“Maybe I’m wrong,” Wiseman said, “but I keep thinking to myself: What did they actually build this for? I feel we still don’t know.”

“And the American Cowboy Suit,” Pinario added. “You don’t want to release that either.”

“Only the game,” Wiseman said. “Syndrome, or whatever it’s called.” Bending down, he watched the soldiers as they hustled toward the citadel. Bursts of smoke, again … activity, feigned attacks, careful withdrawals…

“What are you thinking?” Pinario asked, scrutinizing him.

“Maybe it’s a diversion,” Wiseman said. “To keep our minds involved. So we won’t notice something else.” That was his intuition, but he couldn’t pin it down. “A red herring,” he said. “While something else takes place. That’s why it’s so complicated. We were supposed to suspect it. That’s why they built it.”

Baffled, he put his foot down in front of a soldier. The soldier took refuge behind his shoe, hiding from the monitors of the citadel.

“There must be something right before our eyes,” Fowler said, “that we’re not noticing.”

“Yes.” Wiseman wondered if they would ever find it. “Anyhow,” he said, “we’re keeping it here, where we can observe it.”

Seating himself nearby, he prepared to watch the soldiers. He made himself comfortable for a long, long wait.

At six o’clock that evening, Joe Hauck, the sales manager for Appeley’s Children’s Store, parked his car before his house, got out, and strode up the stairs.

Under his arm he carried a large flat package, a “sample” that he had appropriated.

“Hey!” his two kids, Bobby and Lora, squealed as he let himself in. “You got something for us, Dad?” They crowded around him, blocking his path. In the kitchen, his wife looked up from the table and put down her magazine.

“A new game I picked for you,” Hauck said. He unwrapped the package, feeling genial. There was no reason why he shouldn’t help himself to one of the new games; he had been on the phone for weeks, getting the stuff through Import Standards—and after all was said and done, only one of the three items had been cleared.

As the kids went off with the game, his wife said in a low voice, “More corruption in high places.” She had always disapproved of his bringing home items from the store’s stock.

“We’ve got thousands of them,” Hauck said. “A warehouse full. Nobody’ll notice one missing.”

At the dinner table, during the meal, the kids scrupulously studied every word of the instructions that accompanied the game. They were aware of nothing else.

“Don’t read at the table,” Mrs. Hauck said reprovingly.

Leaning back in his chair, Joe Hauck continued his account of the day. “And after all that time, what did they release? One lousy item. We’ll be lucky if we can push enough to make a profit. It was that Shock Troop gimmick that would really have paid off. And that’s tied up indefinitely.”

He lit a cigarette and relaxed, feeling the peacefulness of his home, the presence of his wife and children.

His daughter said, “Dad, do you want to play? It says the more who play, the better.”

“Sure,” Joe Hauck said.

While his wife cleared the table, he and his children spread out the board, counters, dice and paper money and shares of stock. Almost at once he was deep in the game, totally involved; his childhood memories of game-playing swam back, and he acquired shares of stock with cunning and originality, until, toward the conclusion of the game, he had cornered most of the syndromes.

He settled back with a sigh of contentment. “That’s that,” he declared to his children. “Afraid I had a head start. After all, I’m not new to this type of game.” Getting hold of the valuable holdings on the board filled him with a powerful sense of satisfaction. “Sorry to have to win, kids.”

His daughter said, “You didn’t win.”

“You lost,” his son said.

“What?” Joe Hauck exclaimed.

“The person who winds up with the most stock loses,” Lora said.

She showed him the instructions. “See? The idea is to get rid of your stocks. Dad, you’re out of the game.”

“The heck with that,” Hauck said, disappointed. “That’s no kind of game.” His satisfaction vanished. “That’s no fun.”

“Now we two have to play out the game,” Bobby said, “to see who finally wins.”

As he got up from the board, Joe Hauck grumbled, “I don’t get it. What would anybody see in a game where the winner winds up with nothing at all?”

Behind him, his two children continued to play. As stock and money changed hands, the children became more and more animated. When the game entered its final stages, the children were in a state of ecstatic concentration.

“They don’t know Monopoly,” Hauck said to himself, “so this screwball game doesn’t seem strange to them.”

Anyhow, the important thing was that the kids enjoyed playing Syndrome; evidently it would sell, and that was what mattered. Already the two youngsters were learning the naturalness of surrendering their holdings. They gave up their stocks and money avidly, with a kind of trembling abandon.

Glancing up, her eyes bright, Lora said, “It’s the best educational toy you ever brought home, Dad!”

If There Were No Benny Cemoli

Scampering across the unplowed field the three boys shouted as they saw the ship: it had landed, all right, just where they expected, and they were the first to reach it.

“Hey, that’s the biggest I ever saw!” Panting, the first boy halted. “That’s not from Mars; that’s from farther. It’s from all the way out, I know it is.” He became silent and afraid as he saw the size of it. And then looking up into the sky he realized that an armada had arrived, exactly as everyone had expected. “We better go tell,” he said to his companions.

Back on the ridge, John LeConte stood by his steam-powered chauffeur-driven limousine, impatiently waiting for the boiler to warm. Kids got there first, he said to himself with anger. Whereas I’m supposed to. And the children were ragged; they were merely farm boys.

“Is the phone working today?” LeConte asked his secretary.

Glancing at his clipboard, Mr. Fall said, “Yes, sir. Shall I put through a message to Oklahoma City?” He was the skinniest employee ever assigned to LeConte’s office. The man evidently took nothing for himself, was positively uninterested in food. And he was efficient.

LeConte murmured, “The immigration people ought to hear about this outrage.”

He sighed. It had all gone wrong. The armada from Proxima Centauri had after ten years arrived and none of the early-warning devices had detected it in advance of its landing. Now Oklahoma City would have to deal with the outsiders here on home ground—a psychological disadvantage which LeConte felt keenly.

Look at the equipment they’ve got, he thought as he watched the commercial ships of the flotilla begin to lower their cargos. Why, hell, they make us look like provincials. He wished that his official car did not need twenty minutes to warm up; he wished—

Actually, he wished that CURB did not exist.

Centaurus Urban Renewal Bureau, a do-gooding body unfortunately vested with enormous inter-system authority. It had been informed of the Misadventure back in 2170 and had started into space like a phototropic organism, sensitive to the mere physical light created by the hydrogen-bomb explosions. But LeConte knew better than that. Actually the governing organizations in the Centaurian system knew many details of the tragedy because they had been in radio contact with other planets of the Sol system. Little of the native forms on Earth had survived. He himself was from Mars; he had headed a relief mission seven years ago, had decided to stay because there were so many opportunities here on Earth, conditions being what they were…