no remedy for us. We had seen the beginning of an absolutely stunning scientific experiment: the theology of one race grafted onto that of another. Shutting down the Earthpersons’ brain was a scientific tragedy. For example, in terms of the basic relationship to God, the Earth race held a diametrically opposite view from us. This of course must be attributed to the fact that they are a somatic race while we are a plasma. They drink the blood of their God; they eat his flesh; that way they become immortal. To them, there is no scandal in this. They find it perfectly natural. Yet to us it is dreadful. That the worshiper should eat and drink its God? Awful to us; awful indeed. A disgrace and a shame-an abomination. The higher should always prey on the lower; the God should consume the worshiper. We watched as the Rautavaara case was closed-closed by the shutting down of her brain so that all EEG activity ceased and the monitors indicated nothing. We felt disappointment. In addition, the Earthpersons voted out a verdict of censure of us for our handling of the rescue mission in the first place. It is striking, the gulf that separates races developing in different star systems. We have tried to understand the Earthpersons, and we have failed. We are aware, too, that they do not understand us and are appalled in turn by some of our customs. This was demonstrated in the Rautavaara case. But were we not serving the purposes of detached scientific study? I myself was amazed at Rautavaara’s reaction when the Savior ate Mr. Travis. I would have wished to see this most holy of the sacraments fulfilled with the others, with Rautavaara and Elms as well. But we were deprived of this. And the experiment, from our standpoint, failed. And we live now, too, under the ban of unnecessary moral blame.