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  As she had been doing for the past five minutes, Priderell remained sitting on the right-hand section of the slowly cooking Dominator, without showing any particular interest in Grevan’s presence. It was a rather good trick, even for a Wild Variant whom CG undoubtedly would have classified as a neuronic monster.

  “Thanks for blanking out that compulsion pattern or whatever it was!” he remarked at last, experimentally. “It’s not at all surprising that CG is a little scared of you people.”

  Priderell gazed out into the passageway beyond the door with a bored expression.

  “You’re not fooling me much,” he informed her. “If you weren’t just an illusion, you’d get yourself singed good sitting up there.”

  The green eyes switched haughtily about the room and continued to ignore him.

  “It wasn’t even hard to figure out,” Grevan went on doggedly, “as soon as I remembered your dance with those beasts. The fact is, there weren’t any beasts there at all—you just made everybody think there were!”

  The eyes turned towards him then, but they only studied him thoughtfully.

  He began to feel baffled.

  Then the right words came up! Like an inspiration—

  “It would be just wild, wishful thinking, of course,” he admitted gloomily, “to imagine that Klim could have been anywhere near as right about you as she was about me! But I can’t help wondering whether possibly—”

  He paused hopefully.

  The coral-red lips smiled and moved for a few seconds. And, somewhere else, a low voice was saying:

  “Well, why don’t you come to Room Twenty-three and find out?”

  The Dominator went on crackling, and hissing, and cooling off unguarded—

  THE END

  1952

  THE ALTRUIST

  When something disappears, there is always a reason. But it may be pleasanter to have the mystery than find out the explanation!”

  “I PUT them right there!” Colonel Olaf Magrumssen said aloud.

  He was referring to his office scissors, with which he wanted to cut some string. The string, designed for official use, was almost unbreakably tough, and Colonel Magrumssen had wrapped one end of it around a package containing a set of reports of the Department of Metallurgy, which was to be dispatched immediately. The other end of the string led through a hole in the wall to an automatic feeder-spool somewhere behind the wall, and the scissors should have been on a small desk immediately under the point where the string emerged, because that was where the colonel always left them. Just now, however, they weren’t there.

  There wasn’t anything else on the desk that they might have slipped behind; they weren’t lying on the floor, and the desk had no drawers into which he could have put them by mistake. They were simply and inexplicably gone.

  “Damn!” he said, holding the package in both hands and looking about helplessly. He was all alone in the Inner Sanctum which separated his residential quarters from the general office area of the Department of Metallurgy.

  The Sanctum, constructed along the lines of a bank vault, contained Metallurgy’s secret files and a few simple devices connected with an automatic transportation system between Metallurgy and various other government departments. There was nothing around that would be useful in the present emergency.

  “Miss Eaton!” the colonel bellowed, in some exasperation.

  Miss Eaton appeared in the doorway a minute later, looking slightly anxious and slightly resentful, which was her normal expression. Otherwise, she was a very satisfactory secretary and general assistant to the colonel.

  “Your scissors, Miss Eaton!” he ordered, holding up his package, “Kindly cut this string!”

  MISS Eaton’s gaze went past him to the desk, and her expression became more definitely resentful.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She stepped up and, with a small pair of scissors attached by a decorative chain to her belt, cut the string.

  “Thank you,” said the colonel. “That will be all.”

  “There’s a Notice of Transfer regarding Charles E. Watterly lying on your desk,” Miss Eaton said. “You were to pass on it early this morning.”

  “I know.” The colonel frowned.

  “You might get out Watterly’s record for me, Miss Eaton.”

  “It’s attached to the Notice of Transfer,” Miss Eaton told him. She went out without waiting for a reply.

  The colonel dropped the package into a depository that would dispatch it to its destination untouched by human hands, and turned to leave the Inner Sanctum. Still irritated by the disappearance, he glanced back at the desk.

  And there the scissors were, just where he remembered having left them!

  The colonel stopped short. “Eh?” he inquired incredulously, of no one in particular.

  A long-forgotten childhood memory came chidingly into his mind . . .

  “Lying right there!” a ghostly voice of the past was addressing him again. “If it were a snake,” the voice added severely, rubbing the lesson in, “it would bite you!”

  The colonel picked up the scissors rather gingerly, as if they might bite him, at that. He looked surprised and alert now, all distracting annoyances forgotten.

  Colonel Magrumssen was a logical man. Now that he thought back, there was no significant doubt in his mind that, the evening before, he had left those scissors on that desk. Nor that, after opening the Sanctum and sealing the package this morning, he had discovered they were gone.

  Nor, of course, finally, that they now had returned again.

  Those were facts. Another fact was that, aside from himself, nobody but Miss Eaton had entered the Inner Sanctum meanwhile—and she hadn’t come anywhere near the desk.

  Touching a sticky spot on one of the blades of the scissors, the colonel dabbed at it and noticed something attractively familiar about the pale brown gumminess on his finger.

  He put the finger to his mouth. Why. certainly, he told himself—it’s just taffy.

  His mind paused a moment. Just taffy! it repeated.

  Now wait a minute, the colonel thought helplessly.

  One could put it this way, he decided: at some time last night or this morning, an Unseen Agency had borrowed his scissors for the apparent purpose of cutting taffy with them, and then had brought his scissors back . . .

  PERHAPS it was the complete improbability of that explanation which made him want to accept it immediately. In the humdrum, hard-working decades following Earth’s Hunger Years, Colonel Magrumssen had become a hobbyist of the Mysterious, and this was the most mysterious-looking occurrence he’d yet run into personally. He’d been trained in espionage during the last counter-revolution, and while the lack of further revolutions ultimately had placed him in an executive position in Metallurgy, his interests still lay in investigating the unexplained, the unpredictable, in human behavior, and elsewhere.

  As a logical man, however, he realized he’d have to put in his customary day’s work in Metallurgy before he could investigate the unusual behavior of a pair of office scissors.

  He locked the double doors of the Inner Sanctum behind him—locked them, perhaps, with exceptional attention to the fact that they were being locked—and went into the outer offices, to decide on Charles E. Watterly’s Notice of Transfer.

  The Department of Metallurgy, this section of which was under Colonel Olaf Magrumssen’s supervision, was as smoothly operating an organization as any government coordinator could want to see. So was every other major organization—the simple reason being that employees who couldn’t meet the stiff requirements of governmental employment were dropped quietly and promptly into the worldwide labor pool known as Civilian General Duty. Once CGD swallowed you, it was rather difficult to get out again; and life at those levels was definitely unattractive.

  Charles E. Watterly’s standing in Metallurgy was borderline at best, the colonel decided after going briefly over his record—a rather incredible series of preposterous mistakes, blunders, slipups
and oversights. Watterly’s immediate superior had made up a Notice of Transfer as a matter of course and sent it along to the colonel’s desk to be signed. Signing it would send Charles E. Watterly automatically to Civilian General Duty.

  The colonel was a tolerant man. He didn’t care a particular hang how the Department of Metallurgy fared, providing his own position wasn’t threatened. But even colonels who failed to keep their subordinates in line could wind up doing Civilian General Duty.

  He could afford to give the unfortunate Watterly one more chance, the colonel decided. A man who could operate so consistently against his own interests should be worth studying for a while! And since Watterly’s superior had passed the buck by making out the Notice of Transfer, the colonel summoned Miss Eaton and instructed her to have Watterly placed on his personal staff, on probation.

  Miss Eaton made no comment. The airtight organization which was beginning to haul humanity, uncomfortably and sometimes brutally enough, out of the catastrophic decline of the Hunger Years did not encourage comment on one’s superior’s decisions.

  “Mr. John Brownson of Statistics is here to see you,” she announced.

  “THE two per cent Normal Loss,” John Brownson, a personal assistant of the Minister of Statistics, informed Colonel Magrumssen presently, “has shown striking variations of late, locally. That’s the situation in a nutshell. The check we’re conducting in your department is of a purely routine nature.”

  He was relieved to hear that, the colonel said drily. What did Statistics make of these variations?

  Brownson looked surprised.

  “We’ve made nothing of them as yet,” he admitted. “In time, we hope, somebody will.” He paused and looked almost embarrassed. “Now in your department, we have localized one area of deviation so far. It happens to be the cafeteria.”

  The colonel stared. “The cafeteria?”

  “The cafeteria,” Brownson continued, flushing a trifle, “shows currently a steady point three increase over Normal Loss, Processed foodstuffs, of course, are so universally affected by the loss that almost any dispersal point can be used conveniently to check deviations. Similar changes are reported elsewhere in the capital area, indicating the possible development of a local trend . . .”

  “Trend to what?” the colonel demanded.

  Brownson shrugged thoughtfully. He wasn’t, he pointed out, an analyst; he only produced the statistics.

  “Well, never mind,” said the colonel. “Our poor little cafeteria, eh? Let me know if anything else turns up, will you?”

  Now that was an odd thing, he reflected, still idly, while he gazed after Brownson’s retreating back. When you got right down to it, nobody actually seemed to know why there should be a two per cent untraceable loss in the annual manipulations of Earth’s commodities! People like Brownson obviously saw nothing remarkable in it. To them, Normal Loss had the status of a natural law, and that was that.

  Why, he realized, his reaction hovering somewhere between amusement and indignation, he’d been fooled into accepting that general viewpoint himself! He’d let himself be tricked into accepting a “natural law” which involved an element of the completely illogical, the inexplicable.

  The colonel felt a flush of familiar excitement. Look, he thought, this could be—why, this is big! Let’s look at the facts!

  He did. And with that, almost instantly, a breathtakingly improbable but completely convincing explanation was there in his mind.

  Furthermore, it tied in. perfectly with the temporary disappearance of his office scissors that morning!

  Colonel Magrumssen conceded, however, with something like awed delight at his own cleverness, that it was going to be a little difficult to prove anything.

  THE problem suddenly had become too intriguing to put off entirely till evening, so the colonel sent Miss Eaton out to buy a bag of the best available taffy. And he himself made a trip to his private library in his living quarters and returned with a couple of books which had nothing to do with his official duties.

  He proceeded to study them until Miss Eaton returned with the taffy, which he put in a drawer of his desk. Then, tapping the last page of the text he had been studying—the chapter was titled “Negative Hallucinations”—he reviewed the tentative conclusions he’d formed so far.

  The common starting point in the investigation of any unusual occurrence was to assume that nothing just occurred, that everything had a cause. The next step being, of course, the assumption that anything that happened was part of a greater pattern of events; and that if one got to see enough of it, the greater pattern generally made sense.

  The mysterious disappearance and reappearance of his office scissors certainly seemed unusual enough. But when one tied it in with humanity’s casual acceptance of the fact that some two per cent of Earth’s processed commodities disappeared tracelessly every year, one might be getting a glimpse of a possible major pattern.

  The colonel glanced back over a paragraph he had marked in “Negative Hallucinations::

  Negative hallucinations are comprehensive in the sense that they also negate the sensory registration of any facts that would contradict them. Install in a hypnotic subject the conviction that there is no one but himself in the room; he will demonstrate that he does not permit himself to realize that he cannot see when another person present places both hands over his eyes . . .

  Assuming that it wasn’t too logical of humanity to take Normal Loss for granted, one could conclude that humanity as a whole might be suffering from a very comprehensive negative hallucination—in which case, it wouldn’t, of course, be permitting itself to wonder about Normal Loss!

  It was a rather large assumption to make, the colonel admitted; but he might be in a position to test it now.

  For one then could assume also that there was somebody around, some Unseen Agency, who was benefiting both by Normal Loss and by humanity’s willingness to accept Normal Loss without further investigation.

  An outfit who operated as smoothly as that shouldn’t really have bungled matters by returning his scissors under such suspicious circumstances. But even that sort of outfit might be handicapped by occasional members who weren’t quite up to par. Somebody, say, who was roughly the equivalent of a Charles E. Watterly.

  The notion satisfied the colonel. He unlocked a desk drawer which contained a few items of personal interest to him. A gun, for one thing—in case life eventually turned out to be just a little too boring, or some higher-up decided some day that Colonel Magrumssen was ripe for a transfer and CGD. A methodical man should be prepared for any; eventuality.

  Beside the gun, carefully wrapped, was a small crystal globe, a souvenir from a vacation trip he’d made to Africa some years before. There had been a brief personal romance involved with the trip and the globe; but that part of it no longer interested the colonel very much.

  The thing about the globe right now was that, when one pressed down a little button set into its base, it demonstrated a gradual succession of tiny landscapes full of the African sunlight and with minute animals and people walking about in it. All very lifelike and arranged in such a manner that one seemed to be making a slow trip about the continent. It was an enormously expensive little gadget, but it might now be worth the price he’d paid for it.

  The colonel wrapped the globe back up and set it on the desk next to the bag of taffy. Then he went about finishing up the day’s official business, somewhat amazed at the fact that he seemed to be accepting his Own preposterous theory as a simple truth—that invisible beings walked the Earth, lived among men and filched their sustenance from Man’s meager living supplies . . .

  But he hadn’t, he found, the slightest desire to warn humanity against its parasites! That had nothing to do with the fact that nobody would believe him anyway. So far, he rather approved of the methods employed by the Unseen Agency.

  By the time the next twenty-four hours were over, he also might have a fair idea of its purpose.

  He
laughed. The whole business was really outrageous. And he realized that, for some reason, that was just what delighted him about it.

  HE was sitting in his study, shortly after nine o’clock that evening, when he had the first indication that his plans were beginning to work out.

  Up till then, he had remained in a curiously relaxed frame of mind. Having accepted the apparent fact of the Unseen Agency’s existence, the question was whether its mysterious powers went so far that it actually could read his thoughts and know what he intended to do before he got around to doing it. If it could, his tricks obviously weren’t going to get him anywhere. If it couldn’t, he should get results—eventually. He felt he lost nothing by trying.

  He was aware of no particular surprise then when things began to happen. It was as if he had expected them to happen in just that way.

  He had pushed away the papers he was working on and leaned back to yawn and stretch for a moment. As if by accident, his gaze went to the mantel above the study’s electronic fireplace, where he had placed the little crystal globe showing Africa’s scenic wonders. He had left it switched to the picture of a burned brown desert, across which a troop of lean, pale antelopes trotted slowly toward a distant grove of palm trees.

  From where he sat, he could see that the crystal no longer showed the desert view. Instead, Kilimanjaro’s snow-covered peak was visible in it, reflecting the pink light of an infinitesimal morning sun.

  The colonel frowned slightly, permitting a vague sense of disturbance—an awareness of something being not quite as it should be—to pass through his mind. Presumably, that awareness would reflect itself to some degree in his expression and might be noticed there by a sufficiently alert observer.

  He dismissed the feeling and turned back to his papers.

  What he caught in that moment, from the corner of his eye, couldn’t exactly be described as motion. It was hardly more than a mental effect, a fleeting impression of shifting shadows, light and lines, as if something had alighted for an instant on the farthest edge of his vision and been withdrawn again.