Staghorn's leers and Dr. Peccary's glowers were not for the scenery, however, but for the people who wandered aimlessly through the little park and along the street beyond, carefully avoiding the area beneath the leaning steeple. All of them were uniformly young, ranging from perhaps seventeen at one extreme to no more than thirty at the other. When Dr. Peccary had first seen them, he'd cried out joyfully, "You see, Staghorn, all young! All handsome!" Then he'd stopped talking as he studied those in the foreground more closely.

Their clothing, to call it that, was most peculiar. It was rags.

Here and there was a garment that bore a resemblance to a dress or jacket or pair of trousers, but for the most part the people simply had chunks of cloth wrapped about them in a most careless fashion. Several would have been arrested for indecent exposure had they appeared anywhere except on Humanac's screen. However, they seemed indifferent to this—and to all else. A singularly attractive girl, in a costume that would have made a Cretan blush, didn't even get a second glance from, a young Adonis who passed her on the walk. Nor did she bestow one on him. The park bench held more interest for her, so she sat down on it.

Peccary studied her more closely, then straightened with a start.

"I'll be damned," he said. "That's Jenny Cheever!"

Staghorn continued to leer at the girl. "So you know her?"

"I know her father. He owns the local variety store. She's only twenty today, and there she is a hundred years from now, not a day older."

"Only her image, Dr. Peccary," Staghorn murmured. "Only her image. But a very pretty one."

Peccary came to his feet, unable to control his irritation any longer. "I won't believe it!" he said. "Somehow a piece of misinformation has been fed into that machine. Its calculations are all wrong!"

Staghorn refused to be perturbed. "But you just said you recognize the girl on the bench. I'd say that Humanac has to be working with needle-point accuracy to put recognizable people into a prediction."

"Then shift the scene! For all I know this part of town was turned into an insane asylum fifty years from now." The use of the past tense when speaking of a future event was not ungrammatical in the presence of Humanac. "Do you have the volume up?"

"Certainly. Can't you hear the birds twittering?"

"But I can't hear anyone talking."

"Perhaps it's a day of silence."

Staghorn took another long look at the girl on the parkbench and then turned to the controls, using the fine adjustment on the geographical locator. The screen flickered, blinked, and the scene changed. The two men studied it.

"Recognize it?" said Staghorn.

Peccary gave an affirmative grunt. "That's the Jefferson grammar school on Elm Street. I'm surprised it's still there. But, lord, as long as they haven't built a new one, you'd think they'd at least keep the old one repaired."

"Very shabby," Staghorn agreed.

It was. Large areas of the exterior plaster had fallen away. Windows were shattered, and here and there the broken slats of Venetian blinds stuck through them. The shrubbery around the building was dead; weeds had sprung up through the cracks in the asphalt in the big play yard. There was no sign of children.

"Where is everyone?" Peccary demanded. "You must have the time control set for a Sunday or holiday."

"It's Tuesday," Staghorn said. Then both were silent because at that moment a child appeared, a boy of about eleven.

He burst from the schoolhouse door and ran across the cracked asphalt toward the playground, glancing back over his shoulder as though expecting pursuit. Reaching the play apparatus he paused and looked around desperately. The metal standards for the swings were in place but no swings hung from them. The fulcrums for the seesaws were there but they held no wooden planks to permit teetering. The only piece of equipment that looked capable of affording pleasure was the slide.

It was a small one, only about six feet high, obviously designed for toddlers and not for a boy of eleven. Nonetheless, the boy headed for it eagerly.

But he'd hardly set foot upon the bottom step of the ladder when the schoolhouse door burst open a second time. A young woman charged toward him shouting, "Paul! Get down from there at once! Paul!"

She was an attractive woman, but her voice held a note of panic. She ran so swiftly that Paul, whose ascent of the ladder was accelerated rather than retarded by her command, hadn't quite reached the top when she seized him around the legs and tried to drag him down.

"Please, Miss Terry!" he pleaded desperately. "Just this once let me get to the top! Let me slide down it just once!"

"Get to the top?" Miss Terry was aghast. "You could fall and kill yourself. Down you come this instant!"

"Just one time!" Paul wailed. "Let me do it just once!"

Miss Terry paid no heed to his anguished cries. She tugged at his legs while Paul clung to the handrails. But he was the weaker of the two, and in a few seconds Miss Terry had torn him loose and set him on the ground. Then, seizing him firmly by the hand, she led him back toward the schoolhouse.

Paul went along, sniveling miserably. They entered the building and the play yard was once more silent and deserted.

"By God, Staghorn," Peccary thundered, "you've doctored it! You've deliberately fed false information into Humanac's memory cells!"

Staghorn turned to glare at his guest, his eyes flaming at the outrageous suggestion. "The only hypothetical element I've fed into Humanac is your Y Hormone, Dr. Peccary! You saw me do it. You watched me check the computer before we started."

"I refuse to believe that my Y Hormone will bring about the consequences that machine is predicting!"

"It's the only new factor that was added."

"How can you say that? During the next hundred years a thousand other factors can enter in."

"But the Y Hormone bears an essential relationship to the whole. Sit down and stop waving your arms. I'm going to see if we can get into the school."

Peccary sat down, seething.

It had been a mistake to bring his Y Hormone to Staghorn. It was simply that he'd been thinking of himself as such a benefactor to the human race that he couldn't wait to see a sample of the bright future he intended to create.

"Think of it, Staghorn!" he'd said happily, earlier in the evening. "The phrase 'art is long and time is fleeting' won't mean anything any more! Artists will have hundreds of years to paint their pictures. Think of the books that will be written, the music that will be composed, the magnificent cities that will be built! Everyone will have time enough to achieve perfection. Think of your work and mine. We'll live long enough to unravel all the mysteries of the universe!"

Staghorn had said nothing. Instead, he'd uncorked the small bottle Dr. Peccary had given him and sniffed at it.

The bottle contained a sample of the Y Hormone which Dr. Peccary had spent many years developing. Its principal ingredient was a glandular extract from insects, an organic compound that controlled the insects' aging process. If administered artificially, it could keep insects in the larval stage almost indefinitely.

Dr. Peccary's great contribution had been to synthesize this extract—which affected only insects—with protein elements that could be assimilated by mammals and humans. It had required years of experimentation, but the result was his Y Hormone—Y for Youth.

In his laboratory he now had playful kittens that were six years old and puppies that should have been fully grown dogs. The only human he'd so far experimented on was himself. But because he'd started taking the hormone only recently, he was as yet unable to say positively that it was responsible for the splendid health he was enjoying. His impatience to know the sociological consequences of the hormone had made him bring a sample of it to Staghorn.

After sniffing at the bottle, Staghorn had poured its contents into Humanac's analyzer.

The giant computer gurgled and belched a few seconds while it assessed the nature of the formula. Then Staghorn connected the analyzer with the machine's memory units.

As far as Humanac was concerned, the Y Hormone was now an accepted part of human history.

But, except for this one added factor, the rest of Humanac's vast memory was solidly based upon the complete known history of the earth and the human race. Its principles of operation were the same as those controlling other electronic "brains," which could be programmed to predict tides, weather, election results or the state of a department-store inventory at any given date in the future. Humanac differed chiefly in the tremendously greater capacity of its memory cells. Over the years it had digested thousands of books, codifying and coordinating the information as fast as it was received. Its photocells had recorded millions of visual impressions. Its auditory units had absorbed the music and languages of the centuries. And its methods of evaluation had been given a strictly human touch by feeding into its resistance chambers the cephalic wave patterns produced by the brains of Staghorn's colleagues.

An added feature, though by no means an original one, was the screen upon which Humanac produced visually the events of the time and place for which the controls were set.

This screen was simply the big end of a cathode-ray tube, similar to those used in television sets. It was adapted from I.B.M.'s 704 electronic computer used by the Vanguard tracking center to produce visual predictions of the orbits of artificial satellites.

Staghorn was constantly having trouble explaining to people that Humanac was not a time machine that could look into the past or future. Its pictures of past events were based upon information already present in its memory cells. Its pictures of future events were predictions calculated according to the laws of probability. But because Humanac, unlike a human, never forgot any of the million and one variables impinging upon any human situation, its predictions were startlingly accurate.

Humanac had never been exposed to pictures of Dr. Peccary's home town nor to those of a girl named Jenny Cheever. It arrived at the likeness of both town and girl through a purely mathematical process.

Staghorn's ultimate purpose in building the machine was to use it in developing a true science of history. Because Humanac was only a machine, Staghorn could alter its memory at will. By removing the tiny unit upon which the Battle of Hastings was recorded and then "re-playing" English history without it, he could find out what actual effect that particular battle had.

He was surprised to discover that it had very little. According to Humanac, the Normans would have conquered England anyway a few months later.

At another time, while reviewing the events leading up to the American Revolution, Humanac had produced a picture of Benjamin Franklin kissing a beautiful young woman in the office of his printing shop. On impulse Staghorn removed this seemingly insignificant event from Humanac's memory and then turned the time dial forward to the present to see what effect, if any, the episode had had upon history.

To his amazement, with that single kiss missing, Humanac produced a picture of the American continent composed of six different nations speaking French, German, Chinese, Hindu, Arabic and Muskogean—the last being the language of an Indian nation occupying the Mississippi Valley and extending northward to Lake Winnepeg. It served as a buffer state between the Hindus and Chinese in the west and the French, Germans and Arabs to the east.

It was Humanac's ability to predict the future consequences of any hypothetical event, however, that made it an instrument capable of revolutionizing history. Once its dependability was thoroughly established, it would be possible for a Secretary of State to submit to Humanac the contents of a note intended for a foreign country, then turn the time controls ahead and get Humanac's prediction of the note's consequences.

If the consequences were good, the note would then be sent.

If they were bad, the Secretary could destroy the note and try others—until he composed one that produced the desired result.

Humanac's flaw was that it had no way of explaining the predictions produced on its screen. It merely showed what would happen when and if certain things were done. It left it up to the human operator to figure out why things happened that way.

This was what was troubling Dr. Peccary.

He could see not the remotest relationship between his Y Hormone and the fact that a mathematical probability named Miss Terry should refuse another mathematical probability named Paul permission to climb to the top of a six-foot playground slide.

Meanwhile Staghorn had been using the fine adjustment on the geographic locator and now grunted his satisfaction. "Good! We're in the building, at least."

On the screen was a dusky corridor. On either side of it were classroom doors, some closed, some ajar. Staghorn moved his hand from the fine adjustment to the even more delicate vernier control which permitted him to shift the geographic focus inches at a time. The focus drifted slowly forward to one of the half-open doors, and then he and Dr. Peccary were able to see into the classroom.

It was deserted. Desks were thick with dust. Books, yellow with age, were strewn on the floor.

Staghorn's hand sought the vernier control again. The picture led them on down the corridor to another open door.

Again it was a scene of desolation.

"This can have nothing to do with my Y Hormone!" Peccary insisted.

"Then why is your picture on the wall there?" Staghorn said with a note of malicious pleasure.

Dr. Peccary looked and started. On the classroom wall was a faded photograph of himself. Except that he was wearing a different suit in the picture, he looked just as he looked at the present moment. Staghorn got a closer focus on the photograph so that Peccary could read the legend beneath it. Dr. Clarence Peccary, the man who gave the world the Y Hormone.

"All right then," said Peccary, somewhat mollified by this tribute. "If they put my picture on school room walls a hundred years from now, it means I'm an honored man, a man the world admires. And therefore the Y Hormone can't be the cause of all this desolation!"

"I've found that Humanac's reasoning and human reasoning differ in many ways," said Staghorn. On the screen they were out in the corridor again when from somewhere ahead came a woman's voice.

"You may recite now, Paul. Please stand up."

"Ah, that sounds like Miss Terry," said Staghorn. He fingered the vernier control. The focal point slid forward along the corridor.

"Stand up and recite, Paul," Miss Terry said more sharply.

"I think they're in the room on the left," said Peccary.

II

The focus shifted to the open door and then Peccary and Staghorn could see into the classroom. This one was in slightly better order than the others and was occupied by two people. In front sat Miss Terry, obviously the teacher, and at one of the desks sat Paul. He seemed to be the entire class. At Miss Terry's urging he was coming to his feet, his face still stained with tears. He held his book a few inches from his nose and stared over the top of it sullenly.

"Go ahead, Paul," said Miss Terry, sweetly stubborn. "I'm waiting."

Paul looked at his book and read from it in a monotone, enunciating each word carefully as though it had no relationship to the other words. "I am a human being and as long as I obey the six rules I shall live forever."

"Very good, Paul. Now read the six rules."

Paul sniffled loudly and commenced reading again. "Rule one: I must never go near fire or my clothing may catch aflame and burn me up. Rule two: I must keep away from deep water or I may fall in and drown. Rule three: I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out." He paused to sniffle and wipe his nose on his sleeve, then sighed and continued dismally. "Rule four: I must never play with sharp things or I may cut myself and bleed to death. Rule five: I must never ride horses or I may fall off and break my neck." Paul paused, lowering his book.

"And the sixth rule?" said Miss Terry. "Go ahead and read the sixth rule."

Reluctantly Paul lifted his book. "Rule six: Starting when I'm twenty-one I must take Dr. Peccary's Y Hormone once a week to keep me young and healthy forever."

"Excellent, Paul!" said Miss Terry. "And which rule were you breaking just now on the playground?"

"I was breaking Rule Three," Paul said, then quoted sadly, "I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out."

Dr. Peccary was on his feet stomping around in front of the computer. "Sheer idiocy," he muttered. "He doesn't have any brains to dash out! I'll admit that a computer with sufficient information about the state of the world might be able to make accurate predictions of events a few months or possibly a year into the future—but not one hundred years! In that long an interval even the most trivial error could distort every circuit in the machine." He jabbed a finger toward the screen where Paul was seated at his desk again. "And that's what that picture is—a distortion. I'm not going to let it influence me one bit in what I intend to—" He broke off because of what was happening on the screen.

From somewhere outside the school building came the wail of a deep-throated alarm. Both Miss Terry and Paul were on their feet and by their expressions, terrified.

"The Atavars!" Paul cried, his entire body shaking.

"To the basement, Paul!" Miss Terry's face was blanched as she grasped Paul's hand and headed toward the door. But halfway there, both came to a halt, breathless and staring.

A powerful bearded man strode into the classroom.

Paul and Miss Terry fell back as he advanced. He was a man of about fifty, his bushy hair shot with gray, his eyes cold and blue. He was followed by two younger men who studied Paul and Miss Terry with interest. All three wore rough work clothing.

The bearded man pointed at Paul. "There's the boy," he said quietly. "Take him."

Paul let out a shriek of terror and fled into a corner as the two men advanced. He clawed futilely as they laid hands on him. "For God's sake, shut up," one of the men said with more disgust than anger. He pinioned Paul's arms while the other man bound them together with a strip of cloth.

Miss Terry meanwhile had collapsed into her chair. One of Paul's captors glanced at her and spoke to the bearded man. "What about her?"

The bearded man stepped close to Miss Terry and put a hand on her shoulder. She recoiled as from a snake. "How old are you?" he asked. Miss Terry made some inarticulate squeaks and the man spoke more sharply. "When were you born?"

"Two thousand four," she managed to stutter.

The bearded man considered this and shook his head. "Over fifty. By that time they're hopeless. Leave her and bring the boy."

Miss Terry let out an agonized wail of protest and fainted across her desk. One of the men slung Paul over his shoulder and the bearded leader led the group from the room.

"Amazing," murmured Staghorn. "Absolutely amazing. One never knows what to expect."

"Pure gibberish," said Peccary, then betrayed his interest by saying, "Can you follow them?"

"I'm trying to." Staghorn worked at the geographic adjustment and finally got the screen focused on the corridor again. It was deserted. The bearded man and his companions had already departed. Staghorn touched the controls again, the screen flickered and once more the little park came into focus. But now it, too, was deserted. None of the ragged men and women were in sight, neither in the park nor on the street beyond. Staghorn twisted the focus in all directions without discovering anyone.

"That whistle we heard was obviously some kind of alarm," he said. "Everyone must be in hiding—from the Atavars, whoever they are. I strongly suspect that bearded fellow of being one."

"You might as well shut it off, Staghorn," Dr. Peccary said coldly. "It's too much nonsense for any sane man to swallow. And unless that machine can provide a full and satisfactory explanation as to why my Y Hormone will bring about the conditions depicted on that screen, I see no reason to keep the hormone off the market."

Staghorn turned from the controls to study his companion. "The only possible way that Humanac could give us the entire background of events leading up to what we've just seen would be to set the time control to the present and then leave the machine running until it arrived at this same period again. That would take a hundred years, and I'm not going to sit here that long. What's more, I'm not going to touch your Y Hormone even if you do put it on the market."

"There'll be plenty who will!"

"That's what Humanac says, yes."

Dr. Peccary gestured despairingly. After all, he did have a conscience. "I simply don't believe my hormone can be responsible!"

"I'll remind you that your picture was on the classroom wall and that the sixth rule read by that boy indicated that he was supposed to start using your hormone when he reached the age of twenty-one. That would be about the age to stop growing older."

"That boy is nothing but a mathematical probability!"

"That's all you and I are," Staghorn said owlishly. "Mathematical probabilities. Despite Omar, nothing exactly like either of us has ever existed before or will exist again."

"But damn it, Staghorn...." Dr. Peccary sat down, his face in his hands. "It's worth millions! I've invested years of work and all the money I could scrape together. I don't see anything wrong in a scientist's profiting by his discoveries. And to keep it off the market just because that insane computer says that a hundred years from now—" He broke off, glaring at Humanac's screen which was still focused on the deserted park. "It simply doesn't make sense! The machine doesn't give any reasons for anything. If there were a way I could talk directly to some of those mathematical probabilities, question them, ask them what it's all about...." He was on his feet, striding back and forth before the computer again.

"Perhaps there is a way," Staghorn said quietly.

"Eh?"

"I said that it may be possible for you to talk with them."

"How?"

"By making your mind a temporary part of the computer."

Peccary studied the huge machine apprehensively—its ranks of memory units, its chambers of flickering tubes, the labyrinth of circuits. "How would you go about it?"

"I put you in the transmitter," Staghorn said. He stepped away from the console and slid back a panel to reveal a niche with a seat in it. Above the seat was a sort of helmet that resembled a hair drier in a beauty parlor, except that it was studded with hundreds of tiny magnets and transistors. Staghorn indicated the helmet. "This picks up and amplifies brain waves. I've used it to record the cephalic wave pattern of about a hundred men and women. The recordings are built into the computer, enabling Humanac to assign a mathematical evaluation to the influence of human emotion in making historic decisions. In your case, instead of making a recording of your brain waves, I'd feed the impulses directly into Humanac's memory units."

"And what would happen then?"

"I'm not altogether sure," said Staghorn, and it seemed to Peccary that Staghorn was finding a definite relish in his uncertainty. "I've never tried the experiment before."

"I might get electrocuted?"

"No. There's no danger of that happening. The current that activates the transmitter comes from your own brain, and as you know, such electrical impulses are extremely feeble. That isn't what worries me."

"Well then, what does?"

"In some ways Humanac behaves peculiarly like a living organism. For example, there's one prediction it can never make. Several times I've fed into it the hypothetical information that the two opposing factions of the world have declared war. Naturally everyone would like to know about the outcome of such a war." Staghorn paused, gazing lovingly at his majestic creation.

"And what happens?" Dr. Peccary said impatiently.

"Nothing. That's just it. The moment I turn Humanac into the future to get a prediction, the screen goes dead. Do you know why it goes dead?" Staghorn looked at Peccary with a pleased smile and didn't wait for Peccary to cue him. "It goes dead because, if war were declared, Humanac would be the first target for enemy bombs. When it predicts a future event, it has to take all factors into consideration. If one of those factors is its own destruction, it can predict nothing beyond that moment."

Peccary repeated this sentence in his mind while he slowly digested its meaning. What it seemed to mean was that, although Staghorn and Peccary thought of Humanac as only a complicated machine, Humanac's opinion of itself was altogether otherwise. It could foresee its own death.

"I often wonder," mused Staghorn, "about those people we see wandering around on Humanac's screen. To us they're only images made by a stream of electrons hitting the end of a cathode ray tube. Their space and time is an illusion. All the same, Humanac comprises an entire system—a system modeled as accurately as possible on our own. It's just possible that the boy we saw, Paul, was experiencing a real terror."

Dr. Peccary examined Staghorn in amazement. He had often suspected that Staghorn's genius was tinged with madness. "You're not suggesting that those ... those images are conscious?"

"Ah! What is consciousness?"

"I didn't come here to get into a metaphysical argument."

"No, but it's only fair for me to suggest the possible emotional hazzards involved in hooking you up to Humanac. Because you have to admit that you'll be conscious during the experiment."

"Certainly. But I'll be sitting right there." Peccary pointed to the seat in the transmitter unit.

"In a sense, yes. Very well, take your seat."

Peccary eyed the helmet uneasily. "I'm not sure I want to do this."

"But you do want to make millions from the Y Hormone. And you want to enjoy it with a clear conscience. Perhaps it's as you say—there may be other factors involved. By knowing what they are you may be able to negate their influence." Staghorn's voice was a soft purr as he took Dr. Peccary's arm and urged him into the transmitter unit. Peccary sat down. The seat was small and hard.

"Just bear one thing in mind," Staghorn said. "Don't get lost. It will be best if you stay in the little park where I can see you and where you'll be in focus. Unless you're in focus it might be impossible to—ah—disengage you."

Dr. Peccary could find no meaning whatsoever in this statement, except confirmation of his suspicion that Staghorn was mad. He felt this so strongly that he started to rise from his seat and escape from the transmitter cell. But at that moment Staghorn lowered the helmet onto his head. The sensation he experienced was so novel and startling that he remained seated. For a second or two he could feel the tiny metallic contacts on the inside of the helmet pressing against his skull, but this sensation of physical pressure vanished almost at once. It was replaced by one of headlessness. His body up to his chin still seemed to be sitting in the transmitter—but his intellect had lost completely its sense of localization in the head.

He could think clearly enough, but had no notion as to the spot where his thoughts originated. Indeed, the whole concept of relative position seemed ridiculous. At the same instant he felt tall as a mountain and as low as a rug. His mind could fill the entire universe, while resting neatly in a thimble. He could also see Staghorn, for his eyes continued to function and transmit optical patterns, but precisely where he was while receiving these patterns he couldn't possibly say.

He heard Staghorn remark, "Fine. The connection is perfect. It's always better when the subject is bald. I'm going to switch you over into Humanac's circuits now."

Staghorn's hand moved across the controls and one of his long fingers flipped a switch.

This was the last Dr. Peccary saw of Roger Staghorn. Instantly he found himself standing in the center of the small park in his home town. His reaction was not one of alarm. Quite to the contrary, his immediate thought was one of surprise that he wasn't alarmed. Standing there in the little square felt entirely normal and proper.

Next he was jolted by the realization that he must be an image on Humanac's screen. He quickly looked about in all directions, half expecting to see Staghorn's huge face peering down from the sky like God. There was no sign of Staghorn, however. The world about him was as three-dimensional as any he'd ever known. He was in his home town a hundred years after he'd last seen it.

Good lord! He was a hundred and forty-two years old!

This realization was followed by a host of others. Like a man coming out of amnesia, his past began filling with memories. He was rich. He was the richest man on earth. His Y Hormone was used the world over. A mile away, on the outskirts of town, he could see a portion of his huge production plant. He lived in a majestic palace surrounded by every manner of automatic protective device. Protection? From what? And how had he dared to venture out here in the park alone? But wait ... wait. It was all an illusion. Actually he was only an image on Humanac's screen, a mathematical probability.

He must keep that fact firmly in mind, or he might lose his mental balance.

He gazed about at the town, dismayed by its appearance. Not a person in sight. Not even an automobile. Of course, the motor car might have become obsolete during the passage of a hundred years. There must be some new mode of transportation—something undreamed of a century ago!

While he was wondering what this might be, he heard a clop-clop-clopping and was astonished to see three horsemen approaching the square. As they came closer he recognized them as the bearded man and his two companions.

The boy Paul was bound firmly behind one of the saddles.

A strange panic arose in Dr. Peccary's breast, but he managed to suppress it with a reminder that this was all illusion. He was here for purposes of information; he must have the courage to get it. So he forced himself to the curb at the edge of the park. When the riders were within speaking distance, he managed to hail them with, "Hey, you!"

His nervousness made his words harsh. But then, there was no reason why he should speak politely to kidnapers. He saw that Paul was conscious. The boy had a gag over his mouth but his eyes were open.

The three riders reined in their horses and looked at Peccary with frank curiosity.

"Here's one that didn't hide," one of them remarked, in a tone that Dr. Peccary decided was disrespectful. He stepped forward boldly.

"May I ask what you intend to do with that boy?" he demanded.

"He wants to know what we intend to do with the boy," said the same man.

"Yes, I heard what he said," the bearded man remarked quietly. He hadn't ceased to study Peccary with his piercing blue eyes. Now he urged his horse closer. "You must be a stranger here, son?"

"Not exactly," said Peccary. "As a matter of fact, I was born here. That was some time ago and it's true I haven't been here recently." The way the bearded man stared at him made him extremely nervous. "But I'm sure that kidnaping is against the law. If you don't release that boy I'll have to—to make a citizen's arrest!" Peccary knew that his words sounded ridiculous. From the way the three riders exchanged glances it was evident that they thought the same thing.

"He's going to make a citizen's arrest," commented the one who liked to repeat whatever Peccary said.

"Hush," said the bearded leader. And then to Peccary, "What's your name, son?"

"Clarence Peccary. If you don't do as I say I'll—" He stopped short, his heart leaping as the force of his indiscretion struck him.

The three men had been struck also.

The two younger ones were already on the ground, one on either side of him. Only the bearded man remained mounted. He leaned forward. "I thought you looked familiar. You're Doctor Peccary of the Y Hormone?" His voice was a menacing whisper. Peccary finally answered with a slow nod.

"He must have flipped, running around alone like this," a man beside him said. "However, let's never insult fortune!"

This was the last Dr. Peccary heard. For at that instant one of the men—he never knew which—struck him forcibly over the head with a blunt instrument.

III

At Humanac's controls Roger Staghorn leaped to his feet in alarm as he saw what was happening on the screen.

Peccary had collapsed now. The two men were draping him across the bearded man's saddle. There wasn't an instant to lose! Staghorn leaped to the transmitter cell where Peccary's material body was seated, his eyes peacefully closed. Staghorn flipped the switch to disengage Peccary's consciousness from Humanac's circuits.

Nothing happened. Peccary's body remained as before, blissfully asleep.

Good lord, of course nothing happened! How could it? Peccary had just been knocked cold; at the moment he didn't have any consciousness! Staghorn opened the circuit again and whirled back to the control console.

He looked at the screen. All three men were mounted again. The bearded leader gestured them on.

They set spurs to their horses and galloped away, taking the unconscious Peccary with them.

"No!" Staghorn shouted at the fleeing images. "No, Dr. Peccary! Stay in focus!" The horsemen paid no heed—nor did Staghorn expect them to, rationally. His shouts were only involuntary expressions of despair. Grasping the geographic locator, he twiddled it wildly, managing to keep the three riders in focus for several blocks as they sped down a street of the deserted town.

Then they rounded a corner and he lost them.

By the time he got a focus on the area around the corner they were gone. For several minutes he continued to search, shifting the focal point all over town, but in vain. Dr. Clarence Peccary was lost inside Humanac's labyrinthean brain!

Staghorn was stunned. There would be no difficulty in keeping Peccary's physical body alive indefinitely by intravenous feeding, but it was as good as dead while separated from its sense of identity. Worse yet were the probable consequences to Humanac of having a free soul loose in its mathematical universe. These were too dire to contemplate. The machine's reliability might be altogether ruined and Staghorn's life work destroyed. Under the circumstances there was but one course of action. He had to find Dr. Peccary and get him back into focus, so that he could be disengaged from the computer.

First Staghorn focused the geographic locator on the town square, the point from which Peccary had been abducted; from there he could begin tracking him. Next he set the time control so that it would automatically disengage the transmitter units in exactly three hours.