man can live this way.”
She did not answer him. Finally he said, “It doesn’t make sense to you, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and talk.”
Suddenly they were not alone.
No sound was generated by the man’s coming. One instant they were talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax. He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.
Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.
“Benjamin!” she cried. “I knew someone would come.”
He smiled. “This is your son?”
“Yes,” she said. “We are ready.”
“I remember when you were born,” he said, and smiled in reminiscence. “Your father was afraid you would be twins.”
Earl said, “Why was my father killed?”
“By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders. Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can greatly minimize the cylinders’ power. That is why the undesirables with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.”
Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.
“We’d better hurry,” Mrs. Jamieson said.
Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her. Benjamin’s hands gripped tightly.
Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes....
She no longer felt the hands. She was still in the room! Benjamin and her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing.
Her power was gone!
The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at them, then ran to Earl’s desk, fumbling for the gun.
The Agents’ guns rattled.
Love, Benjamin said, the greatest of these is love. Or did someone else say that? Someone, somewhere, perhaps in another time, in some misty, forgotten chip of time long gone, in another frame of reference perhaps....
Mrs. Jamieson could not remember, before she died.
A Fall of Glass, by Stanley Lee
The pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.
It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in a cloudless blue sky.
His pockets were picked eleven times.
It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey Fownes’ abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses, one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions. But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman rifled Fownes’s handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.
He was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence. The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time. He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the handkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he was playing.
There was an occasional tinkle of falling glass.
It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist, hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. Dome weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing.
Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting his fingerprints off the postman’s bag, and which photographed, X-rayed and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and handedness behind.
By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an orange patrol car parked down the street.
Lanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.
Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.
Lanfierre’s job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn’t be tolerated within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it, Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own small efforts, rarer.
Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable. Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.
“Sometimes his house shakes,” Lanfierre said.
“House shakes,” Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he stopped and frowned. He reread what he’d just written.
“You heard right. The house shakes,” Lanfierre said, savoring it.
MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of the windshield. “Like from ... side to side?” he asked in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice.
“And
