City

Yes, Tyler Webster told the newsmen, the trouble on Venus had been all smoothed out. Just a matter of the parties involved sitting down and talking. The life experiments out in the cold laboratories of Pluto were progressing satisfactorily. The expedition for Centauri would leave as scheduled, despite reports it was all balled up. The trade commission soon would issue new monetary schedules on various interplanetary products, ironing out a few inequalities.

Nothing sensational. Nothing to make headlines. Nothing to lead off the newscast.

"And Jon Culver tells me," said Webster, "to remind you gentlemen that today is the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the last murder committed in the Solar System. One hundred and twenty-five years without a death by premeditated violence."

He leaned back in the chair and grinned at them, masking the thing he dreaded, the question that he knew would come.

But they were not ready to ask it yet – there was a custom to be observed – a very pleasant custom.

Burly Stephen Andrews, press chief for Interplanetary News, clearing his throat as if about to make an important announcement, asked with what amounted to mock gravity:

"And how's the boy?"

A smile broke across Webster's face. "I'm going home for the weekend," he said. "I bought my son a toy."

He reached out, lifted the little tube from off the desk.

"An old– fashioned toy," he said. "Guaranteed old-fashioned. A company just started putting them out. You put it up to your eye and turn it and you see pretty pictures. Coloured glass falling into place. There's a name for it-"

"Kaleidoscope," said one of the newsmen quickly. "I've read about them. In an old history on the manners and customs of the early twentieth century."

"Have you tried it, Mr. Chairman?" asked Andrews.

"No," said Webster. "To tell the truth, I haven't. I just got it this afternoon and I've been too busy."

"Where'd you get it, Mr. Chairman?" asked a voice. "I got to get one of those for my own kid."

"At the shop just around the corner. The toy shop, you know. They just came in today."

Now, Webster knew, was the time for them to go. A little bit of pleasant, friendly banter and they'd get up and leave.

But they weren't leaving – and he knew they weren't. He knew it by the sudden inrush and the papers that rattled quickly to cover up the hush.

Then Stephen Andrews was asking the question that Webster had dreaded. For a moment Webster was grateful that Andrews should be the one to ask it. Andrews had been friendly, generally speaking, and Interplanetary Press dealt in objective news, with none of the sly slanting of words employed by interpretative writers.

"Mr. Chairman," said Andrews, "we understand a man who was converted on Jupiter has come back to Earth. We would like to ask you if the report is true?"

"It is true," said Webster, stiffly.

They waited and Webster waited, unmoving in his chair.

"Would you wish to comment?" asked Andrews, finally.

"No," said Webster.

Webster glanced around the room, ticking off the faces. Tensed faces, sensing some of the truth beneath his flat refusal to discuss the matter. Amused faces, masking brains that even now were thinking how they might twist the few words, he had spoken. Angry faces that would write outraged interpretative pieces about the people's right to know.

"I am sorry, gentlemen," said Webster.

Andrews rose heavily from the chair. "Thank you, Mr. Chairman," he said.

***

Webster sat in his chair and watched them go, felt the coldness and emptiness of the room when they were gone.

They'll crucify me , he thought. They'll nail me to the barn door and I haven't got a comeback. Not a single one .

He rose from the chair and walked across the room, stood staring out of the window at the garden in the sunlight of afternoon.

Yet you simply couldn't tell them.

Paradise! Heaven for the asking! And the end of humanity! The end of all the ideals and all the dreams of mankind, the end of the race itself.

The green light on his desk flashed and chirped and he strode back across the room.

"What is it?" he asked.

The tiny screen flashed and a face was there.

"The dogs just reported, sir, that Joe, the mutant, went to your residence and Jenkins let him in."

"Joe! You're sure?"

"That's what the dogs said. And the dogs are never wrong."

"No," said Webster slowly, "no, they never are." The face faded from the screen and Webster sat down heavily.

He reached with numbed fingers for the contro1 panel on his desk, twirled the combination without looking.

The house loomed on the screen, the house in North America that crouched on the windy hilltop. A structure that had stood for almost a thousand years. A place where a long line of Websters had lived and dreamed and died.

Far in the blue above the house a crow was flying and Webster heard, or imagined that he heard, the wind-blown cow of the soaring bird.