Here he put his head down between his arms and shook his shoulders. After a while, he rolled off the chair and onto the floor. A robot entered, carrying a packing box. He set Shlestertrap back in the chair and left, the heavy box still under his arm.

  I could not help a slight feeling of pride at the sight of the awe with which the two young nzredd regarded my obvious intimacy with the human. They were more than a little confused by his alien communicative pattern; but they were as desperately determined as I to memorize every nuance of this portentous last conversation. This was fortunate: the fact that their versions of this affair agreed with mine helped to strengthen my position in the difficult days that lay ahead.

  “And our civilizing process,” I asked. “Is it to stop?”

  “Huh? What civil—Oh, that! No, sir! Little old Shlesty’s taken care of his friends. Always takes care. Got the new stereo ready. One fine job! Wait—I’ll get it for you.” He rose slowly to his feet. “Where’s a robot? Never one of ’em around when you want one of ’em around. Hey, Highsprockets!” he bellowed. “Get me the copies of the stereo in the next room or something. The new stereo.

  “Got it all cut yesterday,” he continued, when the robot had given him the packages. “Didn’t really finish it the way I wanted to; but when bulletin came, I just sent all your actor friends on home. I don’t work for nothing, I don’t. But I sat up and cut it into right length, and what do you know? It came out fine. Here.”

  I distributed the packages equally among the three of us. “And does it contain that wonderful device you mentioned—The Old Switcheroo?”

  “Contains nothing else but. As neat a switcheroo on an original plot as Hogan Shlestertrap has ever turned. Yop. It’s got all you need. You just notice the way I worked it and pretty soon you’ll be making stereos in competition with Hollywood. Which is more than I’ll be doing.”

  “We do not even faintly aspire to such heights,” I told him humbly. “We will be sufficiently grateful for the gift of civilization.”

  “Thass all right,” he waved a hand at us as he swayed. “Don’t thank me. Thank me. In those two stereos you have two of the finest love stories ever told, and done by the latest Hollywood methods from one of its greatest directors in his grandest—What I mean to say is, they told me to mission you some culture and I missioned you culture and if they don’t like it, they can—”

  At this point, he crumpled suddenly into a huddle upon the chair. We waited patiently for any further disclosures, but, as he seemed preoccupied with a peculiarly human manifestation, we made our departures with no further formality.

  Once safely away from the dome, I instructed my assistants to hurry to our two distant installations and prepare them for immediate projection of our new stereo.

  “Remember,” I called after them. “Any change the First Stereo has made in our way of life will be as nothing to what will be done by The Old Switcheroo.”

  And I was right. The introduction of The Old Switcheroo—

  I saw it myself for the first time along with over a hundred other Plookhh upon our mountain. After it was over, I was as bereft of speech as the rest. After a long pause in which no one dared to comment, the nzred nzredd suggested I project the First Stereo again with The Old Switcheroo immediately following so that we could compare them more easily.

  This was done, but it proved of little help.

  The problem is for you to solve. May my recounting of the entire history of the relationship between Hogan Shlestertrap and myself be of some value in finding a solution! I am old, and, as I have said, ripe for the gullet; you have been hatched in the very midst of this preliminary period of our culture—it is for you to find the way, the way that must be there, out of this impasse in which we shuttle unreproductively.

  You are but a few days from the egg, but you have already seen both the First Stereo and The Old Switcheroo as many times as conditions permit. You should know that there is a single question common to both of them.

  The one essential point of difference between the First Stereo and The Old Switcheroo is that, in the latter, the srob, mlenb, tkan, flin, blap and nzred bolt the matrimonial convention, leaving the guur to pursue them affectionately and finally rescue them from the great spotted snake; while, in the former, the reverse occurs. The loving reunion at the end is the same in both, except that the mlenb, instead of backing into his muddy burrow in the final scene of The Old Switcheroo, slips and falls heavily across it.

  After the preliminary exhibitions, the guurr began insisting loudly that the humans could not have expected them—weak and slow-moving as they are—to destroy great spotted snakes. Confronted with the specific evidence, however, they fell back on the claim that the First Stereo depicted the civilized state; and the second, an alternative barbarity.

  To this, the other six sexes replied that The Old Switcheroo was not an alternative, but the consummation of our cultural process. Also, as a result of the mores developed with the First Stereo, there was now a disgusting and unprecedented surplus of guurr: what better way to dispose of them than in this extremely selective one? The snakes, when sufficiently irritated by attacking guurr, will swallow them it seems—

  The mlenbb, of course, had their own difficulty: whether and how to enter their burrows immediately after the convention. But this was a minor matter.

  Some of the new Plookh families attempted to follow the patterns indicated in the First Stereo; others, those in the second. A very few completely barbaric individuals, oblivious to the high destiny of their species, withdrew from the Plookh community and tried to return to the primitive methods of our ancestors; but since few high-variables cared to attach themselves to so atavistic a group, their offspring are being exterminated rapidly—and good riddance.

  Most Plookhh remain in two great divisions: the guurr, who believe in the civilizing logic of the First Stereo, and the other sexes who accept only the amendment of The Old Switcheroo. Then, of course, there are a few altruistic nzredd and flinn who agree with the guurr, and vice-versa . . .

  We need the cooperation of all seven sexes for successful reproduction. But how can we achieve that, Plookhh argue, unless we know which is the stereo of civilization? To be so close to liberation from our gustatory bondage, and because of sheer intellectual inadequacy—For the past eleven cycles, not a single matrimonial convention has been celebrated.

  As a member of a pre-Shlestertrap family, I take no sides. My convention is past: yours, my diversified nzreddi, lies ahead. I am certain of one thing.

  The answer is to be found in neither one stereo nor the other. The answer involves unity of the two: a core of relationship which both must share and which, when discovered, will dissolve their apparent inconsistency. Remember, these stereos are the product of a highly civilized creature.

  Where is that core of relationship to be found? In the original stereo? In The Old Switcheroo? Or in that book I never finished— ABRIDGED REGULATIONS OF THE INTERPLANETARY CULTURAL MISSION, ANNOTATED, WITH AN APPENDIX OF STANDARD OFFICE PROCEDURES FOR SOLARIAN MISSIONS?

  Humanity has solved such problems, and today flicks stars from its path. We must solve it or die as a race, albeit a civilized race.

  We will not solve it—and this is most important—we will not solve this problem by the disgusting, utterly futile expedient to which more and more of our young are daily resorting. I refer to the unmentionable and perverted six-sex families. . . .

  1950

  The Remarkable Flirgleflip

  A naked man appearing on the streets of Washington was a strange occurrence but how he got there was stranger still!

  BANDERLING, you are a fathead!

  Yes, yes. I know. It is rather improbable that this message will reach you in the years that remain of your smug life; but if something, some new discovery—an unexpected warp in the plenum, say—should bring these pages to the surface, I want Thomas Alva Banderling to know that I consider him the most dilated, augmented and amplified fathead in the history of the race.

  Excepting myself, of course.

  When I consider how happy I was puttering around my collection of dolik and spindfar, how splendidly my paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns was progressing—when I recall that bliss only to be recalled in turn to the filthy, dripping necessities of my present vocation, I tend to become somewhat unacademic in my opinions of Banderling.

  But now that I have informed Banderling of his cephalic obesity across fantastic gulfs of emptiness, what, after all, is left for me? What chance do I have of returning to the creamy towers of the Institute rising in plastic beauty from the septic Manhattan soil?

  I like to dream of the scholarly exhilaration I felt the day we of Field Party Nineteen returned from Mars with a shipload of Punforg out of the Gllian excavation. I like to muse on my delighted reacquaintance with the problems I had left unsolved when the field trip was offered me. Banderling and his obscene radiation depressor? Why, that night was the first time I really noticed him!

  “Terton,” he asked suddenly, his face focusing sharp and studious in the screen of my benscope, “Terton, could you look in at my lab for a moment? I need an extra pair of hands.”

  I was startled. Beyond occasional meetings at Institute Assemblies, Banderling and I had had little reason for conversation. And it was fairly rare for an Associate Investigator to call on a full Investigator for mechanical assistance, especially when their fields were so different.

  “Can’t you get a labtech or a robot?” I asked.

  “All the labtechs have gone. We’re the only ones left in the Institute. Gandhi’s Birthday, you know. I told my robot to package himself two hours ago when I thought I was leaving: Now I find there’s nobody in Control to activate him again, and my depressor’s started to excite. Won’t take long.”

  “Very well,” I sighed, necklacing both my flirgleflip and the dolik I had been examining with it. As I walked into the benscope, giving my necklace the required tugs for the opposite wing of the Institute, I had already ceased to wonder at the oddity of Banderling’s request.

  The dolik on which I had been working, you see, was the so-called Thumtse Dilemna—a thoroughly fascinating business. Most of my colleagues inclined towards Gurkheyser’s statement of the problem when he discovered it at Thumtse over fifty years ago. Gurkheyser declared that it couldn’t be dolik because of the lack of flirg-pattern; and it couldn’t be spindfar because of tire presence of flirg in minute quantities; therefore it was a consciously created paradox and, as such, had to be classified as punforg. But, by definition, punforg could not exist at Thumtse. . . .

  My investigation, however, had convinced me that a flirg-pattern flirgled in a primitive sense—that is, only in the green. Was this sufficient proof of dolik? I thought so and was prepared to support that assertion in my forthcoming monograph. First, I intended to point out, no dolik has ever—

  I WANDER. Once more I forget the reactions of my audience to this subject. If only this were not so, if only on this one point—In any case, I was still considering the Thumtse Dilemna when I stepped out of the benscope into Banderling’s lab., I was not at all prepared psychologically to make the obvious deductions from his nervousness. Even if I had, who could have imagined such psychotic behavior from an Associate Investigator?

  “Thanks, Terton,” he nodded, his necklace jangling with the gadgetry that physicists seem to find necessary at all times. “Would you hold that long bar away from the turntable and press into the grid with your back? Right.” He sucked at the knuckles of his right hand; with his left, he flipped a toggle and clicked a relay-shut. He turned a small knob past several calibrations, frowned doubtfully and moved it back to an earlier mark.

  The turntable before me—a wheellike affair whose spokes were resistor coils and whose hub was an immense mesotronic tube of the type used in a national benscope hookup—began to glow and whirl softly. Behind me, the grid was vibrating gently against my shoulder blades.

  “There’s—uh, nothing dangerous in what I’m doing?” I asked, moistening my lips at the roomful of fully operating equipment.

  Banderling’s little black beard shot up scornfully and the very hairs on his chest seemed to quiver. “What could be dangerous?”

  Since I didn’t know, I decided to feel reassured. I longed for Banderling’s help in the process, but he was moving about rapidly now, sneering impatiently at meters and slapping at switches.

  I had almost forgotten my uncomfortable position and the light bar I was holding, and was considering the middle passage of my paper—the section where I intended to prove that the influence of Gil was fully as great as Tkes upon later Pegis—, when Banderling’s booming voice thrust a question into my consciousness.

  “Terton, don’t you often feel unhappy that you live in an intermediate civilization?”

  He had stopped in front of the turntable and placed his overlong hands upon his hips in a slapping gesture which suggested somehow that he didn’t find universal entropy proceeding satisfactorily.

  “What do you mean—the Temporal Embassy?” I asked. I’d heard of Banderling’s views.

  “Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It’s a thousand times worse than any of those ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control or university trusteeship. You can’t do this—it will be done first a century later; you can’t do that—the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this—nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to intergrate your errors into a useful theory. And what do all these prohibitions and restrictions accomplish; whose ends do they serve?”

  “The greatest good of the greatest number in the greatest period of time,” I quoted firmly from the Institute prospectus. “That humanity may continually improve itself by reshaping the past on the basis of its own historical judgment and the advice of the future.”

  He nodded a sneer at me. “How do we know? What is the master plan of those ultimate humans in that ultimate future where there is no temporal embassy from a still later period? Would we approve of it, would we—”

  “But Banderling, we wouldn’t even understand it! Humans with minds compared to which ours would look like elementary neural responses—how could we grasp and appreciate their projects? Besides, there seems to be no such ultimate future—merely temporal embassy after temporal embassy sent by each age into the preceding one, the advice of each embassy in the period from which it came. Temporal embassies extending always into the past from the improving future, temporal embassies without end.” I paused, out of breath.

  “Except here. Except in an intermediate civilization like ours. They may go out to infinity as far as the future is concerned, Terton, but they stop in our time. We send nobody into the past; we receive orders, but give none of our own.”

  I PUZZLED OVER Banderling as he examined the greenly sparking mesotronic tube with a quantum analyzer and made an adjustment among his controls which excited it still further. He had always been considered a bit of a rebel at the Institute—by no means bad enough for a Readjustment Course, however—, but surely he knew that the organization of the Institute itself was the first suggestion made by the Temporal Embassy when our age durated into its time-fix? I decided that the difficulty with his equipment which I was helping remove had irritated him out of normal reasoning processes. My mind trotted back to important items like spindfar problems, and I began to wish that Banderling would relieve me of the long bar so that I could denecklace my flirgleflip.

  Not that I believed the Thumtse Dilemna could conceivably be spindfar. But it was possible, I had suddenly realized, for flirg—

  “I’ve been told to call off work on my radiation depressor,” the physicist’s morose voice sliced into my thoughts.

  “This machine, you mean?” I inquired rather politely, concealing my annoyance both at his interruption and the sudden increase of warmth in the lab.

  “Hum. Yes, this machine.” He turned away for a moment and came back with a modified benscope projector which he placed in front of me. “The Temporal Embassy merely suggested it, of course. They suggested it to the Institute administration which put it in the form of an order. No reason given, none at all.”

  I clucked sympathetically and moved my perspiring hands to another position on the bar. The vibrations of the grid had almost worn a checkerboard callous into my back; and the thought of being involved in an experiment with revoked equipment when I could be doing constructive investigation into dolik, spindfar and even punforg made me almost pathologically unsocial with impatience.

  “Why?” Banderling demanded dramatically, throwing opened palms into the air. “What is there about this device which requires an ultimatum to stop its progress? I have been able to halve the speed of light, true; I may be able to reduce it even further in the tube, possibly to zero, eventually. Does such an increase of man’s scientific powers seem dangerous to you, Terton?”

  I pondered the question and was happy to be able to answer in all honesty that it didn’t. “But,” I reminded him, “there have been other direct revocations of projects. I had one. There was this dolik which was most curiously flirgled, evidently a product of Middle Ria at the peak of its culture. I had no more established the RIaian origin when I was called to—”

  “What have these infernal, incomprehensible thingumajigs to do with the speed of light?” he blasted at me. “I’ll tell you why I was ordered to stop work on my radiation depressor, Terton, after eleven years of mind-breaking research. This machine is the key to time-travel.”