depend on the lunatic fringe of people like Radwick, Kelly and me. People who would try anything once. People who liked to scare themselves about a thing and then go out and do it.

Radwick and I traveled on a conventional ship almost to Pluto. The small, fast Overdrive ships never came very far into the solar system. The local boys who put us on the small, red traveler serviced the ship with a touch of awe. They were plenty scared, as if afraid they would be stuck on board when we left.

There was something odd about the construction of the ship, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"The design has passed through the minds of the Stardust beings," said Radwick, dumping his blocks on the table in the main cabin with a rattling sound. "Earthmen provided the blueprints but these ships are built out in Scolaris. They're partly organic."

"What!"

I put my hand against one red wall and felt a warm, lifelike glow.

"Certainly, why not?" smiled Radwick, clomping a design with his blocks. He made the carbon ring to symbolize life and an energy formula to symbolize the machine. "It's only in people's minds that there is a clean break between organic and non-organic. Machines have a youth, old age and death; so do people. They are really interchangeable...."

"I don't like the idea of traveling in the stomach of some space-monster," I babbled. "He might get the idea to digest us."

"Stomach-bummick," said Radwick. "This cabin could just as easily be an ear or the inside of an eye. Only the ship isn't organic in that way. It's just partly organic and partly not which may be expressed—"

He fell silent, throwing the blocks around. Suddenly I heard a bell. It consisted of four mellow tones struck at regular intervals.

"What's that?"

"Ideal sound," he said. "You'll have to get used to that too. It's another concept that we don't have back on earth."

"What's ideal about ringing a dinner bell?"

Radwick shrugged. "It's just a discontinuity to us. The Stardust people write off our fashions in clothing as a discontinuity in reasoning that they don't understand. We must write off theirs." He smiled briefly. "You'll come to write off a great many things, young man."

 Prev. P 6/15 next