OUT OF THE IRON WOMB (Part One) by Poul Anderson

Noise Junkies. It's a music podcast, baby, covering every musical genre. What we got that the others don't. I'll tell you. We got momdo Heathers, heather drain Junky, we got wolf and raisins hp N Junky, we got dark Destinations, father alone n and we got you, we got music and we got you made it and you getting a weird and way Media Noise Junkies Weird I Stounding Tub Out of the Iron Womb by Paul Anderson.

The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher, for he destroys worlds darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bow Johnson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him. There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows.

Its teeth ate raggedly across the milky way. Before him, a tumbled, igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long, thin crag sticking into the sky. Like a grotesque of bow sprit. There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking mental skin of his suit. Otherwise, no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man.

Only a granite nakedness spinning through space, out beyond Mars, stooping awkward in the clumsy armor. He put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. It's cold bit at him. Even through the insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer, conducted through the ground.

Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close. Cat footing too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when gravity was feeble enough.

The stars blazed with a cruel, wintry brilliance over him, around him, light years to fall through emptiness. Before he reached one. He had been alone among them before, he had almost thought them friends. Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to vega or speaker or dear old beetlejuice, murmuring what was in him, as if the remote sun could understand. But they didn't care.

He saw that now to them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into the night. He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down. Bo Johnson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive. It would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry.

He smiled stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn't be able to stop. Let's face it, he told himself, you're scared, You're scared. Sweat, he wondered if he had spoken it aloud. There was plenty of room on the asteroid, at least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface.

He could skulk around, hide and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He had to be a hunter two and tracked down the other man before he died, and if he found his enemy he would probably die anyway. He looked about him. Nothing, no sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever moved here since the beginning of time, when the moltenness congealed into death, not till men came and hunted each other.

Slowly, he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff, to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's October. Suit equipment and his own body all together weighed only a couple of pounds. Here it was ghostly, this soundless progress overfields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.

Bo Johnson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to find his enemy and give up buy existence at any price it would command. But he couldn't do that, even if the other man let him do it, which was doubtful. He couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.

Maybe that was what had started at all, the death of Johnny Malone. There are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word stability. They stay put in Jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations. Spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. The trailing group is the jumping off place for Transjovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds.

That way, their own revolution about the Sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost while minimizing the effects of Jupiter's drag. Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners, so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a permanent boomtown atmosphere, even though a spaceship and equipment represent a large investment. This is one of the last strongholds of genuinely private enterprise. The prospector, the mine owner, the rockhound, dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to start out on his own. A race of individualists, rough and noisy and a jealous but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.

The last chance on Achilles has another name which simply sticks an R in the official one, even for that planetoid. It is a rowdy bar where guardsmen come in trios, but Johnny Malone liked it and talked Bo Johnson into going there for a final spree before Chekhoff and departure. Not that to compare, he insisted, every place else has getting too fanged tangling civil exep venus, and I don't enjoy Venus. Johnny was from Luna City, himself, a small dark man with the quick, nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head, but somehow he didn't grate on Bow.

They had been partners for several years now. They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar RockHounds, who watched one of achilles three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smokecase, dialed drinks. Bow was larger and heavier than most spacemen. He'd never have gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in, and was usually content to let others talk while he listened, a placid, blonde giant with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face.

He did not consider himself bright and always wanted to learn. Johnny gulped his drink and winced whiskey. They call it yet water, synthetic alcohol and a dash a caramel. They have the gall the label whiskey, and charge for Everything's expensive here, said Bo mildly. That's why so few RockHounds get rich.

They make a lot of money, but they have to spend it just as fast to stay alive. Yeah, yeah, we stay. Spend some of it on us. Johnny grinned and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid forth a tray with a glass.

Come on, drink up, man, it's a long way home. We've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle, and a wench is what I need most, especially the wench, because I don't think the eminent doctor McKittrick is going to be interested in sociability. And it's close quarters aboard the dog. Bo kept on sipping slowly.

Johnny, he said, raising his voice to cut through the din. You're an educated man. Never could figure out why you want to talk like a jumper because I am on it hot. Look, Bow, why don't you get over that inferiority complex CRS. A man can't run a spaceship without knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on Earth.

So you had to work your way through the academy and never had a chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled Mozart with a horn. So what Johnny's head darted around birdlike he wants some women. We better make our reservations now, I don't, Johnny said, bo, I'll just nurse a beer. It wasn't moral so much as fastidiousness. He'd wait till they hit Luna.

Suit yourself if you don't want to uphold the honor of the Serious Transportation Company, Bow chuckled. The company consisted of a the Serious b her crew, himself and Johnny see a warehouse birth and three other part owners back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere else. But she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved. Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges.

For a space trip is expensive, but in a few more years they'd be able to buy another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a little. Johnny put away another couple of shots and rows. Alcohol costs plenty, but it was also more effective in low g Excuse me, he said, I see a tag it, so you don't want me to ask if she has a friend. Bow shook his head and watched his partner move off swift in the puny gravity.

The Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the Stomacher places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his highest powered smile. There were several other men standing around her, but Johnny had the touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few minutes. Bow side feeling a bit lonesome.

If he wasn't going to make a night of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final inspection of the ship tomorrow and grudged the cost of anti hangover tablets signs what he was putting back into the business. He was trying to build a private horde. Someday he'd retire and get married and build a house. He already had the sight picked out on Cullen overlooking the sound back on earth Man, but it was a long time since he'd drew on earth.

A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music. Bo looked up. There was a tall, black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts, arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger. Johnny made some reply.

Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big. As he neared, he caught the words my girl, damn it like hell I am said the girl I never saw you before? Run along in play son, said Johnny, Or do you want me to change that diaper? The ors That was when it happened.

Bo saw the little needler's spit from the Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at the darted stomach then his knees buckled, and he fell with a nightmare slowness. The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up and slammed a kick at the wall and arched out the door into the dome corridor, beyond a spaceman that knows how to handle himself in low g It was the only clear thought which ran on the sudden storm of Bo's head. The girl screamed, A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.

He tangled with another, out of my way. A roar lifted, someone slugged someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh. Bow had seen death before. The needle wasn't an esthetic, it was poison.

He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms. Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop off onto the next face of the rough cube, which was the asteroid. It ran for a couple of miles, and beyond it were the deeps of space and the cold star ours. He could dimly see the tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness.

No place to hide. His enemy was not there. He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By crossing with a little plain, he was exposing himself to a shot from one of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked from a ravine as he jumped over, and this route was the fastest for completing his search scheme.

The Great Bear slid into sight down under the world as it turned. He had often stood on winter nights back in Sweden and seen its immense sprawl across the weird flicker of Aurora, but even then he wanted the spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his wish, and much good it had done him. He went over the edge of the cliff cautiously, for it wouldn't take much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next million years.

The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely as he moved. He had the feeling that the world was tilting around him. Now it was the precipice, which was scarred black plain under foot, reaching to a sawtoothed bluff at its farther edge. He moved with flat, low g bounds. Besides the danger of springing off the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man near the ground.

Jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there could be so much stillness. He was half way across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a soundless shower of chips.

The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off for outer space. No meteor gravel. That bow stood unmoving an instant fighting the impulse to leap away. He was a spaceman, not a rock hound. He wasn't used to this environment, and if he jumped high he could be riddled.

As he fell slowly down again, sweat was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had come from. Suddenly he was zig zagging off across the plain toward the nearest edge. Another bullet popped the ground near him, The sun rose a tiny, heatless dazzle, blinding in his eyes. Fire crashed at his back.

Thunder and darkness exploded before him. He lurched forward, driven by the impact. Something was roaring, echoes clamorous in his helmet. He grew dimly aware that it was himself. Then he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars.

There was a knife in its back. It was white hot and twisting between the ribs. He stumbled over the edge of the plane and fell, waking when his armor bounced a little against stone. Breath rattled in his throat. As he turned his head.

There was a white plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole and freezing its moisture. The knife in him was not hot, It was cold, with an ultimate cold. Around him whirled and stars rippled, as if seen through heat through fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his finger tips, while chaos shouted beneath. Theoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two or three are required for non military craft.

This is not only an emergency reserved, but a preventative of emergencies, for one man alone might get too tired. At the critical moments, bou knew he wouldn't be allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner. An unemployed spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian snowfall. Bou didn't care. The first day, he had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now till judgment day.

He felt empty, then, drained of grief and hope alike. His main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words. His comforting hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had six sons to space.

Johnny was the last from Saturn to the Sun. His blood was strewn for nothing. It hardly seemed to matter that the Guard's office reported itself unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely. Bow returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKitrick.

She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. Well, she said, what's the matter. I thought we were blasting today, hadn't you heard? Asked Bow. He found it hard to believe she could be ignorant here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.

Johnny's dead. We can't leave. Oh, I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man. I've been in the lab all the time packing my things and didn't know.

A frown crossed her clear brow. But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to Luna with you. Your ticket will be refunded, of course, said Bow heavily. But you aren't certified in the series?

Is license for no less than two abers? Well damn, there won't be another birth for weeks, and I've got to get home. Can't you find somebody? Bou shrugged, not caring much. I'll circulate an ad if you want, but do so, please let me know.

She switched off. Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKitrick was worth considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but she was tall and well built. There were good lines in the strong, high boned face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red and brains too.

You didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now ready to go home. She was human enough, had been to most of the officers parties and danced and laughed and flirted mildly, But even the dullest rockhound gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here, a woman was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard of. As a result to herself, doctor mckittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were ever likely to reach.

Since coming here on commission from the Lunar Lab to bring her home, bo Johnson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her, because she wouldn't look twice at a big, dumb slob like him. He had sweated out a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through another. He placed his ad on the ratinue circuit, and then went out to get drunk.

It was all he could do for Johnny. Now drink him a final wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of the evening he found himself weeping. He woke up many hours later.

Achilles ran on Earth time, but did not rotate on it officially. It was late at night. Actually, the shrunken sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a message for him. He was to call one inner lung guard at the Comet Hotel.

Soonest the Comet anyone who could afford a room to himself there rather than a kip in the public barracks. Was well fueled. Bow swallowed a tablet and made his way to the visy and dialed the robo clerk summoned lung Guard down to the desk. It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which appeared in the screen. Lung Guard was a tall and supple man, somehow neat even without clothes.

Johnson said, Bo, sorry to get you up, but I understood. Oh yes, are you looking for a spaceman. I heard your ad and I'm available. Bow felt his mouth gape open. Huh, I never thought of both, lucky, I guess.

Lung Guard chuckled. His English had only the slightest trace of accent, less than Bow's. I thought I was stanished here too. For the next several months that as a qualified spaceman happened to be marooned and with fire Ball was on the drake heard of what happened to Bow nodded. For every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is doing at any given time.

The Drake had come to Achilles to pick up a cargo of refined thorium for Earth. She had somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction mass water from a crank to gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew. Spacemen were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have for sabotage. The event had taken place about a month ago, when the serious was already on route here.

Bo had heard of it in the course of shop talk. I thought she went back anyway, he said. Lungard nodded, she did. It was the usual question of economics. You know what refined fuel water costs in the belt.

Also, the delay while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles passed optimum position, which would make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to lead me behind. The difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I volunteered, even suggested the idea, because well, it happened during my watch, and even if nobody aimed to me, I couldn't help feeling guilty. Bow understood that kind of loyalty.

You couldn't travel space without men who had it. The company beamed a message, I'd stay here till the schedule permitted an undermand ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for maybe months. Went on lun Guard. I can't see sitting on this lump that long without so much as a chance at planet fault bonus. If you'll take me on, I'm sure the company will agree.

I'll get a message to them on the beam right away. Take us a while to get back, warned Bo. We're going to stop off at another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment and won't go into hyperbolic orbit till after that. About six weeks from here to earth all told. Akay, six months here, lun Guard laughed.

It emphasized the bright charm of his manner, sun blaze. I'll work for free. No need to bring your papers over tomorrow. The certificate in record, we're perfectly in order, showing Ininar lung Guard to be a spacetech one cl with eight years experience, qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand offessions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook hands on it.

Call me Bo, Really is my name Swedish? Another squarehead, eh, grinned lun Guard. I'm from South America myself. Notice a year's gap here, said Bo, pointing to the service record on Venus. Oh yes, I had some fool idea about settling, but soon learned better.

I tried to farm. When you have to carve your own land out of howling desert, well that's not some match jawy. They were lucky not having to wait their turn at the station computer. No other ship was leaving immediately. They fed at the data and requirements and got bank columns of numbers, fuel requirements, acceleration times, orbital elements, the figures always had to be modified.

No trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be done when needed. With a slipstick and the little ship's calculator. Bo went at his share of the job, doggedly, checking and rechecking before giving the problem to the machine. Lung guard breezed through it and spent his time while waiting for in swapping dirty limericks with the tech. He had some good ones.

The serious was loaded, inspected, and cleared. A scooter brought her three passengers up to her orbit. They embarked, settled down, and waited. At the proper time. Acceleration jammed them back in a thunder of rockets.

Bow relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind them. So long, he whispered, so long, Johnny. In another minute he would be knodded in, screaming from the bends, and a couple of minutes later he would be dead. Bow clamped his teeth together as if he would grip consciousness in his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger.

As he fumbled for the supply pouch, it seemed to recede from him down a hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not know. Damn, he gasped, Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. He got the pouch open somehow, The stars wheeled around him. There, stars buzzing in his head like cold white fire flies, buzzing and buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged through him.

He felt his ear drums popping as pressure dropped. The plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. He peeled it off, trying not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. His body was slow, inert a thing to fight. There was no more feeling at his back.

Was he dead already? Redness flamed before his eyes, red like valerious hair blowing across the stars. It was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the patch over the hole in his suit. The adhesive gripped, drying fast in the sucking vacuum. The patch bellied out from internal air pressure, straining to break loose and kill him.

Bo's mind wavered back toward life. He opened the valves wide on his tanks and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. For a long time, he lay there, only lungs and heart and emotion. His throat felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air threw It was like being born again, born spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold. To lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him.

Both shuddered and wanted to scream again. Slowly he groped back toward awareness, his frost bitten back tingled as it warmed up again. Soon it would be a fire. He could feel a hot trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead.

Next time he wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic driven thirty slug would go through a helmet, splashing brains as it passed. He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the gages. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three hours worth left.

Lung guard could kill him simply by waiting. It would be easy to die. He lay on his back staring up at the stars and the spilling, cloudy glory of the milky Way. A warmth was creeping back into numbed hands and feet. Soon he would be warm all over and sleepy.

His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on an asteroid. He wanted terribly to sleep. There wasn't much room in the serious. The only privacy was gained by drawing curtains across your bunk. Men without psych training could get to hate each other.

On a voyage, Bow wondered if he would reach Luna hating Einer lung Guard. The man was competent, a willing worker, tempering his cheerfulness with tact, always immaculate in the neat blue and white of the fireball line, which made Bow feel doubly sloppy in his own old gray coverall. He was a fine conversationalist, with an enormous stock of reminiscence and ideas, witty above a certain passion of belief. It seemed as if he and Valeria were always talking, animated voices like a sound of life over the mechanical ship murmurs, while Bo sat dumbly in a corner, wishing he could think of something to say. The trouble was, in spite of all his efforts, he was doing a commentary dive into another bad case of one sided love.

When she spoke in that husky voice of hers, gray gleam of eyes under hair that floated, flaming and null g the beauty he saw in her was like pain, and she was always around. It couldn't be helped. Once they had gone into freefall. He could only polish so much metal and tinker with so many appliances. After that, they were crowded together in a long waiting And why are you all alone in the belt, asked lung Guard, In spite of all the romantic stories about the wild free life of the rockhound, it's the dullest place in the system.

Not to me, she smiled. I was working. There were experiments to be done, factors to be measured. Away from solar radiation. There are always ions around inside the orbit of Mars to jamble up delicate apparatus.

Bo sat quiet, trying to keep his eyes off her. She looked good in shorts and half cape too good. It's something to do with power beaming, isn't it. Lung Guard's handsome face creased in a frown, afraid, I don't understand. They've been beaming power on the planets for a long time now, so they have.

She nodded. What we're after is an interplanetary power beam, and we've got it. She gestured to the baggage track and a thick trunk full of papers she had put there. That's it, the basic circuits, factors and constants. Any competent engineer could drop a design for them.

Precision work. Eh. Obviously it was hard enough to do on say Earth. You need a really tight beam in just the right frequencies, a feedback signals to drink each beam at the desired outlet relay stations. Oh yes, it was a ten year research project before they could even think about building.

An interplanetary beam has all those problems plus a number of its own. You have to get the dispersion down to a figure solow it hardly seems possible. You can't use feedback because of the time leg so the beams have to be aimed exactly right, and the planets are always moving at miles per second an era of one degree for your beam almost two million miles off in one crossing au and besides being so precise that the beam has to carry up I go wat at least to be worth the trouble problem looked insoluble till someone in the Order of Planetary Engineers came up with an idea for trick control circuit hooked into a special computer. My lab's been working together with the Order on it, and I was making final determinations for them.

It's finished now, twelve years of work and we're done, she laughed, except for building the stations and getting the bugs out. Lung Guard cocked an oddly sardonic brow. And what do you hope for from it? He asked? What if the psycho techs decided to do with this thing?

Isn't it obvious? She cried. Power nuclear fuel is getting scarcer every day, and civilization is finished if we can't find another energy source. The Sun is pouring out more than we'll ever need, but sheer distance dilutes it below a useful level by the time it gets to Venus. We'll build stations on the hot site of Mercury.

Orbital stations can relay. We can get the beams as far out as Mars without too much dispersion. It'll bring down the rising price of atomic energy, which is making all other prices rise and stretch our supply of fissionables for centuries more. No more ulries, no more martians freezing to death because a converter fanils. No more clan feuds on venus starting over uranium beds.

The excited flush on her cheeks was lovely to look at. Lungard shook his head. There was a sadness in his smile. You're a true child of the New Enlightenment, he said. Reason we'll solve everything.

Science will find a cure for all our eels, give man a cheap energy source and leave him forever happy. It won't work, you know, Something like anger crossed her eyes. What are you, she asked, A humanist, Yes, said Lungard quietly. Bo started. He'd known about the anti psychotechnic movement which was growing on Earth, seeing a few of its adherents.

But I never thought a spaceman would be a humanist, he stammered. Lungard shrugged, Riley, don't be afraid. I don't eat babies. I don't even get in hysterics in an argument. All I've done is used the scientific method, observing the world without preconceptions and learned by it that the scientific method doesn't have all the answers.

Instead, said Valeria scornfully, we should all go back to church and pray for what we want, rather than working for it. Not at all, said lung Guard mildly. The new Enlightenment is, or was because it's dying, a very natural state of mind. Here Earth had come out of the world, wars racked and ruined, starving and chaotic, and all because of unbridled ideology. So the physical scientists produced goods and machines and conquered the planets.

The biologists found new food sources and new cures for disease. The psycho tanks built up their knowledge to a point where the socioeconomic unity could really be planned, and the plan worked. Man was unified. War had sunk into an occasional small police action. People were eating and had comfort and security all through applied working science.

Naturally, they came to believe reason would solve their remaining problems. But this faith in reason was itself an emotional reaction from the preceding age of unreason. Well, we've had a century of enlightenment now, and it has created its own troubles. Which it cannot solve. No age can handle the difficulties it raises for itself.

That's left to the next era. There are practical problems arising in No matter how desperately the psychotechs work, they aren't succeeding with them. What problems, asked Bo, feeling a little bewildered man. Don't you ever see a newscast challenged voonn guard the Second Industrial Revolution, millions of people thrown out of work by their new automata. They aren't going hungry, but they are displaced and bitter.

The economic center of Earth is shifting to Asia, the political power with it, and hundreds of millions of Asians are skeptical aboard this antiseptic new order. The West has been bringing them cultural resistance, and not all the psychotactic propaganda the system can shake it off. The men of Mars Venus, the Belt the Jovian moons are developing their own civilizations, inevitably in alien environments, their own ways of living and thinking, which just don't fit into the neat scheme of an Earth dominated solar union. The psychotexts themselves are being driven to oligarchic, unconstitutional acts. They have no choice, but it's making the enemies and then, as the normal human energy and drive, men can only be safe, insane, and secure for so long.

Then he reacts. This new Enlightenment is really a decadent age, a period where an exhausted civilization has been resting under a holy status quo. It can't last. Man always wants something new. You humanists talk a lot about man's right to variability, said Valeria.

If you really carry off that revolution, your writings advocate, you'll just trade one power group for another, and more fanatic, less lawful than the present one. Not necessarily, said Languard. After all, the union will probably break up. It can't last forever. All we want to do is hasten the day because we feel that it's outlived its usefulness.

Bo shook his head. I can't see it, he said heavily. I just can't see it. All those people, the Lunarites, the violent clansman on Venus, the stiff correct Martians, the asteroid RockHounds, even those mysterious Jovians, they all came from Earth. It was Earth's help that made their planets habitable.

We're all men, all one race, a fiction, said Langard. The human race, is a fiction. There are only small groups with their own conflicting interests, and if those conflicts are allowed to break into war, said Valeria, do you know what a lithium bomb can do? There was a reckless gleam in Luangard's eyes. If a period of interplanetary wars is necessary, let's get it over with, he answered, enough men will survive to build something better.

This age has gotten stale. It's petrifying. There have been plenty of shakeups in history. The fall of Rome, the Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, the World wars. It's been man's way of progressing.

I don't know about all those, said Bo slowly. I just know I wouldn't want to live through such a time. You're soft, said Langard. Down underneath your soft, he laughed disarmingly. Pardon me, I didn't mean anything personally.

I'll never convince you. You'll never convince me. So let's keep it friendly. I hope you'll have some free time on Luna. Valeria, I know a little grill where they say the best sent the stakes in the system.

All right, she smiled. It's a date. Bo mumbled some excuse, and when aft he was still calling her doctor, McKitrick. You can't just lie here and let him come kill you. There was a picture behind his eyes.

He didn't know if it was a dream or a long buried memory. He stood under an aspen which quivered and rustled as if it laughed to itself, softly, softly, when the wind embraced it. And the wind was blowing up a red granite slope, wild and salt from the sound, and there were towering clouds lifting over Denmark to the west. The sunlight rained and streamed through aspen, leaves broken, shaken, falling in spatters against the earth, and he Bo Johnson laughed with the wind and the tree and the far watery glitter of the sound. He opened his eyes wearily, like an old man.

O'Rion was marching past, and there was a blaze on crags five miles off, which told of the rising sun. The asteroid spun swiftly. He had been here for many of its days now, and each day burdened him like a year. Got to get out of here, he knew. He sat up, pain tearing along his furrowed breast.

He stared at it in a dull wonder. Where to go? Where to hide, What to do? Thirst nagged him. Slowly, he uncoiled the tube which led from the electrically heated canteen welded to his suit, screwed its end into the helmet nipple, thumbed down the clamp which closed it, and sucked hard.

It helped a little. He dragged himself to his feet and stood swaying. Only the near weightlessness kept him erect. Turning his head in its transparent cage, he saw the sun rise, and bright spots danced before him. When he looked away, his vision cleared, but for a moment he thought the shadow lifting over a nearby ridge was a wisp of unconsciousness.

Then he made out the bulky, black painted edge of it, gigantic against the milky way. It was lung guard, moving unhurriedly up to kill him. A dark laughter was in his radio earphones. Take it easy, bow, I'll be there in a minute. He backed away, his heart a sudden thunder, looking for a place to hide.

Down, Get down, and don't stand where he can see you. He crouched as much as the armor would allow and broke into a bounding run. A slug spat broken stone near his feet. The powdery dust hung for minutes before settling. Breath rattled in his throat.

He saw the lip of a meteoric crater and dove Crouching there. He heard lung Guard's voice again, somewhere Nea, why not come out and finish it now? The radio was nondirectional, so he snapped back a gun against a monkey wrench. Lungard's coolness broke a little. There was almost a puzzled note.

I hate to do this. Why can't you be reasonable? I don't want to kill you. The trouble, said Bow harshly, is that I want to kill you. Behold the man of the New Enlightenment.

Bou could imagine lung Guard's grin. It would be tight, and there would be sweat on the lean face, but the amusement was genuine. Didn't you believe, sweet reasonableness could solve everything? This is only the beginning, Bow, just a small preliminary hint that the age of reason is dying. I've already converted you to my way of thinking by the very fact you're fighting me.

Why not admit it? Bou shook his head futile gesture. Looked in darkness. Where he lay. There was a frosty blaze of stars.

When he looked up, it was more than himself and Johnny Malone, more even than the principle of the thing and the catastrophe to all men, which lung Guard's victory meant. There was something deep and primitive which would not let him surrender. Even the teeth of annihilation. Valerious image swayed before him. Lung Guard was moving around, peering over the shadowy tumble of blackened rock in search of any trace.

There was a magnetic rifle in his hands. Bow strained his helmet to the crater floor, trying to hear ground vibrations, but there was nothing. He didn't know where lung Guard was, only that he was very near. Blindly, he bundled his legs and sprang out of the pit and of part one. Join us next time for the thrilling conclusion to Out of the Iron.

This episode performed and produced by Father Below. Music by HP