“It went crazy,” she said. She shuddered.

“No,” he said. “Regression. It’s trying to hide.”

From the corridor the machine said, “Ugh. Damn it.” Beam found the phone and called Edward Ackers.

Banishment for Paul Tirol meant first a procession of bands of darkness and then a protracted, infuriating interval in which empty matter drifted randomly around him, arranging itself into first one pattern and then another.

The period between the time Ellen Ackers attacked him and the time banishment sentence had been pronounced was vague and dim in his mind. Like the present shadows, it was hard to pin down.

He had—he thought—awakened in Ackers’ apartment. Yes, that was it; and Leroy Beam was there, too. A sort of transcendental Leroy Beam who hovered robustly around, arranging everybody in configurations of his choice. A doctor had come. And finally Edward Ackers had shown up to face his wife and the situation.

Bandaged, and on his way into Interior, he had caught a glimpse of a man going out. The ponderous, bulbous shape of David Lantano, on his way home to his luxurious stone mansion and acre of grass.

At sight of him Tirol had felt a goad of fear. Lantano hadn’t even noticed him; an acutely thoughtful expression on his face, Lantano padded into a waiting car and departed.

“You have one thousand dollars,” Edward Ackers was saying wearily, during the final phase. Distorted, Ackers’ face bloomed again in the drifting shadows around Tirol, an image of the man’s last appearance. Ackers, too, was ruined, but in a different way. “The law supplies you with one thousand dollars to meet your immediate needs, also you’ll find a pocket dictionary of representative out-system dialects.”

Ionization itself was painless. He had no memory of it; only a blank space darker than the blurred images on either side.

“You hate me,” he had declared accusingly, his last words to Ackers. “I destroyed you. But… it wasn’t you.” He had been confused. “Lantano. Maneuvered but not. How? You did …”

But Lantano had had nothing to do with it. Lantano had shambled off home, a withdrawn spectator throughout. The hell with Lantano. The hell with Ackers and Leroy Beam and—reluctantly—the hell with Mrs. Ellen Ackers.

“Wow,” Tirol babbled, as his drifting body finally collected physical shape. “We had a lot of good times … didn’t we, Ellen?”

And then a roaring hot field of sunlight was radiating down on him. Stupefied, he sat slumped over, limp and passive. Yellow, scalding sunlight… everywhere. Nothing but the dancing heat of it, blinding him, cowing him into submission.

He was sprawled in the middle of a yellow clay road. To his right was a baking, drying field of corn wilted in the midday heat. A pair of large, disreputable-looking birds wheeled silently overhead. A long way off was a line of blunted hills: ragged troughs and peaks that seemed nothing more than heaps of dust. At their base was a meager lump of man-made buildings.

At least he hoped they were man-made.

As he climbed shakily to his feet, a feeble noise drifted to his ears. Coming down the hot, dirty road was a car of some sort. Apprehensive and cautious, Tirol walked to meet it.

The driver was human, a thin, almost emaciated youth with pebbled black skin and a heavy mass of weed-colored hair. He wore a stained canvas shirt and overalls. A bent, unlit cigarette hung from his lower lip. The car was a combustion-driven model and had rolled out of the twentieth century; battered and twisted, it rattled to a halt as the driver critically inspected Tirol. From the car’s radio yammered a torrent of tinny dance music.

“You a tax collector?” the driver asked.

“Certainly not,” Tirol said, knowing the bucolic hostility toward tax collectors. But—he floundered. He couldn’t confess that he was a banished criminal from Earth; that was an invitation to be massacred, usually in some picturesque way. “I’m an inspector,” he announced, “Department of Health.”

Satisfied, the driver nodded. “Lots of scuttly cutbeede, these days. You fellows got a spray, yet? Losing one crop after another.”

Tirol gratefully climbed into the car. “I didn’t realize the sun was so hot,” he murmured.

“You’ve got an accent,” the youth observed, starting up the engine. “Where you from?”

“Speech impediment,” Tirol said cagily. “How long before we reach town?”

“Oh, maybe an hour,” the youth answered, as the car wandered lazily forward.

Tirol was afraid to ask the name of the planet. It would give him away. But he was consumed with the need to know. He might be two star-systems away or two million; he might be a month out of Earth or seventy years. Naturally, he had to get back; he had no intention of becoming a sharecropper on some backwater colony planet.

“Pretty swip,” the youth said, indicating the torrent of noxious jazz pouring from the car radio. “That’s Calamine Freddy and his Woolybear Creole Original Band. Know that tune?”

“No,” Tirol muttered. The sun and dryness and heat made his head ache, and he wished to God he knew where he was.

The town was miserably tiny. The houses were dilapidated; the streets were dirt. A kind of domestic chicken roamed here and there, pecking in the rubbish. Under a porch a bluish quasi-dog lay sleeping. Perspiring and unhappy, Paul Tirol entered the bus station and located a schedule. A series of meaningless entries flashed by: names of towns. The name of the planet, of course, was not listed.

“What’s the fare to the nearest port?” he asked the indolent official behind the ticket window.

The official considered. “Depends on what sort of port you want. Where you planning to go?”

“Toward Center,” Tirol said. “Center” was the term used in out-systems for the Sol Group.

Dispassionately, the official shook his head. “No inter-system port around here.”

Tirol was baffled. Evidently, he wasn’t on the hub planet of this particular system. “Well,” he said, “then the nearest interplan port.”

The official consulted a vast reference book. “You want to go to which system-member?”

“Whichever one has the inter-system port,” Tirol said patiently. He would leave from there.

“That would be Venus.”

Astonished, Tirol said: “Then this system—“ He broke off, chagrined, as he remembered. It was the parochial custom in many out-systems, especially those a long way out, to name their member planets after the original nine. This one was probably called “Mars” or “Jupiter” or “Earth,” depending on its position in the group. “Fine,” Tirol finished. “One-way ticket to—Venus.”

Venus, or what passed for Venus, was a dismal orb no larger than an asteroid. A bleak cloud of metallic haze hung over it, obscuring the sun. Except for mining and smelting operations the planet was deserted. A few dreary shacks dotted the barren countryside. A perpetual wind blew, scattering debris and trash.

But the inter-system port was here, the field which linked the planet to its nearest star-neighbor and, ultimately, with the balance of the universe. At the moment a giant freighter was taking ore.

Tirol entered the ticket office. Spreading out most of his remaining money he said: “I want a one-way ticket taking me toward Center. As far as I can go.”

The clerk calculated. “You care what class?”

“No,” he said, mopping his forehead.

“How fast?”

“No.”

The clerk said: “That’ll carry you as far as the Betelgeuse System.”

“Good enough,” Tirol said, wondering what he did then. But at least he could contact his organization from there; he was already back in the charted universe. But now he was almost broke. He felt a prickle of icy fear, despite the heat.