“Nothing?”

  “No more letters, no more money.”

  His hand touched hers. “Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps your father doesn’t really want you to return to Russia?”

  For a moment she stared at him. “It was before I had told him I was coming home. He had ordered me a hundred times, called me a traitor, the vilest names.”

  Carefully Krasilnikov said, “His position in your government would force him to do that, wouldn’t it? How do you know he’s not secretly proud of you?”

  “But this was before! Before I had told him I wanted to come home.”

  “He might have guessed it just the same, from the tone of your letters. Or like I said, there are a lot of Russians around Washington. Couldn’t one of them have tipped him off?”

  She sighed, her eyes on the carpet. “You do not understand how it is in our country, how it is in our families.”

  He should have been proud, and he told himself to be proud; but the thing that had awakened was weeping in his chest. “I guess I don’t,” he told her. “But it seems to me that if you were proud of yourselves when you did what you did, your father might be proud of you, even if he couldn’t say it out loud. I know we were all proud of the President’s son, and the ones who went after him too.”

  She shook her head, eyes still averted.

  He said, “If you want your check back, you can have it. Or I’ll tear it up, if you want me to.”

  She looked up at that. “You aren’t really an evil man, are you, Mr. Percival? I had hoped to employ an evil man, because I thought an evil man might get me what I wanted.”

  He smiled. “Evil enough, if you still want it. And call me Charlie, Ms. Aralov. If you still want to go back home, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” That was perfectly true, and ridiculous though it was, knowing it was true made him feel better.

  “All right, Charlie. I am Sonja. Yes, I am going home.”

  “You don’t have a passport?”

  She shook her head. “We burned them when we arrived; that was part of our pledge that we would stay. You will say it was so foolish, and you will be right.”

  He shook his head. “I never fret over the past, Sonja. It uses up too much energy.”

  “But my real troubles are not with our government, but with the government here. They do not wish me to go. They have put every possible obstacle in my path. There is the court order—” She told him about it, swiftly and inaccurately.

  When she was through he said, “All right, the first thing is to get you a green card.”

  “A green card?”

  “So you can work here. You said you didn’t have much money, Sonja, and your father won’t send you any more. You’re going to have to eat while I’m getting you out.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “And pay the rent on this apartment and maybe some legal fees. If I’m going to help you, you’ll have to do what I say, or it’s no use.”

  She rose from the footstool, angry and imperious. “What could I do here? Nothing! Do you wish me to wait on tables?”

  “That’s a beautiful dress.”

  A breath and she was relaxed and smiling. “Oh, do you like it? I think I have some taste in clothes. Most of our women do not; they are muzhiks, peasants.”

  He said, “I want you to change it. The people who give out green cards don’t like pretty dresses. Put on the dress you wear when you clean the kitchen.”

  “I have told you—”

  “Have you thought of modeling, Sonja?” He saw at once that she had not. “You’re tall, and with that face and that accent…” He let it hang. “I know a woman who runs an agency here. You might have to lose ten pounds or so.”

  “You think that?” At once her attention was on her body, her hands caressing her waist, lingering at her hips.

  “Not for a man, Sonja. But for a modeling agency, maybe. We’ll let Madame Deppe decide.”

  “Not in the clothes in which I clean my oven!”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to change and bathe before we see Madame,” he explained patiently. “But it’s no use seeing her without the green card.”

  She hesitated, though he knew he had won. At last, “All right. It will not harm to try. You will wait while I change?”

  “Of course,” Krasilnikov said.

  When she was gone, he rose and went to the window. It was hot out; he remembered how the heat had struck his face when he had stepped from his car. There was so much good climate in this country, yet they had built their capital here.

  The telephone rang. She called from the bedroom, “Would you get that, please? It is probably a mistake—a wrong number.”

  He said, “All right,” and picked up the telephone. “Sonja Aralov’s apartment.”

  “It is me, Wilson. And you are?”

  “C. C. Percival.”

  “They are sending Ipatiev.”

  “The film star?”

  “Yes. I can hardly believe it, but that is what they say. He will hold her.”

  Half to himself he whispered, “Unless he goes to Hollywood.”

  “You said? I could not hear you.”

  She called, “Was it not a wrong number?”

  He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “It was for me. I let my secretary know I’d be here.” He told the mouthpiece, “Thank you,” and hung up.

  “I am not too long?”

  “No hurry.” There was a copy of Time on the shelf under the little table beside the samovar. He thought, Why do all of us subscribe to it? They could trace every agent just from that—from Time’s subscription list. Of course, we want them to know; agents count for something too. Not much, perhaps, but something.

  He picked it up. The Chinese were in Kazakhstan, the Red Army had been stopped before Paris. It was still better than the old days, he decided. Better than when we were all so afraid, though at least we had peace.

  All the Hues of Hell

  Three with egg roll, Kyle thought. Soon four without—if this shadow world really has (oh, sacred!) life. The Egg was still rolling, still spinning to provide mock gravitation.

  Yet the roar of the sharply angled guidance jets now seeped only faintly into the hold, and the roll was slower and slower, the feeling of weight weaker and weaker. The Egg was in orbit… around nothing. Or at least around nothing visible. As its spin decreased, its ports swept the visible universe. Stars that were in fact galaxies flowed down the synthetic quartz like raindrops down a canopy. Once Kyle caught sight of their mother ship; the Shadow Show herself looked dim and ghostly in the faint light. Of the planet they orbited, there was no trace. Polyaris screamed and took off, executing a multicolored barrel roll with outstretched wings through the empty hold; like all macaws, Polyaris doted on microgravity.

  In his earphones Marilyn asked, “Isn’t it pretty, Ky?” But she was admiring her computer simulation, not his ecstatic bird: an emerald forest three hundred meters high, sparkling sapphire lakes—suddenly a vagrant strip of beach golden as her hair, and the indigo southern ocean.

  One hundred and twenty degrees opposed to them both, Skip answered instead, and not as Kyle himself would have.

  “No, it isn’t.” There was a note in Skip’s voice that Kyle had noticed, and worried over, before.

  Marilyn seemed to shrug. “Okay, darling, it’s not really anything to us, less even than ultraviolet. But—”

  “I can see it,” Skip told her.

  Marilyn glanced across the empty hold toward Kyle.

  He tried to keep his voice noncommittal as he whispered to his mike. “You can see it, Skip?”

  Skip did not reply. Polyaris chuckled to herself. Then silence (the utter, deadly quiet of nothingness, of the void where shadow matter ruled and writhed invisible) filled the Egg. For a wild instant, Kyle wondered whether silence itself might not be a manifestation of shadow matter, a dim insubstance felt only in its mass and gravity, its unseen heaviness. Galaxies drifted lazily over the ports, in a white Egg robbed of Up and Down. Their screens were solid sheets of deepest blue.

  Skip broke the silence. “Just let me show it to you, Kyle. Allow me, Marilyn, to show you what it actually looks like.”

  “Because you really know, Skip?”

  “Yes, because I really know, Kyle. Don’t you remember, either of you, what they said?”

  Kyle was watching Marilyn across the hold; he saw her shake her head. “Not all of it.” Her voice was cautious. “They said so much, darling, after all. They said quite a lot of things.”

  Skip sounded as though he were talking to a child. “What the Life Support people said. The thing, the only significant thing, they did say.”

  Still more carefully, Marilyn asked, “And what was that, darling?”

  “That one of us would die.”

  An island sailed across her screen, an emerald set in gold and laid upon blue velvet.

  Kyle said, “That’s my department, Skip. Life Support told us there was a real chance—perhaps as high as one in twenty—that one of you would die, outbound from Earth or on the trip back. They were being conservative; I would have estimated it as one in one hundred.”

  Marilyn murmured, “I think I’d better inform the Director.”

  Kyle agreed.

  “And they were right,” Skip said. “Kyle, I’m the one. I died on the way out. I passed away, but you two followed me.”

  Ocean and isle vanished from all the screens, replaced by a blinking cursor and the word DIRECTOR.

  Marilyn asked, “Respiration monitor, L. Skinner Jansen.”

  Kyle swiveled to watch his screen. The cursor swept from side to side without any sign of inhalation or exhalation, and for a moment he was taken aback. Then Skip giggled.

  Marilyn’s sigh filled Kyle’s receptors. “The programming wizard. What did you do, Skip? Turn down the gain?”

  “That wasn’t necessary. It happens automatically.” Skip giggled again.

  Kyle said slowly, “You’re not dead, Skip. Believe me, I’ve seen many dead men. I’ve cut up their bodies and examined every organ; I know dead men, and you’re not one of them.”

  “Back on the ship, Kyle. My former physical self is lying in the Shadow Show, dead.”

  Marilyn said, “Your physical self is right here, darling, with Ky and me.” And then to the Director, “Sir, is L. Skinner Jansen’s module occupied?”

  The trace vanished, replaced by NEGATIVE: JANSEN 1’S MODULE IS EMPTY.

  “Console,” Skip himself ordered.

  Kyle did not turn to watch Skip’s fingers fly across the keys. After a moment Skip said, “You see, this place—the formal name of our great republic is Hades, by the way—looks the way it does only because of the color gradations you assigned the gravimeter data. I’m about to show you its true colors, as the expression has it.”

  A blaze of 4.5-, 6-, and 7.8-ten-thousandths-millimeter light, Polyaris fluttered away to watch Skip. When he made no attempt to shoo her off, she perched on a red emergency lever and cocked an eye like a bright black button toward his keyboard.

  Kyle turned his attention back to his screen. The letters faded, leaving only the blue southern ocean. As he watched, it darkened to sable. Tiny flames of ocher, citron, and cinnabar darted from the crests of the waves.

  “See what I mean?” Skip asked. “We’ve been sent to bring a demon back to Earth—or maybe just a damned soul. I don’t care. I’m going to stay right here.”

  Kyle looked across the vacant white hold toward Marilyn.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t, Ky. You do it.”

  “All right, Marilyn.” He plugged his index finger into the Exchange socket, so that he sensed rather than saw the letters overlaying the hellish sea on the screens: KAPPA UPSILON LAMBDA 23011 REPORTS JANSEN 1 PSYCHOTIC. CAN YOU CONFIRM, JANSEN 2?

  “Confirmed, Marilyn Jansen.”

  RESTRAINT ADVISED.

  Marilyn said, “I’m afraid restraint’s impossible as long as we’re in the Egg, sir.”

  DO NOT ABORT YOUR MISSION, JANSEN 2. WILL YOU ACCEPT THE RESTRAINT OF JANSEN 1 WHEN RESTRAINT IS PRACTICAL?

  “Accepted whenever practical,” Marilyn said. “Meanwhile, we’ll proceed with the mission.”

  SATISFACTORY, the Director said, and signed off.

  Skip asked, “So you’re going to lock me up, honeybone?”

  “I hope that by the time we get back it won’t be necessary. Ky, haven’t you anything to give him?”

  “No specifics for psychosis, Marilyn. Not here. I’ve got some back on the Shadow Show.”

  Skip ruffled his beard. “Sure. You’re going to lock up a ghost.” Across the wide hold, Kyle could see he was grinning.

  Polyaris picked up the word: “Ghost! Ghost! GHOST!” She flapped to the vacant center of the Egg, posing like a heraldic eagle and watching to make certain they admired her.

  The shoreline of a larger island entered their screens from the right. Its beach was ashes and embers, its forest a forest of flames.

  “If we’re going to make the grab, Marilyn…”

  “You’re right,” she said. Courageously, she straightened her shoulders. The new life within her had already fleshed out her cheeks and swollen her breasts; Kyle felt sure that she had never been quite so lovely before. When she put on her helmet, he breathed her name (though only to himself) before he plugged into the simulation that seemed so much more real than a screen.

  As a score of pink arms, Marilyn’s grav beams dipped into the shadow planet’s atmosphere, growing dark and heavy as they pulled up shadow fluid and gases from a lake on the island and whatever winds might ruffle it. Kyle reflected that those arms should be blue instead of black, and told the onboard assistant director to revert to the hues Marilyn had originally programmed.

  Rej, the assistant director snapped.

  And nothing happened. The gravs grew darker still, and the big accelerator jets grumbled at the effort required to maintain Egg in orbit. When Kyle glanced toward the hold, he discovered it had acquired a twelve-meter yolk as dark as the eggs Chinese bury for centuries. Polyaris was presumably somewhere in that black yolk, unable to see or feel it. He gave a shrill whistle, and she screamed and fluttered out to perch on his shoulder.

  The inky simulation doubled and redoubled, swirling to the turbulence of the fresh shadow matter pumped into the Egg by the gravs. Generators sang the spell that kept the shadow “air” and “water” from boiling away in what was to them a high vacuum.

  The grumbling of the jets rose to an angry roar.

  Skip said, “You’ve brought hell in here with us, honeybone. You, not me. Remember that.”

  Marilyn ignored him, and Kyle told him to keep quiet.

  Abruptly the gravitors winked out. A hundred tons or more of the shadow world’s water (whatever that might be) fell back to the surface, fully actual to any conscious entity that might be there.

  “Rains of frogs and fish, Polyaris,” Kyle muttered to his bird. “Remember Charlie Fort?”

  Polyaris chuckled, nodding.

  Skip said, “Then remember too that when Moses struck the Nile with his staff, the Lord God turned the water to blood.”

  “You’re the one who got into the crayon box, Skip. I’ll call you Moses if you like, but I can hardly call you ‘I Am,’ after you’ve just assured us you’re not.” Kyle was following Marilyn’s hunt for an example of the dominant life form, less than a tenth of his capacity devoted to Polyaris and Skip.

  “You will call me Master!”

  Kyle grinned, remembering the holovamp of an ancient him. “No, Skip. For as long as you’re ill, I am the master. Do you know I’ve been waiting half my life to use that line?”

  Then he saw it, three-quarters of a second, perhaps, after Marilyn had: an upright figure striding down a fiery beach. Its bipedal locomotion was not a complete guarantee of dominance and intelligence, to be sure; ostriches had never ruled a world and never would, no matter how big a pest they became on Mars. But—yes—those powerful forelimbs were surely GP manipulators and not mere weapons. Now, Marilyn! Now!

  As though she had heard him, a pink arm flicked down. For an instant the shadow man floated, struggling wildly to escape, the gravitation of his shadow world countered by their gravitor; then he flashed toward them. Kyle swiveled to watch the black sphere splash (there could be no other word for it) and, under the prodding of the gravs, recoalesce. They were four.

  In a moment more, their shadow man bobbed to the surface of the dark and still trembling yolk. To him, Kyle reflected, they were not there, the Egg was not there. To him it must have seemed that he floated upon a watery sphere suspended in space.

  And possibly that was more real than the computer-enhanced vision he himself inhabited, a mere cartoon created from one of the weakest forces known to physics. He unplugged, and at once the Egg’s hold was white and empty again.

  Marilyn took off her helmet. “All right, Ky, from here on it’s up to you—unless you want something more from the surface?”

  Kyle congratulated her and shook his head.

  “Darling, are you feeling any better?”

  Skip said levelly, “I’m okay now. I think that damned machine must have drugged me.”

  “Ky? That seems pretty unlikely.”

  “We should de-energize or destroy him, if we can’t revise his programming.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “I doubt that we could reprogram him. Ky, what do you think?”

  “A lot of it’s hardwired, Marilyn, and can’t be altered without new boards. I imagine Skip could revise my software if he put his mind to it, though it might take him quite a while. He’s very good at that sort of thing.”

  Skip said, “And you’re a very dangerous device, Kyle.”

  Shaking his head, Kyle broke out the pencil-thin cable he had used so often in training exercises. One end jacked into the console, the other into a small socket just above his hips. When both connections were made, he was again in the cybernetic cartoon where true matter and shadow matter looked equally real.

  It was still a cartoon with colors by Skip: Marilyn’s skin shone snow-white, her lips were burning scarlet, her hair like burnished brass, and her eyes blue fire; Skip himself had become a black-bearded satyr, with a terra-cotta complexion and cruel crimson lips. Kyle tightened both ferrules firmly, tested his jets, released his safety harness, and launched himself toward the center of the Egg, making Polyaris crow with delight.