And, although they were coming toward Hanley and the now recumbent Kid, there wasn’t even a front end or a back end. They were in the normal coiled position and floating.

  “Hi, boys,” Hanley said. “You scared my friend, blast you. Arid he’d have bought me a drink after he lectured me for awhile. So you owe me one.”

  “Reaction illogical,” Three said to Nine. “So was that of the other specimen. Shall we take both?”

  “No. The other one, although larger, is obviously a weakling. And one specimen will be sufficient. Come.”

  Hanley took a step backwards. “If you’re going to buy me a drink, okay. Otherwise I want to know, where?”

  “Dar.”

  “You mean we’re going from here to Dar? Lissen, Massah, Ah ain’t gwine noplace ’tall ’thout you’all buy me a drink.”

  “Do you understand him?” Nine asked Three. Three wriggled an end negatively. “Shall we take him by force?”

  “No need if he’ll come voluntarily. Will you enter the cube voluntarily, creature?”

  “Is there a drink in it?”

  “Yes. Enter, please.”

  HANLEY walked to the cube and entered it. Not that he believed it was really there, of course, but what did he have to lose? And when you had the D. T.’s it was best to humor them. The cube was solid, not at all amorphous or even transparent from the inside. Three coiled around the controls and delicately manipulated delicate mechanisms with both ends.

  “We are in intraspace,” he told Nine. “I suggest we remain here until we have studied this specimen further and can give a report on whether he is suitable for our purposes.”

  “Hey, boys, how about that drink?” Hanley was getting worried. His hands were beginning to shake and spiders were crawling up and down the length of his spine on the inside.

  “He seems to be suffering,” Nine said. “Perhaps from hunger or thirst. What do these creatures drink? Hydrogen peroxide as we do?”

  “Most of the surface of their planet seems to be covered ‘with water in which sodium chloride is present. Shall we synthesize some?”

  Hanley yelled, “No! Not even water without salt. I want a drink! Whiskey!”

  “Shall I analyze his metabolism?” Three asked. “With the intrafluoroscope, I can do it in a second.” He unwound himself from the controls and went to a strange machine. Lights flashed. Three said, “How strange. His metabolism depends on C2H5OH.”

  “C2H5OH.?”

  “Yes, alcohol—at least, basically. With a certain dilution of H20 and without the sodium chloride present in their seas, as well as exceedingly minor quantities of other ingredients, it seems to be all that he has consumed for at least an extended period. There is .234% present in his blood stream and in his brain. His entire metabolism seems to be based on it.”

  “BOYS,” Hanley begged. “I’m dying for a drink. How’s about laying off the double-talk and giving me one.”

  “Wait, please,” Nine said. “I shall make you what you require. Let me use the verniers on that intrafluoroscope and add the psychometer.” More lights flashed and Nine went into the corner of the cube -which was a laboratory. Things happened there and he came back’ in less than a minute. He carried a beaker containing slightly less than two quarts of clear amber fluid.

  Hanley sniffed it, then sipped it. He sighed.

  “I’m dead,” he said. “This is usquebaugh, the nectar, of the gods. There isn’t any such drink as this” He drank deeply and it didn’t even burn his throat.

  “What is it, Nine?” Three asked.

  “A quite complex formula, fitted to his exact needs. It is fifty per-cent alcohol, forty-five percent water. The remaining ingredients, however, are considerable in number; they include every vitamin and mineral his system requires, in proper proportion and all tasteless. Then other ingredients in minute quantities to improve the taste— by his standards. It would taste horrible to us, even if we could drink either alcohol or water.”

  Hanley sighed and drank deeply. He swayed a little. He looked at Three and grinned. “Now I know you aren’t there,” he said.

  “What does he mean?” Nine asked Three.

  “His thought processes seem completely illogical. I doubt if his species would make suitable slaves. But we’ll make sure, of course. What is your name, creature?”

  “What’s in a name, pal?” Hanley asked. “Call me anything. You guys are my bes’ frien’s. You’can take me anywhere and jus’ lemme know when we get Dar.”

  He drank deeply and lay down on the floor. Strange sounds came from him but neither Three nor Nine could identify them as words. They sounded ‘like’“Zzzzzz; glup—Zzzzzz, glup—Zzzzzz, glup.” They tried to prod him awake and failed.

  They observed him and made what tests they could. It wasn’t until hours ,. later that he awoke. He sat up and stared at them. He said, “I don’t believe it. You aren’t here. For Gossake, give me a drink quick.”

  THEY gave him the beaker again—Nine had replenished it and it was full. Hanley drank. He closed his eyes in bliss. He said, “Don’t wake me.”

  “But you are awake.”

  “Then don’t put me to sleep. Jus’ figured what this is. Ambrosia—stuff the gods drink.”

  “Who are the gods?”

  “There aren’t any. But this is what they drink. On Olympus.”

  Three said, “Thought processes completely illogical.”

  Hanley lifted the beaker. He said, “Here is here and Dar is Dar and never the twain shall meet. Here’s to the twain.” He drank.

  Three asked, “What is a twain?” Hanley gave it thought. He said, “A twain is something that wuns on twacks, and you wide on it from here to Dar. “What do you know about Dar?”

  “Dar ain’t no such things as you are. But here’s to you, boys.” He drank again.

  “Too stupid to be trained for anything except simple physical labor,” Three said. “But if he has sufficient stamina for that we can still recommend a raid in force upon this planet. There are probably three or four billion inhabitants. And we can use unskilled labor three or four billion would help us considerably.”

  “Hooray!” said Hanley.

  “He does not seem to coordinate well,” Three said thoughtfully. “But perhaps his physical strength is considerable. Creature, what shall we call you?”

  “Call me Al, boys.” Hanley was getting to his feet.

  “Is that your name or your species? In either case is it the full designation?” Hanley leaned against the wall.1 He considered. “Species,” he said. “Stands for—let’s make it Latin.” He made it Latin.

  “We wish to test your stamina. Run back and forth from one side of this cube to the other until you become fatigued. Here, I will hold that beaker of your food.”

  He took the beaker out of Hanley’s hands. Hanley grabbed for it. “One more drink. One more li’l drink. Then I’ll run for you. I’ll run for President.”

  “Perhaps he needs it,” Three said. “Give it to him, Nine.”

  It might be his last for awhile so Hanley took a long one. Then he waved cheerily at the four Darians who seemed to be looking at him. He said, “See you at the races, boys. All of you. An’ bet on me. Win, place an’ show. ’Nother li’l drink first?”

  He had another little drink—really a short one this time—less than two ounces.

  “Enough,” Three said. “Now run.” Hanley took two steps and fell flat on his face. He rolled over on his back and lay there, a blissful smile on his face.

  “Incredible!” Three said. “Perhaps he is attempting to fool us. Check him, Nine.”

  Nine checked. “Incredible!” he said. “Indeed incredible after so little exertion but he is completely unconscious —unconscious to the degree of being insensible to pain. And he is not faking. His type is completely useless to Dar. Set the controls and we shall report back. And take him, according to our subsidiary orders, as a specimen for the zoological gardens. He’ll be worth having there. Physically he is the strangest specimen we have discovered on any of several million planets.”

  Three wrapped himself around the controls and used both ends to -manipulate mechanisms. A hundred and sixty-three thousand light , years and 1,630 centuries passed, cancelling each other out so completely and perfectly that’ neither time nor distance seemed to have been traversed.

  In the capital city of Dar, which rules thousands of useful planets, and has visited millions of useless ones—like Earth—Al Hanley occupies a large glass cage in a place of honor, as a truly amazing specimen.

  There is a pool in the middle of it, from which he drinks often and in which he has been known to bathe. It is filled with a constantly flowing supply of a beverage that is delicious beyond all deliciousness, that is to the best whiskey of Earth as the best whiskey of Earth is to bathtub gin made in a dirty bathtub! Moreover it is fortified —tastelessly—with every vitamin and mineral his metabolism requires.

  It causes no hangovers or other unpleasant consequences. It is a drink as delightful to Hanley as the amazing conformation of Hanley is delightful to the frequenters of the zoo, who stare at him in bewilderment and then read the sign on his cage, which leads off in what looks ‘to be Latin with the designation of his species as Al told it to Three and Nine:

  ALCOHOLICUS ANONYMOUS

  Lives on diet of C2H5OH, slightly fortified with vitamins and minerals. Occasionally brilliant but completely illogical. Extent of stamina—able to take only a few steps without falling. Utterly without value commercially but a fascinating specimen of the strangest form of life yet discovered in the Galaxy. Habitat—Planet 3 bf Sun JX6547-HG908.

  So strange, in fact, that they have given him a treatment that makes him practically immortal. And a good thing that is, because he’s so interesting as a zoological specimen that if he ever dies they might come back to Earth for another one. And they might happen to pick up you or me—and you or I, as the case might be, might happen to be sober. And that would be bad for all of us.

  A BLUE bottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.

  “The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative. This is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”

  Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.

  More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better: I saw a saw saw a saw. Or, better yet: Sue saw a saw saw a saw.

  “One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”

  “Yeah,” thought Shorty McCabe, “one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache?” Anyway, the bluebottle fly was becoming more interesting. It was flying down now, toward the front of the classroom, and maybe it would light on Professor Dolohan’s head. And buzz.

  No, but it lighted somewhere out of sight behind the professor’s desk. Without the fly for solace, Shorty looked around the classroom for something else to look at or think about. Only the backs of heads; he was alone in the back row, and— well, he could concentrate on how the hair grew on the backs of people’s necks, but it seemed a subject of limited fascination.

  He wondered how many of the students ahead of him were asleep, and decided that half of them were; and he wished he could go to sleep himself, but he couldn’t. He’d made the silly mistake of going to bed early the night before and as a result he was now wide awake and miserable.

  “But,” said Professor Dolohan, “if we disregard the contravention of probability arising in the statement that the positive absolute is less than absolutely positive, we are led to—” Hooray! The bluebottle fly was back again, rising from its temporary concealment back of the desk. It droned upward to the ceiling, paused there a moment to preen its wings, and then flew down again, this time toward the back of the room.

  And if it kept that spiral course, it would go past within an inch of Shorty’s nose. It did. He went cross-eyed watching it and turned his head to keep it in sight. It flew past and—

  It just wasn’t there any more. At a point about twelve inches to the left of Shorty McCabe, it had suddenly quit flying and suddenly quit buzzing, and it wasn’t there. It hadn’t died and hadn’t fallen into the aisle. It had just—

  Disappeared. In midair, four feet above the aisle, it had simply ceased to be there. The sound it had made seemed to have stopped in midbuzz, and in the sudden silence the professor’s voice seemed louder, if not funnier.

  “By creating, through an assumption contrary to fact, we create a pseudo-real set of axioms which are, in a measure, the reversal of existing—”

  Shorty McCabe, staring at the point where the fly had vanished, said “Gaw!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sorry, professor. I didn’t speak,” said Shorty. “I… I just cleared my throat.”

  “—by the reversal of existing—What was I saying? Oh, yes. We create an axiomatic basis of a pseudo-logic which would yield different answers to all problem. I mean—”

  Seeing that the professor’s eyes had left him, Shorty turned his head again to look at the point where the fly had ceased to fly. Had ceased, maybe, to be a fly? Nuts; it must have been an optical illusion. A fly went pretty fast. If he’s suddenly lost sight of it—

  He shot a look out of the comer of his eye at Professor Dolohan, and made sure that the professor’s attention was focused elsewhere. Then Shorty reached out a tentative hand toward the point, or the approximate point where he’d seen the fly vanish.

  He didn’t know what he expected to find there, but he didn’t feel anything at all. Well, that was logical enough. If the fly had flown into nothing and he, Shorty, had reached out and felt nothing, that proved nothing. But, somehow, he was vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find; hardly to touch the fly that wasn’t there, or to encounter a solid but invisible obstacle, or anything. But—what had happened to the fly?

  Shorty put his hands on the desk and, for a full minute, tried to forget the fly by listening to the professor. But that was worse than wondering about the fly.

  For the thousandth time he wondered why he’d ever been such a sap as to enroll in this Logic 2B class. He’d never pass the exam. And he was majoring in paleontology, anyway. He liked paleontology; a dinosaur was something you could get your teeth into, in a manner of speaking. But logic, phooey; 2B or not 2B. And he’d rather study about fossils than listen to one.

  He happened to look down at his hands on the desk.

  “Gaw!” he said.

  “Mr. McCabe?” said the professor.

  Shorty didn’t answer; he couldn’t. He was looking at his left hand. There weren’t any fingers on it. He closed his eyes.

  The professor smiled a professorial smile. “I believe our young friend in the back seat has… uh… gone to sleep,” he said. “Will someone please try—”

  Shorty hastily dropped his hands into his lap. He said, “I… I’m O. K., professor. Sorry. Did you say something?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Shorty gulped. “I… I guess not.”

  “We were discussing,” said the professor—to the class, thank Heaven, and not to Shorty individually—“the possibility of what one might refer to as the impossible. It is not a contradiction in terms for one must distinguish carefully between impossible and un-possible. The latter—”

  Shorty surreptitiously put his hands back on the desk and sat there staring at them. The right hand was all right. The left— He closed his eyes and opened them again and still all the fingers of his left hand were missing. They didn’t feel missing.

  Experimentally, he wriggled the muscles that ought to move them and he felt them wriggle.

  But they weren’t there, as far as his eyes could see. He reached over and felt for them with his right hand—and he couldn’t feel them. His right hand went right through the space that his left-hand fingers ought to occupy, and felt nothing. But still he could move the fingers of his left hand. He did.

  It was very confusing.

  And then he remembered that was the hand he had used in reaching out toward the place where the bluebottle fly had disappeared. And then, as though to confirm his sudden suspicion, he felt a light touch on one of the fingers that wasn’t there. A light touch, and something light crawling along his finger. Something about the weight of a bluebottle fly. Then the touch vanished, as though it had flown again.

  Shorty bit his lips to keep from saying “Gaw!” again. He was getting scared.

  Was he going nuts? Or had the professor been right and was he asleep after all? How could he tell? Pinching? With the only available fingers, those of his right hand, he reached down and pinched the skin of his thigh, hard. It hurt. But then if he dreamed he pinched himself, couldn’t he also dream that it hurt?

  He turned his head and looked toward his left. There wasn’t anything to see that way; the empty desk across the aisle, the empty desk beyond it, the wall, the window, and blue sky through the pane of glass.

  But—

  He glanced at the professor and saw that his attention was now on the blackboard where he was marking symbols. “Let N,” said the professor, “equal known infinity, and the symbol a equal the factor of probability.”

 

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