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\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
Two identical photons, impinging on a balanced beam splitter, always leave through the same exit port, due to the Hong--Ou--Mandel (HOM) interference \cite{Hong-Ou-Mandel,shih}.
Similar effects can be observed for multi-photon Fock-number states: photons will leave the beam splitter only in certain configurations, for example such that the difference between the occupations of the exit ports is even, while an odd difference never occurs \cite{CST,Stobinska12,Stobinska15}. These results have been partially experimentally confirmed for photons \cite{Spasibko14}, although the existence of the odd-even structure was not demonstrated.
Similar effects have been discussed for atomic Bose-Einstein condensates \cite{Bouyer97,Lucke11}, in terms of spin dynamics, modeled by the population imbalance.
In this Article we shall investigate the photon distribution at the output ports of a balanced beam splitter when the input state is a product of number states. If the the numbers of photons at the two input ports are perfectly balanced, the output distribution follows a $(1-x^2)^{-1/2}$ law, where $x$ is the normalized imbalance in the output photon numbers at the two output ports [see (\ref{balanced_as}) in the following]. However, it is interesting to ask what happens when the input photon state is not perfectly balanced. This is relevant because of practical reasons, as photon numbers may fluctuate, say according to a Poisson distribution, but also in view of future possible applications. We shall prove that the output distribution is robust, and some of its features remain unchanged, even if the hypothesis of perfectly balanced input is relaxed. In fact, we will focus on the extent to which such hypothesis can be relaxed.
Our interest in these phenomena is threefold. On one hand, they offer perspectives in applications, as the output distribution can be viewed as a generalized NOON state \cite{noon}, in the sense that photons bunch and tend to exit the beam splitter at only one of its output ports. These states have remarkable applications in metrology \cite{metrology}, as they lead to the Heisenberg limit.
Also, the general features that emerge from our analysis are reminiscent of typical behavior \cite{YI,typbec,FNPPSY} in optics and cold atomic physics \cite{molmer,SBRK,CD}, bearing consequences on the foundations of statistical mechanics \cite{Tasaki,Winter,Popescu1}.
Finally, there are remarkable similarities with the physics of continuous-time quantum walks, where rigorous results have been obtained \cite{Konno1,Konno2}.
The main result of this Article will be the evaluation of the photon distribution at the output ports of a beam splitter, when the total number of impinging photons is large and imbalanced. We will formulate the problem exactly and then display its asymptotic features.
In Sec.\ \ref{sec:bs} we introduce notation and set up the mathematical description of a beam splitter.
The balanced input case is solved in Sec.\ \ref{sec:balanced}, while the imbalanced input case is solved in Sec.\
\ref{sec:imbalanced}\@.
The universal features that emerge in the latter case are discussed in Sec.\ \ref{sec:comments}, where the
(average) output distribution is shown to follow a $(1-x^2)^{-1/2}$ law, $x$ being the normalized imbalance in the output photon numbers at the two output ports. On average, this law is \emph{robust}, namely insensitive to the input imbalance (the upper limit to the fluctuations being Poissonian). The statistical fluctuations are further analyzed in
Sec.\ \ref{sec:twopoints}, where the characteristics of the two-body correlation function of the probability distribution are computed. We conclude in Sec.\ \ref{sec:concl} by discussing further perspectives and possible applications.
\section{Beam splitter}
\label{sec:bs}
Consider the beam splitter in Fig.\ \ref{fig:setup}, where $n_a$ and $n_b$ photons illuminate ports $a$ and $b$, respectively. Let the total number of photons be fixed $n_a+n_b=N$, and the input state be given by $\ket{n_a,n_b}=\ket{n_a,N-n_a}$. We intend to study the photon distribution at the output ports, namely the
amplitude of having $m_a$ and $m_b$ photons at output ports $a$ and $b$, respectively.
Since the beam splitter preserves the total number of photons, the output photon numbers $m_a$ and $m_b$ are also constrained as $m_a+m_b=N$.
We are interested in the large-$N$ limit, but let us start by recalling what happens in the simplest case $(n_a,n_b)=(1,1)$. Then, the output is either $(m_a,m_b)=(2,0)$ or $(0,2)$. Only the two extreme cases appear, while the balanced output $(m_a,m_b)=(1,1)$ is suppressed. This is the HOM interference \cite{Hong-Ou-Mandel,shih}, due to photon bunching.
If the input photon number $N$ is greater than $2$, the two-peak structure in the probability distribution is blurred, but a similar structure remains in the large-$N$ limit. Moreover, such a structure will be shown to be very robust against the fluctuations in the imbalance in the input photon numbers.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{bs-K_ai.pdf}
\caption{A beam splitter: $n_a$ and $n_b$ photons illuminate ports $a$ and $b$, respectively, and the total number of photons is fixed $n_a+n_b=N$; $m_a$ and $m_b$ photons exit through ports $a$ and $b$, respectively.
The input and output imbalances read $Ny=n_a-n_b$ and $Nx=m_a-m_b$, respectively.}
\label{fig:setup}
\end{figure}
The action of the beam splitter is described by the unitary operator
\begin{equation}
\hat{U} = e^{-\xi(\hat{a}^\dagger \hat{b}-\hat{b}^\dagger a)}=e^{\hat{J}_-\tan\xi}e^{\hat{J}_3\ln\cos\xi}e^{-\hat{J}_+\tan\xi},
\end{equation}
where $\xi=\pi/4$ for a 50:50 beam splitter, $\hat{J}_3=\hat{a}^\dagger\hat{a}-\hat{b}^\dagger \hat{b}$, $\hat{J}_+= \hat{a}^\dagger \hat{b}$, and $\hat{J}_-= \hat{b}^\dagger \hat{a}=\hat{J}_+^\dagger$ \cite{perelomov}, with $\hat{a}$ and $\hat{b}$ being the canonical annihilation operators of photons in the two modes.
The input state $\ket{n_a,N-n_a}$ is obtained
from the (normalized) state $|0,N\rangle$ by \cite{perelomov,sakurai1994modern}
\begin{equation}
\ket{n_a,N-n_a}=\sqrt{{(N-n_a)!\over n_a!\,N!}}(\hat{J}_+)^{n_a}|0,N\rangle.
\end{equation}
The amplitude to get output $\ket{m_a,N-m_a}$ reads
\begin{widetext}
\begin{align}
\langle m_a,N-m_a|\hat{U}|n_a,N-n_a\rangle
&={1\over N!}\sqrt{(N-m_a)!\,(N-n_a)!\over m_a!\,n_a!}(\cos\xi)^{2m_a-N}\langle0,N|(\hat{J}_-)^{m_a}e^{\hat{J}_-\sin\xi\cos\xi}e^{-\hat{J}_+\tan\xi}(\hat{J}_+)^{n_a}|0,N\rangle\nonumber\\
&=\sqrt{(N-m_a)!\over m_a!}{(\cos\xi)^{2m_a-N}\over\sqrt{n_a!\,(N-n_a)!}}
\left.
\left({\partial\over\partial\alpha}\right)^{m_a}[\alpha^{n_a}(1+\alpha\beta)^{N-n_a}]
\right|_{\alpha=\sin\xi\cos\xi,\beta=-\tan\xi}\nonumber\\
&\equiv A_N(x,y) \qquad (Nx=m_a-m_b=2m_a-N,\,Ny=n_a-n_b=2n_a-N),
\vphantom{\sqrt{(N-m_a)!\over m_a!}}
\label{eq:amp}
\end{align}
\end{widetext}
where we have introduced the normalized imbalances $y$ and $x$ in the input and output photon numbers, respectively, both ranging in $-1\le x,y\le1$.
This is our starting formula.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{N600Delta000-012-024.pdf}
\caption{(Color online) Output distributions $P_N(x)$ in Eq.\ (\ref{eqn:Px}), based on the approximate formula (\ref{imbalanced}) (orange points) and exact numerical evaluation (blue points), with $N=600$ for different input imbalances $Ny=0,12,24$.
Note that $\sqrt{N}=\sqrt{600}\simeq24.5$.
All distributions are symmetric in $x$ and are plotted only for $x\ge0$. Since $N=600$ is even, only even output imbalances $Nx$ are allowed, and $P_N(x)$ vanishes for $Nx=0,\pm4,\pm8,\ldots$ when $y=0$.
In all panels, the upper (black) dashed curve is the upper envelope of $P_N(x)$ for the balanced input case $y=0$ based on Eq.\ (\ref{balanced}), and the lower (red) dashed curve is $P(x)=(1/\pi)(1-x^2)^{-1/2}$ given in Eq.\ (\ref{eqn:Pave}).
Since the approximation is very good, the discrepancy between the approximate formula (orange points) and the exact numerical evaluation (blue points) is invisible except for $|x|\sim1$.
}
\label{fig:Px}
\end{figure}
\section{Balanced photon input $\bm{y=0}$}
\label{sec:balanced}
We first consider the balanced-input case $y=0$. This implies that the total photon number $N$ is even, and only even output imbalances $Nx$ are allowed.
The evaluation of the last factor yields $[m_a=(N/2)(1+x)]$
\begin{align}
&
\left. \left({\partial\over\partial\alpha}\right)^{{N\over2}(1+x)}[\alpha^{{N\over2}}(1+\alpha\beta)^{{N\over2}}]\right|_{\alpha=1/2,\beta=-1} \nonumber\displaybreak[0]\\
&={[{N\over2}(1+x)]!\over2\pi i}\oint dz\,{z^{{N\over2}}(1-z)^{{N\over2}}\over(z-{1\over2})^{{N\over2}(1+x)+1}}\nonumber\displaybreak[0]\\
&={[{\scriptstyle{\scriptstyle N\over\scriptstyle2}}(1+x)]!\over2\pi}\left({1\over2}\right)^{{N\over2}(1-x)}\oint d\theta\,e^{-i{N\over2}(1+x)\theta}(1-e^{2i\theta})^{{N\over2}}\nonumber\displaybreak[0]\\
&=(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}[{\scriptstyle{\scriptstyle N\over\scriptstyle2}}(1+x)]!\left({1\over2}\right)^{{N\over2}(1-x)}
\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}\\{N\over4}(1+x)\end{pmatrix},
\end{align}
where the quantity ${N\over4}(1+x)$ is assumed to be integer, otherwise we get a null result.
Therefore, the amplitude is found to be expressed analytically as
\begin{equation}
A_N(x,0)
=(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}{\sqrt{[{N\over2}(1+x)]!\,[{N\over2}(1-x)]!}\over2^{{N\over2}}[{N\over4}(1+x)]!\,[{N\over4}(1-x)]!}
\label{balanced}
\end{equation}
for integer $\frac{m_a}{2}={N\over4}(1+x)$, otherwise $A_N(x,0)=0$. This formula is exact and coincides with the result obtained in Ref.\ \cite{CST}, where an analogy is drawn with the vector model \cite{vector}.
Since the amplitude identically vanishes every two (``even'') points, the probability distribution appears as a rapidly oscillating function of $x$.
Observe that the odd and even ``branches" of (\ref{balanced}) ``compete" at the edges $|x|=1$ of the distribution, yielding wild oscillations.
See the upper panel in Fig.\ \ref{fig:Px}, where the distribution
\begin{equation}
P_N(x)=\frac{N}{2}|A_N(x,y)|^2
\label{eqn:Px}
\end{equation}
is plotted for $N=600$ and $y=0$. This distribution has a comb-like structure, oscillating between its local maxima
[square of Eq.\ (\ref{balanced})] and $0$.
We will come back to this observation when we will consider the imbalanced-input case with $y\neq0$ [see (\ref{13})].
The asymptotic behavior of $A_N(x,0) $ for large $N$ is easily evaluated by using the Stirling formula,
\begin{equation}
A_N(x,0) \sim (-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}{2\over\sqrt{\pi N}(1-x^2)^{{1\over4}}}.
\label{balanced_as}
\end{equation}
The average between the upper and lower envelopes of $P_N(x)$ in the upper panel of Fig.\ \ref{fig:Px} for $y=0$ is just half of the upper envelope,
\begin{equation}
P(x)
=\frac{1}{\pi\sqrt{1-x^2}},
\label{eqn:Pave}
\end{equation}
which is normalized $\int_{-1}^1P(x)dx=1$, and is plotted in Fig.\ \ref{fig:Px} (dashed line).
\section{Imbalanced photon input $\bm{y\neq0}$}
\label{sec:imbalanced}
The evaluation of (\ref{eq:amp}) for nonvanishing $y$ is more involved and requires the calculation of the last factor in (\ref{eq:amp}). Let us first focus on this factor and rewrite it as
\begin{multline}
\left.
\left({\partial\over\partial\alpha}\right)^{{N\over2}(1+x)}[\alpha^{{N\over2}(1+y)}(1+\alpha\beta)^{{N\over2}(1-y)}]\right|_{\alpha=1/2,\beta=-1} \\
= {[{N\over2}(1+x)]!\over2\pi}2^{-{N\over2}(1-x)}i^{-{N\over2}(1-y)}I_{{N\over2}y},
\end{multline}
where
\begin{equation}
I_n\equiv2^N\oint d\theta\left(\sin{\theta\over2}\right)^{{N\over2}-n}\left(\cos{\theta\over2}\right)^{{N\over2}+n}e^{-i{N\over2}x\theta},
\end{equation}
with $n=Ny/2$.
It is not difficult to derive the recursion relation
\begin{equation}
I_n={{N\over2}-n-1\over{N\over2}+n+1}I_{n+2}-{iNx\over{N\over2}+n+1}I_{n+1}.
\label{exactrecur}
\end{equation}
\subsection{Sub-Poissonian case: $\bm{n=o(\sqrt{N})$}}
\label{sec:subp}
Equation (\ref{exactrecur}) is exact.
For $n\ll N$, $n$ in the coefficients can be neglected altogether and Eq.\ (\ref{exactrecur}) reduces to
\begin{equation}
I_n^{(0)}\sim I_{n+2}^{(0)}-2ixI_{n+1}^{(0)}.
\end{equation}
[As we shall see in the following subsection, this amounts to requiring $n=o(\sqrt{N})$, namely sub-Poissonian imbalance.]
The solution to this approximate recursion relation is easily found and yields an explicit expression for $I_n^{(0)}$ as a function of the two initial terms $I_0$ and $I_1$,
\begin{equation}
I_n^{(0)}={p^n-q^n\over p-q}I_1-{pq(p^{n-1}-q^{n-1})\over p-q}I_0.
\label{recur}
\end{equation}
The two parameters $p$ and $q$ are given by
\begin{equation}
p,\,q=ix\pm\sqrt{1-x^2}=\pm e^{\pm i\tan^{-1}{x\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}},
\end{equation}
so that the function $I_n^{(0)}$ is found to be approximately given, for small $n\ll N$, by
\begin{align}
I_n^{(0)} \sim{}& i(-i)^n{\sin [n({\pi\over2}+\tan^{-1}{x\over\sqrt{1-x^2}})]\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}I_1
\nonumber \\
&{}+ i(-i)^{n-1}{\sin [(n-1)({\pi\over2}+ \tan^{-1}{x\over\sqrt{1-x^2}})]\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}I_0.
\label{recur2}
\end{align}
The term $I_0$ is essentially the same as in the balanced-input case,
\begin{equation}
I_0=2\pi i^{{N\over2}}(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}\\{N\over4}(1+x)\end{pmatrix}_0,
\end{equation}
where the subscript $_0$ signifies that the lower entry in the binomial is an integer, otherwise the term vanishes.
The calculation of $I_1$ is a bit involved but can be done explicitly.
We rewrite the relevant integral in the following way
\begin{multline}
\oint d\theta\, e^{-i{N\over2}(1+x)\theta}(1-e^{2i\theta})^{{N\over2}}{1+e^{i\theta}\over1-e^{i\theta}}
\\
=i(-2i)^{{N\over2}}\oint d\theta\,\Bigl[(\sin\theta)^{{N\over2}-1}+ix(\sin\theta)^{{N\over2}}\Bigr]\,e^{-i{Nx\over2}\theta},
\end{multline}
which is easily integrated, yielding
\begin{multline}
I_1=2\pi i^{1-{N\over2}}\,\biggl[2(-1)^{{N\over4}(1-x)-{1\over2}}\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}-1\\{N\over4}(1+x)-{1\over2}\end{pmatrix}_0\\
{} + x(-1)^{{N\over4}(1-x)}\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}\\{N\over4}(1+x)\end{pmatrix}_0\biggr].
\end{multline}
Let us postpone the corresponding solution for the amplitude $A_N$ to the following subsection.
\subsection{Poissonian case: $\bm{n=O(\sqrt{N})}$}
\label{sec:poiss}
The above estimation (\ref{recur2}) is valid only when the corrections of order $n/N$ do not accumulate to give a correction of order 1.
Since there are $n$ factors, each of which contributes a correction of order $n/N$ to $I_n$, the approximation is valid for $n=o(\sqrt{N})$.
However, when $n=O(\sqrt{N})$, one needs to take these contributions into account. This can be achieved by plugging the ansatz
\begin{equation}
I_n=I_n^{(0)} e^{\frac{f_n}{N}}
\label{inin0}
\end{equation}
into (\ref{exactrecur}), and by expanding the recursive formula in $n/N$. One gets
\begin{equation}
f_{n+1} \simeq f_0 + n(n+1) \quad \longrightarrow \quad f_n \simeq n^2.
\label{iterf}
\end{equation}
so that the solution in (\ref{recur2}) must be simply multiplied by the factor $e^{n^2/N}=e^{Ny^2/4}$. This factor is crucial when one deals with the Poissonian case, while it can be neglected when $n=o(\sqrt{N})$.
Putting everything together, we finally arrive at the analytic expression for the amplitude
\begin{widetext}
\begin{align}
A_N(x,y)
&\sim-{1\over2^{{N\over2}}}\sqrt{[{N\over2}(1+x)]!\,[{N\over2}(1-x)]!\over[{N\over2}(1+y)]!\,[{N\over2}(1-y)]!}e^{{N\over4}y^2} \nonumber\\
&\qquad\times\left\{{\sin[{Ny\over2}({\pi\over2}+\tan^{-1}{x\over\sqrt{1-x^2}})]\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}\left[2(-1)^{-{N\over4}(1+x)-{1\over2}}
\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}-1\\{N\over4}(1+x)-{1\over2}\end{pmatrix}_0
+x(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}\\{N\over4}(1+x)\end{pmatrix}_0\right]\right.\nonumber\\
&\qquad\qquad\left.
{}+{\sin[({Ny\over2}-1)({\pi\over2}+\tan^{-1}{x\over\sqrt{1-x^2}})]\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}
\begin{pmatrix}{N\over2}\\{N\over4}(1+x)\end{pmatrix}_0\right\},
\label{imbalanced}
\end{align}
\end{widetext}
where the subscript $_0$ signifies that the lower entry in the binomial [be it ${N\over4}(1+x)-{1\over2}$ or
${N\over4}(1+x)$] is an integer, otherwise the term vanishes.
This expression is one of our main results: it is valid for $0\le Ny\ll N$ and reduces to the previous result (\ref{balanced}) when $y=0$. (Incidentally, we notice that only the condition $0\le Ny\ll N$ is required, so that in practice $N$ need not be very large.)
Observe the presence of a nontrivial $x$ dependence appearing in the sinusoidal function once the input imbalance has been incorporated.
Roughly speaking, one expects that about $Ny/2$ oscillations appear in the probability distribution.
For negative input imbalance $-N\ll Ny<0$, a similar expression is obtained, with the variable $y$ replaced by $|y|$ and multiplied by a phase factor $(-1)^{{N\over2}(1+x)}$ [see (\ref{eq:amp}) with $\xi=\pi/4$].
The corresponding distribution $P_N(x)$ defined in (\ref{eqn:Px}) is plotted in Fig.\ \ref{fig:Px}, for $N=600$ and the input imbalances $Ny=12$ and $24$.
Note that $\sqrt{N}=\sqrt{600}\simeq24.5$.
The agreement is excellent, as one starts to observe deviations only for $|x|\sim 1$.
The distribution $P_N(x)$ displays again rapid (point by point) oscillations, but one notices the presence of two slowly oscillating envelopes, that are obtained if one separately joins points for integer $\frac{N}{4}(1+x)+\frac{1}{2}$ and points for integer $\frac{N}{4}(1+x)$.
For large $N$, the amplitude is approximated by the following function [apart from the total phase $(-1)^{{N\over2}(1+x)}$ for negative $y$],
\begin{widetext}
\begin{align}
A_N(x,y)
={}&{-}{2\over\sqrt{\pi N}}{e^{{N\over4}y^2}\over(1+y)^{{N\over4}(1+y)}(1-y)^{{N\over4}(1-y)}(1-y^2)^{{1\over4}}}\nonumber\displaybreak[0]\\
&{}\times\left((-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)+{1\over2}}\Big\vert_0{\sin[{N|y|\over2}({\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x)]\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}(1-x^2)^{{1\over4}}
-(-1)^{{N\over4}(1+x)}\Big\vert_0\cos[\tfrac{N|y|}{2}(\tfrac{\pi}{2}+\sin^{-1}x)]{1\over(1-x^2)^{{1\over4}}}\right),
\label{13}
\end{align}
\end{widetext}
where the subscript $_0$ signifies that the exponent of $(-1)$ is an integer, otherwise the term preceding the vertical bar vanishes.
The expression (\ref{13}) is our second main result, being a consequence of (\ref{imbalanced}) under the Stirling approximation.
It is interesting to notice the competition of two behaviors at the edges $|x|=1$: when ${N\over4}(1+x)+{1\over2}$ is an integer the distribution vanishes, while when ${N\over4}(1+x)$ is an integer the distribution diverges like $(1-x^2)^{-{1\over4}}$. This is reminescent of the balanced input case with $y=0$ [see comments after (\ref{balanced})].
\section{Comments on the imbalanced-input case}
\label{sec:comments}
Starting from the approximate formula (\ref{13}), the average between the two slowly oscillating envelope curves can be estimated to be given by the function $P(x)$ in (\ref{eqn:Pave}), for any $Ny^2\lesssim1$. In this sense, the function $P(x)$ appears to be ``universal,'' in this context. Let us elaborate on this idea.
Let the initial input state be randomly picked up among states with input imbalance $Ny$ with equal probability. Assume that the input imbalance is bounded by a parameter $n = o(N)$, that is, $|y|\le n/ N \ll1$ for large $N$. Then the average distribution reads
\begin{equation}
{1\over n +1}\sum_{-n\le Ny\le n}{N\over4} |A_N(x,y)|^2 \equiv\overline{P_N(x)},
\label{avi}
\end{equation}
where the summation is taken over $n+1$ even values of $Ny$ (and $n$ is assumed to be an even number, for simplicity). In the sub-Poissonian case $n=o(\sqrt{N})$ we can disregard the exponential factor $e^{-{N\over4}y^2}$ arising from the prefactor in (\ref{13}) and take the average of the following quantities ($\phi={\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x$)
\begin{align}
{1\over n+1}\sum_{k=-{n\over2}}^{n\over2}{\sin^2|k|\phi\over(1-x^2)}&={1\over2(1-x^2)}\left(1-{\sin[(n+1)\phi]\over(n+1)\sin\phi}\right),\nonumber\\
{1\over n+1}\sum_{k=-{n\over2}}^{n\over2}\cos^2|k|\phi&={1\over2}\left(1+{\sin[(n+1)\phi]\over(n+1)\sin\phi}\right).
\label{averages}
\end{align}
Plugging these results in (\ref{avi}) one gets
\begin{widetext}
\begin{align}
\overline{P_N(x)}={1\over\pi} \Biggl[& {1\over2}\left(1-{\sin [(n+1)({\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x)]\over(n+1)\sqrt{1-x^2}}\right){1\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}\biggr\vert_{{N\over4}(1+x)+{1\over2}={\rm integer}}\nonumber\\
&{}+{1\over2}\left(1+{\sin[(n+1)({\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x)]\over(n+1)\sqrt{1-x^2}}\right){1\over\sqrt{1-x^2}}\biggr\vert_{{N\over4}(1+x)={\rm integer}}\Biggr].
\label{exactimb}
\end{align}
\end{widetext}
This is our third and last main result. We see that the oscillating behavior appearing alternatively at $Nx=0,\pm4,\pm8,\ldots$ and at $Nx=\pm2,\pm6,\ldots$ is canceled if we look at the average distribution (or more practically, if we are unable to distinguish the number states $|m_a, m_b\rangle$ and $|m_a\pm \delta m,m_b\mp \delta m \rangle$ at the output ports), which can be viewed as a universal quantity
\begin{equation}
\overline{P_N(x)}\Bigr\vert_{\rm typical}={1\over\pi}{1\over\sqrt{1-x^2}} = P(x),
\label{pbar}
\end{equation}
where $Nx$ is an even number.
The amplitude of the oscillations in $\overline{P_N(x)}$ vanishes as $1/n$ for large input imbalance $n$. This results is still valid in the Poissonian case, when $n=O(\sqrt{N})$: in such a case, the exponential factor $e^{-{N\over4}y^2}$ must be included and the average procedure can be conducted through Gaussian integrations.
\section{Two-body correlation of the probability distribution (statistical fluctuations)}
\label{sec:twopoints}
The quantity $P(x)$ in (\ref{pbar}) is a common feature of all output distributions, being robust against the imbalance in the input photon numbers (the upper tolerable imbalance being Poissonian).
It is then interesting to study the effect of statistical fluctuations.
Consider a physical quantity $f(x)$ that is a function of the output imbalance $x$.
Such a quantity can be the $x$-representation of an operator $\cal O$, $f(x)=\langle x{|\cal O}|x\rangle$.
Its statistical properties are governed by the variance of its expectation value over the probability distribution $P_N(x)$ and over the input imbalance $y$,
\begin{widetext}
\begin{equation}
\delta^2f(x)=\overline{\langle f^2(x)\rangle}-\overline{\langle f(x)\rangle}^2=\int dx\,dx'f(x)f(x')\,\Bigl(\overline{P_N(x)P_N(x')}-\overline{P_N(x)}\cdot\overline{P_N(x')}\Bigr),
\end{equation}
where $\langle f(x)\rangle=\int dx\,f(x)P_N(x)$ and the average $\overline{{}\cdots{}\vphantom{|}}$ over $y$ is defined in (\ref{avi}).
The terms in brackets represent the correlation function of the probability distribution, and are not difficult to evaluate, for the averages over $y$ can be calculated by explicitly summing up all possible integers $Ny$, like in (\ref{averages}). The result is
\begin{align}
&\overline{P_N(x)P_N(x')}-\overline{P_N(x)}\cdot\overline{P_N(x')}\nonumber\\
&={1\over\pi^2\sqrt{(1-x^2)(1-x'^2)}}{\epsilon(x,x')\over8(n+1)}\left({\sin[(n+1)(\phi+\phi')]\over\sin(\phi+\phi')}+{\sin[(n+1)(\phi-\phi')]\over\sin(\phi-\phi')}-{2\over n+1}{\sin[(n+1)\phi] \over \sin\phi}{\sin[(n+1)\phi']\over\sin\phi'}\right),
\end{align}
where $\phi={\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x$, $\phi'={\pi\over2}+\sin^{-1}x'$, and
\begin{equation}
\epsilon(x,x')=
\begin{cases}
+1&\hbox{\rm both ${N\over4}(1+x)$ and ${N\over4}(1+x')$ are integers or both ${N\over4}(1+x)+{1\over2}$ and ${N\over4}(1+x')+{1\over2}$ are integers},\\
-1&\hbox{\rm both ${N\over4}(1+x)$ and ${N\over4}(1+x')+{1\over2}$ are integers or both ${N\over4}(1+x)+{1\over2}$ and ${N\over4}(1+x')$ are integers},\\
0&\hbox{otherwise}.
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
\end{widetext}
The range of input imbalance fluctuations $-n \le Ny\le n$ is assumed here to extend to a sub-Poissonian region $n=o(\sqrt{N})$.
Therefore, for large $n$, the above correlation function decays at most like $1/n$, realizing a ``typical" behavior $\delta f(x)\to0$.
Clearly, if one is unable to count the exact number of photons at the output ports, then the relevant probability distribution is given by the average (\ref{pbar}), that has lost the $y$ dependence, and thus no correlation survives.
\section{Concluding remarks}
\label{sec:concl}
We investigated the photon distribution at the output of a beam splitter for balanced and imbalanced input states.
Equations (\ref{imbalanced})--(\ref{13}) and (\ref{exactimb})--(\ref{pbar})
generalize the Hong--Ou--Mandel scheme, according to which two identical photons that illuminate a balanced beam splitter always leave through the same exit port.
In the limit of large $N$, the output distribution follows a $(1-x^2)^{-1/2}$ law, and the output state can be viewed as a generalized NOON state, as photons tend to appear at only one of the output ports.
We have seen that such an output distribution is robust and reminiscent of typical statistical behavior.
Our results are linked to the results obtained in Refs.\ \cite{Konno1,Konno2}: a beam splitter Hamiltonian implements a continuous-time quantum walk describing perfect state transfer in spin chains~\cite{MS}. This fact allows one to directly apply them also to spin dynamics under the exchange interaction. In the context of the recent research in multi-particle multi-mode quantum walks, it would be very interesting to extend our results to the case of multi-mode interferometers and mixed Fock input states.
\begin{acknowledgments}
We would like to thank the organizers of the conference ``Advances in Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information with Atoms and Photons" (INRIM, Turin, 2014) for giving us the opportunity to discuss the preliminary ideas on which this work is based, and Francesco Pepe for insightful remarks.
This work was supported by the Top Global University Project from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan.
S.P. was partially supported by the PRIN Grant No.\ 2010LLKJBX on ``Collective quantum phenomena: from strongly correlated systems to quantum simulators.''
M.S. was supported by the EU 7FP Marie Curie Career Integration Grant No.\ 322150 ``QCAT,'' by the NCN Grant No.\ 2012/04/M/ST2/00789, by the MNiSW Co-Financed International Project No.\ 2586/7.PR/2012/2, and by the MNiSW Iuventus Plus Project No.\ IP 2014 044873.
K.Y. was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No.\ 26400406) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and by the Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (No.\ 2015K-202).
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 3,912 |
The cruise industry has long boasted of its value compared to land vacations. But Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings is notably not emphasizing low prices. It is instead working to get passengers to spend more on tickets, shore excursions, and onboard extras.
Passengers are paying more for their vacations on Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings' three brands — and the company's CEO expects that trend to keep going up.
Frank Del Rio told analysts Thursday during a fourth-quarter earnings call that a "strong demand environment" picked up steam throughout 2017 and has continued into the early part of this year.
"Both the number of new bookings sold and the price points achieved reached record levels at each of our three award-winning brands," he said. The company owns Norwegian Cruise Line, the high-end Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, a luxury line.
The world's third-largest cruise operator reported record booked load factors and pricing so far for each quarter of 2018, and gains even into 2019.
"The real star of the show, going forward, is our pricing power, with all three of our brands showing meaningful year-over-year pricing gains throughout 2018," Del Rio said.
Since he became CEO in 2015, Del Rio has worked to increase earnings by marketing to fill ships early in the booking cycle, avoiding discounts near the sailing date, offering promotions such as drink or dining packages, and raising prices for tickets and onboard products.
Del Rio said the higher ticket prices that the company has been commanding are a good sign that customers will be eager to spend once they're on vacation.
For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, revenue increased 9 percent to $1.2 billion compared with the same period a year earlier. Profit for the quarter jumped from $72 million to $99 million.
Full-year revenue was $5.4 billion in 2017, compared to $4.9 billion a year earlier. Profit increased from $633 million in 2016 to $760 million last year.
Del Rio credited low unemployment, the stock market's performance, low interest rates, improving economies around the world, and the recent tax law for making the "strong sustained booking environment" possible.
"This year is by far the most excited, most energized and most optimistic I have ever been at the start of a new year," he said.
But executives cautioned that some things went especially well in 2017 and would be difficult to replicate this year: renewed demand for cruises in Europe after a weak year in 2016 and high prices for the first year of Cuba sailings.
"These significant singular benefits combined contribute to difficult year-over-year yield growth comparisons for 2018," Del Rio said.
While the company saw adjusted net yields — or revenue generated per person per day — increase about 5 percent in 2017, the increase for this year is only expected to be 2 percent.
Analysts asked if that estimate might be too conservative or easy to beat.
Del Rio said that despite all the positive indications so far, it's still too early to tell.
Nomura analyst Harry Curtis asked whether the company is concerned — as some investors are — that demand will be high enough to fill new ships over the next couple of years.
Del Rio acknowledged the the company's capacity growth in 2017 and 2018 was higher than the industry at large, but about half of the industry average for 2019. But he said finding customers for those new ships is not a concern.
One place those upcoming ships won't go soon is China. After announcing plans a year ago to send a second ship to China in 2019 — after Norwegian Joy, which launched last year — Del Rio said that is no longer on the horizon.
Norwegian Joy was profitable in 2017, but restrictions on travel to South Korea remain a roadblock and the cruise distribution system in China is "evolving slower than hoped," Del Rio said.
"Given our fleet size today and the fact that we will only be taking one ship per year, it could be a couple of years before we consider adding more tonnage to China, if the conditions in the rest of the world remain as robust as they are today," Del Rio said. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,742 |
{"url":"http:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/questions\/19063\/reference-for-the-existence-of-a-shapovalov-type-form-on-the-tensor-product-of-i","text":"# Reference for the existence of a Shapovalov-type form on the tensor product of integrable modules\n\nShapovalov and Jantzen showed us how to construct a nice inner product on finite dimensional representations of a semi-simple Lie algebra, by simply giving the highest weight vector inner product 1 with itself and making the upper and lower halves adjoint.\n\nThe result I need is an extension of this to tensor products. Roughly, I would like a statement like:\n\nThere is a unique system of $U_q(\\mathfrak{g})$-invariant Hermitian inner products on all tensor products $V_{\\lambda_1}\\otimes \\cdots \\otimes V_{\\lambda_\\ell}$ such that\n\n1. On $V_\\lambda$, it is the Shapovalov form.\n2. The action of $E_i$ and $F_i$ are biadjoint (up to some powers of $q$).\n3. For any $j<\\ell$, the natural map $V_{\\lambda_1}\\otimes\\cdots\\otimes V_{\\lambda_j}\\hookrightarrow V_{\\lambda_1}\\otimes \\cdots \\otimes V_{\\lambda_\\ell}$ is an isometric embedding.\n\nI said to myself, \"Self, it would be silly to post this question on MathOverflow. You are in a math library, just feet away from Lusztig's book. Surely it is in there.\" However, I've had no luck finding it in Lusztig's book, which is sadly lacking in index. Is this actually written down anywhere?\n\nEDIT: Jim asks for more motivation. I feel like this is the sort of question where motivation will not be very helpful in actually finding an answer, but there's no harm in saying a little (and it will allow me to put off real work).\n\nOne of the foundational principles of categorification is that things with nice categorifications have nice inner products (since Grothendieck groups have a nice inner product given by Euler characteristic of the Ext's between objects). I'm working right now on categorifying tensor products of representations, so it would be rather convenient for me to find some earlier references that used this form.\n\n-\nMore context and motivation would help here. You are probably far away from the original motivation of both Shapovalov and Jantzen: find a nonzero symmetric bilinear form on a highest weight module for a semisimple Lie algebra so distinct weight spaces are orthogonal and the radical of the form is the unique maximal submodule. Thus the form is nondegenerate on the simple quotient module. Jantzen worked over the integers in order to study the behavior of f.d. \"Weyl modules\" mod $p$. Both of them found a miraculous determinant formula on each weight space. \u2013\u00a0 Jim Humphreys Mar 22 '10 at 21:57\nEdit request: \"... a nice inner product on finite dimensional representations of a SEMISIMPLE Lie algebra ...\" At least, I can't imagine interpreting the rest of the post without this extra word. \u2013\u00a0 Theo Johnson-Freyd Mar 23 '10 at 2:12\n\nI know a couple of ways to get a Shapovalov type form on a tensor product. The details of what I say depends on the exact conventions you use for quantum groups. I will follow Chari and Pressley's book.\n\nThe first method is to alter the adjoint slightly. If you choose a * involution that is also a coalgebra automorphism, you can just take the form on a tensor product to be the product of the form on each factor, and the result is contravariant with respect to *. There is a unique such involution up to some fairly trivial modifications (like multiplying $E_i$ by $z$ and $F_i$ by $z^{-1}$). It is given by: $$*E_i = F_i K_i, \\quad *F_i=K_i^{-1}E_i, \\quad *K_i=K_i,$$ The resulting forms are Hermitian if $q$ is taken to be real, and will certainly satisfy your conditions 1) ad 3). Since the $K_i$s only act on weight vectors as powers of $q$, it almost satisfies 2).\n\nThe second method is in case you really want * to interchange $E_i$ with exactly $F_i$. This is roughly contained in this http:\/\/www.ams.org\/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1470857 paper by Wenzl, which I actually originally looked at when it was suggested in an answer to one of your previous questions.\n\nIt is absolutely essential that a * involution be an algebra-antiautomorphism. However, if it is a coalgebra anti-automorphism instead of a coalgebra automorphism there is a work around to get a form on a tensor product. There is again an essentially unique such involution, given by\n\n$$*E_i=F_i, \\quad *F_i=E_i, \\quad *K_i=K_i^{-1}, \\quad *q=q^{-1}.$$\n\nNote that $q$ is inverted, so for this form one should think of $q$ as being a complex number of the unit circle. By the same argument as you use to get the Shapovalov form, then is a unique sesquilinear *-contravariant form on each irreducible representation $V_\\lambda$, up to overall rescaling.\n\nTo get a form on $V_\\lambda \\otimes V_\\mu$, one should define $$(v_1 \\otimes w_1, v_2 \\otimes w_2)$$ to be the product of the form on each factor applied to $v_1 \\otimes w_1$ and $R( v_2 \\otimes w_2)$, where $R$ is the universal $R$ matrix. It is then straightforward to see that the result is *-contravariant, using the fact that $R \\Delta(a) R^{-1} =\\Delta^{op}(a).$\n\nIf you want to work with a larger tensor product, I believe you replace $R$ by the unique endomorphism $E$ on $\\otimes_k V_{\\lambda_k}$ such that $w_0 \\circ E$ is the braid group element $T_{w_0}$ which reverses the order of the tensor factors, using the minimal possible number of positive crossings. Here $w_0$ is the symmetric group element that reverses the order of the the tensor factors.\n\nThe resulting form is *-contravariant, but is not Hermitian. In Wenzl's paper he discusses how to fix this.\n\nNow 1) and 2) on your wish list hold. As for 3): It is clear from standard formulas for the $R$-matrix (e.g. Chari-Pressley Theorem 8.3.9) that $R$ acts on a vector of the form $b_\\lambda \\otimes c \\in V_\\lambda \\otimes V_\\mu$ as multiplication by $q^{(\\lambda, wt(c))}$. Thus if you embed $V_\\mu$ into $V_\\lambda \\otimes V_\\mu$ as $w \\rightarrow b_\\lambda \\otimes w$, the result is isometric up to an overall scaling by a power of $q$. This extends to the type of embedding you want (up to scaling by powers of $q$), only with the order reversed. I don't seem to understand what happen when you embed $V_\\lambda$ is $V_\\lambda \\otimes V_\\mu$, which confuses me, and I don't see your exact embeddings.\n\n-","date":"2014-07-25 07:14:46","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.906783938407898, \"perplexity\": 224.9461844209089}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-23\/segments\/1405997893881.91\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20140722025813-00201-ip-10-33-131-23.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
package pl.cluster.utils;
import java.math.BigDecimal;
import java.math.BigInteger;
/**
* Created by Krzysztof on 12.01.2017.
*/
public class NumberUtils {
/**
* <p>Turns a string value into a java.lang.Number.</p>
* <p>
* <p>If the string starts with {@code 0x} or {@code -0x} (lower or upper case) or {@code #} or {@code -#}, it
* will be interpreted as a hexadecimal Integer - or Long, if the number of digits after the
* prefix is more than 8 - or BigInteger if there are more than 16 digits.
* </p>
* <p>Then, the value is examined for a type qualifier on the end, i.e. one of
* <code>'f','F','d','D','l','L'</code>. If it is found, it starts
* trying to create successively larger types from the type specified
* until one is found that can represent the value.</p>
* <p>
* <p>If a type specifier is not found, it will check for a decimal point
* and then try successively larger types from <code>Integer</code> to
* <code>BigInteger</code> and from <code>Float</code> to
* <code>BigDecimal</code>.</p>
* <p>
* <p>
* Integral values with a leading {@code 0} will be interpreted as octal; the returned number will
* be Integer, Long or BigDecimal as appropriate.
* </p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
* <p>
* <p>This method does not trim the input string, i.e., strings with leading
* or trailing spaces will generate NumberFormatExceptions.</p>
*
* @param str String containing a number, may be null
* @return Number created from the string (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static Number createNumber(final String str) throws NumberFormatException {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
if (isEmpty(str)) {
throw new NumberFormatException("A blank string is not a valid number");
}
// Need to deal with all possible hex prefixes here
final String[] hex_prefixes = {"0x", "0X", "-0x", "-0X", "#", "-#"};
int pfxLen = 0;
for (final String pfx : hex_prefixes) {
if (str.startsWith(pfx)) {
pfxLen += pfx.length();
break;
}
}
if (pfxLen > 0) { // we have a hex number
char firstSigDigit = 0; // strip leading zeroes
for (int i = pfxLen; i < str.length(); i++) {
firstSigDigit = str.charAt(i);
if (firstSigDigit == '0') { // count leading zeroes
pfxLen++;
} else {
break;
}
}
final int hexDigits = str.length() - pfxLen;
if (hexDigits > 16 || hexDigits == 16 && firstSigDigit > '7') { // too many for Long
return createBigInteger(str);
}
if (hexDigits > 8 || hexDigits == 8 && firstSigDigit > '7') { // too many for an int
return createLong(str);
}
return createInteger(str);
}
final char lastChar = str.charAt(str.length() - 1);
String mant;
String dec;
String exp;
final int decPos = str.indexOf('.');
final int expPos = str.indexOf('e') + str.indexOf('E') + 1; // assumes both not present
// if both e and E are present, this is caught by the checks on expPos (which prevent IOOBE)
// and the parsing which will detect if e or E appear in a number due to using the wrong offset
if (decPos > -1) { // there is a decimal point
if (expPos > -1) { // there is an exponent
if (expPos < decPos || expPos > str.length()) { // prevents double exponent causing IOOBE
throw new NumberFormatException(str + " is not a valid number.");
}
dec = str.substring(decPos + 1, expPos);
} else {
dec = str.substring(decPos + 1);
}
mant = getMantissa(str, decPos);
} else {
if (expPos > -1) {
if (expPos > str.length()) { // prevents double exponent causing IOOBE
throw new NumberFormatException(str + " is not a valid number.");
}
mant = getMantissa(str, expPos);
} else {
mant = getMantissa(str);
}
dec = null;
}
if (!Character.isDigit(lastChar) && lastChar != '.') {
if (expPos > -1 && expPos < str.length() - 1) {
exp = str.substring(expPos + 1, str.length() - 1);
} else {
exp = null;
}
//Requesting a specific type..
final String numeric = str.substring(0, str.length() - 1);
final boolean allZeros = isAllZeros(mant) && isAllZeros(exp);
switch (lastChar) {
case 'l':
case 'L':
if (dec == null
&& exp == null
&& (numeric.charAt(0) == '-' && isDigits(numeric.substring(1)) || isDigits(numeric))) {
try {
return createLong(numeric);
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// Too big for a long
}
return createBigInteger(numeric);
}
throw new NumberFormatException(str + " is not a valid number.");
case 'f':
case 'F':
try {
final Float f = NumberUtils.createFloat(str);
if (!(f.isInfinite() || f.floatValue() == 0.0F && !allZeros)) {
//If it's too big for a float or the float value = 0 and the string
//has non-zeros in it, then float does not have the precision we want
return f;
}
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
//$FALL-THROUGH$
case 'd':
case 'D':
try {
final Double d = NumberUtils.createDouble(str);
if (!(d.isInfinite() || d.floatValue() == 0.0D && !allZeros)) {
return d;
}
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
try {
return createBigDecimal(numeric);
} catch (final NumberFormatException e) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
//$FALL-THROUGH$
default:
throw new NumberFormatException(str + " is not a valid number.");
}
}
//User doesn't have a preference on the return type, so let's start
//small and go from there...
if (expPos > -1 && expPos < str.length() - 1) {
exp = str.substring(expPos + 1, str.length());
} else {
exp = null;
}
if (dec == null && exp == null) { // no decimal point and no exponent
//Must be an Integer, Long, Biginteger
try {
return createInteger(str);
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
try {
return createLong(str);
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
return createBigInteger(str);
}
//Must be a Float, Double, BigDecimal
final boolean allZeros = isAllZeros(mant) && isAllZeros(exp);
try {
final Float f = createFloat(str);
final Double d = createDouble(str);
if (!f.isInfinite()
&& !(f.floatValue() == 0.0F && !allZeros)
&& f.toString().equals(d.toString())) {
return f;
}
if (!d.isInfinite() && !(d.doubleValue() == 0.0D && !allZeros)) {
final BigDecimal b = createBigDecimal(str);
if (b.compareTo(BigDecimal.valueOf(d.doubleValue())) == 0) {
return d;
}
return b;
}
} catch (final NumberFormatException nfe) { // NOPMD
// ignore the bad number
}
return createBigDecimal(str);
}
/**
* <p>Utility method for {@link #createNumber(java.lang.String)}.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns mantissa of the given number.</p>
*
* @param str the string representation of the number
* @return mantissa of the given number
*/
private static String getMantissa(final String str) {
return getMantissa(str, str.length());
}
/**
* <p>Utility method for {@link #createNumber(java.lang.String)}.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns mantissa of the given number.</p>
*
* @param str the string representation of the number
* @param stopPos the position of the exponent or decimal point
* @return mantissa of the given number
*/
private static String getMantissa(final String str, final int stopPos) {
final char firstChar = str.charAt(0);
final boolean hasSign = firstChar == '-' || firstChar == '+';
return hasSign ? str.substring(1, stopPos) : str.substring(0, stopPos);
}
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------
/**
* <p>Checks whether the <code>String</code> contains only
* digit characters.</p>
* <p>
* <p><code>Null</code> and empty String will return
* <code>false</code>.</p>
*
* @param str the <code>String</code> to check
* @return <code>true</code> if str contains only Unicode numeric
*/
public static boolean isDigits(final String str) {
return isNumeric(str);
}
/**
* <p>Checks if the CharSequence contains only Unicode digits.
* A decimal point is not a Unicode digit and returns false.</p>
* <p>
* <p>{@code null} will return {@code false}.
* An empty CharSequence (length()=0) will return {@code false}.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Note that the method does not allow for a leading sign, either positive or negative.
* Also, if a String passes the numeric test, it may still generate a NumberFormatException
* when parsed by Integer.parseInt or Long.parseLong, e.g. if the value is outside the range
* for int or long respectively.</p>
* <p>
* <pre>
* StringUtils.isNumeric(null) = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric(" ") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("123") = true
* StringUtils.isNumeric("\u0967\u0968\u0969") = true
* StringUtils.isNumeric("12 3") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("ab2c") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("12-3") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("12.3") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("-123") = false
* StringUtils.isNumeric("+123") = false
* </pre>
*
* @param cs the CharSequence to check, may be null
* @return {@code true} if only contains digits, and is non-null
* @since 3.0 Changed "" to return false and not true
*/
public static boolean isNumeric(final CharSequence cs) {
if (isEmpty(cs)) {
return false;
}
final int sz = cs.length();
for (int i = 0; i < sz; i++) {
if (!Character.isDigit(cs.charAt(i))) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
// Empty checks
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------
/**
* <p>Checks if a CharSequence is empty ("") or null.</p>
* <p>
* <pre>
* StringUtils.isEmpty(null) = true
* StringUtils.isEmpty("") = true
* StringUtils.isEmpty(" ") = false
* StringUtils.isEmpty("bob") = false
* StringUtils.isEmpty(" bob ") = false
* </pre>
* <p>
* <p>NOTE: This method changed in Lang version 2.0.
* It no longer trims the CharSequence.
* That functionality is available in isBlank().</p>
*
* @param cs the CharSequence to check, may be null
* @return {@code true} if the CharSequence is empty or null
* @since 3.0 Changed signature from isEmpty(String) to isEmpty(CharSequence)
*/
public static boolean isEmpty(final CharSequence cs) {
return cs == null || cs.length() == 0;
}
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>Double</code>.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>Double</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static Double createDouble(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
return Double.valueOf(str);
}
/**
* <p>Utility method for {@link #createNumber(java.lang.String)}.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>true</code> if s is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str the String to check
* @return if it is all zeros or <code>null</code>
*/
private static boolean isAllZeros(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return true;
}
for (int i = str.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
if (str.charAt(i) != '0') {
return false;
}
}
return str.length() > 0;
}
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>Float</code>.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>Float</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static Float createFloat(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
return Float.valueOf(str);
}
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>BigDecimal</code>.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>BigDecimal</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static BigDecimal createBigDecimal(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
// handle JDK1.3.1 bug where "" throws IndexOutOfBoundsException
if (isEmpty(str)) {
throw new NumberFormatException("A blank string is not a valid number");
}
if (str.trim().startsWith("--")) {
// this is protection for poorness in java.lang.BigDecimal.
// it accepts this as a legal value, but it does not appear
// to be in specification of class. OS X Java parses it to
// a wrong value.
throw new NumberFormatException(str + " is not a valid number.");
}
return new BigDecimal(str);
}
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>Long</code>;
* since 3.1 it handles hex (0Xhhhh) and octal (0ddd) notations.
* N.B. a leading zero means octal; spaces are not trimmed.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>Long</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static Long createLong(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
return Long.decode(str);
}
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>Integer</code>, handling
* hex (0xhhhh) and octal (0dddd) notations.
* N.B. a leading zero means octal; spaces are not trimmed.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>Integer</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static Integer createInteger(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
// decode() handles 0xAABD and 0777 (hex and octal) as well.
return Integer.decode(str);
}
/**
* <p>Convert a <code>String</code> to a <code>BigInteger</code>;
* since 3.2 it handles hex (0x or #) and octal (0) notations.</p>
* <p>
* <p>Returns <code>null</code> if the string is <code>null</code>.</p>
*
* @param str a <code>String</code> to convert, may be null
* @return converted <code>BigInteger</code> (or null if the input is null)
* @throws NumberFormatException if the value cannot be converted
*/
public static BigInteger createBigInteger(final String str) {
if (str == null) {
return null;
}
int pos = 0; // offset within string
int radix = 10;
boolean negate = false; // need to negate later?
if (str.startsWith("-")) {
negate = true;
pos = 1;
}
if (str.startsWith("0x", pos) || str.startsWith("0X", pos)) { // hex
radix = 16;
pos += 2;
} else if (str.startsWith("#", pos)) { // alternative hex (allowed by Long/Integer)
radix = 16;
pos++;
} else if (str.startsWith("0", pos) && str.length() > pos + 1) { // octal; so long as there are additional digits
radix = 8;
pos++;
} // default is to treat as decimal
final BigInteger value = new BigInteger(str.substring(pos), radix);
return negate ? value.negate() : value;
}
}
| {
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{"url":"http:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/254182\/how-to-convert-int-0-infty-sin-t2-dt-to-a-limit-of-a-series?answertab=votes","text":"How to convert $\\int_{0}^{\\infty} \\sin (t^2) dt$ to a limit of a series? [duplicate]\n\nPossible Duplicate:\nProve: $\\int_{0}^{\\infty} \\sin (x^2) dx$ converges.\n\nI have shown that; $\\forall \\epsilon>0, \\exists r\\in \\mathbb{R}$ such that $\\forall x,y>0, r<x,y \\Rightarrow |\\int_{x}^{y} \\sin (t^2) \\, dt| < \\epsilon$.\n\nAlso, i have shown that $\\forall x,y>0, |\\int_{x}^{y} \\sin (t^2) \\, dt| < 1\/x$.\n\nHow do i prove that $\\lim_{x\\to\\infty} \\int_0^x \\sin (t^2) \\, dt$ converges?\n\nEDIT:\n\nPlease do not close this post. I saw Davide's answer in the link, but don't understand his argument. Why does convergence of $\\int_{0}^{\\infty} t^{-3\/2} dt$ imply that $\\int_{a}^{\\infty} t^{-3\/2} \\cos t dt$ converges?\n\nI think that only implies that limsup and liminf of $\\int_{a}^{\\infty} t^{-3\/2} \\cos t dt$ is finite. And that's exactly what i said at the first of the sentence in my post.\n\nOf course, i tried to convert this integral to a limit of a series, to apply 'alternating series test'. So i was trying to prove a lemma, but i failed to prove and it is indeed false. (Check this in the comment below) (To be specific, i was trying to show that $\\int_{0}^{\\infty} \\sin t^2 dt = \\sum_{n=0}^{\\infty} \\int_{\\sqrt{n\\pi}}^{\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}} \\sin t^2 dt$)\n\nTo summarize, what is a theorem that is a generalization of that in Michael's post for Riemann Stieltjes Integral?\n\n-\n\nmarked as duplicate by DonAntonio, Henry T. Horton, tomasz, Brandon Carter, MicahDec 9 '12 at 5:17\n\n\u2013\u00a0Potato Dec 9 '12 at 2:37\nThe easiest way is just to use the alternating series test (some details need to be filled in). \u2013\u00a0Potato Dec 9 '12 at 2:38\n@Potato I was trying to prove that \"For any strictly increasing sequence $\\{c_n\\}$ in $\\mathbb{R}$ such that $c_1=a$, $\\int_{a}^{\\infty} f d\\alpha$ converges iff $\\sum_{n=1}^{\\infty} \\int_{c_n}^{c_{n+1}} f d\\alpha$ converges and their limits are the same\", but i thought this is false. I have no idea how to change this limit to limit of series. \u2013\u00a0Katlus Dec 9 '12 at 2:58\nIncidentally, do you know that not only is this integral convergent, but that its exact value is $\\sqrt{\\pi\/8}$? You can relate this to the Gaussian integral of $e^{-x^2}$ through the relation $e^{ix}=\\cos(x)+i\\sin(x)$. See http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fresnel_integral. \u2013\u00a0alex.jordan Dec 9 '12 at 5:22\n\nWe know that $x<y \\Rightarrow |\\int_{x}^{y} \\sin t^2 dt|<1\/x$.\n\nDefine $F(x) = \\int_{0}^{x} \\sin t^2 dt$.\n\nLet $\\{s_n\\}_{n\\in \\mathbb{Z}^+}$ be a sequence such that $s_n=\\sqrt{n\\pi}$.\n\nThen, $F(s_n) \\\\ =\\sum_{i=0}^{n-1} \\int_{\\sqrt{i\\pi}}^{\\sqrt{(i+1)\\pi}} \\sin t^2 dt \\\\ \u2266\\pi \\sum_{i=0}_{n-1} (-1)^i (\\sqrt{i+1} - \\sqrt{i})$.\n\nThus, $A\\triangleq \\lim_{n\\to\\infty} F(s_n)$ is convergent.\n\nNow, fix $\\epsilon>0$.\n\nThen, there exists $N\\in \\mathbb{N}$ such that $n\u2267N \\Rightarrow |F(s_n) - A| <\\epsilon$.\n\nLet $\\frac{1}{\\epsilon} < s_n$ for some $n\u2267N$ and $y>s_n$\n\nThen,$|F(y)-F(s_n)|< \\frac{1}{s_n} < \\epsilon$.\n\nHence, $|F(y) - A| < \\epsilon$.\n\nThus, $\\lim_{y\\to\\infty} F(y) = A$.\n\n-\n\n$\\lim\\limits_{x\\to\\infty}\\int_0^x \\sin(t^2)\\,dt$ converges if $\\sum\\limits_{n=0}^\\infty \\int_n^{n+1} \\sin(t^2)\\,dt$ converges. What you've already proved makes it possible to apply Cauchy's convergence test to that series.\n\nPostscript per alex.jordan's comment below:\n\n$\\sin=0$ at integer multiples of of $\\pi$, so $\\sin\\left((\\sqrt{n\\pi})^2\\right)$ $=\\sin\\left(\\left(\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}\\right)^2\\right)$, and $\\displaystyle\\int_{\\sqrt{n\\pi}}^{\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}} \\sin(t^2)\\,dt$ s an integral over a short interval of a function whose absolute value is bounded by $1$, so it's unproblematic. So think about convergence of the following sum and about Cauchy's criterion: $$\\sum_{n=0}^\\infty \\int_{\\sqrt{n\\pi}}^{\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}} \\sin(t^2) \\, dt.$$\n\n-\nI was trying to prove the if statement before i post this question, and i thought it is false. What is that theorem called? \u2013\u00a0Katlus Dec 9 '12 at 2:54\nIt's not true that convergence of $\\sum_{n=0}^{\\infty}\\int_n^{n+1}f(t)\\,dt$ implies convergence of $\\int_0^{\\infty}f(t)\\,dt$. $\\int_0^{x}f(t)\\,dt$ could oscillate as a function of $x$ while behaving better at the integral values. So there'd need to be more specific information about this function used. \u2013\u00a0alex.jordan Dec 9 '12 at 5:03\n@alex.jordan would you please check if my argument is correct? \u2013\u00a0Katlus Dec 9 '12 at 5:09\nIf you cut up the integral over intervals $[\\sqrt{n\\pi},\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}]$, then at least every subintegral is over an entirely positive or entirely negative region, and these alternate. So if you can show that they decrease in absolute value and converge to zero, then firstly, you have met the conditions of the alternating series test. Secondly, you would have bounded $\\int_0^x$ between $\\int_0^{\\sqrt{n\\pi}}$ and $\\int_0^{\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}}$ for all $x$ in $[\\sqrt{n\\pi},\\sqrt{(n+1)\\pi}]$, and the concern in my previous comment is alleviated. \u2013\u00a0alex.jordan Dec 9 '12 at 5:16","date":"2016-02-06 14:09:19","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9596787095069885, \"perplexity\": 196.6029908444995}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-07\/segments\/1454701146550.16\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20160205193906-00302-ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
The total amount of land suitable for tomato cultivation in Narok County is approximately 500,000 acres, with a potential of more than 60,000MT, yet the current annual production is approximately 3,000MT, only.
In December, Governor Samuel Tunai secured more than Sh54b deals during an investors' conference held in his area.
Of the total amount, Sh28.4b went to agricultural projects, with a further Sh2.5b, of which the tomato paste plant deal is a part of, still in discussion. | {
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New York City's Department of Records announced last week that it would be making almost 900 thousand photographs from the Municipal Archives collection available to the public for the first time online. The photographs date back to the late 19th century and span the early 20th century. The response has been so overwhelmingly interested that the site has been down since the launch, something I'm sure they were not anticipating. But how could they not? The Daily Mail featured a few images from the collection, and from this preview it is no wonder the public interest has been so intense.
That last photograph of the Manhattan Bridge reminds me of a shot I took a few months ago when I was in the city last. I can't wait until the site goes back up so I can browse the archives; imagine how many more incredible shots there are just waiting to be seen. Don't you just love the old signage (breakfast special with coffee was only 10¢!) and those men painting the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge is making my knees all wobbly. I love the little barefoot Jewish boy in the first shot, too.
This whole thing go me thinking about my senior capstone course in college. The journalism school was split into 4 different tracks (Broadcast, Magazine, News-Editorial, Photojournalism) and aside from a few general lecture classes, each track had their own course schedule that focused specifically on their given field. The capstone course was different in that instead of working independently in our own tracks and only with people who had the same concentration, we were put in teams with kid from other tracks and assigned a neighborhood in Philly. We were given a semester-long assignment to report from that neighborhood (Fishtown represent!); the content of each weekly report we delivered was up to us to decide, but we were responsible for turning in something that utilized each of the skill-sets of our different team members. Mine was a group of three, one from Broadcast (my friend Chris, who now works as an anchor for CBS in Charlottesville), and one from Magazine. Each week we turned in a written article, a video, and a photo essay.
I just bored you with all those details because one particular project really stuck with me, and I was reminded of it when I saw this old pictures of New York. For my capstone, I used the Urban Archives available through the university, a huge database of thousands of old pictures of Philadelphia from the past 150 years, to find photographs of our assigned neighborhood from the last century. I then went to each of the locations and photographed what was there now. Rephotography. Simple, yet somehow brilliantly so, and I wish I could take credit for the idea. It was thrilling to me to track down a specific intersection or house or park and line my shot up exactly as it was in the original photo. For the most part, Philadelphia has stayed much the same. But I imagine the same can't be said for New York. Wouldn't it be incredible, once the New York Department of Records' archive site goes live and can handle the influx of curious visitors, to go to those streets and see what's there now? I bet 40th and 6th Avenue looks a lot different today than it did in May of 1940.
My favorite rephotography project is one by Christopher Rauschenberg, who used photographs by famous French photographer Eugene Atget and traveled around Paris for a year, revisiting and photographing 75 different images. The book, "Paris Changing" is phenomenal, and I love having it on my coffee table. It combines several of my favorite things in one. As far as photobooks go, this one is really something special.
All this to say that two weeks from today, I will be in Paris, taking my own photographs. You guys.
I don't think I've ever been happier to see a Friday before. Really. It's gray and slightly chilly here this morning and I was still lifted by the fact that it was indeed the last day of the work week, the one impediment standing between me and the ability to spend a full-day in pajamas. An awesome thing about my job (and there are many, many awesome things about my job) is the flex-hour work schedule; once you hit your 80 hours for the pay-period, you're free to go. How you work those hours is up to you. Want to work 10 hours a day, Monday through Thursday and take Friday off? Most people do just that in the summer to head down to the shore early. Any amount you work over 8 hours a day you can subtract from the last day of the pay-period, pretty much. So today, there are only 4 short hours standing in my way. Four! The office is virtually empty after 1 or 2 on Fridays anyway, and I'm taking advantage of it and skipping out early to see my friend Aidan, who had her tonsils out this week, poor thing.
I bought this bag for Boyfriend for our trip (2 weeks from this Sunday) to use as a carry-on for his laptop and stuff, so he wouldn't have to take his leather Kenneth Cole bag he carries daily for work. I was worried he wouldn't like it, given that it's not exactly his style, but he gave it two thumbs up, and that gave me an excuse to go ahead and order the Poppy King lipstick I've been eyeing forever (I wasn't going to spend $9 on shipping for just a lipstick) along with it. The bag seems sturdy enough to hold his laptop and camera and passport, but light enough that he could easily use it during the day while we're sight-seeing. Plus, I'm totally going to steal it once we get home.
At my brother's birthday brunch this past weekend, his brother-in-law gave him a box of liquor that was all made in Philadelphia. I didn't know Bluecoat was distilled here, but you know what I do know? Without sounding like a raging alcoholic, I love gin. I love it with ginger ale, I love it with tonic, and I predict that one day I will be able to handle a dirty martini without making faces and feeling like I'm being poisoned. Baby steps! How beautiful is that bottle, though? It sort of matches the hues of that Jonathan Saunders scarf. I am loving that color combination this spring. It has a faint paisley pattern on it, but until the price drops 90%, I'm not going anywhere near it lest the gin tricks me into buying it.
In case you needed clarification, that scarf is more expensive than a 60″ console table. I've had my eye on this skinny number for a while, and think it would look great behind the sofa, stacks of art and interior books behind it, maybe a mercury glass candle for good measure. Again, one of those things I'm waiting to go on sale, and hoping that in the interim, the DIY-fairy strikes me or I become divinely inspired to make my own for cheap. What do you guys think? Buy it or craft it?
Okay lovelies. What are you up to this weekend? Tomorrow Boyfriend is going golfing early in the morning with a few buddies, and that evening we're heading to a Fashion Show and cocktail party (John Varvatos will be there!) with my mom and her boyfriend. Sunday, my boss is having a house-warming party at his house and invited our group over (one of those awesome things about my job). Somewhere in there I'm planning on doing absolutely nothing. What about you? Taking it easy or going going going? Take care, kiddos!
It is infinitely more difficult to wake up on the right side of the bed when it is dismal and raining outside. I'm not exactly what you would call a morning person (or, for that matter, a night person, given my proclivity to fall asleep at 9:45 most nights) as it is, but I find it exceptionally hard to rally or even peel the covers off of me when what's outside is gloomier than the prospect of leaving my toasty bed. Whine whine whine!
To apologize to you lovely, fabulous ladies for my debby-downer mood today, I have 2 Like a Picture posts to share with you. I deviated from what I've done so far and used pictures that weren't of soft-focus women from the chin down. I think I enjoy using those sort of pictures more (and I have plenty in my reserve pile I can use in the coming weeks), but it was interesting to work with non-human subjects; the process was similar but a lot more literal.
I haven't forgotten about my offer to take your submissions and use them for this series, but I think I'm going to hold off until after I get back from Europe. Between my endless and compulsive planning and packing, and the organizing I'm doing behind the scenes for the week of guest-posters, I think it would be better to wait.
Can you imagine if that was your front stoop? Either door would work for me. I love that both the black and the pink pop even more because of what they're next to. Talk about complementary colors. And before we get too far, both blankets are from West Elm, because while I promised not to use another one from Lands Downunder, I made no such assertions for West Elm. On a related note: it is very difficult to find decent throw blankets in multiple colors and textures online. Inevitably I end up sorting through fleece blankets with college football team logos on them.
Don't you just want to know what they're drinking? It looks like lingonberry juice to me, watered down. What do you think? Yes, I didn't have to look too far to find that West Elm blanket, but it matches whatever in is their glasses perfectly.
Alright kiddos, how is everyone doing so far this week? We're all hanging in? It's almost Friday!
Just when I'm getting nervous and think I have nothing to write about, something perfect falls into my lap. I got an email last night from Theresa and Tori (hi lovelies!) with a Photoshop question. It's been a while since my last Photoshop tutorial, and with nothing on the schedule for today it seemed like the perfect opportunity to tackle it.
Theresa and Tori were both curious how to create long, scrolling layouts in Photoshop. You know, ones that don't fit entirely on the screen, that you have to keep scrolling down to see the rest of. A perfectly legitimate question! The way Theresa explained she was going about it now seemed far too circuitous, and it's so easy to do in Photoshop. In fact, determining the size of your layout is actually the first thing you do in Photoshop.
So the Keane streak continues, this week with a song that's been released in some parts of Europe as the first single off the new album. Which, by the way, will be released in less than 2 weeks (!!). With all of the countdowns I've got going on right now leading up to the middle of May it's no wonder why I've been popping awake at 5:45am every morning. This is so not me, either. I'm one of those corpse-sleepers. The moment I get horizontal, I'm out until my alarm goes off, and not a moment sooner. Not even for freak thunderstorms or other natural disasters. Oh, well, unless Fitz is sleeping in the bed. And then I'm up every hour wrestling with his bony pokey legs he insists on sticking straight into my side repeatedly. It's like sharing the bed with an angry bag of popsicle sticks.
Imagine how far out of my own skin I jumped when the song ended and there was 15 seconds of silence, long enough to lull me into a false sense of security, before the guy chops down the door with an ax and then strangles her through it while she shrieks in terror. I nearly wet myself. At work.
Yesterday marked 3 weeks until I depart for a little trip to Europe. I know I haven't been talking about it ad nauseum or anything, so this might come as a surprise to you, but I am nearly jumping out of my own skin with excitement. I finally bought Thalys tickets from Brussels to Paris and back yesterday, and I'd say I'm all but prepared for the trip but in my neuroses I went through my outfits again and realized I'm an entire day short. Like, one whole day. I'll either have to scramble to come up with something or be naked (or go for this little number). How is it possible to remember to buy outlet converters and pack a mending kit but forget an entire day's worth of clothing? Oh, we still need one day/night's worth of plans and accommodations between Gent and Brussels, and we can't decide whether to stay in Gent for another night or take a quick trip to Antwerp. We originally had our hearts set on staying at a converted castle hotel in the Belgian countryside, but car rentals were exorbitantly expensive and the castles were either booked or required a multiple night stay on the weekends. Le sigh.
Anyway, I found this calendar last week and considered including it in the Friday Five but really thought it deserved its own special post. The more I looked at it, the more awesome it got. You might remember that I had a Stendig calendar last year, the pages of which I kept and saved for wrapping presents this Christmas. Seeing as each sheet was thick paper and 2′ x 3′, it seemed crazy to go to waste (although, maybe it was crazier to save a tube of old calendar pages for an entire year and one move). But then I didn't get another one for this year, despite how much I loved its monochrome-ness and general sexiness. And I realize it's too late in the year to commit to a calendar from which I'd have to discard a quarter. Enter, the On This Day calendar.
Like the Stendig, this thing spans about 3 feet, giving off an intentional wall-art feel once hung. Unlike its less-colorful counterpart, the On This Day has a daily fact hidden under a heat-sensitive black square above the geometric day spot (it fades back to black after a few seconds), and is fully wipeable, making it reusable year after year.
Perhaps its only negative is that because it's meant to be reused, there are no set day designations above the numbers. January 18th could be a Wednesday or a Sunday, May 24th could be a Tuesday, and for someone as clueless and generally lost as I am, this is a big deal breaker. Plus, while I like the ability to write down appts or special events on a given day, I like even more the ability to go back and check out what I was doing on a specific Saturday 2 years ago. This seems only achievable with my Blackberry calendar, but that sadly doesn't make for interesting wall art.
How do you guys keep track of everything? Wall calendars? Cell phones? Computer alerts? I'm curious.
Also, a very happy birthday to my Mommom, who turns 87 today! She's still as spry and sassy as ever!
We survived another week, you guys! This week at times felt like it was whizzing past me and at times made me feel like I was stuck in quicksand. Have you ever had one of those weeks? I've been really busy at work, which is great, and after my amazing review last Friday I feel prepared to handle whatever workload is thrown at me. Of course, my rampant productivity burns me out so this whole week I've been passing out even earlier than my usual and preferred 9:30pm bedtime.
My favorite thing about spring, aside from keeping the windows open and seeing the sun stay out past 7, are wishy flowers. More technically, Taraxacum, which I didn't know was their name until I googled it. Ever since I was a kid I've been unable to walk past one in a patch of grass and not pick it and blow on it and make a wish. I did it yesterday, in fact. I think it's magical and fun and I'll do it no matter how old I am. And I'll always call them wishies; Taraxacum is too hard to pronounce and nowhere near as whimsical. This antique book plate from a Swedish (!) flora book published in 1905 (!!) is a steal, and would look beautiful in a small frame on a nightstand next to that gorgeous sea-foam carafe. Don't they complement each other nicely? You could have both for under $20.
I'll admit, I kind of have a thing for scarves, and I don't need to remind any of you I have a thing for Sweden. This is totally one of those Gary-Oldman-eating-macarons things: two of your favorite things coming together magically. Stockholm map on a scarf. You guys. If it weren't over $100 and I wasn't sticking to a more stringent Europe budget, I might indulge. The same can be said for that gorgeous tote bag from Flea Bags, the creation of Brooklyn-based designers Shira Entis and Alex Bell. Their mission was to create eco-minded bags that were also fashionable. Mission accomplished, ladies. I am crazy in love with it, the mix of canvas and leather and those buckles! I'll make it mine one day.
Nina reminded me in this post on Wednesday that I'm overdue on buying a new pair of white Converse. I practically live in these shoes, and have since high school when I was super cool and used to write Pink Floyd lyrics on the rubber part around the sides. I don't do that now, but I wear a pair to death and always hate having to throw them out even when the soles are coming apart and the canvas is permanently brown from dirt. I took advantage of Zappos free overnight shipping and bought a new pair. In case you were going to point out my aforementioned strict Europe budget, I'll have you know I might just incorporate these into my wardrobe over there. So, win-win.
This weekend is my brother's birthday (he'll kill me if I put his age on here, but let's just say he's older than all of you) and we're also going to a double-header at Boyfriend's college to celebrate the new baseball facility, in honor of their late Athletic Director. If the rain holds off, it should be a really nice weekend. What are you guys up to?
This all started with a backpack. And not just any backpack, but the Fjällräven Kanken I wrote about back in September. That particular Swedish brand has been everywhere recently, all over street photography and even popping up over on J. Crew. In a very un-me decision, I've held off buying it because I don't have any need for it, though I do think that many (MANY) years from now it will make a pretty hip diaper bag. And while I haven't bought it and snuggled with it yet, it's making me appreciate backpacks again. So when I saw this Abingdon backpack (also from J. Crew), I couldn't help but pull together my ideal Spring/early-Summer outfit, letting the masculinity of the bag influence the rest of the pieces. To be honest, this is much more my style than a frilly summer dress.
Yep, those are my exact glasses, and it was just a stroke of luck they happened to work so well with this round-up. I love the simplicity of a white button-down and a simple pair of chino shorts, and even those $600 loafers. Doesn't that backpack look so comfortable, like you could just throw your camera and a magazine and maybe a scarf in it and walk around all day? But you have to do it in style, so make sure you wear a fedora; I had one a few years ago and I swear, I've never gotten more compliments from random strangers than when I wore it. Some might have been sarcastic, now that I think about it.
I didn't get picked for jury duty! I mean, for the actual trial. I did have to sit in a courtroom with 35 other perspective jurors and answer a bunch of voir dire questioning and then individual questions from 11am until 4pm. The case was a personal injury suit, and I'm confused as to how it escalated to the Federal level (Jennifer, a little help?). The guy was suing for monetary damages after sustaining a foot injury at work, and they found me to be an undesirable juror since I'd had foot injuries of my own, had a family member who was a plaintiff in a personal injury suit, and happened to have a friend who's an assistant US Attorney at the same courthouse. I still had to sit there all day until they made their selections. I finished reading Rick Steves' guide to Belgium, though! And I'm off the jury pool list for at least two years. I'm not too scared about getting picked again, not because I don't think it's likely but because they made it clear from the video they showed us once we were all checked in that Federal cases do not include crimes of passion, i.e. homicide. Personal injury and white collar crimes? Now those I can handle!
I didn't get to listen to my iPod once I got off the bus yesterday and got in line for the metal detectors to get into the courthouse, which was brutal because I've been playing this new, bonus-track, unreleased Keane song non-stop since I got it. And how did I get it, you ask? Well, Keane was giving away a limited number of downloads of it if you played a game on their facebook page. Ahem. Obviously I jumped at the opportunity, and I was rewarded with this beautiful, beautiful song. It is so perfect, and reminds me so much of their first album. I don't know how I'm going to survive until May 7th when the rest of the album comes out, but this song is definitely tiding me over.
It's okay to be jealous. I actually can't believe my luck. I found out that Keane is also playing a one-off show in Paris one of the night's we'll be there in May, and I'm seriously debating buying tickets for that show, too. I'm already "dragging" Boyfriend (I say that facetiously, he is adorably excited to go with me) to one show here, maybe I'll relent and not throw a concert into our trip itinerary.
Speaking of trip itinerary, I'm in the process of organizing a bunch of wonderful guest-bloggers for that week+ and am so excited and thrilled to share them with you! Not just yet, though. You'll have to wait another month to find out! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,382 |
Regatta Trademark Details
Regatta was registered on Tuesday, November 2, 1993 and is currently owned by Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, The under the registration number 1802668 . This mark is dead with a status of Cancelled - Section 8. The last case file activity for this mark occured 8 years ago on Friday, June 27, 2014, according to the United State Patent & Trademark Office
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, The of Akron, OH
View all trademarks for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, The
Other Trademarks for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, The
K C Williams
KC WILLIAMS, ATTORNEY AT LAW
THE GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER CO. - D/823
AKRON, OHIO 44316-0001
012 — Class 12 includes apparatus for locomotion by land, air, or water including motors, engines, couplings, and transmission components.
Cancellation Terminated No. 999999
Extension 1 Filed
Extension 1 Granted
Cancellation Instituted No. 999999
Cancellation Dismissed No. 999999
Cancelled Sec. 8 (10-Yr)/expired Section 9 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 3,859 |
References:
* [Code](https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/blob/master/datasets/multi_para_crawl)
* [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/datasets/multi_para_crawl)
## cs-is
Use the following command to load this dataset in TFDS:
```python
ds = tfds.load('huggingface:multi_para_crawl/cs-is')
```
* **Description**:
```
Parallel corpora from Web Crawls collected in the ParaCrawl project and further processed for making it a multi-parallel corpus by pivoting via English. Here we only provide the additional language pairs that came out of pivoting. The bitexts for English are available from the ParaCrawl release.
40 languages, 669 bitexts
total number of files: 40
total number of tokens: 10.14G
total number of sentence fragments: 505.48M
Please, acknowledge the ParaCrawl project at http://paracrawl.eu. This version is derived from the original release at their website adjusted for redistribution via the OPUS corpus collection. Please, acknowledge OPUS as well for this service.
```
* **License**: No known license
* **Version**: 7.1.0
* **Splits**:
Split | Examples
:----- | -------:
`'train'` | 691006
* **Features**:
```json
{
"id": {
"dtype": "string",
"id": null,
"_type": "Value"
},
"translation": {
"languages": [
"cs",
"is"
],
"id": null,
"_type": "Translation"
}
}
```
## ga-sk
Use the following command to load this dataset in TFDS:
```python
ds = tfds.load('huggingface:multi_para_crawl/ga-sk')
```
* **Description**:
```
Parallel corpora from Web Crawls collected in the ParaCrawl project and further processed for making it a multi-parallel corpus by pivoting via English. Here we only provide the additional language pairs that came out of pivoting. The bitexts for English are available from the ParaCrawl release.
40 languages, 669 bitexts
total number of files: 40
total number of tokens: 10.14G
total number of sentence fragments: 505.48M
Please, acknowledge the ParaCrawl project at http://paracrawl.eu. This version is derived from the original release at their website adjusted for redistribution via the OPUS corpus collection. Please, acknowledge OPUS as well for this service.
```
* **License**: No known license
* **Version**: 7.1.0
* **Splits**:
Split | Examples
:----- | -------:
`'train'` | 390327
* **Features**:
```json
{
"id": {
"dtype": "string",
"id": null,
"_type": "Value"
},
"translation": {
"languages": [
"ga",
"sk"
],
"id": null,
"_type": "Translation"
}
}
```
## lv-mt
Use the following command to load this dataset in TFDS:
```python
ds = tfds.load('huggingface:multi_para_crawl/lv-mt')
```
* **Description**:
```
Parallel corpora from Web Crawls collected in the ParaCrawl project and further processed for making it a multi-parallel corpus by pivoting via English. Here we only provide the additional language pairs that came out of pivoting. The bitexts for English are available from the ParaCrawl release.
40 languages, 669 bitexts
total number of files: 40
total number of tokens: 10.14G
total number of sentence fragments: 505.48M
Please, acknowledge the ParaCrawl project at http://paracrawl.eu. This version is derived from the original release at their website adjusted for redistribution via the OPUS corpus collection. Please, acknowledge OPUS as well for this service.
```
* **License**: No known license
* **Version**: 7.1.0
* **Splits**:
Split | Examples
:----- | -------:
`'train'` | 464160
* **Features**:
```json
{
"id": {
"dtype": "string",
"id": null,
"_type": "Value"
},
"translation": {
"languages": [
"lv",
"mt"
],
"id": null,
"_type": "Translation"
}
}
```
## nb-ru
Use the following command to load this dataset in TFDS:
```python
ds = tfds.load('huggingface:multi_para_crawl/nb-ru')
```
* **Description**:
```
Parallel corpora from Web Crawls collected in the ParaCrawl project and further processed for making it a multi-parallel corpus by pivoting via English. Here we only provide the additional language pairs that came out of pivoting. The bitexts for English are available from the ParaCrawl release.
40 languages, 669 bitexts
total number of files: 40
total number of tokens: 10.14G
total number of sentence fragments: 505.48M
Please, acknowledge the ParaCrawl project at http://paracrawl.eu. This version is derived from the original release at their website adjusted for redistribution via the OPUS corpus collection. Please, acknowledge OPUS as well for this service.
```
* **License**: No known license
* **Version**: 7.1.0
* **Splits**:
Split | Examples
:----- | -------:
`'train'` | 399050
* **Features**:
```json
{
"id": {
"dtype": "string",
"id": null,
"_type": "Value"
},
"translation": {
"languages": [
"nb",
"ru"
],
"id": null,
"_type": "Translation"
}
}
```
## de-tl
Use the following command to load this dataset in TFDS:
```python
ds = tfds.load('huggingface:multi_para_crawl/de-tl')
```
* **Description**:
```
Parallel corpora from Web Crawls collected in the ParaCrawl project and further processed for making it a multi-parallel corpus by pivoting via English. Here we only provide the additional language pairs that came out of pivoting. The bitexts for English are available from the ParaCrawl release.
40 languages, 669 bitexts
total number of files: 40
total number of tokens: 10.14G
total number of sentence fragments: 505.48M
Please, acknowledge the ParaCrawl project at http://paracrawl.eu. This version is derived from the original release at their website adjusted for redistribution via the OPUS corpus collection. Please, acknowledge OPUS as well for this service.
```
* **License**: No known license
* **Version**: 7.1.0
* **Splits**:
Split | Examples
:----- | -------:
`'train'` | 98156
* **Features**:
```json
{
"id": {
"dtype": "string",
"id": null,
"_type": "Value"
},
"translation": {
"languages": [
"de",
"tl"
],
"id": null,
"_type": "Translation"
}
}
```
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,189 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.askiitians.com\/rd-sharma-solutions\/class-8\/chapter-18-practical-geometry\/exercise-18-3\/","text":"### Enroll For Free Now & Improve Your Performance.\n\n\u00d7\n\n#### Thank you for registering.\n\nOne of our academic counsellors will contact you within 1 working day.\n\nPlease check your email for login details.\n\nClick to Chat\n\n1800-1023-196\n\n+91-120-4616500\n\nCART 0\n\n\u2022 0\n\nMY CART (5)\n\nUse Coupon: CART20 and get 20% off on all online Study Material\n\nITEM\nDETAILS\nMRP\nDISCOUNT\nFINAL PRICE\nTotal Price: Rs.\n\nThere are no items in this cart.\nContinue Shopping\nMenu\n\u2022 Complete JEE Main\/Advanced Course and Test Series\n\u2022 OFFERED PRICE: Rs. 15,900\n\u2022 View Details\n\nPractical Geometry Exercise 18.3\n\nQuestion: 1\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD in which AB = 3.8 cm, BC = 3.4 cm, CD = 4.5 cm, AD = 5 cm and \u2220B\u00a0= 80\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw AB = 3.8 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220ABC=80\u00b0.\n\nStep III: With B as the center and radius 3.4 cm, cut off BC = 3.4 cm.\n\nStep IV: With C as the center and radius 4.5 cm, draw an arc.\n\nStep V: With A as the center and radius 5.3 cm, draw an arc to intersect the arc drawn in Step IV at D.\n\nStep VI: Join AD, BC and CD to obtain the required quadrilateral.\n\nQuestion: 2\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD, given that AB = 8 cm, BC = 8 cm, CD =10 cm, AD =10 cm and \u2220A=45\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw AB = 8 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220BAD=45\u00b0.\n\nStep III: With A as the centre and radius 10 cm, cut off AD =10 cm.\n\nStep IV: With D as the centre and radius 10 cm, draw an arc.\n\nStep V: With B as the centre and radius 8 cm, draw an arc to intersect the arc drawn in Step IV at C.\n\nStep VI: Join BC and CD to obtain the required quadrilateral.\n\nQuestion: 3\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD in which AB = 7.7 cm, BC = 6.8 cm, CD = 5.1 cm, AD = 3.6 cm and \u2220C=120\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw DC = 5.1 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220DCB=120\u00b0.\n\nStep III: With C as the center and radius 6.8 cm, cut off BC = 6.8 cm.\n\nStep IV: With B as the center and radius 7.7 cm, draw an arc.\n\nStep V: With D as the center and radius 3.6 cm, draw an arc to intersect the arc drawn in Step IV at A.\n\nStep VI: Join AB and AD to obtain the required quadrilateral.\n\nQuestion: 4\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD in which AB = BC = 3 cm, AD = CD = 5 cm and \u2220B=120\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw AB = 3 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220ABC=120\u00b0.\n\nStep III: With B as the center and radius 3 cm, cut off BC = 3 cm.\n\nStep IV: With C as the center and radius 5 cm, draw an arc.\n\nStep V: With A as the center and radius 5 cm, draw an arc to intersect the arc drawn in Step IV at D.\n\nStep VI: Join AD and CD to obtain the required quadrilateral.\n\nQuestion: 5\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD in which AB = 2.8 cm, BC = 3.1 cm, CD = 2.6 cm and DA =3.3 cm and \u2220A=60\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw AB = 2.8 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220BAD=60\u00b0.\n\nStep III: With A as the center and radius 3.3 cm, cut off AD = 3.3 cm.\n\nStep IV: With D as the center and radius 2.6 cm, draw an arc.\n\nStep V: With B as the center and radius 3.1 cm, draw an arc to intersect the arc drawn in Step IV at C.\n\nStep VI: Join BC and CD to obtain the required quadrilateral.\n\nQuestion: 6\n\nConstruct a quadrilateral ABCD in which AB = BC = 6 cm, AD = DC = 4.5 cm and \u2220B=120\u00b0.\n\nSolution:\n\nSteps of construction:\n\nStep I: Draw AB = 6 cm.\n\nStep II: Construct \u2220ABC=120\u00b0\n\nStep III: With B as the centre and radius 6 cm, cut off BC = 6 cm. Now, we can see that AC is about 10.3 cm which is greater than AD + CD = 4.5 + 4.5 = 9 cm.\n\nWe know that sum of the lengths of two sides of the triangle is always greater than the third side but here, the sum of AD and CD is less than AC.\n\nSo, construction of the given quadrilateral is not possible.\n\n\n### Course Features\n\n\u2022 728 Video Lectures\n\u2022 Revision Notes\n\u2022 Previous Year Papers\n\u2022 Mind Map\n\u2022 Study Planner\n\u2022 NCERT Solutions\n\u2022 Discussion Forum\n\u2022 Test paper with Video Solution","date":"2020-12-01 03:25:00","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.39306968450546265, \"perplexity\": 2580.082135875001}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-50\/segments\/1606141542358.71\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20201201013119-20201201043119-00242.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Postacie
Jean Baptiste Carrier (1745–1794) – polityk francuski epoki Wielkiej rewolucji francuskiej
Jean Carrier – Antypapież Benedykt XIV
Pierre Carrier–Belleuse (1851–1932) – francuski malarz
Willis Carrier – amerykański inżynier i wynalazca, nazywany ojcem nowoczesnej klimatyzacji
Miejscowości w USA
Carrier – miasto w stanie Oklahoma, w hrabstwie Garfield
Brytyjskie pojazdy wojenne
Gun Carrier Mark I – brytyjski pojazd wojskowy zbudowany w okresie I wojny światowej
Loyd Carrier – ciągnik artyleryjski i transporter gąsienicowy konstrukcji brytyjskiej z okresu II wojny światowej
Merchant aircraft carrier, MAC (MAC–ship) – brytyjskie statki handlowe przystosowywane do pełnienia roli pomocniczych lotniskowców eskortowych podczas II wojny światowej
Universal Carrier – brytyjski gąsienicowy lekki transporter opancerzony z okresu II wojny światowej
Windsor Carrier – transporter opancerzony konstrukcji brytyjskiej (kanadyjskiej) z okresu II wojny światowej
Technika
Carrier Sense Multiple Access – technologia rozszerzająca protokół MAC
Digital Loop Carrier – pętla abonencka z modulacją cyfrową
Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier – plastikowa, 4-stronna obudowa na układy scalone
Single Channel Per Carrier – przesyłanie jednego kanału telewizyjnego na jednej częstotliwości nośnej przy cyfrowym przesyłaniu programów telewizyjnych
Zobacz też
Carrier Mills | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,963 |
Posted inCongress
A Divided Democratic Party Unites Behind Blumenthal
by Christine Stuart May 7, 2016, 11:24 am January 29, 2021, 3:16 pm
Connecticut Democrats gathered Saturday at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford to nominate U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal for a second term, but at an event where the outcome was inevitable the divisions in the party were visible.
Outside the convention center about 20 supporters of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont gathered to remind Connecticut's 16 super delegates that they don't have to cast their vote for former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"Vote for integrity. You have a choice," Sanders supporters chanted.
The at-large delegates will be split 28 for Clinton and 27 for Sanders. The remaining 16 superdelegates have all pledged their support for Clinton.
Bernie Sanders supporters outside the Convention Center (Christine Stuart photo)
Heather Glatt-Deeley, of Cheshire, said that in 2008 superdelegates switched their support from Clinton to Barack Obama. "If the party wants to win they need to select Bernie, who polls way better against Trump," Glatt-Deeley said.
Meanwhile, Brian Anderson, of AFSCME Council 4, and Jim Vigue, of Connecticut Employees Union Independent, were told they couldn't hand out their fliers from the AFL-CIO inside the convention hall. The fliers contained information about the important role labor plays in the Democratic Party.
"Connecticut Democrats are being told that they need to become a party of austerity. Reject this attempt to reconfigure the Democratic Party into the party of Reagan," the flier said.
Michael Mandell, executive director of the Connecticut Democratic Party, said they weren't allowing anyone to hand out information or leaflets on the convention floor. He said Anderson and Vigue were moved to a location near the entrance where they could still talk to delegates and hand out the fliers.
Brian Anderson hands a flier to Rep. David Alexander, D-Enfield (Christine Stuart photo)
He joked the Democratic Party supports the First Amendment, unlike the Republican Party, which banned a Hearst reporter from attending their convention on Monday.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin acknowledged the divisions in the Democratic Party, but called for unity. He said there may be differences "between us as Democrats, but at this moment any difference between us as Democrats shrink to insignificance next to the huge gulf in policy and principle that separates us from the Republican Party today."
The Republican Party is "driven by hate and by fear" and the "Republican standard bearer, who has no standards, has no idea what made America great," Bronin said referring to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"Let's keep Donald Trump far away from the White House," Bronin said.
Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman said the Democratic Party hasn't always agreed on everything, "but in the end we will come together as a party and we have to because on the Republican side we have Donald Trump." The crowd booed. Wyman called Trump "the single most dangerous person ever to seek the presidency."
She said Trump wants to pit people against each other. She said the Republican playbook is to "divide, destroy, and deceive."
As far as the prospects of a Trump presidency, "We're going to work like hell this year to make sure that doesn't happen," Wyman said.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, who nominated Blumenthal to a second term, said the burden to run this year is "great" because candidates will have to defend American values.
Murphy said he doesn't see Blumenthal having difficulty defending those values.
"No one is better at standing up to bullies than Sen. Richard Blumenthal," Murphy said. ". . . Dick Blumenthal is the conscience of the nation, the conscience of the consumer."
More than a 1,000 Democratic delegates were gathered Saturday to nominate Blumenthal, who was Connecticut's attorney general for two decades before winning former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd's seat in 2010 in a race against former World Wrestling CEO Linda McMahon.
Toward the end of his nearly 20-minute acceptance speech, Blumenthal said he will be proud to be on the ballot this November with Clinton, but he had kind words for Sanders.
He said Sanders has engaged new energy and new ideas,"but we know we have to come together to win this campaign and we know how to win tough campaigns by coming together."
Blumenthal said he doesn't care how great the odds, his job is to fight for the people of Connecticut "first, last and always."
"I will never be outworked. I will never be intimidated. I won't back down," Blumenthal vowed.
Democrats also nominated Nancy DiNardo and John Olsen to serve as members of the Democratic National Committee.
Not everyone from the Democratic Party was present.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was at his son's college graduation. U.S. Reps. Jim Himes and John Larson also did not attend. All five members of Connecticut's congressional delegation will be nominated at conventions in their districts on Monday.
Democrats have held every House seat in Connecticut since 2008.
The Republican Party will nominate its candidates for U.S. Senate and all five congressional delegates at their own convention on Monday at 5 p.m.
Tagged: Hartford Convention Center | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 7,600 |
Q: self.customView.backgroundColor assignment causes leak? I'm working with creating my own custom view templates programmatically for the app I'm working on. To achieve this i have a custom view controller MyVC with a a custom view myView added on to it which is a property of MyVC. The class looks something like this:
MyVC.h
#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@interface MyVC : UIViewController{
MyCustomView *myView;
}
@property(nonatomic, retain) MyCustomView *myView
@end
In the implementation i want to assign a background color to 'myView' and i do something like this in the viewDidLoad (after synthesizing my property of corse)
-(void)viewDidLoad{
self.myView = [[MyCustomView alloc] initWithFrame:someFrame];
self.myView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
}
Now when i analyze my code i get a 'potential leak of an object' message when i assign the color. Is it because myView or the background color or both are being retained?
In any case id like to know how this can be done correctly without potential leaks?
A: If you don't using ARC you should release over retained property:
-(void)viewDidLoad{
//allocate and initialize myView
self.myView = [[[MyCustomView alloc] initWithFrame:someFrame] autorelease];
self.myView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,204 |
\section*{Introduction}
\vspace{-2mm}
The systematic study of $A$-hypergeometric $D$-modules, also known as GKZ-systems, was initiated by Gelfand, Graev, Kapranov, and Zelevinski \cite{GGZ}, \cite{GKZ}. These are systems of linear partial differential equations in several complex variables that generalize classical hypergeometric equations.
They are determined by a matrix $A=(a_1 \cdots a_n)=(a_{i,j})$ with columns $a_k\in{\mathbb Z}^d$ and a parameter vector $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$.
Let $x_1,x_2,\dots,x_n$ be coordinates on ${\mathbb C}^n$, with corresponding partial derivatives $\partial_1,\partial_2,\dots,\partial_n$, so that the Weyl algebra $D$ on ${\mathbb C}^n$ is generated by $x_1,\dots,x_n,\partial_1,\dots,\partial_n$.
Let
\[
I_A \defeq \<\partial^u-\partial^v\mid u,v\in{\mathbb N}^n, Au=Av\> \subseteq {\mathbb C}[\partial_1,\ldots, \partial_n]
\]
denote the \emph{toric ideal} of $A$.
Denote by $E_i\defeq\sum_{j=1}^n a_{i,j} x_j \partial_j$ the $i$th \emph{Euler operator} of $A$. The \emph{$A$-hypergeometric $D$-module} with parameter $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ is the left $D$-module
\[
M_A(\beta)\defeq D/D\cdot\< I_A, E_1-\beta_1,\ldots, E_d-\beta_d\>.
\]
For any choice of $A$ and $\beta$, the module $M_A(\beta)$ is \emph{holonomic} \cite{GGZ,adolphson}. When $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ is generic, the dimension of the space of germs of holomorphic solutions of $M_A(\beta)$ at a nonsingular point, also known as its \emph{(holonomic) rank}, is equal to the \emph{normalized volume} ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ of the matrix $A$, see \eqref{eqn:normalized-volume} \cite{GKZ, adolphson}. In general, this is only a lower bound; see \cite{SST} for the case when $I_A$ is homogeneous and \cite{MMW} for the general case.
The set
\[
{\mathcal E}(A)\defeq\{\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d \mid \; {\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))>{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\}
\]
is called the \emph{exceptional arrangement} of $A$, which is an affine subspace arrangement of codimension at least two that is closely related to the local cohomology modules of the toric ring ${\mathbb C}[\partial]/I_A$ \cite{MMW}.
A parameter $\beta \in {\mathcal E}(A)$ is called a \emph{rank jumping} parameter.
There is a combinatorial formula to compute the rank of $M_A(\beta)$ in terms of the \emph{ranking lattices} ${\mathbb E}^\beta$ of $A$ at $\beta$ \cite{berkesch}, with previous results in
\cite{CDD} with $d=2$ and in
\cite{okuyama} when $d=3$ or $\beta$ is \emph{simple} (see also Section \ref{sec:Simple-rank-jumping}).
Unfortunately, the presence of alternating signs in this formula do not yield a strong upper bound for the rank of $M_A(\beta)$; however, if $\beta$ is simple, it quickly follows that the rank of $M_A(\beta)$ is at most $(d-1){\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$, see Corollary \ref{cor:upper-bound-F-simple-rank}.
We show that this bound is tight by constructing a sequence of examples for which the ratio ${\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta))/{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ tends to $d-1$, see Theorem \ref{thm:family-examples}.
In addition, we prove that the equality cannot hold for any example with simple parameter $\beta$ and that our examples are minimal in certain sense, see Remark \ref{rem:remark-minimal-volume}. Another interesting feature of these examples is that ${\mathcal E}(A)$ contains all the lattice points in the convex hull of the columns of $A$ and the origin.
On the other hand, there are other known upper bounds for the holonomic rank of $M_A(\beta)$. In particular,
\[
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\leq \begin{cases}
4^d \cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A) & \text{if $I_A$ is homogeneous~\cite{SST},}\\
4^{d+1}\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A) & \text{otherwise~\cite{BFM-parametric}.}
\end{cases}
\]
It was shown in \cite{Fer-exp-growth} that these upper bounds are qualitatively effective, i.e., there is some $a>1$ such that for any $d\geq 3$, there is a $(d\times n$)-matrix $A_d$ and a parameter $\beta_d\in {\mathbb C}^d$ such that
\[
{\operatorname{rank}}(M_{A_{d}}(\beta_d))\geq a^d {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A_d).
\]
However, the maximum possible value of $\sqrt[d]{{\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta))/{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)}$ that has, up until now, appeared in the literature is $\sqrt[3]{7/5}\approx 1.1187$, see \cite[Example 2.6]{Fer-exp-growth}, which was first considered in \cite{MW}. The supremum of the value of $\sqrt[d]{{\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta))/{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)}$ over the examples in the current note is $\sqrt[5]{4}\approx 1.3195$, i.e., $\sqrt[d]{d-1}$ for $d=5$. It is still an open problem to find the supremum of the set of values of $\sqrt[d]{{\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta))/{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)}$ for variation among the set of full rank $(d\times n)$-matrices $A$ and $\beta\in {\mathbb C}^d$, for $d\geq 3$ and $n\geq d+2$.
\subsection*{Acknowledgements}
We are grateful to Laura Felicia Matusevich and Uli Walther for helpful discussions over the years on bounding the rank of an $A$-hypergeometric system.
\section{Lower bounds for the normalized volume}
\label{sec:lowerBounds}
Fix a $(d\times n)$-integer matrix $A=(a_1 \cdots a_n)$, where $a_i\in{\mathbb Z}^d$ denotes the $i$th column of $A$.
With the convention that $0\in{\mathbb N}$,
assume that ${\mathbb Z} A\defeq \sum_{j=1}^n {\mathbb Z} a_j ={\mathbb Z}^d$ and that the affine semigroup ${\mathbb N} A\defeq\sum_{j=1}^n {\mathbb N} a_j$ is positive, meaning that ${\mathbb N} A\cap(-{\mathbb N} A)=\{\bf{0}\}$.
We also assume for simplicity that all the columns of $A$ are distinct from each other and the origin.
Identify $A$ with its set of columns, and for any subset $F$ of $A$, denote by $\Delta_{F}$ the convex hull in ${\mathbb R}^d$ of the origin and $F$.
We also identity $F$ with its index set $\{j\mid a_j \in F\}$.
Given a lattice $\Lambda$ such that $F\subseteq \Lambda\subseteq {\mathbb Q} F\cap{\mathbb Z}^d$,
the \emph{normalized volume} of $F$ in $\Lambda$ is the integer
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:normalized-volume}
{\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{\Lambda}(F)
= \dim({\mathbb R} F)! \cdot
\dfrac{{\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb R} F}(\Delta_F)}{[ {\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F : \Lambda]},
\end{equation}
where ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb R} F}(\cdot)$ denotes Euclidean volume in ${\mathbb R} F$. We write ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ for ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} A}(A) = {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d}(A)$.
A subset $F$ of the columns of the matrix $A$ is a \emph{face} of $A$, denoted $F\preceq A$, if ${\mathbb R}_{\geq0}F$ is a face of the cone ${\mathbb R}_{\geq0}A\defeq\sum_{j=1}^n{\mathbb R}_{\geq0} a_j$ and $F= A\cap{\mathbb R} F$.
The codimension of a nonempty face $F$ of $A$ is ${\rm codim}(F)\defeq d-\dim ({\mathbb R} F)$, with the convention that ${\rm codim} (\varnothing)=d$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem:adding-a-point}
If $\tau$ is a proper subset of $A$ with $\Delta_\tau \cap A=\tau$, then there exists a column $a$ of $A\setminus \tau$ such that $\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}}\cap A=\tau\cup\{a\}$. Moreover, if $\Delta_{\tau}$ is not full dimensional, then $a$ may be chosen so that $\dim (\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}})=\dim (\Delta_\tau)+1$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
If $\Delta_\tau\subseteq {\mathbb R}^d$ is full dimemsional, then choose any column $a\in A\setminus \tau$.
Since $a\notin \Delta_\tau$, the vector $a$ is a vertex of $\Delta_{\tau \cup\{a\}}$, and the rest of the vertices of $\Delta_{\tau \cup\{a\}}$ are vertices of $\Delta_\tau$.
In particular, if there exists a vector $a'\in (\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}}\cap A)\setminus(\tau\cup\{a\})$, then $a'$ is not a vertex of $\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}}$ and $\Delta_\tau\subsetneq\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a'\}} \subsetneq \Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}}$.
Thus, $a$ can be replaced by $a'$. Also, notice that
\[
(\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a'\}}\cap A)\setminus(\tau\cup\{a'\})\subsetneq(\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}}\cap A)\setminus(\tau\cup\{a\}).
\]
We can thus repeat this process of replacement of $a$ until the equality $\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a''\}}\cap A=\tau\cup\{a''\}$ holds for some $a''$ in $A\setminus\tau$.
On the other hand, if $\Delta_\tau\subseteq {\mathbb R}^d$ is not full dimensional,
let $a\in A\setminus \tau$ be such that $\dim (\Delta_{\tau\cup\{a\}})=\dim (\Delta_\tau)+1$. Such a choice of $a$ exists because the rank of $A$ is $d$.
Since $\Delta_\tau$ is a facet of $\Delta_{\tau \cup\{a\}}$ and $\Delta_\tau \cap A=\tau$, no point in $(\Delta_{\tau \cup\{a\}}\cap A)\setminus \tau$ is in ${\mathbb R} \tau$, and the result follows.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}\label{lem:volume-lower-bound}
If $F\preceq A$ is a face of $A$, then
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:volume-F-ineq}
{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F}(F)+n-|F| -{\rm codim} (F),
\end{equation} where $|F|$ is the cardinality of $F$. In particular, ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq n-d +1$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Since $F\preceq A$ is a face of $A$, $\Delta_F\cap A=F$.
By Lemma~\ref{lem:adding-a-point}, there is a set $\sigma$ of ${\rm codim}(F)$ linearly independent columns of $A\setminus F$ such that $\Delta_{F\cup\sigma}$ is full dimensional and $\Delta_{F\cup\sigma}\cap A=F\cup\sigma$.
The normalized volume in the lattice ${\mathbb Z}^d$ of $F\cup\sigma$ is at least ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F}(F)$.
Again by Lemma~\ref{lem:adding-a-point}, there is a column $a$ of $A\setminus (F\cup \sigma)$ such that no other column of $A\setminus (F\cup \sigma)$ lies in
$\Delta_{F\cup\sigma\cup\{a\}}$, the convex hull of the ${\rm codim}(F)+|F|+1$ points of $F\cup \sigma\cup\{a\}$ and the origin.
In fact, $n-({\rm codim}(F)+|F|+1)$ more columns of $A\setminus(F\cup\sigma)$ can be iteratively found in this way. Notice that each time a new point is added to $F\cup\sigma$ using Lemma~\ref{lem:adding-a-point}, the normalized volume of the convex hull of the new set is increased at least by one. This proves the first statement. The second statement follows from the first one by taking $F=\varnothing$.
\end{proof}
Notice that for any face $F\preceq A$, $n-|F| -{\rm codim} (F)\geq 0$, and equality holds if and only if $A$ is a \emph{pyramid} over $F$, so ${\mathbb Z}^d= {\mathbb Z} F \oplus \left(\bigoplus_{j\notin F} {\mathbb Z} a_j\right)$.
Further, if $A$ is a pyramid over $F$, then equality holds in \eqref{eqn:volume-F-ineq} because ${\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F={\mathbb Z} F$ and ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)={\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F)$, see \cite[Lemma 3.5]{reducibility}.
The converse is not true; a counterexample is provided in Remark \ref{rem:remark-minimal-volume}.
On the other hand, if equality holds in \ref{eqn:volume-F-ineq}, then all the lattice points in $\Delta_A\setminus \Delta_F$ are columns of $A$.
Denote the toric ring associated to $A$ by $S_A\defeq{\mathbb C}[\partial]/I_A\cong {\mathbb C} [{\mathbb N} A]$.
\begin{prop}\label{prop:volume-normal}
If ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)= n-d+1$, then $S_A$ is normal.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
Let $H$ be an affine hyperplane such that all the columns of $A$ not in $\tau\defeq H\cap A$ belong to the open half space determined by $H$ not containing the origin; such a hyperplane exists because ${\mathbb N} A$ is positive and $\bf{0}$ is not a column of $A$.
For any simplex $\sigma\subseteq \tau$ such that $\Delta_{\sigma}\cap A=\sigma$, ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d}(\sigma)=1$ because otherwise, by adding a point of $A\setminus\sigma$ using Lemma~\ref{lem:adding-a-point} and taking the convex hull iteratively, the volume would increase by at least one in each step and the normalized volume of $A$ would be larger that $n-d+1$.
Now, since ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d}(\sigma)=1$, $\sigma$ forms a basis in the lattice ${\mathbb Z}^d$ and ${\mathbb N} \sigma ={\mathbb Z}^d \cap {\mathbb R}_{\geq 0} \sigma$. Since ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}A$ equals the union of the cones ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}\sigma$ for simplices $\sigma\subseteq \tau$ with $\tau$ as above, it follows that ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}A\cap {\mathbb Z}^d ={\mathbb N} A$, and hence, $S_A$ is normal.
\end{proof}
\begin{cor}\label{cor:nonCM-inequality}
If $S_A$ is not Cohen--Macaulay, then $d\geq 2$, $n\geq d+2$, and ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq n-d+2$.
\end{cor}
\begin{proof}
If either $d=1$ or $n-d=1$, then under our hypotheses on $A$, $S_A$ is Cohen--Macaulay. On the other hand, if ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)< n-d+2$, then $S_A$ is normal by Lemma~\ref{lem:volume-lower-bound} and Proposition~\ref{prop:volume-normal}, which implies that $S_A$ is Cohen--Macaulay by~\cite[Theorem 1]{Hochster}.
\end{proof}
The inequality in Corollary~\ref{cor:nonCM-inequality} is sharp; for any $d\geq 2$ and $n\geq d+2$, there is a pointed matrix $A$ as above with ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)=n-d+2$ such that $S_A$ is not Cohen--Macaulay.
To see this, notice first that for $d=2$ and $n=d+2=4$, the matrix
\[
A=\left(\begin{array}{cccc}
1 & 1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 2 & 3\end{array}\right)
\]
satisfies that ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)=4$ and $S_A$ is not Cohen--Macaulay. On the other hand, in order to produce examples with $n\geq 5$, it is enough to modify this example by adding the columns $(0,k)^t$ for $k=4, \ldots, n-1$, and this operation keeps $S_A$ invariant up to isomorphism.
To construct more examples with the same value of $n-d$ but larger $d$, it is enough to consider a pyramid over the previous example. This alters $S_A$ by tensoring over ${\mathbb C}$ with a polynomial ring in a number of variables equal to the increment of $d$.
\section{Rank versus volume in the simple case}
\label{sec:Simple-rank-jumping}
In this section, we recall some notations and results from \cite{berkesch}.
For a face $F\preceq A$, consider the union of the lattice translates
\begin{align*}
{\mathbb E}_F^\beta\defeq
\big[{\mathbb Z}^d\cap(\beta+{\mathbb C} F) \big]\smallsetminus({\mathbb N} A+{\mathbb Z} F) = \bigsqcup_{b\in B_F^\beta} (b+{\mathbb Z} F),
\end{align*}
where $B_F^\beta \subseteq {\mathbb Z}^d$ is a set of lattice translate representatives.
As such, $|B^\beta_{F}|$ is the number of translates of ${\mathbb Z} F$ appearing in ${\mathbb E}_F^\beta$, which is by definition equal to the difference between $[{\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F:{\mathbb Z} F]$ and the number of translates of ${\mathbb Z} F$ along $\beta+{\mathbb C} F$ that are contained in ${\mathbb N} A + {\mathbb Z} F$.
Given the set
$\mathcal{J}(\beta)\defeq\{(F,b)\mid F\preceq A,\, b\in B_F^\beta,\, {\mathbb E}_F^\beta\neq\varnothing\}$,
the \emph{ranking lattices} of $A$ at $\beta$ are defined to be
\begin{align*}
{\mathbb E}^\beta
\defeq \bigcup_{(F,b)\in {\mathcal J}(\beta)} (b+{\mathbb Z} F).
\end{align*}
Note that the ranking lattices of $A$ at $\beta$ is precisely the union of those sets $(b+{\mathbb Z} F)$ contained in ${\mathbb Z}^d \setminus {\mathbb N} A$ such that $\beta\in (b+{\mathbb C} F)$. This is closely related to the set of holes of the affine semigroup ${\mathbb N} A$, namely the set $({\mathbb Z}^d \cap {\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}A)\setminus {\mathbb N} A$.
The main result in \cite{berkesch} states that the rank of $M_A(\beta)$ can be computed from the combinatorics of ${\mathbb E}^\beta$ and $\Delta_A$. An explicit formula for the rank is given when the rank jumping parameter $\beta$ is \emph{simple} (for a face $G\preceq A$), meaning that the set of maximal pairs $(F,b)$ in ${\mathcal J}(\beta)$ with respect to inclusion on $b+{\mathbb Z} F$ all correspond to a unique face $G\preceq A$ (see also \cite{okuyama} for this particular case); in this case,
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:formula-simple-rank-jump}
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))={\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)+ |B_G^\beta|\cdot ({\rm codim}(G)-1)\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} G}(G).
\end{equation}
We now provide some consequences of this result.
\begin{cor}\label{cor:upper-bound-F-simple-rank}
If $d\geq3$ and $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ is simple for the face $F\preceq A$, then
\[
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\leq {\rm codim}(F)\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A).
\]
In particular, if $\beta\in{\mathcal E}(A)$ is simple, then
\[
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\leq (d-1)\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A).
\]
\end{cor}
\begin{proof}
The first statement follows from~\eqref{eqn:formula-simple-rank-jump} and the definition of normalized volume in \eqref{eqn:normalized-volume}. Indeed,
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:inequalities}
|B_F^\beta|\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F)\leq [{\mathbb Z}^d \cap {\mathbb Q} F: {\mathbb Z} F]\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F)
={\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Q} F\cap {\mathbb Z}^d}(F)\leq {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A).
\end{equation}
We can assume without loss of generality that ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq 2$, since otherwise $A$ is a simplex and ${\mathcal E}(A)=\varnothing$.
For the second statement, notice first that if ${\rm codim}(F)=d$, then
${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F)=1=|B_F^\beta|$ and
\begin{equation}
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))={\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)+d-1 \leq (d-1)\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A),\label{eqn:ineq2}
\end{equation}
since $d\geq 3$ and ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq 2$.
Thus, we can assume that ${\rm codim}(F)\leq (d-1)$ and the second upper bound follows from the first one.
\end{proof}
We can improve the bound in Corollary~\ref{cor:upper-bound-F-simple-rank} as follows.
\begin{cor}\label{cor:sharper-upper-bound-F-simple-rank}
If $d\geq3$ and $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ is simple for the face $F\preceq A$, then
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:sharper-inequality}
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\leq {\rm codim}(F)\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)-({\rm codim}(F)-1)(n-|F|-{\rm codim}(F)).
\end{equation}
In particular, if $\beta\in{\mathcal E}(A)$ is simple, then
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:strict-inequality-for-simple}
\frac{{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))}{{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)} < (d-1).
\end{equation}
\end{cor}
\begin{proof}
The proof of~\eqref{eqn:sharper-inequality} follows from the first inequality in \eqref{eqn:inequalities} and \eqref{eqn:volume-F-ineq}. For~\eqref{eqn:strict-inequality-for-simple}, notice first that if ${\rm codim}(F)=1$, then ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))={\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ by \eqref{eqn:formula-simple-rank-jump}; otherwise, $({\rm codim}(F)-1)\geq 1$.
By \cite[Corollary~9.2]{MMW}, ${\mathcal E}(A)= \varnothing$ is equivalent to $S_A$ being Cohen--Macaulay.
Thus, for the case when ${\rm codim}(F)=d$, it is enough to use that the inequality in \eqref{eqn:ineq2} is in fact strict, because ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\geq 4$ by Corollary \ref{cor:nonCM-inequality}.
For the remaining cases, it is now enough to see that $n-|F|-{\rm codim}(F)\geq 1$.
By way of contradiction, assume that $A$ is a pyramid over $F$, so that any $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ can be written uniquely as $\beta=\beta_F +\beta_{\overline{F}}$ with $\beta_F \in {\mathbb C} F$, $\beta_{\overline{F}}\in {\mathbb C} \overline{F}$ and ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))= {\operatorname{rank}}( M_F(\beta_F))$, see \cite[Lemma 3.7]{reducibility}.
Since $\beta\in{\mathcal E}(A)$, it follows that $\beta_F\in{\mathcal E}(F)$.
Notice also that if $F\preceq G\preceq A$, then ${\mathbb E}_G^\beta={\mathbb E}_G^{\beta'}$ for any $\beta'\in \beta+{\mathbb C} F$.
Since $\beta$ is simple for $F$, the generic vectors $\beta' \in \beta + {\mathbb C} F$ are also simple for $F$ and ${\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta'))={\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))$.
Thus,
\[
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_F(\beta'_F)) ={\operatorname{rank}} (M_F(\beta_F))>{\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F).
\]
It follows that for generic $\gamma \in {\mathbb C} F$, ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_F(\gamma))>{\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F}(F)$, which is a contradiction, as this should be equality by~\cite{adolphson}.
\end{proof}
\begin{theorem}
The set
\[
{\mathcal E}_2(A)\defeq\{\beta \in {\mathbb C}^d \mid \; {\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\geq 2 \cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)\}
\]
is an affine subspace arrangement of codimension at least three.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
The exceptional arrangement ${\mathcal E}(A)$ is known to be a finite union of translates of linear subspaces ${\mathbb C} G$ for faces $G\preceq A$ of codimension at least two \cite[Corollary 9.4 and Porism 9.5]{MMW}. Moreover, it is shown in \cite[Theorem~2.6]{MMW} that rank of $M_A(\beta)$ is upper-semicontinuous as a function of $\beta$ with respect to the Zariski topology. Thus, on each irreducible component $C$ of ${\mathcal E}(A)$ the rank of $M_A(\beta)$ is constant outside a Zariski closed subset of $C$ of codimension at least three. Moreover, this codimension three set is also an affine subspace arrangement; see the argument after Definition 4.7 in \cite{berkesch}. It is thus enough to find, for any codimension two component $C$, a set of parameters $\beta\in C$ such that ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))<2 \cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ and whose Zariski closure is $C$. Indeed, if $C$ has codimension two, we have that $C=b+ {\mathbb C} G$ for some face $G\preceq F$ of codimension two and some $b\in {\mathbb C}^d$.
Notice that for any proper face $G'\preceq A$ not containing $G$, the intersection $C\cap ({\mathbb Z}^d +{\mathbb C} G')$ is at most a countably and locally finite union of translates of the linear space ${\mathbb C} G\cap {\mathbb C} G'$ of codimension at least three. Since there are only finitely many such faces $G'$, the set of parameters $\beta \in C$ such that $\beta\notin ({\mathbb Z}^d +{\mathbb C} G')$ for any such $G'$ is not contained in any Zariski closed set of codimension three. For such $\beta$ and $G'$, it follows that ${\mathbb E}^\beta_{G'}=\varnothing$. Then, for $C$ as above and $\beta\in C$, the only possible faces involved in $\mathcal{J}(\beta)$ are $G$ and the two facets containing $G$. Thus, \cite[Section 5.3 and Example 6.21]{berkesch} yield the inequality
\begin{equation*}
{\operatorname{rank}} (M_A (\beta))\leq{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)+ |B_G^\beta| ({\rm codim}(G)-1) {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} G}(G),\end{equation*}
where equality holds if $\beta$ is $G$-simple. By the proof of Corollary~\ref{cor:sharper-upper-bound-F-simple-rank} applied to the codimension two face $G$, it follows that ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_A(\beta))<2\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A)$ for a set of parameters $\beta\in C$ that is not contained in any codimension three Zariski closed set.
\end{proof}
\section{A sequence of examples in the simple case}
\label{sec:examples}
In this section, we prove that for any $d\geq 3$, the strict inequality~\eqref{eqn:strict-inequality-for-simple} from Corollary \ref{cor:sharper-upper-bound-F-simple-rank} is sharp for simple parameters $\beta$.
\begin{theorem}\label{thm:family-examples}
There is a sequence of full rank $(d\times (2d-1))$ integer matrices $\{A_{d,b}\}_{b=2}^\infty$ for which there is a simple parameter $\beta\in{\mathbb C}^d$ for which
\[
\lim_{b\to\infty}
\frac{{\operatorname{rank}} (M_{A_{d,b}}(\beta))}{{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A_{d,b})}
= d-1.
\]
In fact, the set of simple parameters $\beta\in {\mathbb C}^d$ that maximize the ratio ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_{A_{d,b}}(\beta))/{\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A_{d,b})$ is a line through the origin.
\end{theorem}
Consider the following $(d\times (2d-1))$-matrix with $d\geq 3$:
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:Adb}
A_{d,b}
= (a_1 \; a_2\; \cdots a_{2d-1})
\defeq \left(\begin{array}{ccc}
I_{d-1} & I_{d-1} & \bf{0}_{d-1}\\
\bf{0}_{d-1}^t & \bf{1}_{d-1}^t & b
\end{array}\right),
\end{equation}
where $b\geq 2$ is an integer, $I_{d-1}$ denotes the identity matrix of rank $d-1$, $\bf{1}_{d-1}$ is the column vector consisting of $d-1$ entries of $1$, and $\bf{0}_{d-1}$ is the zero column vector of length $d-1$.
Note that ${\mathbb Z} A_{d,b}={\mathbb Z}^d$. We now compute the normalized volume of $A_{d,b}$ in this lattice.
To do this, for $j\in {\mathbb Z}$, set $h^{(j)}\defeq (0,\ldots,0,j)^t$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem:lemma-volume}
The normalized volume of $A_{d,b}$ in \eqref{eqn:Adb} is $b+d-1$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
The polytope $\Delta_A$ can be decomposed as the union of two polytopes in ${\mathbb R}^d$ that intersect in a common facet.
One of these polytopes is the convex hull of the origin, the first $2(d-1)$ columns of $A_{d,b}$, and the lattice point $h^{(1)}$. This is a prism with height $1$ and base equal to a unit $(d-1)$-simplex, so its normalized volume in ${\mathbb Z}^d$ is $d$. The second polytope is the convex hull of $h^{(1)}$ and the last $d$ columns of $A_{d,b}$, which is a $d$-simplex. This $d$-simplex is the lattice translation by $h^{(1)}$ of the $d$-simplex that is the convex hull of the origin, the first $(d-1)$-columns of $A_{d,b}$, and $h^{(b-1)}$; therefore, its normalized volume in ${\mathbb Z}^d$ is $b-1$.
\end{proof}
\begin{remark}\label{rem:b-copies-of-F}
The last column of $A_{d,b}$ is $b\cdot e_d$, where $e_d$ is the $d$th standard basis vector in ${\mathbb C}^d$. The face $F_b\defeq \{a_{2d-1}\}\preceq A$ has normalized volume $1$ in the lattice ${\mathbb Z} F_b$ and
\[
{\mathbb Z}^d \cap {\mathbb C} F_b=\bigcup_{k=0}^{b-1} \left(h^{(k)}+{\mathbb Z} F_b\right)
\]
consists of $b$ translated copies of ${\mathbb Z} F_b$.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark}\label{rem:remark-minimal-volume}
The normalized volume of $F_b\defeq \{a_{2d-1}\}$ in the lattice ${\mathbb Z}^d\cap {\mathbb Q} F_b$ is $b$. In particular, equality holds in \eqref{eqn:volume-F-ineq} for $A=A_{d,b}$ and $F=F_b$.
\end{remark}
\begin{prop}\label{prop:exceptional}
The exceptional arrangement of $A_{d,b}$ is a finite union of lines parallel to ${\mathbb C} e_d$.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
The first $d-1$ columns of $A_{d,b}$ and its last column are linearly independent, and their nonnegative hull is precisely the first orthant ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}^d$. Thus, ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}A_{d,b}={\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}^d$ and ${\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}A_{d,b}\cap {\mathbb Z}^d={\mathbb N}^d$.
To determine the set of holes of ${\mathbb N} A$, given by ${\mathbb N}^d\setminus {\mathbb N} A$, can be written as a finite union of lattice translates of ${\mathbb N} F_b={\mathbb N} b e_d$,
notice first that the affine semigroup $S\subseteq {\mathbb N}^d$ generated by the first $2(d-1)$ columns of $A$ is normal, and their lattice span is ${\mathbb Z}^d$. Note also that, for $F_b\defeq \{a_{2d-1}\}$,
\[
{\mathbb N} A_{d,b}\cap {\mathbb C} F_b={\mathbb N} F_b={\mathbb N} b e_d,
\]
so ${\mathbb C} F_b \cap {\mathbb N} A ={\mathbb N} F_b={\mathbb N} b e_d$.
In order to complete the description of ${\mathbb N}^d\setminus {\mathbb N} A$, denote by $\Delta_b$ the simplex given by the convex hull of the following points in ${\mathbb N} A$:
\[
{\bf 0}, \,
b a_d=b (e_1+e_d), \,
b a_{d+1}=b (e_2+e_d),
\, \ldots, \,
b a_{2d-2}=b(e_{d-1}+e_d), \,
a_n=b e_d.
\]
Since ${\mathbb N} A= S+{\mathbb N} b e_d$, the set of holes of ${\mathbb N} A$ is the union of the sets $c+{\mathbb N} b e_d$, where $c$ runs through the lattice points:
\[
{\mathbb Z}^d\cap \Delta_b\setminus
\left(
{\mathbb R}_{\geq 0} (e_1 + e_d )
\,\cup\,
{\mathbb R}_{\geq 0} (e_2 + e_d )
\,\cup\, \cdots \,\cup\,
{\mathbb R}_{\geq 0} (e_{d-1}+e_d)
\,\cup\,
\left(b e_d + \sum_{k=1}^{d-1} {\mathbb R}_{\geq 0} e_k\right)
\right).
\]
It now follows from \cite{MMW,berkesch} that the exceptional arrangement of $A$ is
\[
{\mathcal E}(A)=\bigcup_{k=1}^{d-1} \bigcup_{m=0}^{b-2} (m e_k+{\mathbb C} F_b).
\qedhere
\]
\end{proof}
By the proof of Proposition~\ref{prop:exceptional},
if $b\geq 3$, then all the lattice points in $\Delta_{A_{d,b}}$ belong to ${\mathcal E} (A_{d,b})$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem:rank-max}
If $F_b\defeq \{a_{2d-1}\}$, then the function $\beta \in {\mathbb C}^d \mapsto {\operatorname{rank}} (M_{A_{d,b}}(\beta))$ reaches its maximum exactly when $\beta \in {\mathbb C} F_b$, and this maximum value is $(d-1)b+1$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
We first show that if $\beta \in {\mathbb C} F_b$, then the rank of $M_{A_{d,b}}(\beta)$ is $(d-1)b+1$. In this case, the ranking lattices at $\beta$ are
\[
{\mathbb E}^{\beta} =
\bigcup_{j=1}^{b-1} \left(h^{(j)}+{\mathbb Z} F_b\right).
\]
Thus, by \cite{berkesch}, the rank jump at $\beta$ is equal to
\[
{\operatorname{rank}}(M_A(\beta) - {\rm \operatorname{vol}}(A) =
|B_{F_b}^{\beta}|\cdot {\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F_b}(F_b)\cdot ({\rm codim} (F_b)-1),
\]
where ${\rm codim} (F_b)=d-1$, ${\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z} F_b}(F_b)=1$, and $|B_{F_b}^{\beta}|=b-1$ by Remark \ref{rem:b-copies-of-F}, since
\[
{\mathbb Z} F_b\subseteq ({\mathbb N} A_{d,b} +{\mathbb Z} F_b)\cap (\beta+ {\mathbb C} F)\cap {\mathbb Z}^d.
\]
Thus,
${\operatorname{rank}} (M_{A_{d,b}} (\beta))={\rm \operatorname{vol}}_{{\mathbb Z}^d}(A_{d,b})+ (b-1)(d-1)$,
which gives the desired equality by Lemma \ref{lem:lemma-volume}.
In order to prove that this is the maximum value of ${\operatorname{rank}} (M_{A_{d,b}} (\beta))$, it is enough to observe that when $\beta$ lies in a component of the form $(m e_k+{\mathbb C} F_b)\subseteq {\mathcal E}(A)$ with $m\neq 0$, then the computation of the rank jump is analogous to the previous case, but the number $|B_{F_b}^{\beta}|$ will be smaller.
This is the case because
\[
me_k, \,
m e_k +e_d, \,
m e_k +2 e_d, \, \ldots, \,
m e_k+ m e_d\in {\mathbb N} A,
\]
and hence there are $(m+1)$-translated copies of ${\mathbb Z} F_b$ in ${\mathbb N} A\cap (m e_k+{\mathbb C} F_b)$.
\end{proof}
\begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem \ref{thm:family-examples}]
The result now follows immediately from Lemmas \ref{lem:rank-max} and \ref{lem:lemma-volume}.
\end{proof}
\raggedbottom
\def$'$} \def\cprime{$'${$'$} \def$'$} \def\cprime{$'${$'$}
\providecommand{\MR}{\relax\ifhmode\unskip\space\fi MR }
\providecommand{\MRhref}[2]{%
\href{http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=#1}{#2}
}
\providecommand{\href}[2]{#2}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 3,205 |
Sono così chiamati i più antichi documenti scritti che attestano la nascita delle lingue romanze.
Elenco
Area iberoromanza:
Glosse emilianensi, X s.d.C.
Nodicia de Kesos, fine X s.d.C.
Area galloromanza:
Giuramenti di Strasburgo, 842 d.C.
Cantilena di Santa Eulalia, 881-882 d.C. ?
Area italoromanza:
Indovinello veronese, VIII s.d.C.
Iscrizione della catacomba di Commodilla (Roma), IX s.d.C.
Placiti campani, 960-963 d.C.
Area retoromanza:
Annotazione del manoscritto di Würzburg, X-XI s.D.C.
Letteratura medievale
Liste di letteratura | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 6,181 |
var logfmt = require('../logfmt'),
assert = require('assert');
suite('logfmt.parse', function() {
test("simple flag parses", function(){
assert.deepEqual({'hello':true}, logfmt.parse('hello'));
})
test("simple key/value parses", function(){
assert.deepEqual({'hello':'kitty'}, logfmt.parse('hello=kitty'));
})
test("simple boolean parses", function(){
assert.deepEqual({'foo':true, 'bar':false},
logfmt.parse('foo=true bar=false'));
})
test('big numbers dont lose precision', function(){
var parsed = logfmt.parse("thing=90071992547409934");
assert.equal(parsed.thing.toString(), '90071992547409934');
})
test("number parse to strings", function(){
assert.deepEqual({'foo':'123', 'bar':'456.789'},
logfmt.parse('foo=123 bar=456.789'));
})
test("string with escapes", function(){
assert.deepEqual({'hello':"\'kitty\'"},
logfmt.parse('hello="\'kitty\'"'));
assert.deepEqual({'hello':"\'kitty\'"},
logfmt.parse('hello=\'kitty\''));
})
test("string with equals", function(){
assert.deepEqual({foo:"hello=kitty"}, logfmt.parse('foo="hello=kitty"'));
})
test("readme string parses", function(){
var test_string = "foo=bar a=14 baz=\"hello kitty\" "
test_string += "cool%story=bro f %^asdf ";
test_string += "code=H12 path=/hello/user@foo.com/close";
var result = logfmt.parse(test_string)
assert.equal( "H12", result["code"])
assert.equal( "bar", result["foo"])
assert.equal(14, result.a)
assert.equal("hello kitty", result['baz'])
assert.equal('bro', result['cool%story'])
assert.equal(true, result.f)
assert.equal(true, result['%^asdf'])
assert.equal('/hello/user@foo.com/close', result['path'])
})
})
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 4,382 |
namespace Microsoft.Azure.Batch.Protocol.Models
{
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters;
using System.Runtime;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
/// <summary>
/// Defines values for AccessScope.
/// </summary>
[JsonConverter(typeof(StringEnumConverter))]
public enum AccessScope
{
/// <summary>
/// Grants access to perform all operations on the job containing the
/// task.
/// </summary>
[EnumMember(Value = "job")]
Job
}
internal static class AccessScopeEnumExtension
{
internal static string ToSerializedValue(this AccessScope? value)
{
return value == null ? null : ((AccessScope)value).ToSerializedValue();
}
internal static string ToSerializedValue(this AccessScope value)
{
switch( value )
{
case AccessScope.Job:
return "job";
}
return null;
}
internal static AccessScope? ParseAccessScope(this string value)
{
switch( value )
{
case "job":
return AccessScope.Job;
}
return null;
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,963 |
Q: allow AOT compatible way to provide custom templateUrl replacement for Angular component I am looking for an option to build Angular library containing components with possibility to configure them with custom templateUrls. The idea is to customize templates in the library ahead of building an app so I'd like to be able to fully leverage AOT - ideally static. I can imagine some dedicated logic eg. custom decorator to be used in place or along with @Component to accomplish my need.
While searching for customization of templates most of the information I've found refer to runtime customization which is not necessary in my case.
I'd appreciate any ideas and suggestions.
After some research I found that what I am looking for is to build a library with
"angularCompilerOptions": {
"enableResourceInlining": false
}
yet then templates are not bundled with library at all. Ideally I'd like to have the template resources bundled with library and then inline them while building final app, although I'd be ok to keep them separate.
UPDATE: one advice I've found is to relay on ivy and use higher order component - this would great option yet as I am using Ionic support for ivy is still on its way.
UPDATE 2: temporary solution/workaround I was able to get working is:
for the component I want to customize use:
<ng-container *ngTemplateOutlet="template">
</ng-container>
<ng-template #default>
default content template
</ng-template>
@Component({
selector: 'original-component',
templateUrl: './original-component.html',
styleUrls: ['original-component.scss'],
})
export class OriginalComponent implements AfterViewInit {
@ViewChild('default', {read: TemplateRef, static: false}) defaultTemplate: TemplateRef<any>;
template: TemplateRef<any>;
constructor(
@Optional() @Inject(TEMPLATE_OVERRIDE_KEY) public readonly templateOverrideKey: string,
private templateRegistry: TemplateRegistry) {}
ngAfterViewInit(): void {
if (this.templateRegistry.get(this.templateOverrideKey)) {
this.template = this.templateRegistry.get(this.templateOverrideKey);
}
if (!this.template) {
this.template = this.defaultTemplate;
}
}
}
then in the same way define custom template and use TemplateRegistry service to pass this as an override.
downsides of this solution
*
*this is dynamic option that is performed in runtime and I'd prefer just "replace" the template before build as only one version ot the template will be used in particular application
*I need to explicitly use the custom component somewhere (eg in the app-component) so it will be initialized and only then have access to the TemplateRef
*need to use let-ctx and access all the original data via ctx.myVar as thats how the ng-template works right now.
note for voting to close the question - I'd appreciate at least some comment elaborating how this question can be improved or what could be an alternate approach.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,273 |
Aplosonyx es un género de escarabajos de la familia Chrysomelidae. El género fue descrito científicamente primero por Chevrolat en 1837.
Especies
Referencias
Enlaces externos
Aplosonyx | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 8,710 |
{"url":"http:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/feeds\/question\/48221","text":"Spectral sequence for cohomology of open subset - MathOverflow most recent 30 from http:\/\/mathoverflow.net 2013-05-18T10:34:16Z http:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/feeds\/question\/48221 http:\/\/www.creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/2.5\/rdf http:\/\/mathoverflow.net\/questions\/48221\/spectral-sequence-for-cohomology-of-open-subset Spectral sequence for cohomology of open subset Vladimir Baranovsky 2010-12-03T21:57:59Z 2010-12-03T21:57:59Z <p>Let <code>$X$<\/code> be a smooth compact orientable manifold (or variety) and let $j: U \\subset X$ be the complement to a union $\\bigcup_{i \\in I} X_i$ of smooth compact orientable manifolds. Suppose that $A$ is a sheaf on $X$ - say, the locally constant sheaf $Z$ (although the question below can be asked for coherent sheaves too). Let $Z_U$ be $j_!j^* Z$, i.e. the locally constant sheaf on $U$ extended by zero to $X$. The usual set theoretic inclusion-exclusion formula leads to a long exact sequence of sheaves $0 \\to Z_U \\to Z \\to \\oplus Z_{X_i} \\to \\oplus Z_{X_i \\cap X_j} \\to \\ldots$ where for a closed subset $f: W \\subset X$ one sets $Z_W = f_* f^* Z$. <\/p> <p>This leads to a spectral sequence with first page given by cohomology of finite intersections $X_{i_1} \\cap \\ldots \\cap X_{i_s}$, and the differential is induced by the combinatorial inclusion-exclusion formula.<\/p> <p>Are there any examples when the differential of $E_2$ is non zero and known explicitly (which means that we also know the E_2 terms)? Maybe something in terms of excess intersection bundles for intersections of $X_i$, some Gysin maps, etc\/?<\/p>","date":"2013-05-18 10:34:16","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9852433800697327, \"perplexity\": 408.28557436376923}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2013-20\/segments\/1368696382261\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"https:\/\/nbviewer.jupyter.org\/url\/jrper.github.io\/teaching\/notebooks\/TheWaveEquation.ipynb","text":"# The Wave Equation\u00b6\n\nThe wave equation is one of the canonical partial differential equationss with which numericists deal, and an example of a hyperbolic PDE. As you probably know, the equation for a parabola is\n\n$$x^2 = a^2 y^2+b.$$\n\nSimilar to this, the standard wave equation in one dimension is\n\n$$\\frac{\\partial^2 u}{\\partial t^2} = c^2\\frac{\\partial ^2 u}{\\partial x^2}.$$\n\nThis is a model for a system radiating information, where the speed of the propagation is $c$, whichand has units of m\/s.\n\nWhen $c$ is constant, the equation accepts leftward and rightward travelling wave solutions, $f(x+ct)$ and $g(x-ct)$.\n\n## Initial Conditions\u00b6\n\nThe second order ODE can be rewritten as a pair of coupled first order ODEs, $$\\frac{\\partial v}{\\partial t} = c^2\\frac{\\partial ^2 u}{\\partial t},$$ $$\\frac{\\partial u}{\\partial t} = v.$$ where the second equation is a rewritten version of the identity, $v=\\frac{\\partial u}{\\partial t}$. From this, it can be seen that we need to provide initial conditions for both $u$ and $v$, i.e $$u(x,0)= U(x)$$ $$\\frac{\\partial u}{\\partial t} (x,0)= V(x).$$\n\n## Boundary Conditions\u00b6\n\nThe boundary conditions must supply enough information to control both leftward and rightward travelling waves, so that we need a boundary condition on every boundary.\n\nLets build a finite difference model for a wave equation\n\nIn\u00a0[44]:\n# import relevant modules\n\nimport numpy\nfrom scipy import linalg\nfrom bqplot import pyplot\nfrom IPython.display import display\nimport ipywidgets\n\n# set up our discretization\n\nN = 101\nNt= 100\ndx = 10.0\/(N-1)\ndt=1.0\nc=1.0\nx = numpy.linspace(-10.0, 10.0, N)\n\n# useful matrices. A handles the new step, B the old.\n\nA = numpy.zeros([2*N, 2*N])\nB = numpy.zeros([2*N, 2*N])\n\nfor j in range(N):\n# Dirichlet boundary conditions\nA[j,j] = 1.0\nA[N-1,N-1] = 1.0\nA[N+j,N+j] = 1.0\nA[2*N-1,2*N-1] = 1.0\nfor i in range(1,N-1):\nA[i, i] = 1.0\nA[i, N+i-1] =-dt*c*1.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nA[i, N+i] = +dt*c*2.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nA[i, N+i+1] = -dt*c*1.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nA[N+i, i] = -dt\/2.0\nA[N+i, N+i] = 1.0\nB[i, i] = 1.0\nB[i, N+i-1] = dt*c*1.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nB[i, N+i] = -dt*c*2.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nB[i, N+i+1] = dt*c*1.0\/dx**2\/2.0\nB[N+i, i] = dt\/2.0\nB[N+i, N+i] = 1.0\n\n# initial conditions\n\ny = numpy.zeros(2*N)\ny[:N]=numpy.exp(-x**2)\n\nY=[]\n\nfor _ in range(Nt):\nY.append(y)\nz=numpy.dot(B,y)\ny = linalg.solve(A, z)\n\nY.append(y)\n\npyplot.figure(1)\nxsc = pyplot.LinearScale(min=-10,max=10)\nysc = pyplot.LinearScale(min=-1,max=1)\naxy = pyplot.Axis(label='u', scale=ysc, orientation='vertical', side='left', grid_lines='solid')\naxx = pyplot.Axis(label='x', scale=xsc, grid_lines='solid')\nlines = pyplot.Lines(x=x, y=Y[0][:N], scales = {'x': xsc, 'y': ysc})\nplt = pyplot.Figure(layout=ipywidgets.Layout(width='auto'), marks=[lines],axes=[axx,axy])\ndef g(t):\nlines.y = Y[int(t\/dt)][:N]\n\nw = ipywidgets.interactive(g, t=(0.,1.0*Nt,1));\nslider = w.children[0]\noutput = w.children[-1]\n\nplay = ipywidgets.Play(\n# interval=10,\nvalue=0,\nmin=0,\nmax=Nt,\nstep=1,\ndescription=\"Press play\",\ndisabled=False\n)","date":"2020-08-06 07:56:08","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8229296803474426, \"perplexity\": 7377.993222131483}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-34\/segments\/1596439736883.40\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200806061804-20200806091804-00240.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: jQuery start animation fadeOut from begining I need to fadeOut element (information box). But when I am in middle of animation and click fadeOut again, I want to start fadeOut from begining.
Checkbox.change: start fadeout----->user again click checkbox.change (return to begin animation)
my code:
if($('#inform-box').is(':animated')) {
//alert('YES, IT IS ANIMATED');
$('#inform-box').hide();
//$(this).stop().animate({opacity:'100'});
}else{
//alert('NOT ANIMATED');
}
$('#inform-box').show().fadeOut( 4000 );
$('#inform-box').html('fadeOut text');
A: Call stop() to stop the current animation, then reset the element's opacity to 1:
$('#inform-box').stop().css({opacity: 1}).fadeOut(4000);
JSFiddle demo.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,527 |
{"url":"http:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/tags\/tensor-products\/hot","text":"# Tag Info\n\n9\n\nThe grammar is \"a category is tensored over a monoidal category\"; this is a generalization of a set being equipped with an action of a monoid, or an abelian group being equipped with an action of a ring. In full generality you should provide the tensoring, but sometimes if you require enough it exists uniquely. The general pattern of the uniqueness results ...\n\n4\n\n$v\\otimes w$ is either of the following: The rank 1 linear mapping $V^*\\to V$ given by $\\alpha\\mapsto v.\\langle \\alpha,w\\rangle$ where $\\langle\\;,\\;\\rangle:V^*\\times V\\to \\mathbb F$ is the duality. This is the easiest to visualize. The decomposable bilinear form $V^*\\times V^*\\to \\mathbb F$ given by $(\\alpha,\\beta)\\mapsto \\langle\\alpha,v\\rangle ... 4 Intuitively, if a functor 'forgets structure' from one category of sets-with-algebraic-structure to another then it will have a left-adjoint; such adjunctions are called 'free-forgetful' adjunctions. Unfortunately$F$is an unfortunate choice of letter because forgetful functors are usually denoted by$U$and free functors by$F$, so for your$F$I'll write ... 3 The point is that in contrast to a short exact sequence, a split short exact sequence can be viewed as a certain kind of diagram with additive commutativity relations: Definition. A sequence$A\\xrightarrow{i} B\\xrightarrow{\\pi} C$is split short exact if there exist$B\\xrightarrow{r} A$,$C\\xrightarrow{\\sigma} B$such that $$ri=\\text{id}_A,\\quad ... 2 The internal hom is defined via maps into it. You know nothing about the classification of maps into a coproduct, but you know how to classify the maps into a product, by the very definition of a product. You can also see how the product comes up in the following calculation: Let A,B,C be graded R-modules (the case of chain complexes is similar, but ... 2 Of course, the algebraic intuition should be the one given by Clive Newstead. However, it might be worth noting that your problem is in fact an instance of something more general. Take \\mathcal C to be a category with pushouts. Denotes {}_{x \\backslash}\\!\\mathcal C the category whose objects are the morphisms x \\to a of \\mathcal C and whose ... 2 Let B be an A-algebra and M, N be B-modules. Here is an example in which M \\otimes_A N and N \\otimes_A M are isomorphic as A-modules, but not as B-modules. \\mathbb Z[x] is a \\mathbb Z-module via the inclusion \\mathbb Z \\hookrightarrow \\mathbb Z[x]. Let M = \\mathbb Z[x] be a \\mathbb Z[x]-module via the identity. Let N = \\mathbb ... 2 The ring B\\otimes _A B has a canonical A-algebra structure and TWO different structures of B-algebra, which I'll call (B\\otimes _A B)_l and (B\\otimes _A B)_r, according as multiplication by elements of B happens on the left or on the right. These B-algebra structures are in general different since if we denote by \\bullet and \\circ the ... 2 In general, no. For instance, let A be a field, let$$M = N = \\langle v_1, v_2, v_3, v_4 \\rangle$$be a 4-dimensional vector space over A, and let$$ P = (M \\otimes N) \/ \\langle v_1 \\otimes v_2 + v_3 \\otimes v_4\\rangle, $$with f the natural map. No non-zero decomposable tensor lies in the kernel$$\\ker(f) = \\langle v_1 \\otimes v_2 + v_3 \\otimes ... 2 Well, first you should recognize that we need some way of representing the$B$you have in your first definition in the second definition. This is because the first definition is the definition of a linear mapping with the thing it maps (a bivector) and the second definition is just a linear mapping without the thing that it maps. In fact the second ... 2 I think the key here is to understand what is meant by the tensor product. For any vectors$a, b, u, v$, the tensor product$a \\otimes b$means $$(a \\otimes b)(u,v) = (a \\cdot u)(b \\cdot v)$$ Or, perhaps, it might mean this instead: $$(a \\otimes b)(v) = a (b \\cdot v)$$ The two notions are equivalent to each other, so mathematicians freely use one or the ... 2 Let$\\{0\\}=N_0<N_1<\\cdots<N_n=N$be a composition series for$N$. In particular,$N_i\/N_{i-1}$is a cyclic module, so$N$can be generated by (at most)$n$elements. Then there is a surjection$R^n\\to N$, and tensorizing by$M$we get$M\\otimes_R R^n\\to M\\otimes_RN\\to 0$. But$M\\otimes_R R^n\\simeq M^n$, so$M\\otimes_R R^n$has finite length which is ... 2 It should be stated in the problem but I think you are right about$v_i = \\pi (u_i)$. Hint: observe that$\\frac{1}{2}((u_1 + u_2) \\otimes (u_1 + u_2))= \\frac{1}{2}(u_1 \\otimes u_2 + u_2 \\otimes u_1) + \\frac{1}{2}(u_1 \\otimes u_1 + u_2 \\otimes u_2)$is projected by$\\pi$to$0$on one hand (projection of LHS) and to$\\frac{1}{2}(u_1 \\otimes u_2 + u_2 \\otimes ...\n\n1\n\nYou are missing a term, we have$\\def\\tensor{\\otimes}$ $$\\nabla \\cdot (u \\tensor u) = (\\nabla \\cdot u)u + (u\\cdot \\nabla) u$$ By definition of $\\nabla \\cdot (u \\tensor u)$, the $i$-th component of this vector is the divergence of the $i$-th row of $u \\tensor u$. So \\begin{align*} [\\nabla \\cdot (u \\tensor u)]_i &= \\nabla \\cdot (uu_i)\\\\ ...\n\n1\n\nNote that if $g\\circ f$ is the identity for some map $g: B\\otimes_A B \\to B$, then $f$ is injective for formal reasons. Namely, if $f(b_1) = f(b_2)$, then $b_1 = g(f(b_1)) = g(f(b_2)) = b_2$. The fact that $B$ is an $A$-algebra means that you have a good candidate for $g$.\n\n1\n\nWriting $G \\cong \\mathbb Z\/n_1 \\oplus \\cdots \\oplus \\mathbb Z\/n_r$, we can indeed reduce the problem to cyclic groups, since $$\\text{Hom}_{\\mathbb Z}(G,k^{\\times}) \\otimes_{\\mathbb Z} \\mathbb Z\/p \\cong \\bigoplus_{i=1}^r \\text{Hom}_{\\mathbb Z}(\\mathbb Z\/n_i,k^{\\times}) \\otimes_{\\mathbb Z} \\mathbb Z\/p,$$ which you can read either way by distributivity of the ...\n\n1\n\nI don't have a complete answer, but I think I can add some information. In the spirit of you last comment, the way toweards characterizing the cone of simple tensors is looking at maximal linear subspaces contained in it. Each line in $V$ determins a linear subspace of dimension $dim(W)$ contained in the cone and vice versa. These two families are exactly ...\n\n1\n\nAs in the question, we set $n := \\dim V$ and $m := \\dim W$ and assume both are finite (though many conclusions hold just as well when either or both are infinite), and pick arbitrary bases $A = (v_a)$ of $V$ and $B = (w_b)$ of $W$. Also, we usually regard bases as ordered sets of vectors; the below doesn't always specify orders, but of course these can be ...\n\n1\n\nNot a good place for a tensor product formalism since these Qx, Qy, Qz must be unbounded. Algebras of unbounded operators are not very useful, mathematically, due to restrictions related to domains of definition. As a general remark, we can use projector-valued measures from the spectral theory to formally define \u201cHermitian operators\u201d with values in affine ...\n\n1\n\nIt might be easier to approach this problem the following way: We have the following free resolution of $I$: $$0 \\to R \\to R \\oplus R \\to I \\to 0,$$ where the first map is given by $1 \\mapsto (-y,x)$ and the second map is given by $(1,0) \\mapsto x, (0,1) \\mapsto y$. After tensoring with $R\/I$ we get the following exact sequence: 0 \\to Tor_1(I,R\/I) \\to ...\n\nOnly top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible","date":"2015-04-27 12:10:53","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9955846071243286, \"perplexity\": 447.1136112016637}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2015-18\/segments\/1429246658116.80\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20150417045738-00090-ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
then enter one of the following codes.
noclip - No clipping mode.
give (item name) (1-100) - Spawn indicated item and number.
Use one of the following values with the "give (item name) (1-100)" code.
limited to 100 as the number value.
with full ammo + 99 each grenades and mines.
Having World War II Normandy codes we dont have yet?
Visit CheatBook for World War II - Normandy Cheats, Tips or Hints!
Visit Cheatinfo for World War II Normandy Cheat Codes or FAQs! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,381 |
Ekaterina Balaban
October 17, 2018 at 11.40 in the Kerch Polytechnic school in Crimea began the break. The students went to the canteen. A few minutes later, an improvised explosive device detonated there. According to the official version of Russian police, a student Vladislav Roslyakov brought in the school a sports bag with explosives, as well as a pump-action gun. After the explosion, he started shooting at the students. 22 people were killed, 45 wounded, Roslyakov shot himself.
Most students do not believe the official version and say that it was a terrorist attack, and there were several shooters. The tragedy has acquired a lot of conspiracy theories. Some of them are connected with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.
This photo project is about trauma and fear, when everyday life collapses in one second, and the essence behind it is uncontrollable and shadowy. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,923 |
Q: PHP Conditional Assign - Interfaces Lets say I create and interface
interface IMyInterface {
function abstractMethod();
}
class MyClass implements IMyInterface {
function abstractMethod() {
//code
}
}
class OtherClass {
private $IMyInterfaceObj;
function __construct($obj) {
$this->IMyInterfaceObj = $obj;
}
}
What can I do to make sure that the object assigned to $IMyInterfaceObj is an Object that actually implements the interface, since PHP is loosely typed. Should I check the type???
A: You would type hint it in the constructor. You cannot do this for basic types such as integers or strings, although you can for arrays with array. The only value you can use to make a parameter an optional one is to use null.
class OtherClass {
private $IMyInterfaceObj;
function __construct(IMyInterface $obj) {
$this->IMyInterfaceObj = $obj;
}
}
Thoroughly reading the documentation on interfaces and type hinting should clear anything else up on the subject.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,689 |
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
@class FBLPromise<ValueType>;
NS_ASSUME_NONNULL_BEGIN
/**
* The class reads a default IID token from IID store if available.
*/
@interface FIRInstallationsIIDTokenStore : NSObject
- (instancetype)init NS_UNAVAILABLE;
- (instancetype)initWithGCMSenderID:(NSString *)GCMSenderID;
- (FBLPromise<NSString *> *)existingIIDDefaultToken;
@end
NS_ASSUME_NONNULL_END
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,754 |
I Can't Breathe Ads On TV
Today a ton of media companies decided to run this video ad that went on for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. It was mostly sound effects of a person breathing where at the same time there was text saying "I can't breathe." This is supposed to be a reflection of the George Floyd incident where a police officer had his knees on his neck for over eight minutes as he struggled to breathe and eventually passed away.
The aired on a lot of networks including Nickelodeon which is of course meant for kids. So while a lot of people see this as a good thing for awareness there were many people were outraged as they felt this was in a sense showing something violent and horrible to kids. It made me think of the topic I posted recently about how if you are a business would you automatically support a cause you believe in even if it makes a certain amount of users upset to the point where you may lose business.
In these cases the companies definitely went ahead with it. I think one of the key thing here is companies were on the same page I guess you could say which makes it easier for them to implement. It probably did cost them a lot of money but during these times I think it's justified.
ADS , Business , geroge floyd , tv
Being Able To Ask Personally For Business Help
Working For Free At The Start
Spending Less To Invest As Opposed To Just Saving
All Future Shop Stores In Canada Closing Down Suddenly
CIK Telecom Vancouver First Day Experience
Given False Answers When The Money Doesn't Seem Worth It
Buying A One Cent Nintendo Switch Game or Not
Considering A Counterfeit As A Deal
Buying Group And Family Presents To Save Time
Telling A Child That You Can't Afford It | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,107 |
#ifndef SkShader_DEFINED
#define SkShader_DEFINED
#include "SkBitmap.h"
#include "SkFlattenable.h"
#include "SkMask.h"
#include "SkMatrix.h"
#include "SkPaint.h"
class SkPath;
/** \class SkShader
SkShader is the based class for objects that return horizontal spans of colors during drawing.
A subclass of SkShader is installed in a SkPaint calling paint.setShader(shader). After that
any object (other than a bitmap) that is drawn with that paint will get its color(s) from the
shader.
*/
class SkShader : public SkFlattenable {
public:
SkShader();
virtual ~SkShader();
/** Return true if the shader has a non-identity local matrix.
@param localM Optional: If not null, return the shader's local matrix
@return true if the shader has a non-identity local matrix.
*/
bool getLocalMatrix(SkMatrix* localM) const;
/** Set the shader's local matrix.
@param localM The shader's new local matrix.
*/
void setLocalMatrix(const SkMatrix& localM);
/** Reset the shader's local matrix to identity.
*/
void resetLocalMatrix();
enum TileMode {
kClamp_TileMode, //!< replicate the edge color if the shader draws outside of its original bounds
kRepeat_TileMode, //!< repeat the shader's image horizontally and vertically
kMirror_TileMode, //!< repeat the shader's image horizontally and vertically, alternating mirror images so that adjacent images always seam
kTileModeCount
};
// override these in your subclass
enum Flags {
//!< set if all of the colors will be opaque
kOpaqueAlpha_Flag = 0x01,
//! set if this shader's shadeSpan16() method can be called
kHasSpan16_Flag = 0x02,
/** Set this bit if the shader's native data type is instrinsically 16
bit, meaning that calling the 32bit shadeSpan() entry point will
mean the the impl has to up-sample 16bit data into 32bit. Used as a
a means of clearing a dither request if the it will have no effect
*/
kIntrinsicly16_Flag = 0x04
};
/** Called sometimes before drawing with this shader.
Return the type of alpha your shader will return.
The default implementation returns 0. Your subclass should override if it can
(even sometimes) report a non-zero value, since that will enable various blitters
to perform faster.
*/
virtual uint32_t getFlags() { return 0; }
/** Return the alpha associated with the data returned by shadeSpan16(). If
kHasSpan16_Flag is not set, this value is meaningless.
*/
virtual uint8_t getSpan16Alpha() const { return fPaintAlpha; }
/** Called once before drawing, with the current paint and
device matrix. Return true if your shader supports these
parameters, or false if not. If false is returned, nothing
will be drawn.
*/
virtual bool setContext( const SkBitmap& device,
const SkPaint& paint,
const SkMatrix& matrix);
/** Called for each span of the object being drawn. Your subclass
should set the appropriate colors (with premultiplied alpha) that
correspond to the specified device coordinates.
*/
virtual void shadeSpan(int x, int y, SkPMColor[], int count) = 0;
/** Called only for 16bit devices when getFlags() returns kOpaqueAlphaFlag | kHasSpan16_Flag
*/
virtual void shadeSpan16(int x, int y, uint16_t[], int count);
/** Similar to shadeSpan, but only returns the alpha-channel for a span.
The default implementation calls shadeSpan() and then extracts the alpha
values from the returned colors.
*/
virtual void shadeSpanAlpha(int x, int y, uint8_t alpha[], int count);
/** Helper function that returns true if this shader's shadeSpan16() method can
be called.
*/
bool canCallShadeSpan16()
{
return SkShader::CanCallShadeSpan16(this->getFlags());
}
/** Helper to check the flags to know if it is legal to call shadeSpan16()
*/
static bool CanCallShadeSpan16(uint32_t flags) {
return (flags & kHasSpan16_Flag) != 0;
}
/** Called before a session using the shader begins. Some shaders override
this to defer some of their work (like calling bitmap.lockPixels()).
Must be balanced by a call to endSession.
*/
virtual void beginSession();
virtual void endSession();
/** Optional methods for shaders that can pretend to be a bitmap/texture
to play along with opengl. Default just returns false and ignores
the out parameters.
*/
virtual bool asABitmap(SkBitmap* outTexture, SkMatrix* outMatrix,
TileMode xy[2]);
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Factory methods for stock shaders
/** Call this to create a new shader that will draw with the specified bitmap.
@param src The bitmap to use inside the shader
@param tmx The tiling mode to use when sampling the bitmap in the x-direction.
@param tmy The tiling mode to use when sampling the bitmap in the y-direction.
@return Returns a new shader object. Note: this function never returns null.
*/
static SkShader* CreateBitmapShader(const SkBitmap& src,
TileMode tmx, TileMode tmy);
virtual void flatten(SkFlattenableWriteBuffer& );
protected:
enum MatrixClass {
kLinear_MatrixClass, // no perspective
kFixedStepInX_MatrixClass, // fast perspective, need to call fixedStepInX() each scanline
kPerspective_MatrixClass // slow perspective, need to mappoints each pixel
};
static MatrixClass ComputeMatrixClass(const SkMatrix&);
// These can be called by your subclass after setContext() has been called
uint8_t getPaintAlpha() const { return fPaintAlpha; }
SkBitmap::Config getDeviceConfig() const { return (SkBitmap::Config)fDeviceConfig; }
const SkMatrix& getTotalInverse() const { return fTotalInverse; }
MatrixClass getInverseClass() const { return (MatrixClass)fTotalInverseClass; }
SkShader(SkFlattenableReadBuffer& );
private:
SkMatrix* fLocalMatrix;
SkMatrix fTotalInverse;
uint8_t fPaintAlpha;
uint8_t fDeviceConfig;
uint8_t fTotalInverseClass;
SkDEBUGCODE(SkBool8 fInSession;)
static SkShader* CreateBitmapShader(const SkBitmap& src,
TileMode, TileMode,
void* storage, size_t storageSize);
friend class SkAutoBitmapShaderInstall;
typedef SkFlattenable INHERITED;
};
#endif
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,247 |
Biografia
Inizia lo studia del canto con la maestra Alda Scaglioni, la stessa di Gianni Morandi, continuerà poi da autodidatta.
Nel 1968 partecipa al Festival di Castrocaro, dove è semifinalista con il brano Se telefonando.
In TV nel 1968 partecipa a Settevoci, trasmissione domenicale condotta da Pippo Baudo.
.
Ottiene un contratto discografico con la Numero Uno di Lucio Battisti dal 1970 al 1973. Lucio le cambierà il nome nel più commerciale ed immediato Sara e le canzoni che incide sono scritte dallo stesso Battisti senza l'ausilio di Mogol pur comparendo nei crediti: Uomini / Perché dovrei, Io mamma / Ti perdono (con Dattoli e Salerno).
Negli anni di permanenza alla Numero Uno, Sara partecipa attivamente alla registrazione degli LP di Lucio Battisti, fornendo la sua voce per i cori, avendo comunque una parte solista in Sognando e risognando inserita nel long-playing Umanamente uomo, il sogno (1973).
Nel 1972 partecipa al Festival di Sanremo in supporto ai Delirium con Jesahel.
Dal 1975 è stata cantante nei Cinque Lire, il primo gruppo di Gaetano Curreri.
Dal 1975 al 1980 ha fatto parte del gruppo Tombstones con cui girerà, con grande successo, quasi tutte le mega discoteche dell'epoca. Nel 1975 esce Angie Baby/I'm Sorry for you (Dischi Ricordi), ripresa dal successo di Helen Reddy, con la produzione di Drupi. .
Nel 1980 è in tour con gli Area. Nella band di Tony Esposito è stata a supporto del tour relativo all'uscita dell'LP Tamburo (Bubble – 1982) con Brian Auger come ospite fisso.
Discografia
Singoli
Solista
1970 – Uomini/Perché dovrei (Numero Uno, ZN 50100)
1972 – Io mamma/Ti perdono (Numero Uno, ZN 50139)
Con i Tombstones
1975 – Angie Baby/I'm Sorry for you (Dischi Ricordi, SRL 10753)
1977 – Maledentro/Paura (Fonit Cetra, SPF 31325)
1977 – Maledentro/Slow Down (con John Miles; Jukebox - Fonit, Decca JB 688)
Collaborazioni
1982 – corista nell'album Tamburo di Tony Esposito (Bubble, BLU 19611)
Note
Voci correlate
Lucio Battisti
Collegamenti esterni
Gruppi e musicisti dell'Emilia-Romagna | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 590 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.physicsforums.com\/threads\/falling-rain-drop-variable-mass.867871\/","text":"# Falling Rain Drop (Variable Mass)\n\n## Homework Statement\n\nSuppose a rain drop with mass ##m_0\\neq 0## is falling due to gravity with initial velocity ##v_0##, assume ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k=##constant. Solve the differential equation and determine the velocity as ##t\\to\\infty##\n\n## Homework Equations\n\n##F=\\frac{dp}{dt}=\\dot{m}v+m\\dot{v}##\n\n## The Attempt at a Solution\n\nSince ##F=mg## the D.E. is ##\\dot{m}v+m\\dot{v}=mg##, substituting in ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k## we find ##kv+m\\dot{v}=mg##, since the mass increases with time we have ##m=m_0+kt##. One method I've attempted is essentially using the integrating factor but since the LHS is already a product rule derivative I don't need to multiply it by anything so:\n\n$$\\frac{d}{dt}(mv)=mg \\\\ \\int \\frac{d}{dt}(mv)dt=\\int mg dt=\\int mg \\frac{dt}{dm}dm=\\frac{g}{k}\\int_{m_0}^{m} m\\, dm\\\\ v(m_0+kt)+C=\\frac{g}{2k}((m_0+kt)^2-m_0^2)=\\frac{g}{2k}(2m_0kt+k^2t^2)$$\n\nat ##t=0##, ##v=v_0\\Rightarrow##, ##v_0(m_0+0)+C=0\\Longrightarrow C=-v_0m_0##\n\ntherefore...\n\n$$v(m_0+kt)-v_0m_0=gm_0t+\\frac{gkt^2}{2}\\\\ v(m_0+kt)=m_0(v_0+gt)+\\frac{gkt^2}{2} \\\\ v=\\frac{m_0(v_0+gt)}{m_0+kt}+\\frac{gkt^2}{2(m_0+kt)}$$\n\nNow I find this solution a bit odd since my professor said that it would become asymptotic but I think he's wrong about this? The first term will approach ##\\frac{m_0g}{k}## but the second term clearly diverges as ##t\\to\\infty## and it doesn't make sense that an object would reach a terminal velocity without drag. I suppose you could say it asymptotically goes to infinity but it's increasing linearly...\n\n## Answers and Replies\n\nharuspex\nHomework Helper\nGold Member\n2020 Award\nmy professor said that it would become asymptotic\nBy itself that means nothing. What is supposed to tend asymptotically to a constant, or to a certain function of what?\nThe link DrSteve posted shows the acceleration tends to a constant.\n\nPotatochip911\nBy itself that means nothing. What is supposed to tend asymptotically to a constant, or to a certain function of what?\nThe link DrSteve posted shows the acceleration tends to a constant.\nOkay I suppose I'm just too used to thinking of functions converging to a constant when that term is mentioned.\n\nehild\nHomework Helper\nThe velocity tends to a simple function as t tends to infinity. What is that simple function?\n\nPotatochip911\nThe velocity tends to a simple function as t tends to infinity. What is that simple function?\nI believe it's just ##v=\\frac{m(t)g}{k}## from setting ##\\dot{v}=0## in the D.E.\n\nSimplifying my expression for ##v(t)## would give ##v(t)=\\frac{m_0g}{k}+\\frac{gt}{2}## though\n\nSorry for so many edits but just noticed that the first one becomes ##v=\\frac{m_0g}{k}+gt## which is almost the same as the result from simplification.\n\nehild\nHomework Helper\nI believe it's just ##v=\\frac{m(t)g}{k}## from setting ##\\dot{v}=0## in the D.E.\n\nSimplifying my expression for ##v(t)## would give ##v(t)=\\frac{m_0g}{k}+\\frac{gt}{2}## though\n\nSorry for so many edits but just noticed that the first one becomes ##v=\\frac{m_0g}{k}+gt## which is almost the same as the result from simplification.\nYou can not set ##\\dot v = 0##. The acceleration does not tend to zero. At great t, v increases linearly with time with rate g\/2 instead of g as it were for a constant-mass body.\n\nPotatochip911\nYou can not set ##\\dot v = 0##. The acceleration does not tend to zero. At great t, v increases linearly with time with rate g\/2 instead of g as it were for a constant-mass body.\nWhoops, I realize now it doesn't make much sense to set acceleration equal to 0 :)\n\nInterestingly at large t, it appears v always increases by ##g\/2## regardless of ##\\alpha## for ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k^{\\alpha}##\n\nehild\nHomework Helper\nWhoops, I realize now it doesn't make much sense to set acceleration equal to 0 :)\n\nInterestingly at large t, it appears v always increases by ##g\/2## regardless of ##\\alpha## for ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k^{\\alpha}##\n##k^{\\alpha}## is just an other constant. Why do you mix alpha in? It was said that dm\/dt=k.\n\nPotatochip911\nehild\nHomework Helper\nIt is interesting the acceleration at long time tends to g\/2, regardless of k.\n\nPotatochip911\nI was looking through my posts when I stumbled upon this one and I can't understand how they're solving the differential equation in the paper that was linked in response to this post.\n\nThe author states that when ##\\frac{dm}{dt}## is independent of velocity then the accretion equation can be solved for ##m(t)## and then the Newtonian equation can be solved for ##v(t)##. I'm having trouble seeing this since for my problem ##\\frac{dm}{dt} = k## which leads to ##m(t) = m_0 + kt##. I don't understand how this helps solve ##mg = \\frac{dm}{dt}v + m\\frac{dv}{dt}## for velocity.\n\nDividing through by ##m## and using ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k## I can get the result $$g = \\frac{kv}{m} + \\frac{dv}{dt}$$\n\nAt which point I can't see how to make progress, evidently I should apply ##m=m_0+kt## but I don't see how that helps when I can't seem to get ##\\frac{dv}{v}## without a ##\\frac{g}{v}## term\n\nharuspex\nHomework Helper\nGold Member\n2020 Award\nI was looking through my posts when I stumbled upon this one and I can't understand how they're solving the differential equation in the paper that was linked in response to this post.\n\nThe author states that when ##\\frac{dm}{dt}## is independent of velocity then the accretion equation can be solved for ##m(t)## and then the Newtonian equation can be solved for ##v(t)##. I'm having trouble seeing this since for my problem ##\\frac{dm}{dt} = k## which leads to ##m(t) = m_0 + kt##. I don't understand how this helps solve ##mg = \\frac{dm}{dt}v + m\\frac{dv}{dt}## for velocity.\n\nDividing through by ##m## and using ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k## I can get the result $$g = \\frac{kv}{m} + \\frac{dv}{dt}$$\n\nAt which point I can't see how to make progress, evidently I should apply ##m=m_0+kt## but I don't see how that helps when I can't seem to get ##\\frac{dv}{v}## without a ##\\frac{g}{v}## term\nI think expanding ##\\frac d{dt}(mv)## was unhelpful.\nGo back to ##mg= \\frac d{dt}(mv)## and substitute for m using m0 etc.\nBoth sides are directly integrable wrt t.\n\nLast edited:\nPotatochip911\ntherefore...\n\n$$v(m_0+kt)-v_0m_0=gm_0t+\\frac{gkt^2}{2}\\\\ v(m_0+kt)=m_0(v_0+gt)+\\frac{gkt^2}{2} \\\\ v=\\frac{m_0(v_0+gt)}{m_0+kt}+\\frac{gkt^2}{2(m_0+kt)}$$\n\nApologies, but how has the $v$ appeared in the RHS?\n\nThe author states that when ##\\frac{dm}{dt}## is independent of velocity then the accretion equation can be solved for ##m(t)## and then the Newtonian equation can be solved for ##v(t)##. I'm having trouble seeing this since for my problem ##\\frac{dm}{dt} = k## which leads to ##m(t) = m_0 + kt##. I don't understand how this helps solve ##mg = \\frac{dm}{dt}v + m\\frac{dv}{dt}## for velocity.\n\nDividing through by ##m## and using ##\\frac{dm}{dt}=k## I can get the result $$g = \\frac{kv}{m} + \\frac{dv}{dt}$$\n\nAt which point I can't see how to make progress, evidently I should apply ##m=m_0+kt## but I don't see how that helps when I can't seem to get ##\\frac{dv}{v}## without a ##\\frac{g}{v}## term\n\nYou might want to think about integrating factors. The differential equation is of the form:\n$$\\frac{dv}{dt} + f(t) v = h(t)$$\nwhere $h(t)$ is a constant in this case. If you use an integrating factor, you get to an expression that is almost similar to the form you derived in the original post.\n\nLast edited:\nPotatochip911\nI think expanding ##\\frac d{dt}(mv)## was unhelpful.\nGo back to ##mg= \\frac d{dt}(mv)## and substitute for m using m0 etc.\nBoth sides are directly integrable wrt t.\n$$mg = \\frac{d}{dt}(mv)$$\n$$d(mv) = mg\\cdot dt$$\n$$\\int_{t=0}^{t=t} d(mv) = g\\int_0^t(m_0+kt)dt$$\n$$mv-m_0v_0 = g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)$$\n$$v = \\frac{m_0v_0+g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)}{m_0+kt}$$\n\nTheir expression for velocity is so simplified in the paper I can't even tell if this is correct.\n\nApologies, but how has the $v$ appeared in the RHS?\nI have basically no idea how I derived anything in the original post. I don't even understand how I got this\n$$\\frac{d}{dt}(mv)=mg \\\\ \\int \\frac{d}{dt}(mv)dt=\\int mg dt$$\n\nDoes this part make sense to you?\n\nYou might want to think about integrating factors. The differential equation is of the form:\n$$\\frac{dv}{dt} + f(t) v = h(t)$$\nwhere $h(t)$ is a constant in this case. If you use an integrating factor, you get to an expression that is almost similar to the form you derived in the original post.\n\nI thought I couldn't use integrating factor here because the ##m## is actually ##m(t)## and it's in the denominator for the ##f(t)## function. I might be wrong I haven't done integrating factor in years.\n\nharuspex\nHomework Helper\nGold Member\n2020 Award\n$$mg = \\frac{d}{dt}(mv)$$\n$$d(mv) = mg\\cdot dt$$\n$$\\int_{t=0}^{t=t} d(mv) = g\\int_0^t(m_0+kt)dt$$\n$$mv-m_0v_0 = g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)$$\n$$v = \\frac{m_0v_0+g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)}{m_0+kt}$$\n\nTheir expression for velocity is so simplified in the paper I can't even tell if this is correct.\nThat all looks right, and you can quickly see the asymptotic behaviour is v=gt\/2.\nDoes this answer your question in post #11?\n\nPotatochip911\nI thought I couldn't use integrating factor here because the ##m## is actually ##m(t)## and it's in the denominator for the ##f(t)## function. I might be wrong I haven't done integrating factor in years.\n\nJust thought I would respond to this part for now. I believe you can use an integrating factor here.\n\nBackground on integrating factor (might be useful if you haven't seen it for a while; feel free to skip this section):\nWithout just jumping to the formula, the integrating factor can be thought of as the answer to the following question: \"what term do I need to multiply the equation by such that I can write it as a derivative of a product?\" I.e. if we have:\n$$\\frac{dv}{dt} + f(t){v} = h(t)$$ it would be much more convenient to write the LHS in a form that is more easily integrated (wrt. $t$). If we have integrating factor $P(t)$ and we multiply it through to get:\n$$P(t) \\frac{dv}{dt} + P(t)f(t){v} = h(t)P(t)$$\nwe now want the LHS to be expressed as $\\frac{d}{dt}(P(t)v(t))$. By using the product rule and comparing coefficients, we can see that $\\frac{dP(t)}{dt} = P(t)f(t)$. This can be solved to give the form of the integrating factor $P(t) = e^{ \\int f(t) dt }$\n\nTherefore, if we integrate the equation with respect to $t$:\n$$P(t)v(t) = \\int P(t)h(t) dt$$\n\nSpecific response to your question:\nSo we have $f(t) = \\frac{k}{m_0 + kt}$. Can that be integrated? (Hint: think about natural logarithms). Don't forget that the integrating factor is $P(t) = e^{ \\int f(t) dt }$\n\nOne final note:\nI hasten to add this as you have already been helped, but I just thought to let you know of another way of getting to the differential equation (it is my preferred approach when doing these types of questions). It is very similar to what you have written, but you can perhaps use it to double-check whether your ODE is correct in future problems. The whole principle here (as you know) is that Impulse = change in momentum. So we can draw a diagram of the mass at time $t$: it has mass $m$ and velocity $v$ (downwards). It has a weight $mg$ acting on it downwards. We can then draw an 'after' picture at time $\\delta t$ later (so at time $t + \\delta t$). It now mass mass $m + \\delta m$ (as it is accumulating mass) and has velocity $v + \\delta v$ (downwards). During the time $\\delta t$, an impulse equal to $mg \\delta t$ acted on the raindrop. If we resolve vertically downwards and write out impulse = change in momentum:\n$$mg \\delta t = (m + \\delta m)(v + \\delta v) - mv$$\nWe can then simplify, divide by $\\delta t$ and let $\\delta t$ tend to 0 to form the same ODE that you derived.\n\nPlease note that the 'before' and 'after' diagrams may look different for different types of problems (e.g. rocket burning fuel). While diagrams may differ, the underlying concepts are the same.\n\nHope that was useful. If not, let me know which parts could be more clear. Apologies if you already knew all of that, but perhaps it might be helpful to another reader.\n\nPotatochip911\nThat all looks right, and you can quickly see the asymptotic behaviour is v=gt\/2.\nDoes this answer your question in post #11?\nYes it does thanks.\n\nJust thought I would respond to this part for now. I believe you can use an integrating factor here.\nBackground on integrating factor (might be useful if you haven't seen it for a while; feel free to skip this section):\nWithout just jumping to the formula, the integrating factor can be thought of as the answer to the following question: \"what term do I need to multiply the equation by such that I can write it as a derivative of a product?\" I.e. if we have:\n$$\\frac{dv}{dt} + f(t){v} = h(t)$$ it would be much more convenient to write the LHS in a form that is more easily integrated (wrt. $t$). If we have integrating factor $P(t)$ and we multiply it through to get:\n$$P(t) \\frac{dv}{dt} + P(t)f(t){v} = h(t)P(t)$$\nwe now want the LHS to be expressed as $\\frac{d}{dt}(P(t)v(t))$. By using the product rule and comparing coefficients, we can see that $\\frac{dP(t)}{dt} = P(t)f(t)$. This can be solved to give the form of the integrating factor $P(t) = e^{ \\int f(t) dt }$\n\nTherefore, if we integrate the equation with respect to $t$:\n$$P(t)v(t) = \\int P(t)h(t) dt$$\n\nSpecific response to your question:\nSo we have $f(t) = \\frac{k}{m_0 + kt}$. Can that be integrated? (Hint: think about natural logarithms). Don't forget that the integrating factor is $P(t) = e^{ \\int f(t) dt }$\n\nInteresting for some reason I had it in my mind that they had to be polynomials.\n$$\\frac{dv}{dt}+\\frac{k}{m}v=g$$ $$\\ln P(t)=\\int \\frac{k}{m_0+kt}dt=\\ln{\\left (m_0+kt\\right )}+C$$ $$P(t)=e^C(m_0+kt)$$\n$$\\frac{d}{dt} ( v(m_0+kt)e^C ) = (m_0+kt)e^Cg$$\n$$v(m_0+kt)-v_0m_0 = g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)$$\n$$v = \\frac{v_0m_0+g(m_0t+kt^2\/2)}{m_0+kt}$$\nresulting in the same answer as from the previous method, nice.\nOne final note:\nI hasten to add this as you have already been helped, but I just thought to let you know of another way of getting to the differential equation (it is my preferred approach when doing these types of questions). It is very similar to what you have written, but you can perhaps use it to double-check whether your ODE is correct in future problems. The whole principle here (as you know) is that Impulse = change in momentum. So we can draw a diagram of the mass at time $t$: it has mass $m$ and velocity $v$ (downwards). It has a weight $mg$ acting on it downwards. We can then draw an 'after' picture at time $\\delta t$ later (so at time $t + \\delta t$). It now mass mass $m + \\delta m$ (as it is accumulating mass) and has velocity $v + \\delta v$ (downwards). During the time $\\delta t$, an impulse equal to $mg \\delta t$ acted on the raindrop. If we resolve vertically downwards and write out impulse = change in momentum:\n$$mg \\delta t = (m + \\delta m)(v + \\delta v) - mv$$\nWe can then simplify, divide by $\\delta t$ and let $\\delta t$ tend to 0 to form the same ODE that you derived.\n\nPlease note that the 'before' and 'after' diagrams may look different for different types of problems (e.g. rocket burning fuel). While diagrams may differ, the underlying concepts are the same.\n\nHope that was useful. If not, let me know which parts could be more clear. Apologies if you already knew all of that, but perhaps it might be helpful to another reader.\n\nI have seen this before but mostly forgotten about it, I will try to use this method in the future when possible.\n\nI also just realized the equations in the original post used to be separated in latex using \"\\ \\\" which no longer creates new lines, the ##v## in post #13 is actually at the start of a newline.\n\nMaster1022","date":"2021-04-21 18:29:40","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 2, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9196398854255676, \"perplexity\": 480.17914498600044}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-17\/segments\/1618039546945.85\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210421161025-20210421191025-00498.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Florence Mallinson1
F, #509081, b. 8 March 1962
Florence Mallinson was born on 8 March 1962.1 She is the daughter of Alastair Mallinson and Rosemary Harvey.2
Amelia Agnes Mallinson1
F, #509082, d. 2 May 1890
Amelia Agnes Mallinson was the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She died on 2 May 1890.1
Gertrude Mabel Mallinson1
F, #509083, d. 22 May 1969
Gertrude Mabel Mallinson was the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She married, firstly, Norman Healey Swallow.1 She married, secondly, Frederick Henry Harkness in 1921.1 She died on 22 May 1969.1
Her married name became Swallow.1 From 1921, her married name became Harkness.1
Norman Healey Swallow1
M, #509084, d. 7 October 1916
Norman Healey Swallow married Gertrude Mabel Mallinson, daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.1 He died on 7 October 1916.1
Daisy Florence Mallinson1
Daisy Florence Mallinson was the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She died on 27 January 1971, unmarried.1
Ethel Maudie Mallinson1
F, #509086, d. 14 February 1935
Ethel Maudie Mallinson was the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She married Herbert Frederick Green on 23 July 1912.1 She died on 14 February 1935.1
From 23 July 1912, her married name became Green.
Herbert Frederick Green1
Herbert Frederick Green married Ethel Maudie Mallinson, daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker, on 23 July 1912.1
Evangeline Dorothea Mallinson1
Evangeline Dorothea Mallinson is the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She married Philip Smith on 11 April 1916.1
From 11 April 1916, her married name became Smith.
Philip Smith1
M, #509089, d. December 1965
Philip Smith married Evangeline Dorothea Mallinson, daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker, on 11 April 1916.1 He died in December 1965.1
He was registered as a Licentiate, Royal College of Physicians, London (L.R.C.P.)1 He was registered as a Member, Royal College of Surgeons (M.R.C.S.)1 He lived at Kettering, Northamptonshire, England.1 He gained the rank of Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.1 He graduated with a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.)1 He was awarded the Military Cross (M.C.)1 He graduated with a Diploma of Public Health (D.P.H.)1 He graduated with a Bachelor of Surgery (B.S.)1
Gwyneth Elaine Mallinson1
F, #509090, d. 1968
Gwyneth Elaine Mallinson was the daughter of Sir William Mallinson, 1st Bt. and Amelia Louisa Tucker.2 She married Arthur Herbert Harkness on 11 October 1917.1 She died in 1968.1
From 11 October 1917, her married name became Harkness. | {
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Q: Predicting values of the multiple variables from GAM I have a dataset of metal concentrations taken from different river sites. I'm trying to predict the expected concentrations of metal B, C and D at given values of metal A
i.e. when metal A = 1 ug/L then metal B = ? ug/L, C = ?, D = ?
I'm using a GAM model as it can account for possible non-linear relationships.
My model is as follows:
library(mgcv)
library(tidymv)
#create the dataset
metalA <- sample(x = 0:1000, size = 5000, replace = TRUE)
metalB <- sample(x = 0:1000, size = 5000, replace = TRUE)
metalC <- sample(x = 0:1000, size = 5000, replace = TRUE)
metalD <- sample(x = 0:1000, size = 5000, replace = TRUE)
site <- stri_rand_strings(5000, 2)
mydata <- data.frame(metalA, metalB, metalC, metalD, site)
#the model
model <- gam(metalA ~ s(metalB) + s(metalC) + s(metalD) + random(site), data = mydata, method = "REML")
#check the results
gam.check(model)
#results summary
summary(model)
#plot
plot(model, residuals = TRUE)
visreg(model)
In reality, the concentration data I'm working with is quite heavily left skewed, and after adding in basis functions its more like:
model2<- gam(metalA~ s(metalB) + s(metalC, k=5) + s(metalD, k=7) + random(site), data = mydata, method = "REML")
My question is: How do I then generate predicted values for metalB, metalC and metalD at values of (say) 0.5, 2 & 10 for metalA?
I've tried using predict_gam() however it gave me the message Error: cannot allocate vector of size 2.1 Gb
predict_1 <- predict_gam(model)
the only way I've gotten predict_gam() to work was by creating multiple subset GAM models containing only 2 metals i.e.
modelB <- gam(metalB~ s(metalA) + random(site), data=mydata, method = "REML")
modelC <- gam(metalC~ s(metalA) + random(site), data=mydata, method = "REML")
modelD <- gam(metalD~ s(metalA) + random(site), data=mydata, method = "REML")
predict_B <- predict_gam(modelB)
predict_C <- predict_gam(modelC)
predict_D <- predict_gam(modelD)
...but even then I cant figure out how to extract the specific data from the output that I need i.e. value of B, C and D when A = 1.
Any help much appreciated!
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Ground Breaker Tana Douglas
Photograph by Lisa Johnson Rock Photographer.
Tana Douglas is known as the first woman roadie and got her start working Production in 1973 when Philippe Petit rigged a steel cable between the towers at the northern entrance to the Sydney Harbor Bridge. (Kathy Sander another roadie got her start in 1974 touring with Elton John). Without realizing it she had just done her first gig. This was followed by a meeting with a well-known Australian Tour manager Wane "Swampy" Jarvis, who piqued her interest in the production side of the Music Industry. This led to her first paying gig with a band called Fox, setting up and looking after their stage equipment known as the backline. After taking that job and relocating to Melbourne, an offer to work for a different band came along in the middle of 1974. This band was AC/DC. Throughout Tana's four-decade career she has worked in backline, sound, lights, logistics, production, and tour management.
At just fifteen, Tana had joined the circus that was rock 'n' roll and after taking the job with a young and upcoming band AC/DC, found herself on a fast track to a lifelong career. Her first job with AC/DC was to continue doing backline until she says that "it became clear that we really needed our own PA to help Bon (Scott) with his vocals. I was sent to pick it up from a local sound company called Strauss, Nova Sound. Not realizing that from that moment in time I would become their FoH Sound engineer. It wasn't so much a matter of volunteering for the position, it was what the band wanted. They trusted me and knew that I understood what sound they were looking for, which is very important. I had zero training. In those days in Australia, it was not uncommon to do 10, 12 or even 14 shows in a week. There was no time for training. I also had the dubious pleasure of operating their monitors, at the same time; through the FoH console. Not the ideal situation for a notoriously loud band."
The sound system Tana fetched was a 3-way system with A4 bins, JBL horns, and tweeters. Tana discovered that it was not cutting it and upgraded to a 4-way system with W Bins, A4's as midrange, and multi-cell horns and tweeters. The monitor system consisted of five fold-back wedges with dual speakers in each. The only advice she was given to running sound, was to keep the guitar volume down and it should be good. Tana says "we would do shows with other bands on the bill as we weren't headlining these larger shows in the beginning, so I would watch and try to learn as much as possible from people who obviously knew what they were doing and apply it to the shows where we used our PA."
The biggest challenge she faced with mixing for AC/DC was inadequate equipment and the sheer volume coming off the stage. Tana says that "as the PA grew in size so did the number of speaker cabinets on stage, for the guitars. As I was still relatively new to this whole thing, I didn't know enough to demand a system that would be capable of doing the job. We were restricted by the budget and size of venues to accommodate a larger PA. We also travelled with all the gear in the back of a bus. Not to mention I was only 16 years old."
Despite all this Tana learned some important lessons. One was that the equipment must be able to handle the job, so you can do your job. "If you are good you can get the most out of your system, but there is only so much a system can give, I made it work, but thinking back it would have been nice to have had at least twice the system. Would have made my life so much easier. Even with the restrictions both the band and the audience were happy with the sound I managed to get."
The 18 months Tana spent working with AC/DC ignited her passion for a life on the road but she realized she needed to find an environment where she could continue to learn. She took a job with a production company called ACT that specialized in International tours coming to Australia. Their crews were considered the best in Australia and Tana toured with artists Suzi Quatro, David Essex, Leo Sayer, Carlos Santana, Neil Diamond, and Status Quo.
Tana says "leaving AC/DC was a big step, a leap of faith that it would be the best move for me to grow and learn. I also wanted a team around me that I could become a part of and if I had those two things, the job I did at that time really didn't matter. The position they needed filled was for a lighting person, so I jumped. It was a complete change of direction which I felt was appropriate for this next phase of my life."
For the next several months she worked her ass off, watching, learning and growing. Tours in Australia typically last about a month and Tana did seven back to back tours working with some of the best international production personnel. Tana says she utilized the time wisely "I always asked about everything. How? What? Why? When? Where? something should be done. These questions make the difference between someone who knows how to set up a system and someone who knows how to operate a system. whether it is sound or lights. I think another important thing I learnt very early on was that for me to be accepted in this industry it was all about how I fitted in as a member of a crew, not how I stood out as a woman."
Tana would make her transition into lighting official by moving to the U.K., where she landed a job building a 360 lamp lighting rig for Status Quo and then spent the next four years touring with them. Tana would move over to TASCO and head up their lighting department working and touring with Ozzy, David Coverdale, Iggy Pop, The Who, Elton John to name a few. In 1983, Tana would move to the U.S. to work for the U.S. TASCO Division along with Delicate Productions and Light and Sound Design, continuing to work with Elton John, Men at Work, INXS, Little River Band and Johnny Halliday's Spectacle in Paris for 7 months.
Lighting appealed to the artistic side of Tana, she loved art in school and always enjoyed creating things and experimenting with color. It was also an exciting time to be involved in lighting, everything was changing so quickly. She says "we went from a couple of hydraulic light towers with 16 steel lamps a side to suspended truss configurations with hundreds of aluminum lighting fixtures, moving motors, truss spot operators, retractable set pieces, to the piece de resistance: the Vari-Lite. There was no turning back."
Thinking outside of the box when problems arise and need a quick resolution for live TV. TASCO Crew.
The first time Tana realized she had "made it" came when she was requested for The Who and Friends Roar In at Wembley Stadium in 1979. This was The Who's comeback show after the loss of Keith Moon and AC/DC was on the bill as well. The second time was when she was in charge of dimmers and control of the largest lighting rig ever built consisting of 3,000 par cans, 64 Vari-Lites, a dozen 10K Fresnels and all the moving parts including a giant fist with the performer, Johnny Halliday inside.
Tana remembers her time at Tasco "I loved my time with TASCO London. It was hard work and extremely long hours, new innovations, pulling all-nighters, in a freezing cold warehouse in time for the tour to start. What made it all worthwhile is I was given a position of authority which validated that all the hard work had been worth it. I have to say I loved the other people that worked for TASCO. It was a really good bunch headed up by Terry Price and Paul Newman at the time and made me feel a part of it all. That was always important to me. Growing up without any family to speak of, I needed that feeling of belonging and I found it there."
Focusing the rig between acts.
Tana loved Tasco, but after gaining custody of her son, Tana knew she had to make some changes in her career. She says " the blinding difference between men touring and women touring is children. I don't know if that will ever really change. Maybe now, there are laws in place on grounds for dismissal but when I was touring it was not something that was up for discussion. I had gained custody of my son, and that meant I needed to make changes to my career. Touring for 10 months of the year was no longer an option. So she moved into Logistics.
Working in logistics, Tana dealt with making the band's schedule work, creating carnets, and financial bonds for customs, freight forwarding to make sure the equipment arrives on time and in working condition. Dealing with artists' personal requests, such as when Alice Cooper forgot his snake and had to get it to London in time for his first show or when a bass player left his instrument at home in LA when the band flew to England to play Reading Festival. This was an instrument he insisted was too important to travel as cargo and required breaking into his house after warning the local police, retrieving instrument and getting on a plane to Reading in time to hand it to him on the side of the stage as the band was starting their set.
Many of her clients came from the crew people she had grown up with and had moved into Tour or Production Manager positions. At first, she was working for a company, but when the company went belly up, she started to handle the accounts on her own, starting her own company Network. During the ten years she worked in logistics, she handled accounts for Bad Religion, Tom Waites, Butthole Surfers, Billy Ray Cyrus, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Luther Vandross, En Vogue, Tool, Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam, Lenny Kravitz, Ice-T, Ice Cube. Henry Rollins, Carlos Santana and many more. Sadly she closed her company due to health reasons in 1985.
After her health recovered, she went into tour managing. Tana believes these things are a "natural progression if you have worked enough different parts of production over the years, then you should really know what it takes to be a successful tour manager. It wasn't something I had aspired to be and I only really worked with one band that was in development and while I enjoyed it, the band fell apart and I moved on to representing Bill Ward from Black Sabbath negotiating his reunion with Sabbath for their upcoming shows at the Birmingham NEC that were to be both filmed and recorded. That was fun and included flying Bill halfway around the world for a "chance" encounter with the promoter who was happy to have Bill on board and then the negotiations that ensued with Sharon Osbourne, who was not happy to have Bill on board. But that's a whole other story."
Tana now resides in Los Angeles, and has spent the past couple of years finishing a book called "LOUD". It is being published through HarperCollins and will be released on April 20, 2020. Tana is also involved with organizations called Crewcare and Support Act both based in Australia. The organizations focus on health and wellbeing for road crew. They sponsor and the annual "Roady4Roadies" that raises funds to help and support both musicians and crew members in times of difficulty. Both organizations are doing cutting edge research into the effects of life on the road. She is also working with The Arts Centre in Melbourne on a new project for their Rock Vault that will entail a series of panel discussions and individual interviews to be filmed, centered on the history of Production in the Australian Music Industry.
What do you like best about touring?
The music, of course, is what draws most of us in, but then there are the bonds that form with others on tour that are special. A good crew makes all the difference. I would tend to pick a tour by the crew, not the performer, as the crew is who you'll be living with for the next 12 months of your life, not the performer. Plus, a good crew doesn't work for a bad performer.
What do you like least?
I dealt with a lot of solitude being the only woman on a tour. I mean, there is always a group of people around, but interaction with 20 to 100 guys on a daily basis can get tricky when you are out there alone as a female, for extended amounts of time. What is acceptable behavior for a guy can be frowned upon for women.
How did you deal with that?
Not always well, sad to say. We all make mistakes in judgment. I guess what is important is we learn from them and hopefully don't keep making the same ones. At least, mix it up a little (laughing).
What is your favorite day off activity?
Swimming and horseback riding
What is your educational or training background
Did you find it hard to find people to train/teach you? Do you recommend a formal education or just learning on the job? or a combination?
Once I'd taken that leap of faith over to ACT way back in Australia with the likes of Wyn Milson, Peter Wilson, Curley Campbell, D'Arcy, Russell Kidner, Billy McCartney to name a few, it was like I'd found my tribe and to them, it was a bit like having a little sister (who could drink you under the table) but also keep up with them on the work front. Who doesn't want the best for their little sister? On the international side, I had the likes of Patrick Stansfield, Paul Newman, Chris "Smoother" Smythe as an early support system. I think also while I was obviously young, thankfully nobody figured out just how young I was. That may have changed things.
There were no options for schooling as there are now. How effective that is I am sure it depends on who is teaching the class. I hear that Kevin Lyman is teaching a class at USC. I'm sure that would be worth attending. I think though with any schooling it needs to be adapted to a real-life situation. You can be taught that something is hot, but until you feel just how hot it is, you can't appreciate what it is you are being told. In the touring world, it is different every day. You must be prepared to adapt to that, as does your equipment. Be flexible. There is no one way.
What if any obstacles or barriers have you faced?
It's never easy when you are going against the grain. It was a wilder time when I was starting out. There were no rules, there were no other women. I literally had to give as good as I got. There was resistance from some areas, but there was also a great deal of support from others, once they realized not only was I serious about doing this as a career, but I was also capable of doing the job better than most, there was a shift in how I was perceived. For me, the biggest obstacle was a personal one. Relationships never went well for me. Maybe it was because I was mostly in a supervisory position? Or as I say, "My picker is broken". Think long and hard before getting into a relationship, as you can't let a relationship come before the job you have been hired to do.
How have you dealt with them?
I tried to stay away from relationships, while likewise staying away from the group that is of the opinion that you shouldn't be there before they even meet you. Don't even bother with them. Prove yourself by example, by doing the job better than others. Don't complain, make it better. Choose your battles. There is no point in winning a battle if you lose the war.
Advice you have for other women and young women who wish to enter the field?
Focus on the details. Learn from every situation that arises. There will be many and they will all be different. Your success will rely on how you fit in as a crew member, not how you stand out as a woman. There is no such thing as a stupid question, as long as you learn from the answer. Embrace change, as there will be a lot of it. The friendships you make on the road will stay with you for your life, so be authentic and true to yourself.
Must have skills?
Think outside of the box. If you have done a course or some other type of schooling that is great but don't let it tether you. Every day is different on the road and things change in a moment. Be prepared and keep up. Always listen to advice and respect your crew.
What are your future goals
At this stage, I am interested in developing talent on both the artist side and the crew side. I have also started my second book.
Favorite gear?
I got to play with a Neve desk which at the time was a big deal. I was also lucky enough to be one of the first people to tour with the new AVOlites dimmers and consoles that changed the face of lighting.
Anything else you want to add or contribute
Where you start is rarely where you finish. Just because you start in one field doesn't mean you need to stay there. What we think we want isn't always what we need. By being willing to accept change you will end up where you were meant to be. It will be a journey that is not an easy one, but the rewards make it all worthwhile. Enjoy the world!
More on Tana
The SoundGirls Podcast – Tana Douglas: Our industry's first woman roadie
Tana Douglas on Roadie Free Radio
Loud The Book
Strategies for a Successful Career in Touring
Find More Profiles on The Five Percent
Profiles of Women in Audio
Recent Profiles
Sam Boone – Systems Engineer Greta Stromquist: Dialogue Editor and Associate Producer Annlie Huang: Music Editor for Television & Mix Engineer Kylie Grace Snyder – Forging her Own Path Kia Shavon: The Mix Artist
Other Profiles
Ali "AMAC" McGuire
SoundGirls Spotlight Grace Banks Recording Engineer
Annie Stoic – LD and Assistant Tour Manager for Joan Jett
Annie is currently the Lighting & Assistant Tour Manager for Joan Jett & the Blackhearts who just finished up touring with Heart and Cheap Trick. In addition to her Tour Managing position, she is guitarist for her all female band Jackknife Stiletto.
Traveling the Long Road – Karrie Keyes
Beginning her career in live sound at the age of 18, Karrie Keyes has been the monitor engineer for Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder for 27 years. She's also spent 10 years 1990-2000 as monitor engineer for Red Hot Chili Peppers and has mixed a very diverse list of additional artists. | {
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Home > News > Join the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and Prince's Trust 'TEAM' programme
Join the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and Prince's Trust 'TEAM' programme
During the current climate, it is widely recognised that young people have experienced difficulties, whether it is having limited opportunities to socialise, schooling, employment, security or are lacking the motivation and confidence needed to start to think about life after the pandemic. Now more than ever, it is vital to provide an opportunity for young people to gain some focus and a sense of purpose.
Starting on Monday 18 January, Kirklees College is working in partnership with West Yorkshire Fire and Service Rescue and the Prince's Trust to deliver a 12 week 'TEAM' programme to enable young people to build the skillset they need to achieve their goals.
The delivery of the programme has been adapted to include a blended approach of face-to-face and digital, with a physical folder of work to complete, offering a level 1 qualification in teamwork, employability and communication skills.
The schedule of activities, including a socially distanced community project, workplace skills, employability workshops and a teamwork week, aims to build resilience and motivation amongst young people.
The programme will cover digital and presentation skills, future career planning, supporting the community, health and wellbeing, personal development and self-management skills. By partly working alongside active firefighters on an operational fire station, these skills will be enhanced through practical activities and involvement in community safety, making this a unique and Covid-secure experience.
The taster day is taking place on Wednesday 13 January by appointment only at Dewsbury Fire Station or virtually via Microsoft Teams on Thursday 14 January.
If you would like to refer yourself or someone else to the programme, please contact Annabel Pugh at the Prince's Trust Team at West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service on 07816112636. | {
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} | 8,343 |
export default () => Promise.resolve(window.hljs ||
import(/* webpackChunkName: "highlight" */ '../../third-party/highlight.js').then(
result => result.default
));
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 795 |
{"url":"http:\/\/openstudy.com\/updates\/5578168ae4b0826b0eafe59d","text":"## anonymous one year ago You deposit \\$3000 in an account that pays 5% annual interest compounded continuously. What is the balance after 2 years?\n\n\u2022 This Question is Open\n1. anonymous\n\nY=3\u00d72 with exponent \u00d7-3\n\n2. anonymous\n\nY=(3\\4)exponent \u00d7\n\n3. anonymous\n\nY=(3\\4)exponent \u00d7\n\n4. Miracrown\n\nyou are absolutely right, but then why did you use 3\/4?\n\n5. Miracrown\n\n6. Miracrown\n\nso what is going to be the principal in this case?\n\n7. Miracrown\n\nP = 3000 r = 5% t = 2 Therefore ... $A = 3000e^{0.05\\times2}$\n\n8. Miracrown\n\nSolve for a","date":"2017-01-16 17:49:54","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.4542092978954315, \"perplexity\": 3552.175256481055}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-04\/segments\/1484560279224.13\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00270-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: Python make plot I have this code of a mortgage calculator. I would like to make this code into a plot using Matplotlib. The values I want is "Principal Paid" and "Interest Paid" as a line, showing the dollars on x and the years/dates on the y. I'm not sure how to start since I have input values, can someone help?
import pandas as pd
import numpy_financial as npf
from datetime import date
def fixed_rate_mortgage(interest: float, years: int, payments_year: int, mortgage: int, start_date: str):
rng = pd.date_range(start_date, periods=years * payments_year, freq='MS')
rng.name = "Payment Date"
df = pd.DataFrame(index=rng, columns=['Payment', 'Principal Paid', 'Interest Paid', 'Ending Balance'], dtype='float')
df.reset_index(inplace=True)
df.index += 1
df.index.name = "Period"
df["Payment"] = -1 * npf.pmt(interest/12, years*payments_year,mortgage)
df["Interest Paid"] = -1 * npf.ipmt(interest/payments_year, df.index, years*payments_year,mortgage)
df["Principal Paid"] = -1 * npf.ppmt(interest/payments_year, df.index, years*payments_year,mortgage)
df["Ending Balance"] = 0
df.loc[1, "Ending Balance"] = mortgage - df.loc[1, "Principal Paid"]
df = df.round(2)
df['Ending Balance'] = mortgage - df['Principal Paid'].cumsum()
df[df['Ending Balance'] < 0] = 0
return df
payments_year = 12
years = input("Write how many years \n")
years = float(years)
interest = input("Write the interest \n")
interest = float(interest)
loan = input("Write the amount you want to loan \n")
loan = float(loan)
start_date = input("What is the starte date, put it in YYYY-MM-DD format")
year, month, day = map(int, start_date.split("-"))
start_date = date(year, month, day)
fixed_rate_mortgage(interest, years, payments_year, loan, start_date)
A: Assuming that the df returned by fixed_rate_mortgage function is correct, the following code can be used as a starting point to plot the data frame using matplotlib.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x1 = df['Principal Paid']
x2 = df['Interest Paid']
y = df['Payment Date']
plt.plot(x1,y,label="Principal Paid")
plt.plot(x2,y,label="Interest Paid")
plt.legend()
plt.show()
You can further customise the plot by referring to matplotlib documentation.
| {
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} | 7,204 |
Vondeling Venue and St Clement chapel are located on the working wine farm Vondeling in the Voor Paardeberg wine region of Paarl. Vondeling is on "the road less travelled" and offers true country hospitality and simplicity.
The fairy tale like chapel, St Clement offers old world charm combined with modern simplicity. Locally crafted stained glass windows, thatch roof, high copper steeple and wooden pews make this a very unique place to exchange vows.
The chapel is very conveniently situated adjacent to the reception area - so the transition from ceremony to reception is seamless. Vondeling can host a maximum of 100 guests inside the classical function venue. Cape heritage combined with minimal modern touches create a beautiful elegant space in which the most beautiful weddings are hosted.
Exclusivity is guaranteed as we only host one wedding on a weekend.
The Farmhouse, situated on the Vondeling farm accross the road from the venue, sleeps 14 guests in 7 en-suite bedrooms. This immaculately restored Cape Dutch homestead dates back to the 1700's and boasts an array of acivities. 20m swimming pool adjacent to a spacious under cover braai (BBQ) area enures festive gatherings. Flood-lit tennis court, croquet and boulles will keep the muscles going and peaceful vineyard walks at sunset sets the mood for a relaxing evening. The beautifully appointed bedrooms are ideal for exquisite wedding photography. Inside areas include a fully equipped large farm kitchen, dining room, lounge with fireplace and a games room with snooker table and satelite tv. The house also has free wi-fi.
The Farmhouse is serviced daily and a very substantial breakfast is offered on every morning of your stay.
Please contact Mariaan Harris on info@vondelingwines.co.za or 021-8698339 for more information.
There are currently no reviews for Vondeling yet.
Vondeling details have been saved to your shortlist. | {
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} | 6,593 |
layout: page
title: Other-Markdown-Tools
---
If you would like a tool added to this list [email me](mailto:pritchard.adam@gmail.com).
A bigger list of tools (that probably negates the need for this page) can be found at [github.com/writekit/awesome-markdown](https://github.com/writekit/awesome-markdown).
## Tools
### Editors
* [StackEdit](https://stackedit.io): In-browser MD document editor
* [Minimalist Online Markdown Editor](http://markdown.pioul.fr/)
* [Mou](http://25.io/mou/): Desktop editor for OS X
## Libraries
### JavaScript
* [Marked](https://github.com/chjj/marked)
* [Remarkable](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable)
* [PageDown](https://code.google.com/p/pagedown/) (and [PageDown Extra](https://github.com/jmcmanus/pagedown-extra))
* [markdown-it](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it)
* [Gitdown](https://github.com/gajus/gitdown): GitHub markdown preprocessor
* [reMarked.js](https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js): HTML-to-Markdown processor
* [Kramed](https://github.com/GitbookIO/kramed): Fork of Marked | {
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} | 5,955 |
Q: Setting Event to Expire Using Custom Metabox Working on a real estate website and setting Open House dates and times using drop downs in a Custom Meta Box. Example drop down below:
<select name="sale_listing_open_house1_start_day" id="sale_listing_open_house1_start_day">
<option value="monday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Monday' ); ?>>Monday</option>
<option value="tuesday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Tuesday' ); ?>>Tuesday</option>
<option value="wednesday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Wednesday' ); ?>>Wednesday</option>
<option value="thursday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Thursday' ); ?>>Thursday</option>
<option value="friday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Friday' ); ?>>Friday</option>
<option value="saturday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Saturday' ); ?>>Saturday</option>
<option value="sunday" <?php selected( $selected, 'Sunday' ); ?>>Sunday</option>
</select>
Let's say there's a drop down for the end day, month, date and time ... Is there any way to format this so that the Open House will expire once the date/time has passed what was specified in the drop down?
A: Have a look at the Post Expirator plugin.
The Post Expirator plugin allows the user to set expiration dates for both posts and pages. There is a configuration option page in the plugins area that will allow you to seperataly control whether or not posts/pages are either deleted or changed to draft status.
A: I am not sure to clearly understand what you want but why won't you use a Javascript timer to "lock" it after a certain time is passed?
Otherwise, you'll have to use Database/PHP and check the expiration date. I do not see how you can do otherwise ( with the given information ).
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 9,840 |
import traverse from './traverse.js';
export default dsl;
Object.assign(dsl, {
// TODO: this is crazy, but I'm doing this for the time being because I
// don't want to think about boring html escaping.
html: dsl,
traverse
});
function dsl(strings, ...values) {
return values.map((value, i) => {
if ('function' === typeof value) {
value = value();
}
return strings[i] + value;
}).join("");
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 5,945 |
Lethbridge ist der Name von:
Lethbridge, Stadt im Süden der kanadischen Provinz Alberta
Lethbridge Motor Car Co., kanadischer Hersteller von Automobilen
Lethbridge ist der Familienname folgender Personen:
Lucy Lethbridge (* 1963), britische Schriftstellerin
Rob Lethbridge (* 1953), australischer Zehnkämpfer und Speerwerfer
Thomas Charles Lethbridge (1901–1971), britischer Forschungsreisender, Autor und Archäologe
William Lethbridge (1825–1901), Namensgeber der Stadt Lethbridge
Christopher Lethbridge (Cricketspielerer) (* 1961), englischer Cricketspielerer
Grace Marguerite Lethbridge Geburtsname von Grace Marguerite Hay Drummond-Hay (1895–1946), die erste Frau, die die Erde im Luftschiff umrundete
Julian Lethbridge (* 1947), britischer Maler
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Figur aus Doctor Who | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 107 |
Q: Issues using Active Directory in 2010 after installing Visual Studio 2012 I recently installed 2012 on my developer box, and a coworker did as well (in a team of 8). Only the 2 of us noticed almost immediately an issue running our existing application using 2010. Specifically the error we get during run-time is:
Information about the domain could not be retrieved (1355).
Using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.Principal.FindByIdentity()
Like I said, this issue only occurs for us 2 that have installed 2012, noone else on the team has this problem. We've searched high and low and only found threads discussing the same concept (that the problem occurred after installing 2012).
At this point, I'm not even sure uninstalling 2012 will fix the problem (as the damage is probably already done) and unfortunately no System Restore points exist for me for some reason?!
A: Not an experience with VS 2012, but for me it's a problem of DNS resolution. have you got a DNS configured on the computer, is your computer present on the DNS, does the reverse DNS setuped.
For your test try to fill your local C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts with the IP and names your code try to join.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,723 |
In the most recent issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, the article "Making Big Bets for Social Change" opens with the story of how, in the late 1990s, the founders of the Gap, Don and Doris Fisher, committed US$15 million to improve public education in the United States through the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)—an amount that was approximately three times KIPP's annual revenue at the time. Today, KIPP is educating more than 70,000 students in 183 schools across the U.S., and 82 percent of KIPP alumni have gone to college. Now that was a big bet that paid off in spades.
In fact, late last year, I started noticing that "big bets" were popping up all over the place. The Ford Foundation committed US$500 million to fight inequality, while Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, and other billionaires united to create and fund the Breakthrough Energy Coalition to invest in clean energy. I read David Gelles' excellent New York Times article about Unilever's full-on commitment to sustainability, which was published just before COP21 in Paris, where governments, corporations, and civil society groups convened to take an important and powerful stance to combat climate change. And with the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, we are at an exciting turning point to potentially end poverty, hunger, and inequality.
We know that the challenges ahead in building a sustainable future are immense and require collaborative, creative thinking from all sectors of society. And we also know that we won't achieve these goals unless we think big—and think bold.
Bold thinking doesn't necessarily always come easily to those of us working on social change issues. We may feel constrained by financial resources, as we work to deliver on global programs of the utmost importance with limited budgets. We suffer at times from the "we've tried that, and it didn't work" school of thinking—as many of the challenges we work on have existed for decades.
We hope you will join us in New York from November 1-3 at BSR16 to help us answer that powerful—and empowering—question. What if we had all of the resources at our disposal to create social equality, fight climate change, and create a sustainable future? What if we successfully collaborated across sectors, industries, and geographies to solve these challenges?
At BSR16, we'll hear compelling stories from companies, foundations, big thinkers, and creative doers who have made big bets in the service of building a better world. We look forward to welcoming you there for a week of networking, learning, and celebrating. As the ancient Roman poet Virgil noted, "Fortune favors the bold." This year in New York, we'll make sure that we have fortune on our side. | {
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Q: UPDATE column if column is greater than a value I have a table with these columns
*
*proxy_id (primary key)
*proxy (IP of a proxy)
*current_requests (number of current requests the proxy has handled since its last_cool_down)
*total_requests (number of requests this proxy has fulfilled in its lifetime)
*last_used (datetime of last time this proxy was used)
*last_cool_down (datetime of last time this proxy was on cooldown)
After I have used a proxy I run this command (obviously with the current date and time, but we will assume the current datetime is 2020-04-28 13:10:03)
UPDATE proxy_table
SET
current_requests = current_requests + 1,
total_requests = total_requests + 1,
last_used = '2020-04-28 13:10:03',
last_cool_down = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
WHERE proxy_id = 1
My issue is I must ALWAYS update current_requests and last_used no matter what. However, in the above code, it doesn't consider this condition. If current_requests + 1 == 20, then current_requests = 0 and last_cool_down = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'. How can I do this?
So essentially something like this
UPDATE proxy_table
if (current_requests + 1 == 20) {
SET current_requests = 0;
SET last_cool_down = '2020-04-28 13:10:03';
else {
SET current_requests = current_requests + 1;
}
SET total_requests = total_requests + 1;
SET last_used = '2020-04-28 13:10:03';
WHERE proxy_id = 1;
I want to do this in one sql statement, rather than running 2 statements. My attempt at this didn't work:
UPDATE proxy_table
SET
CASE
WHEN current_requests + 1 = 20
THEN current_requests = 0, last_cool_down = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
ELSE current_requests = current_requests + 1
total_requests = total_requests + 1,
last_used = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
WHERE
proxy_id = 1
A: You can use CASE expressions to set the column values dependent on the current value of current_requests:
UPDATE proxy_table
SET
last_cool_down = CASE WHEN current_requests = 19 THEN '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
ELSE last_cool_down
END,
current_requests = CASE WHEN current_requests = 19 THEN 0
ELSE current_requests + 1
END,
total_requests = total_requests + 1,
last_used = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
WHERE proxy_id = 1
Demo on dbfiddle
A: MySql has this special feature to use the changed column values in expressions of the UPDATE statement, so the order of the assignments must be like this:
UPDATE proxy_table
SET last_cool_down = CASE WHEN current_requests + 1 = 20 THEN '2020-04-28 13:10:03' ELSE last_cool_down END,
current_requests = CASE WHEN current_requests + 1 = 20 THEN 0 ELSE current_requests + 1 END,
total_requests = total_requests + 1,
last_used = '2020-04-28 13:10:03'
WHERE proxy_id = 1
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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Matsushita Fiscal Q1 Results In Steep Loss
By Jeff Malester ⋅ Published: August 6, 2001
Severely impacted by setbacks in sales of mobile communications equipment, such as cellular phones, and weaker demand for core consumer electronics products, Matsushita Electric Industrial reported a net loss of $156.4 million in its fiscal first quarter, compared with net income of $75.8 million in the year-ago first quarter.
Adverse effects from global price competition, which were not fully offset by Matsushita's manufacturing cost reductions, led to an operating loss of $312 million in the first three months, compared with an operating profit of $171 million in the same quarter last year. The loss is said to be the company's first-ever quarterly setback.
Consolidated group sales in the first quarter moved down 6 percent to $13.51 billion, compared with $14.29 billion in the year-ago three months.
Growth in televisions and DVD-related equipment helped push sales of video and audio equipment up 3 percent in the fiscal first quarter ended June 30, to $3.2 billion, from $3.1 billion in the same quarter last year.
These products are part of Matsushita's new AVC Networks segment, which reported a 2 percent sales decline, to $7.66 billion, in the first three months, compared with $7.81 billion in the same three months in 2000.
Within the AVC Networks' information and communications equipment category, CD-R/RW drives and car A/V equipment recorded sales increases. However, setbacks in sales of mobile communications equipment, including cellular phones, led to a 5 percent overall sales decrease in the information and communications equipment category, hitting $4.5 billion, compared with $4.7 billion in the year-ago three months.
Faced with sputtering global demand, Matsushita reported that overseas sales were slow during the first three months, dipping 6 percent to $6.86 billion, compared with $7.31 billion in the year-ago three months.
Overseas sales of video and audio equipment within the AVC Networks segment increased 4 percent to $2.2 billion, said Matsushita. The company also pointed out that the U.S. economic slowdown had an adverse impact on the Asian and European economies.
In its forecast for the first half of fiscal 2002, Matsushita assumes that current severe business conditions will continue through its second fiscal quarter, due to growing uncertainty about the global economic outlook.
The company now expects six-month fiscal sales on a consolidated group basis to drop 10 percent, compared with the same period last year. The company said sales would be about $19.2 billion, compared with its late April forecast of $20.9 billion.
Net income for the fiscal six months also is expected to show a large decrease, resulting in an estimated net loss of about $362.1 million. The previous forecast called for net income of $72.5 million.
Matsushita said it might revise its previously announced annual sales and earnings forecasts for fiscal 2002 at a later date, pending further review and monitoring of developments in external and business conditions.
By By Jeff Malester
Sony, Matsushita Report Fiscal Year Results
Sony Reports Higher Fiscal Q1 Net Loss
Matsushita Reports A/V Sales Increased 19% During Fiscal Q1
hhgregg Posts $5.7M Loss In Fiscal Q1.
Sony Posts Fiscal Q1 Lower Sales, Loss
Good Guys Loss Widens in Fiscal Q1
Matsushita Fiscal Q1 Operating Profit Up 48%
Good Guys Fiscal Q1 Loss Nearly Doubles
Dell Cuts 10% Of Workforce, Reports Fiscal Q1 Results
Pioneer Reports 28% Fiscal Year Net Loss | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,377 |
Tag: Black History Month
Posted in Black History, Faces Of Our History, Uncategorized, women
Zay's Art Class
Posted on February 4, 2021 by iamsunnyd
Today in art class my son heard about Alma Thomas who was a expressionist artist. We did our play on one of her paintings.
If you would like to find out more about her, please click here
I love when they teach kids about different people in history!!
Image• Posted on February 25, 2018 February 23, 2018 by iamsunnyd
Posted in Black History, Faces Of Our History, music, Thoughts
Faces of Our History: Maxwell Roach
Posted on February 23, 2018 February 23, 2018 by iamsunnyd
Maxwell Roach was born to Alphonse and Cressie Roach on January 10, 1924 in Pasquotank County, North Carolina. Max's mother was a gospel singer, so music was always in his home growing up.
Max started playing the bugle in parade orchestras very young, it wasn't until he was 10 years old that he started playing the drum for in gospel bands. At age 18, fresh out of school he was called upon to fill in for Sonny Greer who worked with the Duke Ellington orchestra. From there he started playing in the jazz clubs. Max landed his 1st professional recording on December 1943, he worked with Coleman Hawkins.
Max was known for his bebop style of play. He played alongside many of the major names in jazz, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis and Coleman Hawkins.
Max furthered his knowledge by studying classical percussion at the Manhattan School of Music in 1950 to 1953. In 1952, Max and Charles Mingus founded Debut Records releasing a record on May 15, 1953, known as "Jazz at Massey Hall". Max also released "Percussion Discussion".
Max musical talents allowed him to present to solo concerts, proving the he could satisfy an audience on his own merit. This opened the door for many opportunities like recording a duet with the oration by Dr. Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream". Max also wrote music for theater, he was known for working with Sam Shepard.
Max also worked with Hip Hop Artist Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. Max shared that there was a direct link between the two. The expression of these young black artists and the art form in which he had pursued his whole life.
Max was given the MacArthur Foundation grant in 1988. He also was recognized and awarded for his many contributions to music. Max was also elected to the International Percussive Art Society Hall. In 1986, London name a park in Brixton after him which he went do to officially open it. In 2009, he was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.
On August 16, 2007 Maxwell Roach passed away in Manhattan. He was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery, in The Bronx, New York City.
Posted in Black History, Black Lives Matter, opinions, Thoughts, Uncategorized
Is Black History Month Necessary?
Posted on February 17, 2018 by iamsunnyd
Posted in Black History, Faces Of Our History
Faces of Our History: John S. Rock
John S. Rock was born to free African American parents John and Maria in Salem, New Jersey on October 13, 1825.
Although attending school in his formative years was rare for African American children, his parents pushed him to focus on his education. John did exactly what his parents required him and earned enough to allow him to become a teacher. In 1844, he landed a job in a Salem class from where he would continue for four years.
John had an amazing work ethic, so much so he got the attention of fellow teachers. He began teacher classes longer and offered private tutor classes. Dr. Shaw and Dr. Gibson, two distinguished medical doctors taught him all they knew about medicine. John started his apprenticeship, to that he could gaining the appropriate medical training to pursue his career. In 1848, John applied to medical school but was denied due to his race.
In 1849, John transferred to a dentistry and started his apprenticeship under Dr. Harber who had recently opened a dental practice in Philadelphia in 1850. A year after he was awarded a medal for his work on a set of silver dentures. John applied to American Medical College in Philadelphia and was admitted. In 1852, he graduated becoming the f1st African American earn a degree in medicine.
John was proud of his accomplishments, at the age of 27 he had established himself and was well-respected as a teacher, dentist, and physician.
John was also known as a passionate abolitionist and civil rights leader. John became a part of the national Equal Rights League, along with many other famous abolitionist including Fredrick Douglass, Henry H. Garnet and many others.
John is known for coining the phrase "Black is Beautiful" during a speech in March 1858 at Faneuil Hall. It was later said that although he did not speak those exact works, rather saying something similar like "the beautiful, rich color of the negro".
In 1856, John traveled to Paris seeking medical attention after being denied a passport. Upon his return doctor's orders stated that he needed to cut his workload to remain healthy. During this time, he decided to study law. John passed and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. He began to work even harder for the rights of African Americans.
John felt as though he was not making any head way for his fellow African Americans and strive to achieve another level in which he could make more of an impact. February 1, 1865, congress approved the 13th Amendment ending slavery. Charles Sumner put forth a motion that made John the 1st African American to be admitted to the bar of the US Supreme Court and also the 1st African American to be received on the floor the US House of Representatives.
The Civil Rights Acts which enforced the 13th Amendment was passed on April 9, 1866. John was excited and happy, but shortly after fell ill. On December 3, 1866 he passed away in his mother home at the age of 41. He was laid to rest and buried in Everett's Woodlawn Cemetery. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 8,556 |
È conosciuto con il soprannome "The Thrill from West Hill". Paul Tracy fece un test con la Benetton all'Estoril nel 1994, riuscendo a girare più veloce dei piloti JJ Lehto e Jos Verstappen, rispettivamente seconda guida e collaudatore Benetton. Il pilota canadese è stato solamente 7 decimi di secondo più lento della pole di Gerhard Berger, nonostante questo Flavio Briatore offrì un contratto con poche garanzie per la stagione 1995, perciò Tracy decise di rimanere in Formula CART.
Risultati in CART/Champ Car
1991: 21º
1992: 12º
1993: 3º, 5 vittorie
1994: 3º, 3 vittorie
1995: 6º, 2 vittorie
1996: 13º
1997: 5º, 3 vittorie
1998: 13º
1999: 3º, 2 vittorie
2000: 5º, 3 vittorie
2001: 14º
2002: 11º, 1 vittoria
2003: Campione (su Lola B03/00), 7 vittorie
2004: 4º, 2 vittorie
2005: 3º, 2 vittorie
2006: 7º
2007: 11º, 1 vittoria
Altri progetti
Collegamenti esterni
Piloti della Champ Car
Piloti della IRL | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,067 |
The State Senate is in session for 2013 but will not meet again in Columbia until April 9. I hope that you find this update helpful and informative. If I can help you with an issue, please let me know.
SRS – Workforce Impacts: This issue will affect 2,000 workers with reducedhours and a 20% reduction in pay and 150 workers with furloughs with no pay. Ourlocal legislative delegation continues to tell the members of our congressional delegationabout the importance of heading off the reductions in work hours and furloughs. Most families cannot sustain a twenty percent reduction in pay for an extended period oftime with little advance notice. The Department of Energy has advised us that budget committees in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate have to provide approval to allow the transfer of funds at SRS which is expected to alleviate the need for the coming furloughs. Consideration of such approval cannot occur until sometime in April because of the federal budget timelines.
Experian Credit Monitoring Deadline: This coming Sunday, March 31, 2013 is the deadline for taxpayers to sign up for protection and unlimited fraud resolution. 1.4 Million taxpayers have done so as of last week. Individuals should enroll with ProtectMyID by visiting www.protectmyid.com/scdor and entering the code "SCDOR123" or by calling 1-866-578-5422. If you have problems or questions, call the Department of Revenue's Data Breach Assistance Team at (803) 898-7638.
Deadline to Enroll Dependents: The deadline to enroll minor dependents, whose social security numbers may have been compromised, in Experian's Family Secure plan is May 31, 2013. Individuals must enroll with ProtectMyID by March 31 to be eligible to enroll any minor dependents with Family Secure by the May 31 deadline.
Experian Family Secure — To see those, go here.
How to Place a Security Freeze — To see how to place a security freeze, go here.
The full Senate will consider the bill when the Senate returns the week of April 9.
Early Voting: The Senate gave third reading to the early voting bill on Wednesday. The bill now heads to the House where changes are expected.
Concealed Weapons Permit: Last week, the Senate set for special order the legislation (S.308) allowing concealed weapons permit (CWP) holders to carry their handgun into a restaurant which serves alcohol as long as the permit holder does not consume any alcohol while there. Restaurants have the option to post a sign not allowing concealable weapons on the premises; if that is done, then CWP holders cannot carry legally into such restaurants. The bill has stiff penalties for violating including revocation of the concealed weapons permit and a zero tolerance threshold for alcohol consumption. The full Senate will consider the bill when the Senate returns to session on April 9.
Streamlining DHEC Permit Process: Last week, the S.C. Department of Health andEnvironmental Control unveiled Permit Central — a new initiative that simplifies the process for obtaining health and environmental permits. Permit Central consists of a series of customer service tools that provide applicants with information about permits in plain, helpful language. To learn more about Permit Central or to use its interactive features, visit here.
"Read to Succeed" Legislation Filed: Several constituents asked about this bill after I wrote about it last week. The legislation is modeled after an initiative implemented in Florida. The program would screen children for readiness in 4K and 5K to identify potential learning barriers; provide intensive in-class and supplemental reading instruction; revise in-service requirements concerning teaching reading skills; and, beginning in the 2015-2016 school year, retain 3rd graders who cannot read on grade level unless they meet an exemption. The bill calls for moving a portion of the $6 million earmarked for reading improvement under the Education Improvement Act to the "Read to Succeed" program.
Volunteers Needed – Prevent High School Dropouts: The "Choices" program is a local program being used in Aiken County middle schools with eighth graders to encourage more children to finish high school. Several local businesses and individuals have volunteered their time. The program needs more volunteers. If you are willing to volunteer, please email Debbie Hubbard at dhubbard@aiken.k12.sc.us or call her at 593-7300. To learn more, go here.
Remember to Vote Today: If you live in County Council District 6, please remember to vote today in the special election for Aiken County Council.
Meeting with Students: Last Friday, I visited with 9th graders from all of the area's public high schools. The students are part of Junior Leadership Aiken County. Yesterday, I joined Senator Shane Massey and Representatives Bill Taylor and Don Wells in meeting with student leaders from USC Aiken. Notably, both sets of students recognized the connection between high school dropout prevention and improving our state.
Congratulations to John Stewart of Bridgestone!: Last week, the SC Department of Commerce and Governor Haley recognized John Stewart, the plant manager for Bridgestone's PSR facility, as Aiken county's economic development ambassador of the year. He is Chair elect of the Aiken Technical College Foundation Board as well as a member of the Aiken County Manufacturers Council.
Congratulations to USC Aiken Men's Basketball!: Last week, the USCA Men's Basketball team won the Southeast Regional Championship to qualify for the Elite Eight in the NCAA Division II basketball tournament. They play again this Thursday in Louisville, Kentucky.
Tom Young's Website: My website can be reached at www.senatortomyoung.com.There are links to a variety of constituent services; the status of sponsored bills; and roll call votes. Please add my web site as a bookmark on your computer.
Q: Who may have been affected by the SC DOR security breach?
A: Individual taxpayers, their dependents, and businesses who have filed a South Carolina tax return since 1998 to the present may have been affected.
Q: What type of personal information may have been exposed?
A: While the investigation is still ongoing, South Carolina taxpayer's Social Security Numbers, debit card numbers, credit card numbers, and information that would be found on the front of a check like bank account and routing numbers may have been exposed.
Q: What should you do if you have filed a SC tax return since 1998 to the present?
Option One: Sign up online.
Go to www.protectmyid.com/scdor and use the activation code: SCDOR123 to initiate the registration process. All future notices from Experian® will be sent to you by email.
Only one email address may be associated with one registration for ProtectMyID™.
Option Two: Call the Experian® Call Center.
Call 1-866-578-5422 to complete the process with a live agent. You may choose to have all future notices from Experian® sent to you by postal mail or email.
If a taxpayer has no access to the internet, does not have a working email address, or if there is another reason why he or she cannot access the internet, then he or she must call the Experian® Call Center.
Q: What are the hours of operation for the Experian® Call Center?
Q: What benefits will a taxpayer receive after registering with ProtectMyID™?
Credit Report: You will get a free copy of your Experian® credit report.
Daily Credit Monitoring: You will receive alerts regarding any suspicious activity, including new inquiries, newly opened accounts, delinquencies, or medical collections found on your Experian®, Equifax® and TransUnion® credit reports for one year.
Identity Theft Resolution: If you have been a victim of identity theft, you will be assigned a dedicated, U.S.- based Experian® Identity Theft Resolution Agent who will walk you through the fraud resolution process from start to finish.
Identity Theft Insurance: If you have been a victim of identity theft, you will immediately be covered by a $1 million insurance policy that can help you cover certain costs, including lost wages, private investigator fees, and unauthorized electronic fund transfers for one year.
ExtendCARE: You will get full access to personalized assistance from a highly-trained Fraud Resolution Agent even after the initial one year ProtectMyID™ membership expires.
Q: Is there a deadline to register with ProtectMyID™?
A: January 31, 2013 is the deadline to register for one year of identity theft protection with ProtectMyID™.
Q: How much does it cost to register with ProtectMyID™?
A: No fee is charged to the enrollee to register with ProtectMyID™ for the first year.
Q: How will someone be contacted who has filed a tax return since 1998 to the present in SC and no longer lives in the state?
A: Notice will be sent to them by standard U.S. mail.
Even though your minor dependent may not have a credit history, you may enroll them for identify theft protection. All individuals under the age of 18 must be enrolled by one parent or guardian. A parent or guardian will be notified several weeks after registration when Family Secure™ enrollment has opened by postal mail or email.
Minors are individuals under the age of 18.
Dependents are individuals who are claimed as dependents for tax filing purposes.
Q: Have minors' Social Security Numbers been exposed?
A: Social Security Numbers of minors and/or dependents may have been exposed.
Q: How do I enroll a minor for Family Secure™ coverage?
Step One: A minor's parent or guardian must first enroll with ProtectMyID™. Only one parent or guardian may enroll the minor.
Step Two: The parent or guardian, who enrolled in ProtectMyID™, will receive a letter or email explaining how to enroll minor dependents in the Family Secure™ plan.
Step Three: The parent or guardian, who enrolled in ProtectMyID™, will then enroll minor dependents in the Family Secure™ plan.
Q: After being enrolled as a minor in the Family Secure™ plan, what should I do when I turn 18 years old or begin to file tax returns?
A: Call Experian® for assistance 1-866-578-5422.
Q: What are the benefits of Family Secure™ coverage?
A: The primary benefit that Family Secure™ offers is monitoring the identity (primarily the SSN) of the minor for one year, even if the minor has no credit report. Once registered, in the event a child does not have a credit file, if any credit, loan or similar account is opened with that information, Experian® will alert the parent or guardian. Details of the alerts on minors are not released unless or until the parent or guardian authenticates themselves with Experian® as the parent or guardian of the minor.
Family Secure™ coverage is for one adult and any number of minors. (Five minors can be enrolled via the website. For more than five, the customer must call Experian®). The adult coverage includes a $2 million product guarantee covering the whole family, Score Tracker and Fraud Resolution.
Minors receive monthly monitoring for existence of a minor's credit report, and if a credit report is found, then Experian® monitors for any changes to that report.
Q: What if I file joint tax returns or have joint banking and credit accounts with my spouse?
A: Every individual with a Social Security Number should register with ProtectMyID™ separately, because credit histories are tied to individual's Social Security Numbers.
Q: Will my deceased family members be at risk?
A: It is not necessary to sign the deceased up for ProtectMyID. However, you should notify all three credit bureaus (Experian®, Equifax® and TransUnion®).
Q: How do I protect an adult who is a dependent and/or is disabled?
A: The individual charged with the legal authority to assist a dependent adult filing taxes can enroll the dependent adult with ProtectMyID™ as long as that individual provides proper documentation to Experian®.
Q: What if I serve in the military and filed taxes in South Carolina since 1998 to the present?
A: The State of South Carolina will work with the U.S. Department of Defense to identify and notify all military personnel who have filed South Carolina taxes since 1998 to the present.
Q: What should I do if I am a business owner?
A: South Carolina business owners are being offered two free products. Businesses have the opportunity to enroll with both Dun & Bradstreet and Experian® Business Credit AdvantageSM.
Q: What type of business information may have been exposed?
A: While the investigation is still ongoing, Federal EIN numbers, SC Department of Revenue tax ID numbers, credit and debit card information, and bank account information may have been exposed.
Go to visit www.DandB.com/SC to initiate the registration process.
Option Two: Call Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. Call Center.
Call 1-800-279-9881 to complete the process with a live agent.
Hours of Operations: Monday – Friday: 8:00 a.m. -8:00 p.m. EST.
If your business filed a South Carolina tax return since 1998, Experian® is offering a comprehensive business credit monitoring service called Business Credit AdvantageSM – a service that allows unlimited access to the company's complete business credit report and score, plus instant email notifications of changes to the business credit profile. These email alerts include reported changes to the business address, credit inquiries, newly opened credit lines, and score changes. South Carolina businesses can begin to view and protect their business credit information with Experian® by signing up for Business Credit AdvantageSM at www.smartbusinessreports.com/SouthCarolina.
Q: How can I get a free credit report?
A: Under the Federal Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, you can get a free credit report through the Federal Trade Commission at www.annualcreditreport.com or call (877) 322-8228. The law entitles you to a free report from each of the three major credit-reporting companies every 12 months. You may choose to order one report every four months. Further, the site contains tips on steps you can take to prevent identity theft as well as what to do if your identity has been stolen.
A: A credit freeze simply means that new credit accounts will not be approved and your credit file cannot be accessed by anyone without your approval. Therefore, even if thieves have all of your personal identifying information, they still will not be allowed to get credit in your name. However, freezing your credit account may slow down the process of obtaining credit legitimately.
Q: How can I freeze my credit report?
A: Contact one of the three credit-reporting companies if you want to freeze your credit, which privacy advocates say is the surest way to protect against identity theft. Your answers to security questions will tell the credit agencies that you live in South Carolina, which entitles you to a freeze at no charge to you. However, if spouses have joint accounts, each spouse must seek a freeze independently of the other. You will be provided a PIN so that you can lift the freeze when you decide. Be sure to ask whether a freeze with one reporting agency freezes all your credit with the two others. The credit agencies names and numbers are: Experian, (888) 397-3742; Equifax, (800) 525-6285; and TransUnion, (800) 680-7289. You may also go to their respective websites to do this.
Q: Is there a charge to freeze my credit report?
A: There should not be a charge to do this under S.C. state law. If the credit-reporting agency charges you a fee to freeze your credit records, which is barred by state law, contact the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs at (800) 922-1594.
Q: Are there protective measures available short of implementing a credit freeze?
A: Ask about a less aggressive "fraud alert" that requires credit companies to monitor your credit for any unusual activity for 90 days. A fraud alert requires the credit company, with which you filed the alert, to share that request with the two other credit companies.
Q: Where can I get a summary of South Carolina's credit freeze law?
A: To learn more about South Carolina's credit freeze law which started in 2008, go here.
Q: What can parents do to protect their children from identity theft?
A: The Federal Trade Commission has an excellent summary on this topic which includes steps for how to freeze your child's credit. To see that summary, go here.
I am hearing from lots of constituents that one year of credit monitoring provided by the state is not sufficient. I agree. My understanding is that the one year period was negotiated as a quick fix to an immediate crisis. However, the potential exposure to our citizens is much longer than that. Hence, I am working with other state representatives to explore extending the period for credit monitoring protection.
Other Questions? If you have other questions, I will do my best to get you an answer. Please be patient as I do my best to get information for you. You can email me at tom@tomyoungforsenate.com or call me at (803) 215-3631.
More Information? I will provide more information to you by email as I learn it. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,673 |
{"url":"https:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/1684364\/algorithm-to-find-an-integrating-factor-in-a-first-order-ode","text":"# Algorithm to find an integrating factor in a first order ODE?\n\nIs there an algorithm to find the integrating factor for any given first order differential equation or can we only solve it by guesswork or trial and error method? If not what should I look for while considering any first order non-exact differential equation?\n\n## 2 Answers\n\nI found the following which hopefully will help you. It is from Lamar University:\n\nhttp:\/\/tutorial.math.lamar.edu\/Classes\/DE\/Linear.aspx\n\n\u2022 Sorry but this page explains only for some special forms of non-exact ODEs. I'm looking for a more general method to find the I.F. in a non-exact ODE. Mar 6 '16 at 5:59\n\nFor the non-linear, non-exact first order O.D.E $f(x,y)=M(x,y) + N(x,y)y'=0$, the integrating factor $\\mu(x,y)$ can be written as $$\\mu(x,y) = e^{\\int{\\frac{M_y - N_x}{N}dx}}$$. Multiplying $f(x,y)$ by $\\mu(x,y)$ will make $f$ exact.","date":"2022-01-26 06:58:07","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7993402481079102, \"perplexity\": 229.81625845589008}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-05\/segments\/1642320304915.53\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220126041016-20220126071016-00311.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: how to change php and xdebug versions of Vagrant (VDD) VM? I have installed a vagrant drupal development VM.
I do not quite get how the config of my VM can be changed, using vagrant chef or vagrantfiles?
A: The correct way to set it is in the included config.json file.
Look for:
"php": {
"version": false
},
Change false value to the version you want.
A: Read through the Chef recipes to see how it installs php, change whatever needs to be changed.
A: It looks like Drupal VDD uses the Opscode PHP cookbook:
https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/php
I read that cookbook by default will install whatever PHP versions are available to your system's packaging tools (apt, yum). I.e. if the specified version of PHP isn't available to apt/yum, it will likely just install the latest version.
To override this, you can try telling the cookbook to install from source, e.g.
"php": {
"version": "5,3",
"install_method": "source"
},
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 4,828 |
Win Mayweather v McGregor Tickets At bgo Casino.
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If all this is enough to get your blood pumping, it's worth noting that entrants are not limited to earning one prize draw ticket. Instead, they'll earn an additional entry for every £50 they wager, so the best way to lay a glove on the promotion is to play for as many days as possible and earn even more tickets.
Remember, if you don't already have an account with bgo Casino, you can also take advantage of the site's sensational welcome package, which includes a free £10 simply for registering your mobile telephone number – which is something of a 'gimme' for readers of this website! – and an exceedingly generous first deposit match of 400% up to £80 when you do decide to load up your account with real money. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,458 |
require "dry-configurable"
require "dry-container"
require "rom_factory/version"
require "rom_factory/config"
require "rom_factory/builder"
require "rom_factory/factory"
require "rom_factory/struct"
require "rom_factory/attributes/callable"
require "rom_factory/attributes/regular"
require "rom_factory/attributes/sequence"
module RomFactory
# Your code goes here...
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 447 |
package com.zeus.eclipsePlugin.project.operations;
import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
import org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException;
import org.eclipse.core.runtime.IProgressMonitor;
import org.eclipse.ui.WorkbenchException;
import org.eclipse.ui.actions.WorkspaceModifyOperation;
import com.zeus.eclipsePlugin.ZLang;
import com.zeus.eclipsePlugin.ZXTMPlugin;
import com.zeus.eclipsePlugin.model.ZXTM;
import com.zeus.eclipsePlugin.swt.EmptyMonitor;
/**
* This operation changes the password of a ZXTM. Will throw an exception if the
* password is rejected by the ZXTM.
*/
public class ChangeZXTMAuthOp extends WorkspaceModifyOperation
{
private ZXTM zxtm;
private String user, password;
private boolean store;
/**
* Setup the change password operation.
* @param zxtm The ZXTM who's password you are changing.
* @param user The user to authenticate with.
* @param password The new password value.
* @param store Should the password be stored locally?
*/
public ChangeZXTMAuthOp( ZXTM zxtm, String user, String password, boolean store )
{
this.zxtm = zxtm;
this.user = user;
this.password = password;
this.store = store;
}
/**
* Attempts to update the password, throws an exception if it fails.
*/
/* Override */
protected void execute( IProgressMonitor monitor ) throws CoreException,
InvocationTargetException, InterruptedException
{
if( monitor == null ) monitor = new EmptyMonitor();
monitor.beginTask( ZLang.bind( ZLang.ZL_ChangingPasswordForZXTM, zxtm ), 2 );
monitor.subTask( ZLang.ZL_ConnectingToZXTM );
try {
synchronized( ZXTMPlugin.getDefault().getProjectManager() ) {
zxtm.setUserAndPassword( user, password );
zxtm.setStorePassword( store );
monitor.worked( 1 );
monitor.subTask( ZLang.ZL_UpdatingProjectSettings );
ZXTMPlugin.getDefault().getProjectManager().update( false );
monitor.worked( 1 );
}
} catch( Exception e ) {
throw new WorkbenchException( e.getLocalizedMessage(), e );
}
monitor.done();
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 8,384 |
Q: Inter-dependent s with JavaScript I have a javascript array of dates, in the form
{year:'2010',month:'6',day:'23'}
I need to have three <select>s in a row, the first populated with the years in the list, the second populated with the months in the year selected by the first, and the third populated with the days corresponding to the selected year and month.
I do not have access to libraries like jQuery.
What is the best way to handle this?
A: To retrieve the year data to setup the initial select, you'll have to traverse the array at least once (hopefully only once).
Due to the fact you want the second select populated in response to the first and the third populated based on the second and first, you'll need a fast way to reference them.
I'd initially populate the select, whilst sorting out the data into an easier to retrieve system. I'm using Arrays with keys here, others may suggest it is better to use Objects with keys instead.
/* Global variables */
var arr = new Array({year:'2010',month:'6',day:'23'},
{year:'2011',month:'6',day:'23'},
{year:'2010',month:'5',day:'23'});
var srt = new Array();
function populateArrs()
{
for(var i=0;i<arr.length;i++)
{
var y = arr[i].year;
var m = arr[i].month;
var d = arr[i].day;
var in_select = false;
/* Month array, day array */
var mArr;
var dArr;
if(srt[y] != null)
{
mArr = srt[y];
in_select = true;
}
else
mArr = new Array();
if(mArr[m] != null)
dArr = mArr[m];
else
dArr = new Array();
if(dArr[d] == null)
dArr[d] = d;
/* No else as at this stage it will already exist in array set */
mArr[m] = dArr;
srt[y] = mArr;
/* Don't duplicate values in the select */
if(!in_select)
{
var opt = document.createElement('option');
opt.value = y;
opt.text = y;
/* Get your year select */
var ySel = document.getElementById('year_select');
ySel.appendChild(opt);
}
}
}
if (window.addEventListener)
window.addEventListener("load", populateArrs, false);
else if (window.attachEvent)
window.attachEvent("onload", populateArrs);
Afterwards, you need to set up onclick events to populate your other selects dynamically. You can simply reference the appropriate arrays by using lookups and for..in loops.
Months:
var ySel = document.getElementById('year_select');
var mArr = srt[ySel.options[ySel.selectedIndex].value];
for( x IN mArr)
/* Populate month select */
Days:
/*As above, then */
var mSel = document.getElementById('month_select');
var dArr = srt[mSel.options[mSel.selectedIndex].value];
Hope that helps.
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Q: Writing Turkish characters to MySQL using WampServer and Java i am having a problem with my Wamp Server. When i execute a query which contains Turkish characters, i am getting this error:
SEVERE: Incorrect string value: '\xE7l? ya...' for column 'body' at row 1
java.sql.SQLException: Incorrect string value: '\xE7l? ya...' for column 'body' at row 1
Here is my Java code:
Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
con = DriverManager.getConnection(url, user, password);
PreparedStatement p = con.prepareStatement("SET NAMES utf8");
p.executeUpdate();
PreparedStatement ps =
con.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO duyurular values (?, ?, ?, ?)");
ps.setInt(1, 0);
ps.setString(2, title);
ps.setString(3, body);
ps.setInt(4, writer);
ps.executeUpdate();
My database and table which i am trying to write to are all set to "utf8_turkish_ci" collation. My Wamp Server version is 2.2.
I am able to write Turkish characters using PHPMyAdmin sql console but not able to with my Java code. What should i do to get over this? Thanks in advance.
A: There is nothing in here that would tell the driver to encode strings in UTF-8. You are only making the database expect UTF-8, and then the driver encodes your strings in some other encoding and the database throws an error.
You don't show what your url is, but it's supposed to be like this:
jdbc:mysql:///dbname?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8
Then you can remove this:
PreparedStatement p = con.prepareStatement("SET NAMES utf8");
p.executeUpdate();
A: For others benefit, Check the bellow answer
Add these lines to either my.cnf or my.ini:
[client]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
character-set-server=utf8
For more details check this
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Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis
by
Various Authors of Some Repute
APPRECIATIONS
Gouverneur Morris
Booth Tarkington
Charles Dana Gibson
E. L. Burlingame
Augustus Thomas
Theodore Roosevelt
Irvin S. Cobb
John Fox, Jr
Finley Peter Dunne
Winston Churchill
Leonard Wood
John T. McCutcheon
R. H. D.
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him,
and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two
is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would
never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his
other brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the taking of
sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for gunsites
against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns, and
medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go
elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the
elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed
and sorry. I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind
of a sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the
last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in "The Bar
Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most exciting of all
sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who
were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some
of them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an
honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a
faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a
brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even
better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have
dusted every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in
which he played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at
top speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of
water (for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole truth with
lightning flashes of wit and character building and admiration or
contempt. Until the invention of moving pictures the world had nothing
in the least like his talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had
developed and prepared the slides, his words sent the light through
them, and lo and behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own
mind, exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the spoken
word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of things that he had
seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived. The history of the last
thirty years, its manners and customs and its leading events and
inventions, cannot be written truthfully without reference to the
records which he has left, to his special articles and to his letters.
Read over again the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March
of the Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is dead, the
world can never be the same again.
But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in
due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity.
One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact
with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a
good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he
distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it.
Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be
alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil
himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same
effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute
energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way
of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and
discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the
scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a
book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and
from the receiver there poured into you affection and encouragement.
But the great times, of course, were when he came in person, and the
temperature of the house, which a moment before had been too hot or too
cold, became just right, and a sense of cheerfulness and well-being
invaded the hearts of the master and the mistress and of the servants
in the house and in the yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and
the baby, who had been fretting because nobody would give her a
double-barrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about
the disappointments of this uncompromising world.
He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a little afraid
of them. He was afraid perhaps that they wouldn't find out how much he
loved them. But when they showed him that they trusted him, and,
unsolicited, climbed upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then
the loveliest expression came over his face, and you knew that the
great heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed with an
exquisite bliss, akin to anguish.
One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine received a
telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And I thank God that
little Miss Hope is too young to know what an appalling loss she has
suffered. . . .
Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter was allowed
to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could wait on the table (and
though I say it, that shouldn't, she could do this beautifully, with
dignity and without giggling), and perhaps the dinner was good, or R.
H. D. thought it was, and in that event he must abandon his place and
storm the kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener
was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in for
praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so beautiful; as for
his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't the iris, it was the man
behind the iris. And then back he would come to us, with a wonderful
story of his adventures in the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and
leaving behind him a cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of
life, and a gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the
Actinidia vines.
It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that he was
with us most and we learned to know him best, and that he and I became
dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and
complicated. And he who had given so much friendship to so many people
needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a
time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other, and
where there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."
Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first days of
the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't draw all the time,
but we pretended that it did, and with much pretense came faith. From
the fireplace that smoked to the serious things of life we extended our
pretendings, until real troubles went down before them--down and out.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever
lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spiraeas
were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet
violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep
pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were
in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In
the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every
morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the
woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke
because of pretending) and talked until the next morning. He was one
of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest pleasure not in
looking backward or forward, but in what is going on at the moment.
Weeks did not have to pass before it was forced upon his knowledge that
Tuesday, the fourteenth (let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew
it the moment he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday sunshine
making patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine rejoiced
him and the knowledge that even before breakfast there was vouchsafed
to him a whole hour of life. That day began with attentions to his
physical well-being. There were exercises, conducted with great vigor
and rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous
singing of ballads.
At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in
marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood
six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head
carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a
child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him.
He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but
so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days
that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands flat upon the floor.
The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door
you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at
work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a
stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had
written and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and
admire in that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and
pleasure to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would
send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had
drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a
half-column of unsigned print; R. H. D. would find you out, and find
time to praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from
his room at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and
hungry, and whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of
excessive energy, and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and
letters and telegrams.
Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen,
dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced
in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or
ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest.
Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of
statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.
Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work
(else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free
conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a
newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so
much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom.
He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say,
he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious
ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He
did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously
human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March through Brussels," was probably
written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks he was
the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no
facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any
facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy
and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of,
the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases,
paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over
again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to
describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and
elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail which the
most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a process
of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to
recall; and after each omission he would ask himself: "Does the
picture remain?" If it did not, he restored the detail which he had
just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so
on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those, swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures (complete in
every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and
continuously adorned.
But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R. H.
D. emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one
hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about
every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven
words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he
wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.
A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never
seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect
for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of
the best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing,
often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his
cigar. He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and
he used all the smoke there was in it.
He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch
whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He
had toward food and drink the Continental attitude; namely, that
quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his
exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from
the champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of
right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he moved
resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and, although
that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes
of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never
once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some
critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are
impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon
his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or
self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples.
Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same conscience that
he had for himself. His great gift of eyesight and observation failed
him in his judgments upon his friends. If only you loved him, you
could get your biggest failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven,
without any trouble at all. And of your molehill virtues he made
splendid mountains. He only interfered with you when he was afraid
that you were going to hurt some one else whom he also loved. Once I
had a telegram from him which urged me for heaven's sake not to forget
that the next day was my wife's birthday. Whether I had forgotten it
or not is my own private affair. And when I declared that I had read a
story which I liked very, very much and was going to write to the
author to tell him so, he always kept at me till the letter was written.
Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was away from
her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift scrawl at that, for,
no matter how crowded and eventful the day, he wrote her the best
letter that he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a
slave to it.
Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw
their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And
it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them;
her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under
fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been
away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and
a broken arrowhead, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for
nearly two hours and a half.
I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give
more than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space
at my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon
them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the
Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and from
which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers:
those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those
quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous
exposures of this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of
view. He was a quickener of the public conscience. That people are
beginning to think tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at
one time looked yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White,
and Blue is owing in some measure to him.
R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He
thought that peace at the price which our country has been forced to
pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have
gradually taught this country to see the matter in the same way.
I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of
my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was
inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable
"personal interviews" which appear in the newspapers, and in which the
important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things
which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a
fifteen-dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain."
There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No
two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ from
other men--differ in his personal character and in the character of his
work? And that question I can answer off-hand, without taking thought,
and be sure that I am right.
An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the Recording
Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to which even his
brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent mechanism as a writer
are subordinate; and to which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his
powers of affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are
subordinate, too; and that characteristic is cleanliness. The biggest
force for cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of the
world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where "Nobody hunts us and
there is nothing to hunt."
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the
"beau ideal of jeunesse doree," a sophisticated heart of gold. He was
of that college boy's own age, but already an editor--already
publishing books! His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as
were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the
face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred
Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed, and we cut an
exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion to see the world at
lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard Harding Davis came into the
Palm Room--then, oh, then, our day was radiant! That was the top of
our fortune: we could never have hoped for so much. Of all the great
people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see.
The boys of those days left college to work, to raise families, to grow
grizzled; but the glamour remained about Davis; HE never grew grizzled.
Youth was his great quality.
All his writing has the liveliness of springtime; it stirs with an
unsuppressible gayety, and it has the attraction which companionship
with him had: there is never enough. He could be sharp; he could write
angrily and witheringly; but even when he was fiercest he was buoyant,
and when his words were hot they were not scalding but rather of a dry,
clean indignation with things which he believed could, if they would,
be better. He never saw evil but as temporary.
Following him through his books, whether he wrote of home or carried
his kind, stout heart far, far afield, we see an American writing to
Americans. He often told us about things abroad in terms of New York;
and we have all been to New York, so he made for us the pictures he
wished us to see. And when he did not thus use New York for his colors
he found other means as familiar to us and as suggestive; he always
made us SEE. What claims our thanks in equal measure, he knew our kind
of curiosity so well that he never failed to make us see what we were
most anxious to see. He knew where our dark spots were, cleared up the
field of vision, and left us unconfused. This discernment of our
needs, and this power of enlightening and pleasuring his reader, sprang
from seeds native in him. They were, as we say, gifts; for he always
had them but did not make them. He was a national figure at
twenty-three. He KNEW HOW, before he began.
Youth called to youth: all ages read him, but the young men and young
women have turned to him ever since his precocious fame made him their
idol. They got many things from him, but above all they live with a
happier bravery because of him. Reading the man beneath the print,
they found their prophet and gladly perceived that a prophet is not
always cowled and bearded, but may be a gallant young gentleman. This
one called merrily to them in his manly voice; and they followed him.
He bade them see that pain is negligible, that fear is a joke, and that
the world is poignantly interesting, joyously lovable.
They will always follow him.
THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF DAVIS
BY CHARLES DANA GIBSON
Dick was twenty-four years old when he came into the smoking-room of
the Victoria Hotel, in London, after midnight one July night--he was
dressed as a Thames boatman.
He had been rowing up and down the river since sundown, looking for
color. He had evidently peopled every dark corner with a pirate, and
every floating object had meant something to him. He had adventure
written all over him. It was the first time I had ever seen him, and I
had never heard of him. I can't now recall another figure in that
smoke-filled room. I don't remember who introduced us--over
twenty-seven years have passed since that night. But I can see Dick
now dressed in a rough brown suit, a soft hat, with a handkerchief
about his neck, a splendid, healthy, clean-minded, gifted boy at play.
And so he always remained.
His going out of this world seemed like a boy interrupted in a game he
loved. And how well and fairly he played it! Surely no one deserved
success more than Dick. And it is a consolation to know he had more
than fifty years of just what he wanted. He had health, a great
talent, and personal charm. There never was a more loyal or unselfish
friend. There wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental
and physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and sometimes
shy. He often tried to conceal these last two qualities, but never
succeeded in doing so from those of us who were privileged really to
know and love him.
His life was filled with just the sort of adventure he liked the best.
No one ever saw more wars in so many different places or got more out
of them. And it took the largest war in all history to wear out that
stout heart.
We shall miss him.
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
One of the most attractive and inspiring things about Richard Harding
Davis was the simple, almost matter-of-course way in which he put into
practice his views of life--in which he acted, and in fact WAS, what he
believed. With most of us, to have opinions as to what is the right
thing to do is at the best to worry a good deal as to whether we are
doing it; at the worst to be conscious of doubts as to whether it is a
sufficient code, or perhaps whether it isn't beyond us. Davis seemed
to have neither of these wasters of strength. He had certain simple,
clean, manly convictions as to how a man should act; apparently quite
without self-consciousness in this respect, whatever little mannerisms
or points of pride he may have had in others--fewer than most men of
his success and fastidiousness--he went ahead and did accordingly,
untormented by any alternatives or casuistries, which for him did not
seem to exist. He was so genuinely straightforward that he could not
sophisticate even himself, as almost every man occasionally does under
temptation. He, at least, never needed to be told
"Go put your creed into your deed
Nor speak with double tongue."
It is so impossible not to think first of the man, as the testimony of
every one who knew him shows, that those who have long had occasion to
watch and follow his work, not merely with enjoyment but somewhat
critically, may well look upon any detailed discussion of it as
something to be kept till later. But there is more to be said than to
recall the unfailing zest of it, the extraordinary freshness of eye,
the indomitable youthfulness and health of spirit--all the qualities
that we associate with Davis himself. It was serious work in a sense
that only the more thoughtful of its critics had begun of late to
comprehend. It had not inspired a body of disciples like Kipling's,
but it had helped to clear the air and to give a new proof of the
vitality of certain ideals--even of a few of the simpler ones now
outmoded in current masterpieces; and it was at its best far truer in
an artistic sense than it was the fashion of its easy critics to allow.
Whether Davis could or would have written a novel of the higher rank is
a useless question now; he himself, who was a critic of his own work
without illusions or affectation, used to say that he could not; but it
is certain that in the early part of "Captain Macklin" he displayed a
power really Thackerayan in kind.
Of his descriptive writing there need be no fear of speaking with
extravagance; he had made himself, especially in his later work,
through long practice and his inborn instinct for the significant and
the fresh aspect, quite the best of all contemporary correspondents and
reporters; and his rivals in the past could be easily numbered.
BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS
One spring afternoon in 1889 a member brought into the Lambs Club
house--then on Twenty-sixth Street--as a guest Mr. Richard Harding
Davis. I had not clearly caught the careless introduction, and,
answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated the surname. He did not
pronounce it as would a Middle Westerner like myself, but more as a
citizen of London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to
burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given
phonetically. Several other words containing _a_ long a were sounded
by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a
related eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain
Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time many of
Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was an affectation. I
mention the peculiarity, which after years convinced me was as native
to him as was the color of his eyes, because I am sure that it was a
barrier between him and some persons who met him only casually.
At that time he was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper, and in
appearance was what he continued to be until his death, an unassertive
but self-respecting, level-eyed, clean-toothed, and wholesome athlete.
The reporter developed rapidly into the more serious workman, and
amongst the graver business was that of war correspondent.
I have known fraternally several war correspondents--Dick Davis, Fred
Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and others--and it seems to me
that, while differing one from another as average men differ, they had
in common a kind of veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant
world wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not
bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the quality.
And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated the reporter sense.
He had insight--the faculty of going back of appearances. He saw the
potential salients in occurrences and easily separated them from the
commonplace--and the commonplace itself when it was informed by a
spirit that made it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness.
That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when adherence to
duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree of pressure that gave
it test conditions and he had an unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water
appreciation of it.
I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked enthusiastically to
write of men doing men's work and doing it man fashion with
full-blooded optimism.
At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall. He had a
boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages not inconsistent
with his admiration of their medals. By temperament he was impulsive
and partisan, and if he was your friend you were right until you were
obviously very wrong. But he liked "good form," and had adopted the
Englishman's code of "things no fellow could do"--therefore his
impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was not
quarrelsome.
In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he could
himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the humor of
MacWilliams.
In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the younger man if
the poster smirching Stuart's relation to Madame Alvarez is true, it is
Davis talking through both men, and when, standing alone, Clay lifts
his hat and addresses the statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his
best.
Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre, but modern
criticism in that respect is immature and wrong. The soliloquy exists.
Any one observing the number of business men who, talking aloud to
themselves, walk Fifth Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the
soliloquy was not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place
for it.
When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick and a deserved
popularity. It was cheerily North American in its viewpoint of the
sub-tropical republics and was very up to date. The outdoor American
girl was not so established at that time, and the Davis report of her
was refreshing. Robert Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he
would have tried to do--Captain Stuart was the English officer that
Davis had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better side
of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis would draw out.
Alice and King were the half-spoiled New Yorkers as he knew them at the
dinner-parties.
At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It was his
first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the skill that he
developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I was called in by the
manager as an older carpenter and craftsman to make another dramatic
version. Dick and I were already friends and he already liked plays
that I had done, but that alone could not account for the heartiness
with which he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself.
Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could do that.
Only native modesty could explain the absence of the usual author pride
and sensitiveness. The play was immediately successful. It would have
been a dull hack, indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage
material as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the
dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the welding of
additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time enough to cool, he sent
me a first copy of the Playgoers' edition of the novel, printed in
1902, with the inscription:
TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS:
Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below:
DEAR GUS,
If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play, I
would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others. So
for the sake of the public try to like it.
DICK.
In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the
play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where,
twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and
out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious
republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company.
With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the
numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all
five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his
published tales.
At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some
unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the
assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good
judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there
were his helpful suggestions of work and make-up to the actors, and on
the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an
easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.
That picture enterprise he has described in an article, entitled
"Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in Scribner's Magazine.
The element that he could not put into the account, and which is
particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of "Soldiers of
Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with intention and
unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes.
For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some
local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our
evenings together at a cafe table over looking "the great square,"
which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the
Langhams and Stuart dine there: "At one end of the plaza the
President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through
the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking
spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles
around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around
the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the
bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with
his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace."
Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that
wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar
would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had
gone between. From one long silence he said: "I think I'll come back
here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of
months." What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her
and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background!
And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from the
dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it as so much
larger"--indicating the square--"until I saw it again when we came down
with the army." A tolerant smile--he might have explained that it is
always so on revisiting scenes that have impressed us deeply in our
earlier days, but he let the smile do that. One of his charms as
companion was that restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too.
The picture people began their film with a showing of the "mountains
which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles
of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the
water." That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago.
"The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against
those five mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for
one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape, and yet
how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it
recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle
that is so much of his book!
We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had
planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads,
and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who
remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had
overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on
sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead.
Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked
his grave.
One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob its
surprises by reminiscence--but I refrain. Yet it is only justice to
point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for the "Men of Zanzibar,"
"Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly,"
and his other books, he got his structure and his color at first hand.
He was a writer and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in
his writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a young
fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel
the wind in his face. Like water at the source, it is undefiled.
DAVIS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I knew Richard Harding Davis for many years, and I was among the number
who were immediately drawn to him by the power and originality of
"Gallegher," the story which first made his reputation.
My intimate association with him, however, was while he was with my
regiment in Cuba, He joined us immediately after landing, and was not
merely present at but took part in the fighting. For example, at the
Guasimas fight it was he, I think, with his field-glasses, who first
placed the trench from which the Spaniards were firing at the right
wing of the regiment, which right wing I, at that time, commanded. We
were then able to make out the trench, opened fire on it, and drove out
the Spaniards.
He was indomitably cheerful under hardships and difficulties and
entirely indifferent to his own personal safety or comfort. He so won
the esteem and regard of the regiment that he was one of the three men
we made honorary members of the regiment's association. We gave him
the same medal worn by our own members.
He was as good an American as ever lived and his heart flamed against
cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book of Americanism
which all our people would do well to read at the present time.
BY IRVIN S. COBB
Almost the first letter I received after I undertook to make a living
by writing for magazines was signed with the name of Richard Harding
Davis. I barely knew him; practically we were strangers; but if he had
been my own brother he could not have written more generously or more
kindly than he did write in that letter. He, a famous writer, had gone
out of his way to speak words of encouragement to me, an unknown
writer; had taken the time and the pains out of a busy life to cheer a
beginner in the field where he had had so great a measure of success.
When I came to know him better, I found out that such acts as these
were characteristic of Richard Harding Davis. The world knew him as
one of the most vivid and versatile and picturesque writers that our
country has produced in the last half-century, but his friends knew him
as one of the kindest and gentlest and most honest and most unselfish
of men--a real human being, firm in his convictions, steadfast in his
affections, loyal to the ideals by which he held, but tolerant always
in his estimates of others.
He may or may not have been a born writer; sometimes I doubt whether
there is such a thing as a born writer. But this much I do know--he
was a born gentleman if ever there was one.
As a writer his place is assured. But always I shall think of him as
he was in his private life--a typical American, a lovable companion,
and a man to the tips of his fingers.
BY JOHN FOX, JR.
During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis was
always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip
somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand,
in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was
youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident
youth--and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has
suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot
think of him as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of
those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell
about it.
We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the
Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any
angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was
ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better
understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the
back of his head--no card that was not face up on the table. Every
thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read
and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and
outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship
because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if
he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the
fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him.
Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was incomprehensible to him.
He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the Japanese
equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him
he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I
believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over there I was
in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor.
Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic
championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose
absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for
a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly
demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of
today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or
shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when
our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his
state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite
childishly.
Of course, he was courageous--absurdly so--and, in spite of his
high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso hill, the
day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for tree-trunks when a few
bullets whistled near; but Dick stalked out in the open and with his
field-glasses searched for the supposed sharpshooters in the trees.
Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I
saw Dick going unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had
left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the
trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have been content
with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where Dick lay with a
soldier.
"That hit you?" asked Dick. The soldier grunted "No," looked sidewise
at Dick, and muttered an oath of surprise. Dick had not taken his
glasses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on the ground with sciatica
during that campaign, like a snake, but pulling his twisted figure
straight and his tortured face into a smile if a soldier or stranger
passed.
He was easily the first reporter of his time--perhaps of all time. Out
of any incident or situation he could pick the most details that would
interest the most people and put them in a way that was pleasing to the
most people; and always, it seemed, he had the extraordinary good
judgment or the extraordinary good luck to be just where the most
interesting thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the
last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one must, laid
final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and clean mind of the man.
R. H. D. never wrote a line that cannot be given to his little daughter
when she is old enough to read, and I never heard a word pass his lips
that his own mother could not hear. There are many women in the world
like the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and of
these Dick himself was one.
BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE
In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his death, the
personality of the man seems to overshadow the merit of the author. In
dealing with the individual the writers overlook the fact that we have
lost one of the best of our story-tellers. This is but natural. He
was a very vivid kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all
parts of the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and
those who knew him were less interested in the books than in the man
himself--the generous, romantic, sensitive individual whose character
and characteristics made him a conspicuous figure everywhere he
went--and he went everywhere. His books were sold in great numbers,
but it might be said in terms of the trade that his personality had a
larger circulation than his literature. He probably knew more waiters,
generals, actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the
people he knew best are not the people who read books. They write them
or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew Richard Davis you knew his
books. He translated himself literally, and no expurgation was needed
to make the translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was
the identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides
through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic marriage.
Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness of his mind, which
was still fresh at an age when most men find avarice or golf a
substitute for former pastimes. He not only refused to grow old
himself, he refused to write about old age. There are a few elderly
people in his books, but they are vague and shadowy. They serve to
emphasize the brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the
time for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and
acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in this
country who have read his books, and they know, even better than those
who were acquainted with him personally, how good a friend they have
lost. I happened to read again the other day the little collection of
stories--his first, I think--which commences with "Gallegher" and
includes "The Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales.
His first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and was
stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher" is a fine
story, and is written in that eager, breathless manner which was all
his own, and which always reminds me of a boy who has hurried home to
tell of some wonderful thing he has seen. Of course it is improbable.
Most good stories are and practically all readable books of history.
No old newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy
boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing from one
hand could escape detection even in a remote country village. Greed
would have urged the constable to haul to the calaboose every stranger
who wore gloves. But he managed to attach so many accurate details of
description to the romance that it leaves as definite an impression of
realism as any of Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene
in the newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture of
toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray overcoats with
pearl buttons (like most good story-tellers he was strong on the
tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and policemen, the swiftness of
the way the story is told, as if he were in a hurry to let his reader
know something he had actually seen--create such an impression of truth
that when the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on
the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of the
judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious infant, and
whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the hand of the sister of
the sporting editor in marriage.
To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of writers,
but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance of the truth to
situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same
quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war
correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age
filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw
and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable
suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject
with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a
headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then
filled in the story with human details, so that the reader came away
with an impression that all these heroic deeds were performed by people
just like the reader himself, which was exactly the truth.
It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers and the
stupidity of the French and English prevented him from seeing the
actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene is an ugly one, a
wallow of blood and mire. But so probably were Agincourt and Crecy
when you come to think of it, and Davis, you may be sure, would have
illuminated the foul battle-field with a reflection of the glory which
must exist in the breasts of the soldiers.
The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes, which
reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging. A man is
blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some people the world of
men is a confused and undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a
simple and pleasant pattern--good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind
and cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad,
the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are modest, the
brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers humorous; where the
Prodigal returns to dine in a borrowed dinner-jacket at Delmonico's
with his father, and where always the Young Man marries the Girl. And
this is the world as much as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world
as you see it.
BY WINSTON CHURCHHILL
On that day when I read of Mr. Davis's sudden death there came back to
me a vivid memory of another day, some eighteen years ago, when I first
met him, shortly after the publication of my first novel. I was paying
an over-Sunday visit to Marion, that quaint waterside resort where Mr.
Davis lived for many years, and with which his name is associated. On
the Monday morning, as the stage started out for the station, a young
man came running after it, caught it, and sat down in the only empty
place--beside me. He was Richard Harding Davis. I recognized him, nor
shall I forget that peculiar thrill I experienced at finding myself in
actual, physical contact with an author. And that this author should
be none other than the creator of Gallegher, prepossessing, vigorous,
rather than a dry and elderly recluse, made my excitement the keener.
It happened also, after entering the smoking-car, that the remaining
vacant seat was at my side, and here Mr. Davis established himself. He
looked at me, he asked if my name was Winston Churchill, he said he had
read my book. How he guessed my identity I did not discover. But the
recollection of our talk, the strong impression I then received of Mr.
Davis's vitality and personality, the liking I conceived for him--these
have neither changed nor faded with the years, and I recall with
gratitude to-day the kindliness, the sense of fellowship always so
strong in him that impelled him to speak as he did. A month before he
died, when I met him on the train going to Mt. Kisco, he had not
changed. His enthusiasms, his vigor, his fine passions, his fondness
for his friends, these, nor the joy he found in the pursuit of his
profession, had not faded. And there come to me now, as I think of him
filled with life, flashes from his writings that have moved me, and
move me indescribably still. "Le Style," as Rolland remarks, "c'est
l'ame." It was so in Mr. Davis's case. He had the rare faculty of
stirring by a phrase the imaginations of men, of including in a phrase
a picture, an event--a cataclysm. Such a phrase was that in which he
described the entry of German hosts into Brussels. He was not a man,
when enlisted in a cause, to count the cost to himself. Many causes
will miss him, and many friends, and many admirers, yet his personality
remains with us forever, in his work.
BY LEONARD WOOD
The death of Richard Harding Davis was a real loss to the movement for
preparedness. Mr. Davis had an extensive experience as a military
observer, and thoroughly appreciated the need of a general training
system like that of Australia or Switzerland and of thorough
organization of our industrial resources in order to establish a
condition of reasonable preparedness in this country. A few days
before his death he came to Governor's Island for the purpose of
ascertaining in what line of work he could be most useful in building
up sound public opinion in favor of such preparedness as would give us
a real peace-insurance. His mind was bent on devoting his energies and
abilities to the work of public education on this vitally important
subject, and few men were better qualified to do so, for he had served
as a military observer in many campaigns.
Throughout the Cuban campaign he was attached to the headquarters of my
regiment in Cuba as a military observer. He was with the advanced
party at the opening of the fight at Las Guasimas, and was
distinguished throughout the fight by coolness and good conduct. He
also participated in the battle of San Juan and the siege of Santiago,
and as an observer was always where duty called him. He was a
delightful companion, cheerful, resourceful, and thoughtful of the
interests and wishes of others. His reports of the campaign were
valuable and among the best and most accurate.
The Plattsburg movement took very strong hold of him. He saw in this a
great instrument for building up a sound knowledge concerning our
military history and policy, also a very practical way of training men
for the duties of junior officers. He realized fully that we should
need in case of war tens of thousands of officers with our newly raised
troops, and that it would be utterly impossible to prepare them in the
hurry and confusion of the onrush of modern war. His heart was filled
with a desire to serve his country to the best of his ability. His
recent experience in Europe pointed out to him the absolute madness of
longer disregarding the need of doing those things which reasonable
preparedness dictates, the things which cannot be accomplished after
trouble is upon us. He had in mind at the time of his death a series
of articles to be written especially to build up interest in universal
military training through conveying to our people an understanding of
what organization as it exists to-day means, and how vitally important
it is for our people to do in time of peace those things which modern
war does not permit done once it is under way.
Davis was a loyal friend, a thoroughgoing American devoted to the best
interests of his country, courageous, sympathetic, and true. His loss
has been a very real one to all of us who knew and appreciated him, and
in his death the cause of preparedness has lost an able worker and the
country a devoted and loyal citizen.
WITH DAVIS IN VERA CRUZ, BRUSSELS, AND SALONIKA
BY JOHN T. McCRUTCHEON
In common with many others who have been with Richard Harding Davis as
correspondents, I find it difficult to realize that he has covered his
last story and that he will not be seen again with the men who follow
the war game, rushing to distant places upon which the spotlight of
news interest suddenly centres.
It seems a sort of bitter irony that he who had covered so many big
events of world importance in the past twenty years should be abruptly
torn away in the midst of the greatest event of them all, while the
story is still unfinished and its outcome undetermined. If there is a
compensating thought, it ties in the reflection that he had a life of
almost unparalleled fulness, crowded to the brim, up to the last
moment, with those experiences and achievements which he particularly
aspired to have. He left while the tide was at its flood, and while he
still held supreme his place as the best reporter in his country. He
escaped the bitterness of seeing the ebb set in, when the youth to
which he clung had slipped away, and when he would have to sit
impatient in the audience, while younger men were in the thick of
great, world-stirring dramas on the stage.
This would have been a real tragedy in "Dick" Davis's case, for, while
his body would have aged, it is doubtful if his spirit ever would have
lost its youthful freshness or boyish enthusiasm.
It was my privilege to see a good deal of Davis in the last two years.
He arrived in Vera Cruz among the first of the sixty or seventy
correspondents who flocked to that news centre when the situation was
so full of sensational possibilities. It was a time when the American
newspaper-reading public was eager for thrills, and the ingenuity and
resourcefulness of the correspondents in Vera Cruz were tried to the
uttermost to supply the demand.
In the face of the fiercest competition it fell to Davis's lot to land
the biggest story of those days of marking time. The story "broke"
when it became known that Davis, Medill McCormick, and Frederick Palmer
had gone through the Mexican lines in an effort to reach Mexico City.
Davis and McCormick, with letters to the Brazilian and British
ministers, got through and reached the capital on the strength of those
letters, but Palmer, having only an American passport, was turned back.
After an ominous silence, which furnished American newspapers with a
lively period of suspense, the two men returned safely with wonderful
stories of their experiences while under arrest in the hands of the
Mexican authorities. McCormick, in recently speaking of Davis at that
time, said that, "as a correspondent in difficult and dangerous
situations, he was incomparable--cheerful, ingenious, and
undiscouraged. When the time came to choose between safety and leaving
his companion he stuck by his fellow captive even though, as they both
said, a firing-squad and a blank wall were by no means a remote
possibility." This Mexico City adventure was a spectacular achievement
which gave Davis and McCormick a distinction which no other
correspondents of all the ambitious and able corps had managed to
attain.
Davis usually "hunted" alone. He depended entirely upon his own
ingenuity and wonderful instinct for news situations. He had the
energy and enthusiasm of a beginner, with the experience and training
of a veteran. His interest in things remained as keen as though he had
not been years at a game which often leaves a man jaded and blase. His
acquaintanceship in the American army and navy was wide, and for this
reason, as well as for the prestige which his fame and position as a
national character gave him, he found it easy to establish valuable
connections in the channels from which news emanates. And yet, in
spite of the fact that he was "on his own" instead of having a working
partnership with other men, he was generous in helping at times when he
was able to do so. Davis was a conspicuous figure in Vera Cruz, as he
inevitably had been in all such situations. Wherever he went he was
pointed out. His distinction of appearance, together with a
distinction in dress, which, whether from habit or policy, was a
valuable asset in his work, made him a marked man. He dressed and
looked the "war correspondent," such a one as he would describe in one
of his stories. He fulfilled the popular ideal of what a member of
that fascinating profession should look like. His code of life and
habits was as fixed as that of the Briton who takes his habits and
customs and games and tea wherever he goes, no matter how benighted or
remote the spot may be.
He was just as loyal to his code as is the Briton. He carried his
bath-tub, his immaculate linen, his evening clothes, his war
equipment--in which he had the pride of a connoisseur--wherever he
went, and, what is more, he had the courage to use the evening clothes
at times when their use was conspicuous. He was the only man who wore
a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his particular table in
the crowded "Portales," at the Hotel Diligencia, he was to be seen, as
fresh and clean as though he were in a New York or London restaurant.
Each day he was up early to take the train out to the "gap," across
which came arrivals from Mexico City. Sometimes a good "story" would
come down, as when the long-heralded and long-expected arrival of
Consul Silliman gave a first-page "feature" to all the American papers.
In the afternoon he would play water polo over at the navy aviation
camp, and always at a certain time of the day his "striker" would bring
him his horse and for an hour or more he would ride out along the beach
roads within the American lines.
After the first few days it was difficult to extract real thrills from
the Vera Cruz situation, but we used to ride out to El Tejar with the
cavalry patrol and imagine that we might be fired on at some point in
the long ride through unoccupied territory; or else go out to the
"front," at Legarto, where a little American force occupied a sun-baked
row of freight-cars, surrounded by malarial swamps. From the top of
the railroad water-tank we could look across to the Mexican outposts a
mile or so away. It was not very exciting, and what thrills we got lay
chiefly in our imagination.
Before my acquaintanceship with Davis at Vera Cruz I had not known him
well. Our trails didn't cross while I was in Japan in the
Japanese-Russian War, and in the Transvaal I missed him by a few days,
but in Vera Cruz I had many enjoyable opportunities of becoming well
acquainted with him.
The privilege was a pleasant one, for it served to dispel a
preconceived and not an entirely favorable impression of his character.
For years I had heard stories about Richard Harding Davis--stories
which emphasized an egotism and self-assertiveness which, if they ever
existed, had happily ceased to be obtrusive by the time I got to know
him.
He was a different Davis from the Davis whom I had expected to find;
and I can imagine no more charming and delightful companion than he was
in Vera Cruz. There was no evidence of those qualities which I feared
to find, and his attitude was one of unfailing kindness,
considerateness, and generosity.
In the many talks I had with him I was always struck by his evident
devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings he was
the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes were
young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters, war
correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did the noble
thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that
he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the favored
types which his imagination had created for his stories. In a certain
sense he was living a life of make believe, wherein he was the hero of
the story, and in which he was bound by his ideals always to act as he
would have the hero of his story act. It was a quality which only one
could have who had preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in spite
of the hardening processes of maturity.
His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not only had
the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a situation, but also
had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to describe them vividly. I
don't know how many of those men at Vera Cruz tried to describe the
kaleidoscopic life of the city during the American occupation, but I
know that Davis's story was far and away the most faithful and
satisfying picture. The story was photographic, even to the sounds and
smells.
The last I saw of him in Vera Cruz was when, on the Utah, he steamed
past the flagship Wyoming, upon which I was quartered, and started for
New York. The Battenberg cup race had just been rowed, and the Utah
and Florida crews had tied. As the Utah was sailing immediately after
the race, there was no time in which to row off the tie. So it was
decided that the names of both ships should be engraved on the cup, and
that the Florida crew should defend the title against a challenging
crew from the British Admiral Craddock's flagship.
By the end of June, the public interest in Vera Cruz had waned, and the
corps of correspondents dwindled until there were only a few left.
Frederick Palmer and I went up to join Carranza and Villa, and on the
26th of July we were in Monterey waiting to start with the triumphal
march of Carranza's army toward Mexico City. There was no sign of
serious trouble, abroad. That night ominous telegrams came, and at ten
o'clock on the following morning we were on a train headed for the
States.
Palmer and Davis caught the Lusitania, sailing August 4 from New York,
and I followed on the Saint Paul, leaving three days later. On the
17th of August I reached Brussels, and it seemed the most natural thing
in the world to find Davis already there. He was at the Palace Hotel,
where a number of American and English correspondents were quartered.
Things moved quickly. On the 19th Irvin Cobb, Will Irwin, Arno Dosch,
and I were caught between the Belgian and German lines in Louvain; our
retreat to Brussels was cut, and for three days, while the vast German
army moved through the city, we were detained. Then, the army having
passed, we were allowed to go back to the capital.
In the meantime Davis was in Brussels. The Germans reached the
outskirts of the city on the morning of the 20th, and the
correspondents who had remained in Brussels were feverishly writing
despatches describing the imminent fall of the city. One of them,
Harry Hansen, of the Chicago Daily News, tells the following story,
which I give in his words: "While we were writing," says Hansen,
"Richard Harding Davis walked into the writing-room of the Palace Hotel
with a bunch of manuscript in his hand. With an amused expression he
surveyed the three correspondents filling white paper.
"'I say, men,' said Davis, 'do you know when the next train leaves?'
"'There is one at three o'clock,' said a correspondent, looking up.
"'That looks like our only chance to get a story out,' said Davis.
'Well, we'll trust to that.'
"The story was the German invasion of Brussels, and the train mentioned
was considered the forlorn hope of the correspondents to connect with
the outside world--that is, every correspondent thought it to be the
OTHER man's hope. Secretly each had prepared to outwit the other, and
secretly Davis had already sent his story to Ostend. He meant to
emulate Archibald Forbes, who despatched a courier with his real
manuscript, and next day publicly dropped a bulky package in the
mail-bag. Davis had sensed the news in the occupation of Brussels long
before it happened. With dawn he went out to the Louvain road, where
the German army stood, prepared to smash the capital if negotiations
failed. His observant eye took in all the details. Before noon he had
written a comprehensive sketch of the occupation, and when word was
received that it was under way, he trusted his copy to an old Flemish
woman, who spoke not a word of English, and saw her safely on board the
train that pulled out under Belgian auspices for Ostend."
With passes which the German commandant in Brussels gave us the
correspondents immediately started out to see how far those passes
would carry us. A number of us left on the afternoon of August 23 for
Waterloo, where it was expected that the great clash between the German
and the Anglo-French forces would occur. We had planned to be back the
same evening, and went prepared only for an afternoon's drive in a
couple of hired street carriages. It was seven weeks before we again
saw Brussels. On the following day (August 24) Davis started for Mons.
He wore the khaki uniform which he had worn in many campaigns. Across
his breast was a narrow bar of silk ribbon indicating the campaigns in
which he had served as a correspondent. He so much resembled a British
officer that he was arrested as a British derelict and was informed
that he would be shot at once.
He escaped only by offering to walk to Brand Whitlock, in Brussels,
reporting to each officer he met on the way. His plan was approved,
and as a hostage on parole he appeared before the American minister,
who quickly established his identity as an American of good standing,
to the satisfaction of the Germans.
In the following few months our trails were widely separated. I read
of his arrest by German officers on the road to Mons; later I read the
story of his departure from Brussels by train to Holland--a trip which
carried him through Louvain while the town still was burning; and still
later I read that he was with the few lucky men who were in Rheims
during one of the early bombardments that damaged the cathedral. By
amazing luck, combined with a natural news sense which drew him
instinctively to critical places at the psychological moment, he had
been a witness of the two most widely featured stories of the early
weeks of the war.
Arrested by the Germans in Belgium, and later by the French in France,
he was convinced that the restrictions on correspondents were too great
to permit of good work.
So he left the European war zone with the widely quoted remark: "The
day of the war correspondent is over."
And yet I was not surprised when, one evening, late in November of last
year, he suddenly walked into the room in Salonika where William G.
Shepherd, of the United Press, "Jimmy Hare," the veteran war
photographer, and I had established ourselves several weeks before.
The hotel was jammed, and the city, with a normal capacity of about one
hundred and seventy-five thousand, was struggling to accommodate at
least a hundred thousand more. There was not a room to be had in any
of the better hotels, and for several days we lodged Davis in our room,
a vast chamber which formerly had been the main dining-room of the
establishment, and which now was converted into a bedroom. There was
room for a dozen men, if necessary, and whenever stranded Americans
arrived and could find no hotel accommodations we simply rigged up
emergency cots for their temporary use.
The weather in Salonika at this time, late November, was penetratingly
cold. In the mornings the steam coils struggled feebly to dispel the
chill in the room.
Early in the morning after Davis had arrived, we were aroused by the
sound of violent splashing, accompanied by shuddering gasps, and we
looked out from the snug warmth of our beds to see Davis standing in
his portable bath-tub and drenching himself with ice-cold water. As an
exhibition of courageous devotion to an established custom of life it
was admirable, but I'm not sure that it was prudent.
For some reason, perhaps a defective circulation or a weakened heart,
his system failed to react from these cold-water baths. All through
the days he complained of feeling chilled. He never seemed to get
thoroughly warmed, and of us all he was the one who suffered most
keenly from the cold. It was all the more surprising, for his
appearance was always that of a man in the pink of athletic
fitness--ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, and full of tireless energy.
On one occasion we returned from the French front in Serbia to Salonika
in a box car lighted only by candles, bitterly cold, and frightfully
exhausting. We were seven hours in travelling fifty-five miles, and we
arrived at our destination at three o'clock in the morning. Several of
the men contracted desperate colds, which clung to them for weeks.
Davis was chilled through, and said that of all the cold he had ever
experienced that which swept across the Macedonian plain from the
Balkan highlands was the most penetrating. Even his heavy clothing
could not afford him adequate protection.
When he was settled in his own room in our hotel he installed an
oil-stove which burned beside him as he sat at his desk and wrote his
stories. The room was like an oven, but even then he still complained
of the cold.
When he left he gave us the stove, and when we left, some time later,
it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a British
hospital, where I'm sure it is doing its best to thaw the Balkan chill
out of sick and wounded soldiers.
Davis was always up early, and his energy and interest were as keen as
a boy's. We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and
rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity
that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd,
Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these
parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most
enjoyable daily events of our lives.
Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by British,
French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian, and Bulgarian
civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English, and Scotch nurses
and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge, high-ceilinged room that
the waiters could barely pick their way among the tables, we hung for
hours over our dinners, and left only when the landlord and his
Austrian wife counted the day's receipts and paid the waiters at the
end of the evening.
One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion than
Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he could not
make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of standing up at a
banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table with a few friends who
were only too eager to listen rather than to talk, his stories,
covering personal experiences in all parts of the world, were intensely
vivid, with that remarkable "holding" quality of description which
characterizes his writings.
He brought his own bread--a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred to
the better white bread--and with it he ate great quantities of butter.
As we sat down at the table his first demand was for "Mastika," a
peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and his second demand
invariably was "Du beurre!" with the "r's" as silent as the stars; and
if it failed to come at once the waiter was made to feel the enormity
of his tardiness.
The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in Philadelphia,
and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central America, to his early
Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged through an endless variety
of personal experiences which very nearly covered the whole course of
American history in the past twenty years.
Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures,
but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them,
told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of
humorous comment that made them gems of narrative.
At times, in our work, we all tried our hands at describing the
Salonika of those early days of the Allied occupation, for it was
really what one widely travelled British officer called it--"the most
amazingly interesting situation I've ever seen"--but Davis's
description was far and away the best, just as his description of Vera
Cruz was the best, and his wonderful story of the entry of the German
army into Brussels was matchless as one of the great pieces of
reporting in the present war.
In thinking of Davis, I shall always remember him for the delightful
qualities which he showed in Salonika. He was unfailingly considerate
and thoughtful. Through his narratives one could see the pride which
he took in the width and breadth of his personal relation to the great
events of the past twenty years. His vast scope of experiences and
equally wide acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were
amazing, and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and
interesting history could tell his stories in such a simple way that
the personal element was never obtrusive.
When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from the
British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked his
passage on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only obtainable
accommodation was a lounge in the dining-saloon. We gave him a
farewell dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all
the other Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the
dinner we rowed out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably
installed for his voyage.
He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away. That
was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.
End of Project Gutenberg's Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis, by Various
*** | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 9,035 |
Q: Access Violation in TeeChart Below code gives me access violation. Can anyone help me with this.
for(long i = nTools-1; i > 0 ; i--)
{
if(m_spGraph.GetTools().GetItems(i).GetToolType() == 25 && m_spGraph.GetTools().GetItems(i).GetAsRectangle().GetAllowDrag() == TRUE) // Rectangle tool
{
m_spGraph.GetTools().Delete(i);
}
}
Thanks
Akshay
A: In VB6, if I run this and then I open an Editor I see 5 Rectangle tools and 5 Annotation tools:
TChart1.AddSeries scBar
TChart1.Series(0).FillSampleValues 8
Dim i As Integer
For i = 0 To 9
If (i Mod 2 = 0) Then
TChart1.Tools.Add tcRectangle
Else
TChart1.Tools.Add tcAnnotate
End If
Next i
Then, If I run this and I open the editor again after it, I only see the 5 Annotation tools:
For i = TChart1.Tools.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1
If (TChart1.Tools.Items(i).ToolType = 25 And TChart1.Tools.Items(i).asRectangle.AllowDrag) Then
TChart1.Tools.Delete i
End If
Next i
So it seems to work fine for me here.
Have you tried it with different TeeChart ActiveX builds? Have you obtained different results with each them?
Please, edit your question adding an SSCCE so we can reproduce the problem here and try to figure if there's a problem in your code or in the component.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 9,701 |
<?php
namespace Undf\PlanBundle\Entity;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Undf\LocationDataBundle\Entity\City;
/**
* Stage
*
* @ORM\Table(name="stage")
* @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\StageRepository")
*/
class Stage
{
/**
* @var integer
*
* @ORM\Column(name="id", type="integer")
* @ORM\Id
* @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
*/
private $id;
/**
* @var Plan $plan
*
* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Plan", inversedBy="stages")
* @ORM\JoinColumns({
* @ORM\JoinColumn(name="plan_id", referencedColumnName="id")
* })
*/
private $plan;
/**
* @var Admirer
*
* @ORM\OneToOne(targetEntity="Undf\LocationDataBundle\Entity\City")
* @ORM\JoinColumn(name="city_id", referencedColumnName="id")
*/
private $city;
/**
* @var integer
*
* @ORM\Column(name="position", type="integer")
*/
private $position;
/**
* @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Link", mappedBy="stage", cascade={"persist", "remove"}, orphanRemoval=true)
* @ORM\OrderBy({"url" = "ASC"})
*/
private $links;
/**
* @var boolean
*
* @ORM\Column(name="is_start", type="boolean")
*/
private $isStart;
/**
* @var boolean
*
* @ORM\Column(name="is_end", type="boolean")
*/
private $isEnd;
public function __construct()
{
$this->links = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
}
public function __toString()
{
return $this->city->getName();
}
/**
* Get id
*
* @return integer
*/
public function getId()
{
return $this->id;
}
/**
* Set plan
*
* @param \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Plan $plan
* @return \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Stage
*/
public function setPlan(Plan $plan)
{
$this->plan = $plan;
return $this;
}
/**
* Get plan
*
* @return Plan
*/
public function getPlan()
{
return $this->plan;
}
/**
* Set city
*
* @param Undf\LocationDataBundle\Entity\City $city
* @return Stage
*/
public function setCity($city)
{
$this->city = $city;
return $this;
}
/**
* Get city
*
* @return Undf\LocationDataBundle\Entity\City
*/
public function getCity()
{
return $this->city;
}
/**
* Get position
*
* @return integer
*/
public function getPosition()
{
return $this->position;
}
/**
* Set position
* @param integer $position
* @return \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Stage
*/
public function setPosition($position)
{
$this->position = $position;
return $this;
}
/**
* Set links
*
* @param \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection $links
* @return Plan
*/
public function setLinks($links)
{
foreach($this->links as $link) {
if($links->contains($link)) {
$links->removeElement($link);
} else {
$this->removeLinks($link);
}
}
foreach($links as $link) {
$this->addLinks($link);
}
return $this;
}
/**
* Add a link
*
* @param \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Link $link
* @return \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Plan
*/
public function addLinks(Link $link)
{
$link->setStage($this);
$this->links->add($link);
return $this;
}
public function removeLinks(Link $link)
{
$this->links->removeElement($link);
}
/**
* Get links
*
* @return \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection
*/
public function getLinks()
{
return $this->links;
}
/**
* Set is_start
*
* @param boolean $isStart
* @return \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Plan
*/
public function setIsStart($isStart)
{
$this->isStart = $isStart;
return $this;
}
/**
* Get is_start
* @return boolean
*/
public function getIsStart()
{
return $this->isStart;
}
/**
* Set is_end
*
* @param boolean $isEnd
* @return \Undf\PlanBundle\Entity\Stage
*/
public function setIsEnd($isEnd)
{
$this->isEnd = $isEnd;
return $this;
}
/**
* Get is_end
*
* @return boolean
*/
public function getIsEnd()
{
return $this->isEnd;
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,769 |
Q: Create a course using classes in Python Here are my instructions, followed by my code. I am having trouble figuring out how to create an empty list to put the students into (a roster) and then of course how to remove students from that list.
The Course class should have the following methods:
*
*__init__ takes and stores a single integer course number.
*get_course_number takes no arguments and returns the integer course number.
*add_student takes a single string student name and adds it in a roster.
*drop_student takes a single string student name. If the student is currently in the roster, it removes that student name from the roster and returns nothing.
*get_roster takes no arguments and returns a list containing the names of all students enrolled in the course in alphabetical order.
This is what I have written so far:
class Course(object):
def __init__(self,course_number):
self.course_number = int(course_number)
def get_course_number(self):
print (self.course_number)
def add_student(self, student):
self.list=[]
self.student= student
self.list.append(student)
def drop_student(self, student_id):
self.student_id= student_id
if student_id in self.student:
del self.student[student_id]
def get_roster(self):
print (sorted(self.student))
Any insight is much appreciated!
A:
*
*init takes and stores a single integer course number.
Looks good.
*get_course_number takes no arguments and returns the integer course number.
Notice that the question says "return" but you're actually "printing" the integer course number. This means if someone was trying to use your function to ask what the course number is, they would see it printed on the screen, but would not be able to assign it to a variable. You probably want something like:
return (self.course_number)
*add_student takes a single string student name and adds it in a roster.
This function is currently creating a new list everytime it's run. You should perhaps make sure this line is in your init function:
self.list=[]
There is also no need to set self.student, as this line does:
self.student= student
This is basically defining a specific student to currently be the Course's student even after the line has run. You also never use the self.student again, so it's a wasted line.
Other than that this function looks fine.
*drop_student takes a single string student name. If the student is currently in the roster, it removes that student name from the roster and returns nothing.
Again, no need to assign self.student. Here you want to remove the student from the self.list you would initialize in your init function. Two notes here:
*
*Make sure that any code under an if statement is indented. If I fixed only that in the code you wrote it would look like this:
def drop_student(self, student_id):
self.student_id= student_id
if student_id in self.student:
del self.student[student_id]
*Look up the "remove" method for python. Here is a good stackoverflow discussion on it.
*get_roster takes no arguments and returns a list containing the names of all students enrolled in the course in alphabetical order.
self.student is not a list of students, but if it was, your code would be right. Make sure you use the list of students that you should be initializing in your init function.
A: I think this is what you need, just a few changes:
class Course(object):
def __init__(self,course_number):
self.course_number = int(course_number)
self.students = []
def get_course_number(self):
print (self.course_number)
def add_student(self, student_id):
self.students.append(student_id)
def drop_student(self, student_id):
if student_id in self.students:
self.students.remove(student_id)
def get_roster(self):
print (sorted(self.students))
def show_students(self):
print self.students
Here is an example in a shell:
>>> from stack import Course
>>> course = Course(2)
>>> course.add_student(1)
>>> course.add_student(3)
>>> course.show_students()
[1, 3]
>>> course.drop_student(3)
>>> course.show_students()
[1]
>>> course.add_student(5)
>>> course.show_students()
[1, 5]
>>> course.get_roster()
[1, 5]
A: You have done a good job so far. The main mistake you've made is in add_student where you have written:
def add_student(self, student):
self.list=[]
self.student= student
self.list.append(student)
here self.list is obviously meant to represent the "roster". Unfortunately, as you can see, every time you invoke add_student you set the "roster" to an empty list.
Instead of creating the roster there, just create an empty roster in your __init__ function:
def __init__(self,course_number):
self.course_number = int(course_number)
self.roster = []
This list will be used to store students. Now you add_student is straight-forward: just append to the roster:
def add_student(self, student):
self.roster.append(student)
Another issue to point out. Your requirements state you return the course number and sorted list of students but you actually don't do that, you print them. Instead of using print, use return there (and remember that get_roster should return the roster containing the duplicates).
drop_student should be easy to do now. You get a student name and you simply need to remove it from the roster, for this you can use the remove method on lists.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,148 |
De Getbol, Koreaanse getijdenvlakten zijn een geheel van wadden aan de zuidwest- en zuidkust van Zuid-Korea. Ze behoren, op de Waddenzee na, tot de grootste wadden ter wereld. De wadden aan de oostelijke kusten van de Gele Zee en de straat van Korea liggen in de Koreaanse provincies Chungcheongnam-do, Jeollabuk-do en Jeollanam-do.
De wadden behoren tot het natuurlijk erfgoed en werden door Zuid-Korea in 2010 een eerste maal voorgedragen voor opname in de UNESCO werelderfgoedlijst. De nominatie werd in 2018 ingetrokken na evaluatie en werd, met bijkomende documentatie in 2019 opnieuw ingediend. De bijeenkomst van het werelderfgoedcomité werd in 2020 uitgesteld vanwege de coronapandemie maar werd in juli 2021 gehouden in Fuzhou. Tijdens deze 44e sessie van de Commissie voor het Werelderfgoed werd de inschrijving weerhouden en werd de site als Getbol, Koreaanse getijdenvlakten erkend als werelderfgoed.
De site kan opgedeeld worden in vier onderscheiden zones: Seocheon Getbol, Gochang Getbol, Shinan Getbol en Boseong-Suncheon Getbol. De site vertoont een complexe combinatie van geologische, oceanografische en klimatologische omstandigheden die hebben geleid tot de ontwikkeling van diverse sedimentaire kustsystemen. Elk onderdeel vertegenwoordigt een van de vier subtypes van getijdenvlakken (in baaien, estuaria, lagunes en rond archipels).
De site herbergt een hoge mate van biodiversiteit, met meldingen van 2.150 soorten flora en fauna, waaronder 22 wereldwijd bedreigde of bijna bedreigde soorten. Het is de thuisbasis van 47 endemische en vijf bedreigde mariene ongewervelde soorten naast een totaal van 118 trekvogelsoorten waarvoor het gebied kritieke habitats biedt op de zomertrek van en naar Siberië, een trek waarvoor jaarlijks zo'n miljoen trekvogels een rustpauze in de wadden nemen.
Endemische fauna omvat de Koreaanse inktvissen (Octopus minor), en afzetting feeders zoals Japanse modderkrabben (Macrophthalmus (Mareotis) japonicus), wenkkrabben (Uca lactea), en borstelwormen (Polychaeta), Stimpson's spookkrabben (Ocypode stimpsoni), Gele Zee zeeslakken (Umbonium thomasi), , evenals verschillende suspensie feeders zoals mosselen. De site is voor de Commissie voor het Werelderfgoed illustratief voor het verband tussen geodiversiteit en biodiversiteit, en toont de afhankelijkheid van culturele diversiteit en menselijke activiteit van de natuurlijke omgeving.
Galerij
Werelderfgoed in Zuid-Korea | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 106 |
Final Fantasy V Original Sound Version
Buy at Play-Asia
Nobuo Uematsu (composition)
2 discs, 138 minutes total
Disc 1 (66 minutes)
Ahead on Our Way
A Presentiment
Four Valiant Hearts
Hurry! Hurry!
Lenna's Theme
Fate In Haze
Victory's Fanfare
Pirates Ahoy!
Tenderness in the Air
Sealed Away
Cursed Earth
Walking the Snowy Mountains
The Fierce Battle
The Dragon Spreads its Wings
The Fire Powered Ship
Run!
The Ancient Library
Musica Machina
The Day Will Come
Mambo De Chocobo
My Home, Sweet Home
The Airship
The Evil Lord Exdeath
Exdeath's Castle
The Four Warriors of Dawn
Battle with Gilgamesh
Unknown Lands
Critter Tripper Fritter!?
The Castle of Dawn
Beyond the Deep Blue Seas
As I Feel, You Feel
Waltz Clavier
Go Go Boco!
The Land Unknown
The Book of Sealings
Intension of the Earth
The Prelude of Empty Skies
Searching the Light
The Silent Beyond
The New Origin
Fanfare 1
I'm a Dancer
Piano Lesson 1
Released Nov 26, 1994 by Squaresoft (catalog no. PSCN-5015~6, retail 2800 yen).
Uematsu's most underrated soundtrack.
Reader review by Jeremy Althouse
Nobuo Uematsu's music to Final Fantasy V is spectacular. Though some say it lacks the scope of the music of Final Fantasy IV, VI, or VII, it still provides many memorable tracks.
FFV OSV is a complete soundtrack, right down to several short (10-20 second) piano tracks at the end of the second disc. About half of the songs are standard Final Fantasy fare - not bad by any means, but they pale in comparison to the other half of the tracks, which are excellent. "Mambo de Chocobo" is the best rendition of Chocobo music ever. "Fighting Gilgamesh" is some of the best battle music ever put in an RPG. "The New Origin" is exhillarating - you can't tell until 6 or 7 seconds into the piece whether it's in minor or major chords.
The main theme of Final Fantasy V, "Ahead on our Way", has generated some critisism due to being very upbeat, but this is unsubstantiated. It is no less meaningful than the themes from Final Fantasy VI or VII.
All in all, the music of Final Fantasy V is on par with the rest of the series. I recommend playing the game first - indeed many criticisms of the music come from those who have not played the game - but even without playing the game the soundtrack can be enjoyed.
Nobuo Uematsu's best soundtrack ever!
Reader review by Aaron Lau
In my personal opinion, this is Nobuo Uematsu's best soundtrack ever. Some may disagree, either for not playing the game, bad sound system or for some other reason, but trust me, this is *awesome* music here. First, you've got the main theme, "Ahead on Our Way", one heck of an upbeat-ish song, and brilliantly composed. After that are many variations of the song scattered throughout the soundtrack: "Lenna's Theme", "The Day Will Come", "Four Valient Hearts", all of which are awesome. As for "The Dragon Spreads Its Wings", now I am truly breathless. The first one sounds really nice, but it's the variation, "The New Origin", that really takes the cake. It's strong, powerful, and it's got Nobuo written all over it. Anyone who says this sound system isn't great should listen to *this* song. There are many other songs that are good too. The Final Fantasy theme is also here, of course, and while it isn't the strong impact version, it's more than beautiful.
So whatever the reason for not liking this soundtrack, listen to it again. Even I didn't like it at first, but after throughly listening to it I have to say this is the most brilliantly composed music I've ever heard. It only could've been done by only one man: Nobuo Uematsu.
Underrated, under-appreciated, but unbelieveable; one of Uematsu's greatest.
Reader review by Jason Strohmaier
This is the most highly underrated CD ever composed by Nobuo Uematsu. I must admit that the songs don't have as much sadness to them, but they still have much determination and soul. The storyline is a much more spooky one than that of the fourth of sixth installments of the Final Fantasy series, and the songs are made to fit that. The second disk has two of my favorite battle themes of all time, "Battle with Gilgamesh" and "The Decisive Battle". "Battle with Gilgamesh" is my favorite, and is an unbelievable hard rock song that is beyond any other in sheer power. "The New Origin" is the best ending theme that I believe Nobuo Uematsu has ever created, featuring a great rendition of the already great "Dragon Spreads Its Wings" song. Almost all of the dungeon themes are great ("Fate in Haze", "Sealed Away", and "Cursed Earth". I think there are more in the set, but I'm not sure).
I'm not going to draw any comparisons between this set of songs or any other Final Fantasy OSVs that everyone else seems prone to. There are some songs in this CD set that are better than those on the Final Fantasy IV and VI CD sets, and vice versa. I think that the people who say that the songs on this set are not as good as those that Nobuo usually creates just don't know the game that they are connected to well enough to be able to link the songs to the events in the storyline. No matter how you look at it, this set shows yet again that Nobuo Uematsu is one of the greatest game music composers ever to grace a the video game market.
An absolute must for Uematsu fans.
Reader review by Jesse Watson
While I can't imagine anyone disliking this CD, it is somewhat of a disappointment. As you might know by now, Nobuo Uematsu is my hero. His music is immortal, the most beautiful ever created - but not this one. Nobuo was going through something of a mid-life crisis around the time he wrote this. He was in an emotionless period when he composed most of these songs, so they're pure skill - no emotion. The mix of emotion and skill is what makes Nobuo's music superb.
How is it when there is no emotion present? It's not that bad, really. In fact, it's better than most other composers, even if it isn't truly Final Fantasy. Most of the music is just good, while some of it is superb, Nobuo quality. I think he was able to tap into some of the emotion of FFIV when he wrote the best pieces of this sound track. While I can't give this Mr. Uematsu's standard highly recommended, I can still say that any true fan of game music as well as Nobuo Uematsu should have this. There is, also, that the instrument set used in this game was a bit synthy for my taste. If you don't mind synth, grab this one. There is plenty in here that you can recognize, even if it is just pure skill for the most part. However, like I said, there are some songs that remind me of loneliness, of aging, of being mortal. These songs are very good, very exploratory-sounding. The more I listen, the more I like it.
Different but one of Uematsu's best.
Reader review by John Lau
Let me begin by saying, this work is genius! In my opinion, Final Fantasy V is the best Final Fantasy game and the soundtrack is no exception. The tracks are filled with a sense of childishness, and I guess that's why I like this soundtrack so much. From the upbeat rhythms of "Ahead on our Way," to the cute, yet rocking song of our favorite villain, ExDeath, this disc has a lot to offer. Many think that this is Nobuo Uematsu's low point. But, I don't think so. I like this better than FF VI OSV, and that is saying quite a lot. It is not just the songs, but the instruments that make this CD cool. It is just different. The melodies are not of the usual Final Fantasy flair, but of a new, funnier flair. I wouldn't mind if Nobuo Uematsu did this again. This is truly a work of art!
Final Fantasy V concert by Little Jack Orchestra (2012)
Last comment May 2013 by Adam Corn
Started May 2013
by Namorbia
Even more wetting oneself news (FFV GBA)
Last comment Aug 2006 by GoldfishX
Started Aug 2006
Final Fantasy XIV: Journeys ~Arrangement Album~
Last comment Jun 2019 by Qui-Gon Joe
Started Jun 2019
by Adam Corn
Final Fantasy XIV Piano Collections
Last comment Jun 2019 by Adam Corn
A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy - Volume II
Final Fantasy 5 Dear Friends
Orchestral Game Music Concert 2
Final Fantasy 13 Piano Collections
Final Fantasy 6 OSV | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,319 |
\section{Introduction.}
There are several important subjects in cosmology where neutrinos play
(or may play) a significant role. Among them are primordial
nucleosynthesis, dark matter, and the large scale structure formation.
In the last two cases neutrinos are important only if they are massive.
Unfortunately there is no direct experimental evidence for
nonzero $m_\nu$, though the accuracy of experiments is rather loose
especially for $\nu_\mu$ and $\nu_\tau$:
\begin{equation}{
m_{\nu_e} < 5\, eV\cite{mnue}
\label{mnue}
}\end{equation}
\begin{equation}{
m_{\nu_\mu} < 160\, keV\cite{mnumu}
\label{mnumu}
}\end{equation}
\begin{equation}{
m_{\nu_\tau} < 24\, MeV\cite{mnutau}
\label{mnutau}
}\end{equation}
Though direct measurement give only upper bounds for $m_\nu$
there are accumulated indirect data on anomalous neutrino
behaviour which can be nicely explained by
neutrino oscillations. If this is the case, then neutrino mass should be
nonvanishing. (Inverse is not true, nonzero masses of different neutrino
flavors do not necessarily imply oscillations though the absence of
oscillations in this case would be very unnatural.)
Theory neither demands nor forbids nonzero neutrino mass. In all the
known cases of massless particles there is a theoretical principle
which not only explains the vanishing of the mass and also protects
its zero value against radiative corrections. For example vanishing
masses of photon and graviton are ensured respectively by gauge
invariance in QCD or by coordinate covariance in general relativity.
No similar principle is known for neutrinos. So if "anything which is
not forbidden is permitted", neutrinos should be massive. One may hope
that mass spectrum of neutrinos is related to a new physics at high
energy scale beyond that of electroweak interactions. Since this scale
is unknown, theory does not say anything about possible values of
neutrino masses and one is free to speculate about them in the limits
permitted by experiment, cosmology, and astrophysics. Except for
restrictions on neutrino mass cosmology permits to put bounds on neutrino
oscillation parameters, magnetic moments, and decay properties.
\section{Relic Neutrinos and Cosmological Bounds on Their Mass.}
Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the Universe after photons
of cosmic microwave background radiation. Their number density is
determined by thermal equilibrium which existed in the early universe
and is given by
\begin{equation}{
n_{\nu_j} = n_{\bar \nu_j} = (3 / 22) n_\gamma
\label{nnuj}
}\end{equation}
where $j = e,\,\mu ,\,\tau$ and
$n_\gamma =400 (T_\gamma /2.7\,K)^3 cm^{-3}$.
This result is valid if the following conditions are fulfilled:
\begin{enumerate}
\item{}Thermal equilibrium of neutrinos with the primeval electromagnetic
plasma at temperatures above 3 MeV. This is known to be true and gives
$n_\nu/ n_\gamma = 3/8$.
\item{}Adiabatic heating of photons by $e^+ e^-$-annihilation which
increases the photon number density so that the above ratio goes down
to $n_\nu /n_\gamma = 3/22$.
\item{}No other sources producing additional photons below neutrino
decoupling (at $T=3$ MeV). At sufficiently small temperatures, $T<10$ keV,
possible existence of such sources is strongly constrained by the accurate
Planck spectrum of cosmic microwave radiation.
\item{}No new interactions of neutrinos. Their frozen abundance
is determined by the usual weak interaction cross-section. If for example
neutrinos possess Yukawa interaction with massless Goldstone boson
(Majoron) with sufficiently large coupling constant $g$, their
relative number density could be as small as
$r_\nu \equiv n_\nu /n_\gamma \approx m_\nu /(g^4 m_{Pl})$ where $m_{Pl} =
1.221\cdot 10^{19}$ GeV is the Planck mass. Correspondingly the limit
obtained below for $m_\nu$ would be weaker.
\item{}Relic neutrinos are 100\% left-handed. If they have Dirac
mass and participate in
normal weak interactions only, this assumption is true roughly speaking
with the accuracy $(m_\nu /MeV)^2$. For Majorana mass no additional
states appear for any mass value.
\item{}Neutrino stability. Neutrino life-time should be bigger than the
universe age, $t_U \approx 10^{10}$ years. Otherwise their number density
at the present day would be smaller or even negligible.
Still the influence of the decay products on the universe
expansion rate permits to put some bounds on the mass/life-time even
if the decay goes into invisible particles.
\item{}Vanishing chemical potential of neutrinos. This ensures equality
$n_\nu = n_{\bar \nu}$. Normally leptonic chemical potentials are of the
same order of magnitude as the baryonic one, which is known to be very
small from the baryon asymmetry of the universe. Still strictly speaking
a large lepton asymmetry is not forbidden and in this case the limit
on the mass would be stronger. We return to the case of large neutrino
chemical potentials in connection with primordial nucleosynthesis.
\end{enumerate}
Energy density in the universe is characterized by the cosmological
parameter $\Omega = \rho /\rho_c$ where $\rho_c = 3H^2 m_{Pl}^2 /8\pi$
and $H$ is the Hubble constant which is parametrized as
$H=100h_{100}\,km/sec/mpc $. Since the energy density of neutrinos
(and antineutrinos) is smaller than the total energy density of
matter we can
write the upper bound on their mass (Gerstein-Zeldovich limit)\cite{gz}
as:
\begin{equation}{
\sum_j m_{\nu_j} < \Omega_m \rho_c /(n_\nu + n_{\bar \nu}) =
94 h_{100}^2 \Omega_m \,eV
\label{mnugz}
}\end{equation}
Here $\Omega_m$ corresponds to energy density of matter in contrast to
vacuum energy density (or cosmological constant). Since $\Omega$ is not
a well known quantity it could be more restrictive to express the bound
on $m_\nu$ through the lower limit on the universe age and the Hubble
parameter. The universe age is given by
\begin{equation}{
t_U ={1 \over H} \int^1_0 {dx \over (1-\Omega_{tot} +
\Omega_m /x + \Omega_r/ x^2 + \Omega_v x^2)^{1/2} }
\label{tu}
}\end{equation}
where $\Omega_m$, $\Omega_r$, and $\Omega_v$ are the present-day
fractions of cosmological
energy density of nonrelativistic matter, relativistic matter, and vacuum
(cosmological constant); $\Omega_{tot} = \Omega_m + \Omega_r + \Omega_v$.
In spatially flat universe, as advocated by inflationary scenario,
$\Omega_{tot}=1$. It is usually assumed that $\Omega_r \ll \Omega_m$
because relativistic energy density decreases faster in the course of
expansion than the nonrelativistic one. It may be not so if there are
late-decaying particle producing relativistic decay products at
contemporary epoch. It is also assumed that $\Omega_v=0$ (vanishing
cosmological constant). This assumption has no theoretical justification,
moreover any reasonable theoretical estimate gives the value of vacuum
energy density 50-100 orders of magnitude bigger than the observational
limit\cite{sw}. So having something so small, because of unknown mechanism,
one assumes that this quantity is exactly zero. The recent conflict between
a large universe age and a high value of the Hubble constant indicates
that cosmological constant and correspondingly $\Omega_v$ might be nonzero.
The universe age is determined from the ages of old globular clusters and
the relative abundances of long-lived radionucleides and is found to be
in the range $t_U= 12-15$ Gyr. Recently even a larger value, $t_U=17$ Gyr,
was advocated (for the review see \cite{vdb}). The Hubble parameter is
probably somewhere between $0.5<h_{100}<1$. The new data has tendency to
higher values, $h_{100}= 0.7-0.8$\cite{hubble} but is still hard to
estimate systematic errors.
Assuming that good old cosmology with zero cosmological term is valid and
approximating the integral (\ref{tu}) by the expression
$t_U\approx [H(1+\sqrt{\Omega}/2)]^{-1}$ we get
\begin{equation}{
\sum_j m_{\nu_j} < 390\,eV \left( {9.8\,Gyr \over t_U } -h_{100} \right)^2
\label{mnutu}
}\end{equation}
With $h_{100}=0.65$ and $t_U > 12$ Gyr one gets $m_\nu < 10$ eV. With larger
$H$ and $t_U$ the bound is even stronger but at some stage the assumption
of vanishing $\Omega_v$ becomes incompatible with their high values and
one has to invoke nonzero cosmological constant. The bound becomes weaker
but still meaningful. For example with $\Omega_{tot}=1$, $t_U > 14$ Gyr,
and $h_{100} > 0.75$ we get $m_\nu < 20$ eV.
There is also the well known bound on the mass of a very heavy neutrino
(if it exists) from below\cite{dvz}:
$m_\nu > 3$ GeV. It was obtained with $\Omega_v =0$. Relaxing this assumption
one gets the limit 2-3 times weaker. These limits are not very interesting
after direct measurement of the decay width of $Z^0$ made at LEP which
showed that there is no space for an extra neutrino with mass below $m_Z/2$.
Moreover it is difficult to believe that so heavy neutrinos could be stable
on cosmological time scale, though formally it is not excluded.
\section{Spectrum of Cosmic Neutrinos}
It is assumed usually that cosmic neutrinos (if they are massless)
have equilibrium Fermi-Dirac spectrum with vanishing chemical
potentials:
\begin{equation}{
f_\nu = 1/[\exp(E/T_\nu) + 1]
\label{specnu}
}\end{equation}
with the temperature $T_\nu = (4/11)^{1/3} T_\gamma = 1.93(T\gamma/2.7)$.
However in contrast to electromagnetic background radiation where spectral
distortion is extremely small, below $10^{-4}$\cite{cobe}, neutrino spectrum
is much more distorted. It is because electrons and neutrinos have different
temperatures at $T<m_e$ so that the annihilation $e^+ e^- \rightarrow
\bar \nu \nu$ produces nonequilibrium $\nu$ and $\bar \nu$ which cannot
thermalize at these low temperatures. Calculations of ref.\cite{df} give
the result:
\begin{equation}{
\delta f_{\nu_e} /f_{\nu_e} \approx 5\times 10^{-4} (E/T) (11E/4T -3)
\label{deltaf}
}\end{equation}
Numerical calculations\cite{dt} give similar results. The distortion
for $\nu_\mu$ and $\nu_\tau$ is approximately twice smaller because
at that temperatures they have only neutral current interactions.
This effect results in an increase of neutrino number density at
the present day by almost 1\%. It is not important from the point of
view of the bound on their mass. It could be potentially essential for
the primordial nucleosynthesis. Distortion of the electronic
neutrino spectrum would change the neutron-to-proton ratio
because electronic neutrinos (in contrast to $\nu_\mu$ and $\nu_\tau$)
participate in the reactions $n+\nu \leftrightarrow p+e^-$ and
$p+\bar \nu \leftrightarrow n+e^+$ and directly shift its value
(not only through the influence on the cooling rate). If there is an
excess of $\nu_e$ and equally of $\bar \nu_e$ at higher energies
(with respect to the equilibrium values) the $n/p$-ratio would be
bigger because the number density of protons is larger than the number
density of neutrons by factor $\exp (\Delta m /T)$ and correspondingly
destruction of neutrons in the first reaction is
less efficient than the production of them in the second reaction. An
excess of neutrinos at low energy produces the opposite effect because
of threshold 1.8 MeV in the second reaction which inhibits neutron
production. The correction (\ref{deltaf}) could shift the $n/p$-ratio
at per cent level but for this particular case
its influence on nucleosynthesis is practically negligible. As we have
mentioned above the dependence of $n/p$-ratio on the spectrum
corrections is not sign-definite and it
happened that the spectrum was distorted in such a way
that $n/p$-ratio does not change. The effect would be much
bigger if nonequilibrium $\nu_e$ ($\bar \nu_e$)
come from the annihilation of heavy tau-neutrinos with the mass around
10 MeV, $\nu_\tau \bar \nu_\tau \rightarrow \nu_e \bar \nu_e$\cite{dpv}.
Another possible
source of nonequilibrium electronic neutrinos could be decays
of massive particles\cite{ts,dk} after neutrino decoupling from
the cosmic plasma, that takes place around 2 MeV. A possible candidate for
the role of the mother-particle is massive $\nu_\tau$. As we
mentioned above the effect of nonequilibrium $\nu_e$ could shift
$n/p$-ratio either way. In particular if $n/p$ goes down, this would
relax the Schwartsman bound\cite{schw} on the number of massive
neutrino species\cite{dk} or relax the bound on
the baryon-to-photon ratio during nucleosynthesis\cite{gt}.
\section{Bounds on Neutrino Mass from Nucleosynthesis}
In the case that neutrinos live longer than nucleosynthesis time,
$t_{NS}\sim 100$ sec but shorter than the universe age,
$t_U \sim 10^{10}$ years, consideration of primordial nucleosynthesis
permits to exclude an interesting interval of $\nu_\tau$ mass\cite{ckst,
dr}, while for $\nu_e$ and $\nu_\mu$ the bounds are weaker than the
experimental ones (1,2). The arguments are essentially the same as those
leading to the nucleosynthesis bound on the number of massless neutrino
flavors\cite{schw}.
New particle species in the primeval plasma during nucleosynthesis
epoch would change the universe cooling rate and correspondingly the
frozen value of neutron-to-proton ratio which predominantly
determines abundances of the produced light elements. Concordance with
observations leads to the bound on the extra neutrino species,
$k_\nu < 1$. Quite recently the bound was more restrictive, $k_\nu<0.3$
or even $k_\nu <0.1$ but recent data on primordial $^4He$ and deuterium
created some confusion and the relaxation of the bound. For the details
and references see the talk by G. Steigman at this conference\cite{gs}.
If neutrinos are heavy their influence on the cooling rate would be
similar to addition of extra massless neutrino flavors.
Though in equilibrium the energy density of massive particles
is smaller than that of massless ones, tau-neutrinos with mass in
MeV-range went out of equilibrium when their number density is still
nonnegligible and since the energy density of nonrelativistic particles
in the course of expansion decreases more slowly, they gradually begin
to dominate. For example 10 MeV tau neutrino which is stable on the
nucleosynthesis time scale is equivalent to almost 7 massless neutrino
species if it is a Dirac particles and to 4 species if it is a Majorana
one \cite{dr}. This argument permits to exclude $\nu_\tau$ in the mass
interval $0.5< m_{\nu_\tau}<35$ MeV\cite{ckst,dr} if the permitted bound
on extra neutrino species is $\Delta N_\nu < 0.6$. In the case of a
weaker bound, $\delta N_\nu <1$, the excluded mass interval shrinks to
$1<m_{\nu_\tau}<30$ MeV. These results are valid for the Majorana type
neutrinos. In the Dirac case the lower limits are approximately twice
better. It is connected with twice larger number of possible states for
the Dirac particles. The occupation number of right-handed neutrinos
in the primeval plasma was calculated in ref.\cite{dkr} (for earlier
papers see\cite{mnud}) where it was shown that in the case of a very
strong bound $\Delta N_\nu < 0.1$ the lower end of the excluded interval
for the Dirac tau neutrino goes down to approximately 10 KeV.
These results were obtained under assumptions of kinetic equilibrium
of neutrinos in the primeval plasma. As is mentioned in the previous
section this assumption is violated and nonequilibrium electronic
neutrinos may considerably strengthen the limits. For example
nonequilibrium $\nu_e(\bar \nu_e)$ coming from the annihilation of 20
MeV tau neutrinos are equivalent to almost one extra neutrino species
if $\nu_\tau$ has the Dirac mass and to 0.15 extra nus if it has the
Majorana mass\cite{dpv}.
Tau-neutrinos with MeV mass would not spoil successful nucleosynthesis
results if they are unstable on the
nucleosynthesis time scale. This case was
analyzed in ref.\cite{unstable}. The bounds on the mass depend upon
the life-time and decay channels. For a sufficiently short life-time
tau-neutrinos remain in equilibrium during nucleosynthesis, their number
density is Boltsmann suppressed and practically any mass is permitted.
Another way to avoid the nucleosynthesis bound on the mass is to assume
a new interactions for $\nu_\tau$ which could deplete their density at
nucleosynthesis. Since MeV tau-neutrinos should be unstable anyhow a new
interaction which generates the decay, is necessary. This could be flavor
nonconserving effective four-fermion interaction generating the decay
$\nu_\tau \rightarrow 3\nu$ or the Yukawa coupling to a light (or massless)
scalar boson (like e.g. Majoron) producing the decay
$\nu_\tau \rightarrow J+\nu_l$ where $l$ stands for $e$ or $\mu$. The
life-time with respect to these decays may be very long so that $\nu_\tau$
remains stable during nucleosynthesis. It is possible that the nondiagonal
coupling $g'\nu_\tau \nu_l J$ leading to the decay is much weaker than
the diagonal one $g \nu_\tau \nu_\tau J$. In this case the annihilation
$\nu_\tau+\nu_\tau \rightarrow 2J$ may be efficient during nucleosynthesis
diminishing $\nu_\tau$ number density\cite{dprv}.
This could help to avoid the mass limits mentioned above. For the details
and references see also the talk by S.Pastor at this conference.
\section{Lepton Asymmetry}
It is usually assumed that there is no charge asymmetry in lepton sector,
the number density of neutrinos is equal to that of antineutrinos. Lepton
asymmetry is not directly observable and in principle may be large. The
reason for the assumption of its smallness is a small value of the baryon
asymmetry, $(n_B - n_{\bar B}) /n_\gamma \approx 3\times 10^{-10}$. Usually
theoretical models predict lepton and baryon asymmetry of about the same
magnitude though there may be interesting exceptions.
The value of charge asymmetry in kinetic
equilibrium can be characterized by chemical potential $\mu$ so that
the expression (\ref{specnu}) is changed to
\begin{equation}{
f_\nu = 1/[\exp((E-\mu)/T_\nu) + 1]
\label{mns}
}\end{equation}
In chemical equilibrium $\bar \mu + \mu =0$ where $\bar \mu$ is
the chemical potential of antiparticles.
It is convenient to introduce the quantity $\xi=\mu/T$ which remains
constant in the course of expansion if the corresponding charge is
conserved.
The strongest bound on the magnitude of lepton asymmetry can be derived
from primordial nucleosynthesis. Nonzero chemical potential results in
an increase of neutrino energy density and in this sense is equivalent
to an addition of extra neutrino species. If the nucleosynthesis upper
bound is $\Delta n_\nu <1$ then $|\xi_l| < 1.5$, and if $\Delta n_\nu <0.3$
then $|\xi_l| < 0.8$. For electronic type neutrinos the limit is
much stronger because, as we have mentioned above, the $n/p$-ratio
is especially sensitive to the spectrum of electronic neutrinos. If the
data on light element abundances permit one extra neutrino species
electronic chemical potential is bounded by $\xi_e < 0.07$. For more
details and the list of references see review paper\cite{ad3}.
Lepton asymmetry should be generated along the same lines as the
baryon asymmetry, namely by the out-of-equilibrium processes with
leptonic charge nonconservation and C and CP breaking\cite{ads}.
Leptogenesis in GUT models predicts lepton symmetry of the same
order as the baryonic one and correspondingly $\xi \leq 10^{-9}$.
Electroweak leptogeneration\cite{krs} satisfies the condition of
$(B-L)$-conservation and also predicts a very low result for the
lepton asymmetry. Moreover if electroweak phase transition is second
order then the asymmetry is not generated but washed out by
electroweak processes. In this case any preexisting state with
arbitrary $B=L$ acquires $B=L=0$ after electroweak stage. However
if there was a primordial lepton asymmetry $L_i$ then after
electroweak epoch asymmetry $B=L=L_i/2$ would be generated.
The initial lepton asymmetry might come from the
out-of-equilibrium decays of heavy Majorana neutrino\cite{fy}.
One sees that in this case the lepton asymmetry is very small too.
Still there is a hope to generate a large lepton asymmetry in a
version\cite{dk2} of the model of baryogenesis with baryonic (and
leptonic) charge condensate\cite{afd} (see also \cite{ad3}). It is
essential that electroweak processes would not spoil this result;
this could happen if the relevant processes take place below the
electroweak scale or if electroweak baryo- and lepto- genesis do not
operate. The model\cite{dk2} predicts
a relatively small spatial scale of the variation of lepton
asymmetry. The concrete size of the scale is model dependent and
could quite easily be as small as O(kpc) or as large as O(Gpc). It
is interesting if the recently observed\cite{deut} different abundances
of primordial deuterium at large distances,
$z\approx 3$, could be explained
by variation of leptonic chemical potentials. If this is the case
then not only deuterium but other light elements (especially $^4 He$)
should have systematically varying abundances.
\section{Neutrino Oscillations and New Neutrinos}
Neutrino oscillations is probably the central (hypothetical) phenomenon
in neutrino physics. There is not yet conclusive laboratory evidence in
favor of oscillations but an impressive experimental activity in the
field makes one hope for an essential progress in the near future. For
the reviews and references see talks by Caldwell\cite{cald} and
Valle\cite{valle} at this conference. There are plenty of indirect
evidence in favor of oscillations. First among them is the deficit of
solar neutrinos discovered by the group led by Davies whose 80th
anniversary we all celebrate here. This deficit may be explained by
the resonance neutrino oscillations (the MSW effect) and there is
plenty of discussion of the problem at this conference. There are some
other observed anomalies in neutrino physics like atmospheric neutrino
problem or Karmen anomaly. If all the data are correct the implications
could be quite exciting. One possibility is an existence of a new
sterile neutrino, $\nu_s$ with an efficient oscillations between
$\nu_s$ and normal neutrinos (for a recent discussion see\cite{pelt}).
Oscillations into new neutrino states would distort successful
nucleosynthesis predictions and hence a bound on oscillations parameters
can be derived. Neutrino oscillations in the hot dense cosmic plasma
at high temperatures when neutrinos are strongly coupled to the plasma
is a rather comlicated phenomenon. It cannot be described by the usual
Schroedinger equation but the density matrix formalism
should be used instead\cite{ad4}. At smaller temperatures (roughly
speaking below 2-3 MeV), when neutrino scattering dies down, one can
return to the Schroedinger equation with the properties of the medium
described by refraction index\cite{raf}. The bounds on the oscillation
parameters derived in refs.\cite{bd} are meaningful if primordial
nucleosynthesis strongly constraints the number of extra neutrino
species. In the case that $\Delta n_\nu =1$ is permitted no restriction
follows from nucleosynthesis for oscillations into one and only one new
state. It was argued in ref.\cite{fv1} that neutrino oscillations could
give rise to a large leptonic chemical potentials. This is a very interesting
result though it is in contradiction with papers\cite{bd}. It deserves
further consideration.
Recently there appeared a renewed interest\cite{bm,fv,sil,bdr} to the old idea
of the mirror world\cite{miro}. It is assumed that there exists another
world almost or exactly symmetrical to ours which is coupled to our world
only through gravity and possibly through a new very weak interaction.
Such a possibility is inspired by superstrings with the symmetry group
$G_{tot}=G\times G'$ (like e.g. $E_8\times E'_8$). Another world contains
the same set of particles and similar interactions. Exact symmetry
between the two worlds are forbidden by the nucleosynthesis because the\
mirror world contributes effectively $\Delta n_\nu = 10.75/1.75 = 6.14$
to the number of massless neutrino species. However if the symmetry is
broken so that the (re)heating temperatures after inflation are different
the nucleosynthesis constraints may be satisfied. A very interesting
phenomenologically model arises if the electroweak symmetry breaking
scales are different in our and mirror worlds, $v'/v \approx 30$. To
satisfy the nucleosynthesis constraints in this case the ratio of the
temperatures of normal and mirror particles at the nucleosynthesis era
should be $T'/T < 0.96 (\Delta n_\nu)^{1/4}$\cite{bdr}. Oscillations
between mirror and normal neutrinos with
a reasonable choice of parameters may explain all known neutrino
anomalies\cite{bm}. The model predicts the existence of relatively
heavy mirror neutrinos with the mass in keV range which may be warm
dark matter while light neutrinos with mass in eV range are natural
candidates for hot dark matter. Because of different electroweak
scales the masses of fundamental fermions in the mirror world are
about 30 times larger. This results in the absence of stable mirror
nuclei and in turn to quite different astrophysics and in particular
to an easier black hole formation.
If neutrinos have a magnetic moment then their interaction with magnetic
field would result in spin-flip and so normal left-handed neutrinos
would be transformed into sterile right-handed ones. If this process was
efficient during nucleosynthesis it doubled the number
of neutrino species. Assuming that during nucleosynthesis there
existed magnetic fields in the primeval plasma which seeded the
present-day magnetic fields in galaxies, one can put an upper bound on
the neutrino magnetic moment, $\mu_\nu <10^{-16} \mu_B$\cite{ers} where
$\mu_B$ is the electron Bohr magneton.
\section{Neutrinos and the large Scale Universe Structure}
Massive neutrino are natural candidates for dark matter particles. In
comparison with other candidates neutrinos have a definite advantage:
they are known to exist and it is natural to expect that they are
massive. Unfortunately the theory of large scale structure formation with
light neutrinos ($m=O(10)$eV), so called hot dark matter, does not fit
the observed picture. Formation of galactic (and smaller) size structures
is strongly suppressed. Moreover light neutrinos contradict Tremaine-Gunn
limit\cite{tg}. Because of Fermi exclusion principle one cannot squeeze
arbitrary many neutrinos into a galaxy and to represent invisible mass
in dwarf spheroids they should be heavier than 0.3-0.5 keV. So
one has to invoke new heavy hypothetical particles (cold dark matter).
Cosmology presents one of the strongest arguments in favor of their
existence and thus of new physics beyond the standard model. (For
the recent review see e.g. ref\cite{ad5}). Still neutrinos are probably
not absolutely useless for structure formation. One of the popular models
requests 70\% of cold dark matter and 30\% of hot dark matter
and might be especially good if there are two equal mass neutrinos with
$m=2.5$ eV\cite{cald}.
A single component dark matter model looks of course more natural and
attractive. Unfortunately with the simple assumption of scale-free (flat)
spectrum of initial perturbations\cite{hz} such models do not agree
with observational data. Addition of 30\% of hot dark matter permits to
increase the power at large scales without distortion small scales.
The same goal can be achieved with heavy (MeV) unstable but long lived
particle\cite{unst}. A rather natural candidate for such a particle
is tau-neutrino. The role of the decaying particle is to enhance the
energy density of relativistic matter coming from the product of its
decay. This would result in a later onset of nonrelativistic stage
and correspondingly to a smaller power of evolved structures at small
scales. An improvement of the bound on $\nu_\tau$ mass is very interesting
from the point of view of testing these models.
\section{Acknowledgement}
This work was supported by DGICYT under grants PB92-0084 and SAB94-0089.
| {
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} | 6,711 |
ACCEPTED
#### According to
Index Fungorum
#### Published in
Agaric. mod. Tax. (Koenigstein), Edn 4 774 (1986)
#### Original name
Boletus fragicolor Berk.
### Remarks
null | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,125 |
Indian dancing session at Halton Mill
Halton Mills.'Halton Mills housing development, which has been bought by a group of businessmen.
Published: 12:26 Thursday 26 April 2018
Halton Mill in Halton is joining other community businesses around the country to celebrate the third annual Community Business Weekend.
Aimed at shining a light on the 7,000 community businesses across England, Community Business Weekend offers a unique opportunity for local people to visit and see how they can get involved.
On Sunday May 6, Halton Mill, which has been community-owned since 2008, is hosting an ancient Indian dance destressing session, with all proceeds being donated to Child.org.
Sharlene Gandhi, who is running the session said: "This is the first event of its kind in the Lancaster area. I would love to bring a little bit of my native culture to families and young people this bank holiday weekend, and hopefully get everybody a little bit stretched out and sweaty in the process!"
Peter Jenkins, interim chief executive at organisers Power to Change, said: "Community businesses are a great example of local people taking power into their own hands. Every day tens of thousands of people get up and go to work at one of the 7,000 community businesses in England. Hundreds of thousands of us shop, visit or benefit from them directly, but they are still relatively unknown.
"That's why Community Business Weekend is so important. To find out more about The Dance Destresser event and buy tickets, visit https://ti.to/child-org/dance-destresser.
To find out about other Community Business Weekend events in the area and for more information about the weekend, visit www.communitybusinessweekend.org.
Free legal advice on offer in Lancaster city centre | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,310 |
The 7 - Ladies Only - Anybody For T n' A?
That title was a play on words, of course I'm referring to the penny PPV brought to us by NWA TNA. How many of you ladies will shillout the big bucks? I have been watching TNA pretty regularly for some time, so I'm real happy to see this promotion finally getting that groove going. Not only that, but they got some pretty attractive men there too. The best looking are of course AJ Styles (country accent and all), and Christopher Daniels, to name a few.
Have any of you ladies sampled TNA? Do you think they have a chance in Hell to be the second banana to Vinnie Mac? Let us know. Also, let me know what you think of my brand spanking new sig, just below...
Purple Pixie
Bauerwurst
From: Sunderland, England
I don't see much TNA but what I do see I enjoy. AJ Styles is definately the best (as far as I am concerned) at the mo. I definately think they'll stay in second place though.
Hey on a lighter note it's great to see a new thread! The title got my attention. I like the sig- It's too true!Oh yeah and what about my new header- eh?!?
I had to get the TNA special -- after all, it was on sale!! I've gotten TNA shows twice before (one of which had the original showing of the tag team match).
The thing about TNA is that they have some stuff that's killer good, & lots that I find either pretty bad, boring, confusing, or all three.
On the "eye-candy / beefcake" front, they don't have (that I've seen, at least) anybody that I really get all fluttery about. They've got a few cuties, but nobody even near the HHH / O'Haire neighbourhood. There's nobody that I find myself staring at, making "oooh" noises.
There's also a big recognisability problem with many of the guys, given that the promotion is trying to develop an audience. Maybe it's just because I don't have WCW or ECW background. But I have a lot of trouble getting that sense of "he's the guy who does ... whatever". They seem to have a lot of guys that look too much alike to me -- they need to get some more readily-distinguishable characters. Every time I see Christopher Daniels, I think that it's Justin Credible. I swear they have at least 3 different guys who look like X-Pac. And too many of them have generic names -- I can't keep track of vanilla names like Chris Harris vs. Chris Daniels. "Michael Shane", "Shane Michaels", "Shawn Michaels"(:-)), "Shane Douglas", "Douglas Shane" -- have they got a "Douglas Michaels" &/or "Michael Douglas" waiting in the wings?
I guess they've sort of given up on the 4-faction thing? That was way too confusing for casual viewers to keep track of -- I don't even know who most of the guys are, & I'm supposed to keep track of their political affiliations besides??
On the "entertainment" front, I love Raven, & as far as I'm concerned, he owns the entertainment aspect of TNA. But I'm bored to tears with Shane Douglas, who seems to be the closest thing they have to a recurring nemesis for Raven. And that Reverend Whatsis is too cartoonish for Raven's subtlety. Gilbertti can be entertaining. But really, other than Raven, I haven't been particularly drawn to any of the characters.
(It occurs to me, as I type, that overall I have a lot more of an interest & rapport with the characters on the Lucha Libre shows than I do with most of the TNA characters. I don't even speak spanish, & have no clue what's going on half the time. Hmm.)
On the "wrestling" front, the X Division is killer good, although they scare the crap out of me. I've seen Chris Sabin & Frankie Kazarian several times & find them just amazing. I hadn't seen Michael Shane before, but he was good. (Now, if I could just keep track of his damn name, that'd be helpful.) I'm not convinced that Red isn't a gymnast chick, but that's OK. Outside of the X Division, the wrestling that I've seen is occasionally good, but more often, somewhere from OK to pretty bad. Maybe I've just been unlucky -- maybe I need more of a connection to the participants.
So, given what I've seen, there isn't quite the critical mass that I need to plunk down my $10 every week. (I would shell out $10 once a month for a Raven, X Division, plus miscellaneous highlights show though.) If it were on free TV, I'd probably watch it, & maybe develop some interest in the characters. By definition, it is the Number 2 promotion in the US, just because it's the only one that's readily available to a broad audience. Will it be worth Vinnie Mac buying out one day? Maybe. Is Vinnie Mac quaking in his Gucci loafers? Naw.
But you've gotta love the spot where Kazarian dives over Sabin, slightly overshoots, grabs Sabin's trunks, & gives us pretty much a full moon! (No apparent sign of a thong or anything. Pity spandex stretches so far without tearing.) :-)
(edited by emma on 11.9.03 2308)
RyanAnderson's3PtMagic
From: DC
Who would've known that big ol' Val Venis would be around for the ladies Too bad he left...
Thread ahead: Women in Wrestling
Next thread: Iron Men - Smackdown 9/18
Previous thread: Wrecking rental cars -- SmackDown 9/11/03 (24 newer) Next thread | Previous thread
The 7 - Ladies Only - Anybody For T n' A? Register and log in to post! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,661 |
Displaced Archives
Displaced archives have long been a problem and their existence continues to trouble archivists, historians and government officials. Displaced Archives brings together leading international experts to comprehensively explore the current state of affairs for the first time. Drawing on case studies from around the world, the authors examine displaced archives as a consequence of conflict and colonialism, analysing their impact on government administration, nation building, human rights and justice. Renewed action is advocated through considerations of the legal approaches to repatriation, the role of the international archival community, 'shared heritage' approaches and other solutions. The volume offers new theoretical, technical and political insights and will be essential reading for practitioners, academics and students in the field of archives, cultural property and heritage management, as well as history, politics and international relations.
James Lowry is a Lecturer in the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies, UK.
Displaced Archives
Edited by James Lowry
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, James Lowry; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of James Lowry to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-1-4724-7069-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-57760-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
List of Contributors
Foreword by Eric Ketelaar
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Displaced Archives
James Lowry
1 Archives Seizures: The Evolution of International Law
Charles Kecskeméti
2 Making Sovereignty and Affirming Modernity in the Archives of Decolonisation: The Algeria–France 'Dispute' between the Post-Decolonisation French and Algerian Republics, 1962–2015
Todd Shepard
3 Displaced Archives in The National Archives of the United Kingdom
Mandy Banton
4 Indonesian National Revolution Records in the National Archives of the Netherlands
Michael Karabinos
5 Hiding the Colonial Past? A Comparison of European Archival Policies
Vincent Hiribarren
6 Expatriate Archives Revisited
Timothy Lovering
7 A Proposal for Action on African Archives in Europe
Nathan Mnjama and James Lowry
8 Displaced Archives in the Wake of Wars
Leopold Auer
9 Pan-European Displaced Archives in the Russian Federation: Still Prisoners of War on the 70th Anniversary of V-E Day
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
10 Iraq and Kuwait: The Seizure and Destruction of Historical Patrimony
Bruce Montgomery
11 Networking Records in their Diaspora: A Reconceptualisation of 'Displaced Records' in a Postnational World
Anne J. Gilliland
12 Revisiting the Law and Politics of Compromise
Douglas Cox
Index
List of Contributors
Leopold Auer, formerly Österreichisches Staatsarchiv.
Mandy Banton, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Douglas Cox, School of Law, City University of New York.
Anne J. Gilliland, Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
Vincent Hiribarren, Department of History, King's College London.
Michael Karabinos, Institute for History, Leiden University.
Charles Kecskeméti, former Executive Secretary of the International Council on Archives.
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Ukrainian Research Institute and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
Eric Ketelaar, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.
Timothy Lovering, Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee.
James Lowry, Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies, University of Liverpool.
Nathan Mnjama, Department of Library and Information Studies, University of Botswana.
Bruce Montgomery, Special Collections and Archives, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Todd Shepard, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
Foreword
Eric Ketelaar
Archives ... Worth Fighting For! was the message on a t-shirt, printed by students in archival enterprise at the University of Texas on the occasion of Archives Week 1999. The t-shirt also carried the image of Angelina Eberly firing the cannon in the 'Archives War' of 1842 that kept the national archives of Texas in Austin, and thus kept Austin as the capital of the Republic and later the state. Fighting for archives when archives are the cause of a conflict or hunted for their content or merely used as a pawn ... Fighting for archives may also make archives a victim. Whatever the cause for such fighting, it often concerns archives removed from the place where they originally accumulated. The archives may have been moved to a safe place, captured by military force and removed elsewhere or removed following seizure and confiscation.
These are 'displaced archives', a term used as early as 1960 by Ernst Posner when commemorating the second Archivist of the United States, Solon Justus Buck. From 1943, Buck (assisted by Posner) promoted programmes to protect archives in war areas in Europe and Asia, including establishing collection centres for displaced archives to be returned to their rightful owners. Among these displaced archives were diplomatic, military, administrative and historical archives of the defeated enemy, along with archives that the enemy had seized in occupied countries. The collection centres were just one stop on an odyssey of the archives before they reached their final destination. That journey often ended only decades later – and still there are archives displaced during or after armed conflict lingering in custody, public and private.
Archives are always displaced, that is (in day-to-day language), removed from place A to place B. An immigrant relocates with some of his documents to another place, a government agency's records are transferred from its offices to an archival repository, private papers are sold to a new owner residing within or outside the country of origin. Administrative reform and state succession can cause archives to be moved elsewhere. Archives can migrate to another location, legally with the migrant's other possessions or illegally. Colonisation and decolonisation lead to archives ending up at places other than where they were created.
Each of these categories of displaced archives is Worth Fighting For! but each 'struggle for the files' is difficult and fraught with delays, blockages and obstructions that prolong the strife. This is due to different reasons. In the first place, I agree with Douglas Cox that fighting for displaced archives often is a substitute for fighting over the historical events that gave rise to the displacement. Moreover, fighting for archives is exercising power: the power to dispose, detain, return and donate – and to determine the conditions. Those powers are generally hidden behind legal, political, religious and professional arguments. These arguments, in turn, are invoked as 'principles' that should guide the fate of displaced archives. But practice does not always obey principle, as Leopold Auer comments. Power, principles and practice can defeat or protract the process of returning displaced archives.
This is aggravated by the incommensurability of the legal regimes governing the displacement and return of archives, and the inequality of the parties involved. Inequality also within the parties: diplomats, lawyers, politicians, military, archivists – their agendas, principles and practices only seldom converge. One of the strategies for overcoming this scramble is resorting to the practical resolution of disputes over displaced archives on a case-by-case basis, rather than striving at an all-encompassing and definitive arrangement. One such pragmatic option is leaving unanswered, for the time being, the question where the rightful place of the archives is, and rather endeavouring to facilitate access to the archives, considering the International Council on Archives' (ICA) Principles of Access to Archives.
Enshrined in the ICA's Code of Ethics, as Charles Kecskeméti reminds us, is the moral duty of archivists to cooperate in the repatriation of displaced archives. That effort may well begin with making the disputed archives accessible, not only making them available for consultation on the premises and abroad, but also by providing finding aids and other tools that will enable any interested individual or community to use the archives effectively. Archivists, individually and collectively, have an obligation to the records, to the users and to society at large. They provide access, so that the archival heritage created by oppressors and oppressed alike, within the country or in exile, is not kept hidden away, locked up, unintelligible, unsearchable and unusable. Fighting for archives is fighting for access to archives, which, as the Universal Declaration on Archives states, 'enriches our knowledge of human society, promotes democracy, protects citizens' rights and enhances the quality of life'.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the authors, so many of them veterans of the struggle to resolve archival disputes, for contributing to this book, which I hope will take the work a step further. I am grateful to Eric Ketelaar, Mandy Banton and Margaret Procter for their comments on the manuscript and advice on a number of points. Any editorial errors are mine. I thank Dymphna Evans, Lianne Sherlock and Marc Stratton for seeing the value of this project and helping to bring it to fruition, Megan Venter for her assistance in compiling the index and Jennifer Black for her advice on the design of the cover.
Introduction
Displaced Archives
James Lowry
Archives as Bodies
Archivists speak about the archive as a body – a corpus of records. To Léon de Laborde, head of Napoleon III's Imperial Archives, the following statement is attributed:
A library is something, archives are someone. This something can be distributed, cut up, parcelled out according to all bibliographical systems ... It is quite otherwise with that someone that lives and breathes; do not dismember him; it would be far too cruel to rob him of his head in order to put it in this room, to tear off his arms and legs to scatter them elsewhere, because the heart only beats on the condition that one respects the entire body.1
This concern for wholeness stems from the fact that archives tell stories through their forms, structures and relations, as well as their content. The order in which individual records accumulate in a file tells us something about the matter being documented and the way it is being handled. Individual files accumulate in an order that can tell us how they relate to other files and the organisation and processes of their creator. Archival theory has evolved to support the preservation of these connections. It is a theory that privileges wholeness. From this perspective, the displacement of archives can be conceived of as the disfiguration of an organic whole – the removal of part of a body. As Charles Kecskeméti stated in 1977, 'It is the duty of archivists to safeguard the integrity of the national heritage but irregular accession to the archives are just as contrary to the concept of integrity as are "amputations" '.2 And there is a correspondence between the violated corpus of the archive and human bodies. Records are material evidence of systems for regulating bodies, and the material by which those systems function. Paulo Nzili, castrated in Embakasi Detention Camp in Kenya in 1957, was among the Kenyans who made a claim for compensation from the British government in 2009 for abuses that occurred during the Kenyan Emergency.3 The litigation would bring to light the existence of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's (FCO) secret 'migrated archive' that was removed from Kenya on the eve of independence and maintained in Hanslope Park, in the south-east of England.4 The migrated archive and other records removed from Kenya, some perhaps yet to be identified, may not document that particular act of castration, but they form part of the body of official records created in Kenya by the regime under which the castration occurred. The records emanate from the system that functioned to quell the Mau Mau rebellion by establishing Embakasi and other detention camps, and by recruiting, training and paying British and local army and police officers. They document the context in which the violation of Nzili's body was ordered, executed and condoned. They document, if not the act itself, certainly the apparatus that enacted it. At present, those records are removed from the context of their creation and are incomplete, just as, in their absence, the records remaining in Kenya are incomplete.
The FCO's migrated archive, removed to Britain because of the sensitivity of the records, is now a symbol of a denuded Kenyan heritage and a lack of accountability in the British government. The values of archives as symbols of patrimony and sources of intelligence are apparent in the treatment of records throughout the history of warfare, (de)colonisation and the succession of states. The first evidence of the recognition of the value of archives can be found in the remnants of the early infrastructures for their protection. Alfonso Archi has described how the royal palace archives at the ancient cities of Ebla, Mari and Ugarit were accessed from the royal audience halls.5 The proximity of the archives to the seat of power is telling of the value attributed to the records they house, if only in that convenient access to them was a prerequisite for the efficient functioning of power. In addition to their physical situation, the architecture of state archives is often suggestive of value. The trope of the 'archive as temple' in archival literature employs the imposing facades of many archive buildings as evidence of a deeper connection between archives and power. As Eric Ketelaar has written, '[A]rchives serve symbolically as temples shielding an idol from the gaze of the uninitiated, guarding the treasures as a monopoly for the priesthood, exercising surveillance over those who are admitted'.6 Archives as physical places of power and protection signify the values of records.
Further evidence of the value of archives may be found in events that demonstrate that archives have been coveted, such as thefts and displacements. There are numerous examples throughout history, and each one represents an acknowledgement of the values of archives as symbols, treasures, evidence or intelligence.
These values of archives are attached to them differently by different people and regimes, and they are informed by different systems of law and ideations of identity (around patrimony, community, resistance, diaspora, etc.). In each archive, then, there will be multiple stakeholders with various interests and connections with the records. This situation becomes more complex after displacement. Just as the complete archive tells a story through its forms, structures and relations, the dismembered archive can tell stories about the process of dismemberment, with the same concepts of context in play: the connections become more complex and entangled as the number of stakeholders and range of values increases. It is this mesh of connections, values and needs that makes access and repatriation problematic.
The Purpose and Context of This Book
Though the problem of displaced archives has a long history, it continues to trouble archivists, historians and government officials. What is striking is that there has been no serious multilateral action on the problem for thirty years. It is as if the great exertion to bring the Vienna Convention into being in 1983 exhausted its authors and disappointed its audience to such an extent that no enthusiasm remains for multilateral co-ordination on solutions. The primary purpose of this book is to revive the international dialogue on displaced archives in view of the theoretical, socio-political and technological developments of more recent years.
Displaced archives have been the subject of international treaties and conventions over a long history, as may be seen from Bautier's 1961 survey covering the thirteenth century through to the 1950s.7 In 1977, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a study it commissioned from the International Council on Archives (ICA): Charles Kecskeméti's Archival Claims: Preliminary Study on the Principles and Criteria to be Applied in Negotiations. Its principal contribution to the study of archival displacement was the definition of a number of principles – 'territorial provenance', 'retroactive patrimoniality', 'functional pertinence', 'joint heritage' – that might provide a vocabulary for discussions. The 1977 study informed UNESCO's 1981 Model Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements and Conventions Concerning the Transfer of Archives, in which Kecskeméti and Evert Van Laar outlined different types of agreements on displaced archives, discussing their forms, coverage and the conditions appropriate to their use. As this work was going on, the International Law Commission was considering the same issue. Its work would culminate in 1983 in the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts. The Convention was adopted by the United Nations, but it has not come into force since too few states have consented to it. The failure of the Convention haunts many of the chapters in this book.
Some research and analysis of archival claims have been undertaken since the Vienna Convention. In 1995, the ICA published a Reference Dossier on Archival Claims compiled by Hervé Bastien. The dossier brings together international legal texts, relevant UNESCO resolutions and key ICA documents including resolutions, the advice ICA provided on the Vienna Convention and a position paper adopted by ICA's Executive Committee in 1995. It is an invaluable resource for the study of the problem of displaced archives. In 1998, Leopold Auer's Disputed Archival Claims: Analysis of an International Survey (A RAMP Study) was published by UNESCO. It reports on Auer's survey of archival claims, providing examples and statistics that lend 'colour to the already existing picture' and augment Bastien's Dossier.
This appears to have been the last on the matter until the 2004 ICA Congress in Vienna, just over twenty years after the Vienna Convention. At the 2004 Congress, the National Archivist of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Chikhi, raised the issue of displaced archives. In May 2009, the Executive Board of the ICA, meeting in Tamanrasset, Algeria, approved the establishment of the Displaced Archives Working Group. Though the group struggled to define displaced archives, it agreed on two lines of work: one towards the creation of an updated bibliography on the subject, the other for a revision to Auer's questionnaire, for circulation to the international archival community. Giulia Barrera, of Italy's Direzione Generale per Gli Archivi, drafted a plan to take the former piece of work forward while I slightly revised Auer's questionnaire for circulation to ICA members. Both documents were submitted to the working group, but as of 2016, this work has not been taken forward and the working group is considered dormant.
Alongside this history of the efforts of international organisations to deal with displaced archives, there is a history of bilateral work on particular cases, some of which are discussed in this book. Many of these cases still need resolution, but some offer examples of solutions. This book attempts to encourage both multilateral and bilateral actions by posing questions about the definition of displaced archives, examining legal approaches to issues associated with archival displacement and repatriation, considering other kinds of solutions and contemplating the role of the international archival community.
Defining Displaced Archives
This book is concerned with the removal of archives from the place of their creation. In particular, it is concerned with displacements: those removals that are arguably not illicit thefts but somehow legitimised or defensible by virtue of the fact of their being removed by states, regimes or exiled groups rather than individuals. A number of chapters in this book attempt to define or challenge definitions of 'displaced archives'.
The generally accepted term for this phenomenon in Commonwealth countries has been migrated archives, though this has more recently become synonymous with a particular series of FCO records now partially transferred to the UK National Archives. Timothy Lovering, in his chapter, 'Revisiting Expatriate Archives', proposes that the term 'migrated archives' is too euphemistic to reflect the political and cultural significance of archival displacement, at least in the complex case of the Rhodesian army records. He proposes 'expatriate archives' as the most appropriate term for the records he is concerned with. Much of the UNESCO and ICA work refers to 'archival claims', which is certainly the most diplomatic of the phrases in use – perhaps it deserves more currency. This book is called Displaced Archives and favours the term because it denotes a contestable removal without implying theft, does not share 'expatriate's' association with nationhood (via its Ancient Greek root, patris), which is not an appropriate association for all forms of archival displacement, and communicates the nature of the problem more immediately than the term 'archival claims'. However, where 'displaced archives' is used in this book, it is not in adherence to an agreed definition. Instead, each author engages with the question of definitions to the extent necessary for their work.
A number of the chapters in this book discuss categorisations of archival displacement. There have been a number of attempts at categorising displaced archives, such as Albert Leisinger's classifications, which drew on the work of Morris Rieger.8 Nathan Mnjama has discussed how these categories manifest in the African context and, in this volume, Lovering considers Mnjama's use of them.9 Thinking through terms and taxonomies – defining displaced archives – is an important prerequisite for action on repatriation and other possible solutions: it goes to the essence of the problem. Defining displaced archives according to, for instance, their spatial and temporal contexts as opposed to their social and political contexts, has ramifications for how archival claims are settled. This is perhaps most clearly articulated in Bruce Montgomery's chapter, 'Iraq and Kuwait: The Seizure and Destruction of Historical Patrimony', which raises questions about the rightful heirs of archives after significant socio-political changes. Should state security documents created by Saddam Hussein's regime be returned to the current regime in Iraq? Should records created by Iraq's persecuted Jewish community be repatriated to Iraq or distributed to the Jewish diaspora? The definition of nations, communities, borders and identities are at the heart of all conversations about the ownership of archives, so exactly how those definitions are constructed is crucial to understanding and resolving disputes over archives.
Definitions have also been significant in the process of displacement, at least during decolonisation. In 'Making Sovereignty and Affirming Modernity in the Archives of Decolonisation: The Algeria–France "Dispute" between the Post-Decolonisation French and Algerian Republics, 1962–2015', Todd Shepard revises and expands his '"Of Sovereignty": Disputed Archives, "Wholly Modern" Archives, and the Post-Decolonization French and Algerian Republics, 1962–2012,' published in The American Historical Review in 2015. Shepard, amongst others in this book, discusses the French and Belgian policy of distinguishing between archives of sovereignty and archives of administration in order to decide which records should be left and which removed during decolonisation. Mandy Banton discusses how files marked watch were priorities for removal from the British colonies in her chapter, 'Displaced Archives in The National Archives of the United Kingdom'. Shepard and Banton both note the ad hoc application of processes for dealing with these categories of records, which, as Vincent Hiribarren observes, was a feature of decolonisation. How these archives were defined at the time of their displacement is fundamental to how they are treated under law now.
The Legal Approach and Its Implications
Historically, archival claims have been treated as legal issues. As Kecskeméti outlines in his chapter, 'Archives Seizures: The Evolution of International Law', in Europe, it was through customary law that archives were ceded with the territories to which they related, a practice only interrupted by the Second World War. As the central figure in the ICA at the time the Vienna Convention was written and adopted, and as the author of much of the ICA's professional advice on displaced archives, Kecskeméti reflects on the politics and personalities involved in the development of the Convention, which was an attempt to fill the post-war legal vacuum, and he fixes the Convention in its place in the history of international archives law.
Legal approaches have often failed to resolve modern archival displacements, many of which arose from the failure to articulate and apply legal norms. Leopold Auer's chapter, 'Displaced Archives in the Wake of Wars', examines legal approaches to the treatment of archives during conflict, noting differing guidance in rules of combat, as well as problems in applying international conventions when archives can be defined as both cultural property and sources of intelligence. Shepard and Banton observe the inconsistencies with which official policy was applied as European powers withdrew from their colonies. These chapters expose legal regimes as illusory: political will and logistical considerations have far more effect on the fate of records than conventions, laws and policies. Banton, especially, shows how political will, however changeable and inconsistent, is more powerful than legal norms and precedents. Her chapter discusses the British retention of records over a period in which British legal opinion on the ownership of the records vacillated. Much of this had to do with definitions. There is a correlation between the difficulty of defining displaced archives and the failure of legal solutions, since definitions are prerequisites for the application of laws.
In contemplating the legal nature of displaced archives, we begin to encounter questions about the nature of states, forms of government and the legitimacy of regimes. In this respect, this book barely scratches the surface, but two important examples are found in Hiribarren's chapter 'Hiding the European Colonial Past: A Comparison of Archival Policies', in which he looks for patterns in European approaches to removing records during decolonisation. First, his attempt to observe commonalities in European archival policies at the end of the colonial period finds a connection between breaks with autocratic regimes and present-day democratic aspirations to openness. Opening the archives of former regimes is a technique for distancing and distinguishing the present regime from its predecessor. This dynamic has interesting consequences for narratives of nationhood, as Hiribarren shows. Second, in relating access to colonial records to European expectations of government transparency, Hiribarren suggests that ongoing secrecy over displaced archives should be a concern for all citizens of the former colonial powers, since it demonstrates a lack of accountability in their own governments.
Hiribarren is not so much concerned with repatriation as opening and being transparent about what governments hold. Nevertheless, repatriation has been the focus of discussions throughout the history of the problem, and a legal perspective has continued to dominate these discussions. As the chapters in this book make clear, this has produced relatively few resolutions in the post-Second World War, post-colonial context.
Considering Solutions
Auer, whose work in 1998 was an important contribution to the literature on displaced archives, concludes in his chapter that bilateral negotiations remain the most effective method of resolving archival claims. Shared heritage arrangements also warrant consideration; Michael Karabinos and Douglas Cox offer some examples of successful shared heritage ventures and suggest that they might serve as models. And somewhat cynically we could count, as another tested approach, the more mercenary and ethically dubious tactic discussed in Patricia Kennedy Grimsted's chapter – the sale or 'trade' of displaced archives to their rightful owners. This book looks at these approaches and advances new concepts that could encourage new solutions. Anne Gilliland offers a new perspective in 'Networking Records in Their Diaspora: A Reconceptualization of Displaced Records in a Postnational World'. She uses post-nationalism and ideas such as 'rights in records' and 'co-creation' to provide a theoretical framework that questions many of the assumptions about the nature of the problem, which have been tied up with nation states, borders, law and records as material property. This is a challenge to both holders of disputed archives and claimants. It is a challenge to those on all sides of post-conflict and post-colonial relationships to examine what is actually at stake in archival disputes. The practical analogue of this theoretical frame is found in the technologies that support the transnational movement of information. Do the technologies that have emerged since the last significant work on this in the 1990s, such as linked data, offer a way out of the impasse? Cox's concluding chapter, 'Revisiting the Law and Politics of Compromise', similarly breaks new ground in terms of the established discourse around displaced archives. Cox asks us to examine the underlying principles that have informed displacements and disputes; he suggests that the frequent stalemates in archival claims are rooted in adherence to ideas that might usefully be compromised without detriment to either side.
The Role of the International Archival Community
What is the role of the international professional community of archivists in solving the problem of displaced archives, given that it is intrinsically political and political will is essential in the resolution of cases? In this book, we see the power of political will most clearly in Grimsted's description of Russia's stance on the repatriation of records removed to Moscow during and immediately following the Second World War. The preeminent expert on the displaced archives held in Russia, Grimsted has provided an update on European records in Russia in 'Pan-European Displaced Archives in the Russian Federation: Still Prisoners of War on the 70th Anniversary of V-E Day'. She notes the use of archives as bargaining chips in geopolitical manoeuvring. The resolution of those cases is entirely a matter of the will of the Russian government. But now that archival theory acknowledges that archival work is implicitly political, what are the repercussions for displaced archives? How will archivists work to shift, subvert or maintain the prevailing political will? If archivists have agency, how will they use it?
There is a role for archivists in all countries to play in resolving disputes over archives. A number of chapters in this book reflect on what that role might be – most directly, and perhaps naively, in the chapter that I have written with Nathan Mnjama: 'A Proposal for Action on African Archives in Europe'. We call for European archivists, in particular, to take an official position on African archives displaced during decolonisation. This echoes Kecskeméti's reference to the ICA's code of ethics: 'Archivists should cooperate in the repatriation of displaced archives.'10 How archivists do this will obviously vary widely across countries and organisations.
At the simplest level, archival work can have an effect. Michael Karabinos' contribution to this book, 'Indonesian National Revolution Records in the National Archives of the Netherlands', underscores the value of basic archival work, in particular archival description, in enabling conversations between nations to advance: it is through catalogues that we become aware of which records are where. On the removal of records from Ireland by the British following the Treaty of 1922, Gerard O'Brien wrote:
As regards the important files from the Chief Secretary's Office itself, all transferred papers were marked 'sent to London' in the CSO registers, usually with the date of their transfer, and the registers themselves left behind in the Castle [in Dublin].11
These systematic traces are rare. Much more commonly, no purposeful traces were left. As Auer writes in his chapter, 'At the beginning of the process of identification, there may only be circumstantial evidence, perhaps no more than gaps in the archives'. Mnjama and I have raised the problem of not knowing what was removed during decolonisation, and call for more work on the preparation of guides. As Hiribarren has stressed, access is essential, and Karabinos shows how access begins with description. The catalogue is the key.
How else might the international community contribute? In his conclusion to this book, Cox offers some thoughts on how archivists can facilitate solutions and prevent further disputes. In 1981, Kecskeméti and Van Laar envisaged an arbitration role for UNESCO and the ICA. Is it time for this idea to be revisited? Or should the work of the international community be focused on more short-term interventions, such as the establishment of a fund for copying projects? Again, this is an echo of an older conversation that seems to have ceased with the failure of the Vienna Convention. It is a conversation we could usefully return to now that the theoretical, socio-political and technological landscapes are so different.
A Note on the Structure and Contents of the Book
In the same way that legal approaches, which strive for generality, have failed to address the unique circumstances of archival displacements, attempts to arrange the chapters of this book according to general categories, such as the technical, theoretical or legal issues they deal with or the nature of the displacements they discuss (through war, or through decolonisation), led to artificial divisions that elided the complex ways in which the issues are entangled. The final arrangement of the chapters is therefore loosely structured, and cross-references have been supplied in the text and footnotes to point to some of the connections.
An imperfection of this book is that its contributors are overwhelmingly white, western European or Anglophone, and writing from countries whose governments are in possession of archives claimed by other countries. There was a public call for contributions to this book and personal invitations to experts in the global south and east, especially those countries with unresolved claims. The leading experts on archival displacement in the countries of the global south and east are often the national archivists, who are thoroughly familiar with their collections and the gaps in them arising from displacement. National archivists have often discussed archival displacement at conferences but may find it politically difficult to publish on subjects that concern relations between their governments and foreign powers. Considerations of political prudence may also explain why my invitations to experts in government employ in the global north were met with silence. In an attempt to bring other voices into the conversation, Mnjama and I have heavily quoted African colleagues, but where these are recent quotes they are often from Mnjama's anonymised survey of African national archivists.12 Along with the other lines for further research suggested throughout this book, there is a need for more diverse voices in the conversation that will, I hope, now be revived.
Conclusion
Displaced archives have not been under discussion in the international archival community for some time, but many long-standing cases have not been resolved and some new cases have arisen. In that time, new archival theories, new social forces and new technologies have also emerged. Archival theory continues to shift. The continuum theory has gained ground since the work of Bastien and Auer in the mid- and late-1990s. The odyssey of migration described by Lovering constitutes an example of the continuum conception of the life and relationships of records, Karabinos brings continuum thinking into his study of Indonesian records in the Netherlands, and Gilliland uses continuum concepts to significantly re-frame the problem. New technologies have changed the way that records are created and used, which has arguably led to a shift in perceptions of information and its carriers. What value does the data have, and what value the records? Archival theory is still grappling with the implications of the digital environment where records are increasingly seen as 'performances'. When what constitutes the original is unclear, does, could or should that change the perception of the adequacy of copies in settling disputes? Cox challenges us to rethink what 'originals' and 'copies' mean. Then, is there such a thing as 'digital repatriation', or are we still talking about copying? Lovering refers to the repatriation of content, but are archives objects with emotional implications as Kecskeméti has suggested? Could new thinking about materiality and affect in archives reinforce the symbolic power of the originals, as artefacts of unique and significant value? And then, what do displaced archives tell us about ourselves? Gilliland has started that line of enquiry by questioning the significance of nationhood, and Hiribarren has reflected on the connections between archives, openness and national narratives. Where is the boundary of the nation? Montgomery notes that the 1907 Hague Convention is silent on the legality of private contractors removing records during conflicts, which is another iteration of a problem for archivists and others caused by shifting or blurring boundaries between the public and private spheres seen, for instance, in discussions about the extension of Freedom of Information requirements to private companies that provide public services.
Theories, social forces and technologies have developed since the last significant work on this issue. In this changed environment, it is time to reconsider displaced archives. By resolving disputes and reconstituting bodies of archives, physically or virtually, we can reconstruct the contents and connections that enable archives to tell their stories. This will have important consequences for historical narratives, accountability and justice.
Notes
1 Quoted by Moore, 2008, p. 220.
2 Kecskeméti, 1977, p. 6.
3 Witness statement of Paulo Muoka Nzili, Claim number HQ09X02666 in the High Court of Justice Queen's Bench Division between Paulo Muoka Nzili (Claimant) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Defendant), statement dated 3 November 2010, available at <https://www.leighday.co.uk/LeighDay/media/LeighDay/documents/Mau%20Mau/Claimant%20statements/Paulo-Nzili-WS--26-10-10---Final-.pdf> [accessed 17 April 2016].
4 Banton, 2013.
5 Archi, 2003.
6 Ketelaar, 2002, p. 234.
7 R-H. Bautier's report to the Sixth International Conference of the Round Table on Archives, held in Warsaw in 1961.
8 A. Leisinger, 1982, pp. 1–7.
9 Nathan Mnjama, 2011.
10 ICA, 1996.
11 O'Brien, 2004, p. 20.
12 Our intention was also to make available relevant text from journal articles and conference proceedings from the 1960s through to the 1990s, which are unavailable digitally and scarce in hardcopy.
References
Archi, Alfonso. 'Archival Record-Keeping at Ebla 2400–2350 bc'. In Maria Brosius, ed., Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Banton, Mandy. '"Lost" and "Found": The Concealment and Release of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office "Migrated Archives"', Comma: International Journal on Archives 2012–1, 2013, pp. 33–46.
ICA. Code of Ethics, 1996, p. 2. Available at: <http://www.ica.org/5555/reference-documents/ica-code-of-ethics.html>
Kecskeméti, Charles. Archival Claims: Preliminary Study on the Principles and Criteria to Be Applied in Negotiations, Paris, France: UNESCO, 1977, p. 6.
Ketelaar, Eric. 'Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection', Archival Science 2: 2002, 221–238, p. 234.
Leisinger, A. 'Disputed Archival Claims: A Persistent and Urgent Problem' ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives, Harare, 13–17 September, 1982, pp. 1–7.
Mnjama, Nathan. 'Migrated Archives Revisited', ESARBICA, 30, 2011.
Moore, Lara. Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820–1870, Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2008, p. 220.
O'Brien, Gerard. Irish Government and the Guardianship of Historical Records, 1922–72, Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2004, p. 20.
1 Archives Seizures
The Evolution of International Law1
Charles Kecskeméti
Historical Summary
Since the seventeenth century, the system of rules governing the relationships between states has been called the jus gentium (law of nations). We owe to Emer de Vattel, citizen of Neuchâtel and subject to the King of Prussia, the brilliant synthesis of this law, still used as a starting point for reflections on public international law.2 Vattel makes a distinction between customary law (tacitly established rules, in other words 'custom') and conventional law recorded in treaties; each treaty constitutes a unique case complying with customary law.
Customary and conventional laws concerning archives have existed since the Middle Ages. Studies undertaken under the umbrella of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the 1970s have identified 144 treaties between 1645 and the end of the Second World War, the former being the date of the Second Treaty of Brömsebro signed between Sweden and Denmark. While most of these treaties relate to the transfer of sovereignty and the records that should accompany the transfer, thirteen of them address the restitution of displaced archives.
All these treaties are governed by three principles of customary law:
1 The predecessor state gives to the successor state the documents necessary for exercising sovereignty and ensuring administrative continuity. The list of archives to be transferred or duplicated is established by agreement between the two parties.
2 The archives displaced during the period the state was dependent are returned when the state becomes independent again.
3 Archives seized and displaced during a war are returned at the end of hostilities to the power against whom the war was being waged.
A fourth principle was added during the twentieth century, according to which the provisional occupying military authorities' archives would remain the property of the occupying power.
As summarised by R.-H. Bautier in 1961: 'For centuries there has been, if not an "international law on archives", at least an "archival issue in the international law".'3 Neither systematic exposition nor critical studies have been conducted on the international law on archives. There is no handbook, no corpus of treaties and no collection of studies. Archivists have tended only to pay attention to the issue of displaced archives during negotiations to resolve bilateral disputes, and lawyers have seemingly had even less cause to consider the problem. The Institute of International Law, founded in 1873, which meets every two years and whose commissions work inter-sessionally, has considered during its 137-year history, a wide range of topics related to international law, but it has never addressed the issue of archives in international law.
In the archival field, compliance with customary law was respected until the Second World War. In a monarchic Europe, the issue was familial: if a state added a province to its territory, the reigning prince received from his 'cousin' the archives that would help him to govern his new province. The advent of the age of popular sovereignty created a new framework. In the Europe of nation states, the transfer of archives is no longer merely a technical operation; it now has a chauvinistic, emotional dimension.
The break with convention regarding transfers in the case of a succession of states occurred after the Second World War. A few agreements were signed just after the war, in particular by France, with newly independent colonies and protectorates. The distinction between sovereignty archives and governance archives as a principle upon which to decide what is owned by who (mainland and colony or protectorate), dates back to this time. These concepts were malleable and gave the negotiators a lot of flexibility, but had the merit of solving a few cases.
The application of customary law suddenly stopped with the great wave of decolonisation, and disputed claims proliferated within ten years. In the 1960s some fifty newly independent countries did not conclude the ordinary agreement to receive the records that would formerly automatically have been given to the new sovereign by his 'cousin'. Some agreements were secured in 1975 between Portugal and its newly independent colonies, but these consisted solely of the issuance of authenticated copies on both sides, without mentioning the transfer of records in one direction or another. The evacuation of the archives from the former colonies to Europe was not handled uniformly, which led to extreme contrasts in practice. For example, the archives of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française) remained in Dakar, while about 7.5 km of records were transferred from Algeria to France.
The United Nations (UN) and UNESCO, as well as the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, felt the need to put an end to the legal disorder resulting from the fall into abeyance of customary law with respect to archives. One of the conditions for success in such an endeavour is to associate archival expertise with legal expertise so as to ensure that the law reflects the archival issues.4 Studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s under the aegis of the UN (via the International Law Commission) and UNESCO (via the International Council on Archives, or the ICA) resulted in, amongst other items that I will return to later, three theoretical outcomes:
1 they identified a wide range of topics for further research;
2 they explicated the difficult set of circumstances created by the non-compliance with customary law from 1939;
3 they revealed how significant the lack of theoretical and historical literature was in this field.
An Intellectual Framework for Approaching Resolutions
UNESCO and the ICA's work began in 1974. The first task was to give the member states a tool in order to facilitate dispute settlements with a typology of disputes, a specific and unambiguous terminology, concepts able to offer a way out of impasses and a coherent set of principles based on practice – in other words, an intellectual framework in which the involved parties could find consensual solutions. UNESCO and ICA's efforts aimed at initiating the codification of customary law on the basis of an analysis of the conventional law.5
This work found that most of the current and latent disputes fell under one of the four following types:
1 change of sovereignty over a territory, without the creation of a new state;
2 transfers carried out during wars or after a military occupation;
3 creation of new states as a result of break-ups of political entities;
4 impacts of colonisation and decolonisation.
Three principles, based on provenance, were developed to govern the settlement of disputes:
1 The retroactive sovereignty principle, which means that the archives produced by administrations and institutions in charge of managing the business of the territory that has become a newly independent state are devolved to the new state.
2 The territorial origin principle, according to which the archives produced by the territory before it became dependent, and then incorporated in the archives of the annexing or supervising state, are bound to the successor state. This principle also requires the restitution of the public and private archives seized by belligerents during hostilities or by the occupying authorities.
3 The functional pertinence principle, observed by most of the treaties signed after a change of sovereignty, means that the transfer of power and responsibilities must be accompanied by the transfer of archives that are necessary for administrative continuity to be ensured.
The implementation of these principles requires an international climate of détente and a full recognition of the right of every national community to its national heritage. In its effort to celebrate and ensure the continuity of its national heritage, every national community should be able to rely upon the assistance of other states owning sources related to its history. The same spirit of solidarity implies that countries holding information will forward that information to the citizens of other countries who need it to protect or assert their rights. In his presentation for the International Conference of the Round Table on Archives (CITRA) in Thessaloniki, Klaus Oldenhage of the Bundesarchiv, summarising the Federal Republic of Germany's experience, underlined the crucial importance of professional cooperation for reconstituting the archival heritages dismembered during the Second World War and for getting on with the preservation and opening up of occupying military authorities' archives.6
If archival holdings are produced by an administration whose succession is divided between several states, and therefore the archival holdings belong to several national heritages, the only responsible solution is to implement the concept of joint heritage. Applying this concept, the archival holdings are entirely preserved in one of the involved countries, ensuring their safety, and the other countries have equal access and moral property rights. This concept has proven to be practicable. It is a fundamental basis of the 1926 Baden–Baden convention between Austria and Hungary. Regarding the transfer of archives from Vienna to Budapest, the Baden–Baden convention, based on the principle of provenance, discarded the territorial pertinence principle, the application of which would have required the division of the archival holdings. The convention stated that the archives produced by the central authorities of the Habsburg Monarchy between 1526 and 1918 were the common, indivisible and inalienable property of Austria and Hungary. The archival holdings' (held in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Hofkammerarchiv and Kriegsarchiv) preservation and management were entrusted to Austria. Hungary, as a co-owner, was represented by permanent delegates located in the premises of the Austrian archives. Decisions on access and disposal rules were taken by mutual agreement between the archival authorities of both countries. The documents related to the preparation of this convention (those emanating from the Austrian side in German), with a history of the negotiations, have been published under Imre Ress's leadership.7
The tentative codification of the customary law, outlined in the report 20C/102 of the Director General of UNESCO, was unanimously adopted by the 1980 UNESCO General Conference. Work continued on the theoretical level with the publication of a series of studies8 and, at the practical level, with the implementation of an international microfilming programme.
The 1983 Vienna Convention
Confronted by a legal vacuum, the International Law Commission of the United Nations undertook, in 1967, the preparation of an international Convention on Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives and Debts. A wide range of texts and data were collected and analysed – this part of the Commission's work is of enduring value. UNESCO, ICA and the professional community awaited with optimism the completion of the Commission's work, with the promise of starting a new era in the history of the international law on archives. Unfortunately, the reality was disappointing. The 1983 Vienna Convention is a typical product of the time of the contest between the two Cold War blocs. It did not aim to codify customary and conventional laws to provide a legal basis for the resolution of disputes. In its determination to use the process as a platform to continue disputes, instead of finding solutions agreeable to all, the majority of the Conference even rejected the joint heritage provisions proposed by UNESCO and supported by the Austrian, Hungarian and Swiss delegates. The International Law Commission, rather than attempting to reach consensual agreements, presented an argument meant to support the demands of former colonies and more specifically to strengthen the position of Algeria in its dispute with France.
The Vienna Conference became a political platform that produced a political statement rather than a workable convention, since an international convention adopted by a simple majority vote was meaningless (as it would be ignored by the minority holding the disputed archives). The Conference agreed with the International Law Commission and the Convention was adopted. The adopted text is demanding to the point of being inapplicable. Indeed, the Convention requires from the signatory states the transfer to the successor states of public archives in accordance with the criteria specified in articles 27, 28, 30 and 31, even if there is no agreement between the states. The wording of three of these criteria is questionable, as pointed out in the ICA professional advice, but given the political objectives of the Commission, it had obviously to abstain from resorting to archival expertise.9 In 1984, it became clear that the Convention was dead.10 On paper, the law is passed according to the United Nations, even if the Convention will never enter into force because it has too few signatories. Because of the Commission's militant option, approved by the intergovernmental Conference, the legal gap was not filled, and it has not been filled since.
Since the Conference was a political platform, it is not surprising that the ICA's professional advice on the Convention would be the target of political attacks. In an enthusiastic paper advocating for Algeria's cause over France, Marco Mozzati, professor at the University of Pavia, without even reading the professional advice, accused the ICA of shaping the text as requested by the French Foreign Office in order to counter Algeria's claims.11 If Mozzati had read it, he would have found that the text, of a strictly legal and professional nature, included neither arguments nor considerations related to the pending litigation. Besides, the central tenet of the advice about the imperative need to open negotiations between the opposing parties corresponded to the Algerian position. Mozzati's attack indirectly gave support to the view that the Vienna Convention was not conceived as a legal tool inaugurating the era of the settlement of disputes that had built up over the three decades of decolonisation, but as a weapon aimed at strengthening the position of Algeria in its dispute with France.
The controversial paper by the Deputy Director General of the Polish State Archives, Wladyslaw Stepniak, which was presented at several conferences, advocated the territorial pertinence principle, which was discarded by the research conducted under the aegis of UNESCO.12 Stepniak, who had matters to settle with the ICA, chose to discredit the professional advice using truncated or distorted quotes in order to overshadow the Convention's clauses requiring the transfer of archives without the agreement of the parties, and innuendoes suggesting the ICA maneuvered with Germany to take the displacement of communities into account in the negotiations. The ICA's position on this matter was confirmed during the multilateral meeting held by the Bundesarchiv and the ICA in Koblenz on 12 December 1994, to explore the issue of archives restitution. This position is based on experience that shows that archives left behind when a population is being displaced (due to deportation, fleeing etc.) are never transferred afterwards and that archives taken away by the displaced population are never sent back to their place of origin. Even if this status quo can be contested, it need not be: the law of nations requires that the right of access to archives be guaranteed to the people concerned, in both ways; displaced archives available to the people of the territory they have been displaced from; and remaining archives available to the displaced people and their descendants.
International Law on Seizure and Spoliation during and after the Second World War
Seizures on a scale exceeding even Napoleon's transfers, led by the Third Reich for political, military, financial or ideological reasons, destroyed any archival precedent on the European continent even before the Soviets continued the spoliations. I stress this point because we are still suffering the consequences. Without the trauma caused by Nazism, Europe would not have so easily accepted being without legislation on archives. By 1943, the Allies knew they would have to be prepared for a tremendous effort to locate all the seized archives scattered across the Reich territory. Immediately after the victory, Britain and America began repatriations, and thousands of tons of archives were sent back to their countries of origin. There was one exception: about 500 items from the Smolensk Communist Party archives were kept in Washington – an unnecessary thing to do, as microfilms would have been as useful for research as the original documents. But these 40 to 50 linear metres of seized archives allowed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to pose as a spoliation victim. Meanwhile, the USSR held 27,000 linear metres of foreign records secretly transferred to Moscow.
I shall restrict myself to a short comment on the Soviet continuation of the Nazi spoliation, whose most eminent expert, Patricia Grimsted, has contributed to this volume. This comment is about the Russian law of 1998 stating that all the archives seized during war time, which were preserved in the territory of Russia, were then Russia's property. According to Emer de Vattel's discourse, such a law is a violation of the law of nations, the generally established practice for all civilised nations of the world. According to the current legal terminology, it is an 'internationally unlawful act' null and void under international law.13 The 1998 law is illicit, regardless of the emotional motives and the political background that surrounded its adoption. In practical terms, it violates the 1907 Hague Convention signed by Russia. If the USSR could plead a breakdown in continuity with imperial Russia in 1917, the situation changed radically after 1991, when, in a sense, the Russian Federation restored continuity with the pre-1917 Russian Empire. Regardless of the obligations imposed under the Hague Convention, the subject of the law being of an international nature, its unilateral character makes it incompatible with legal norms. It is as unacceptable as a national law allowing the police to conduct searches in embassies or arrest diplomats declared personæ non gratæ.
The Council of Europe urged Russia to end its non-restitution stance, but was not successful. With the restitutions Russia has made to the Allied countries after 1998, it has gone half way in applying the Allied powers' resolution adopted on 5 January 1943. The second half of the way is yet to be travelled, and the issue is not only with the records held by Russia. In 1996, Leopold Auer was commissioned by UNESCO to identify and analyse ongoing or latent legal disputes, in order, finally, to be able to measure the extent of the problem. But most of the archivists who were asked to fill out his questionnaire were convinced that the sensitive nature of the topic required maintaining opacity, and did not reply. Auer could therefore identify only sixty-one legal disputes reported by twenty-four countries against twenty-five countries.14 There is no current comprehensive data on outstanding disputed claims.
A Matter of Common Sense and Ethics
Over forty years after UNESCO's initiative to help countries resolve archival disputes, the results are mixed. In addition to the technical progress mentioned earlier, we should be glad that some bilateral issues have been resolved, in particular those between Indonesia and the Netherlands, Namibia and South Africa, and Slovakia and the Czech Republic. But this does not constitute a trend, as proven by the lasting Franco–Algerian dispute and the new disputes created by the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia. In these two cases, both key successor states are taking time to reconsider the matter.
This leads to the question: why is it so difficult to take the path of the rule of law? Maybe because holding archives that belong to other countries with the idea that it enriches the national heritage is a seductive myth, stronger than common sense. One could come up with explanations related to the circumstances of specific cases, but there is no point in getting into a controversy about specific cases: the law is powerless in front of ideology. We have to abandon the myth, once and for all, and recognise that irregular additions to the national heritage are as contrary to the concept of integrity as amputations.
Transfers and restitutions, exchange agreements and the creation of joint heritage arrangements are within the competence of the legislative and executive authorities of states. The use of archivists' theoretical and practical knowledge is obviously crucial to finding an acceptable solution for all parties and to carry out the necessary arrangements. The archival expertise includes an ethical component, as defined in the ICA's code of ethics: 'Archivists should cooperate in the repatriation of displaced archives.'15
Notes
1 This chapter is an edited version of a translation by Céline Fernandez of Kecskeméti's 'Saisies d'archives et de bibliothéques: l'évolution du droit' published in A. Sumpf and V. Laniol, eds., Saisies, spoliations et restitutions. Archives et Bibliothèques au XXe siècle, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, pp. 25–34, published in English with the authorisation of Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
2 Vattel, 1758.
3 Bautier, 1963, pp. 11–56.
4 In October 1996, two months after the end of his term as President of the International Council on Archives, the late Jean-Pierre Wallot presented at a conference held in Roanne, France, a masterful synthesis on the efforts made since 1945 to close the legislative gap.
5 Kecskeméti, 1977 (PGI-77/WS/1). Reproduced in Actes de la XVIIe Conférence internationale de la Table ronde des archives, Cagliari, 1977, pp. 113–130.
6 Oldenhage, pp. 129–133.
7 Ress (ed.), 2008.
8 Borsa, 1981; C. Kecskeméti and E. Van Laar, 1981; Pieyns, 1981.
9 After the Conference, the French Foreign Office asked ICA to formulate advice on the Convention. This professional advice, circulated at the time, was published in 1997, in the Council of Europe's reference dossier, compiled on behalf of ICA's Legal Matters Committee by Hervé Bastien. The refrerence dossier has been published in Interdependence of Archives. Proceedings of the 29th, 30th and 31st Conference of the Round Table on Archives, pp. 209–268 in English and pp. 207–265 in French. The Professional advice has also been published in C. Kecskeméti, 2000, pp. 259–266.
10 About the Vienna Intergovernmental Conference fiasco, see Monnier, 1984, pp. 221–229.
11 Mozzati, 1989, pp. 213–244.
12 Stepniak, 2003.
13 An action or an omission by which a State breaches of an international obligation.
14 Auer, 1998, p. 37.
15 ICA. Code of Ethics, September 1996, p. 2.
References
Auer, Leopold. Disputed Archival Claims: Analysis of an International Survey; A RAMP Study (CII 98/WS/9), Paris, France: UNESCO,1998.
Bautier. 'Les Archives et le Droit International'. Les Archives dans la Vie Internationale: Actes de la Sixième Conférence Internationale de la Table Ronde des Archives [Warsaw, 1961]. Paris, France: Direction des Archives de France, 1963, pp. 11–56.
Borsa, Iván. Feasibility Study on the Creation of an Internationally Financed and Managed Microfilm Assistance Fund to Facilitate the Solution of Problems involved in the International Transfer of Archives and in Obtaining Access to Sources of National History Located in Foreign Archives. Paris, France: UNESCO, 1981 (PGI-81/WS/7).
Council of Europe. Reference Dossier on Archival Claims. Compiled on behalf of ICA's Legal Matters Committee by Hervé Bastien. Strasbourg, France, 1997.
ICA. Code of Ethics, September 1996, p. 2. Available at: <http://www.ica.org/5555/reference-documents/ica-code-of-ethics.html>
Kecskeméti, Charles. Archival Claims: Preliminary Study on the Principles and Criteria to be Applied in Negotiations. Paris, France: UNESCO, 1977 (PGI-77/WS/1).
Kecskeméti, Charles. Sovereignty, Disputed Claims, Professional Culture. Essays on Archival Policies. Brussels, Belgium: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique, 2000, p. 365.
Kecskeméti, Charles and Evert Van Laar. Model Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements and Conventions Concerning the Transfer of Archives. Paris, France: UNESCO, 1981 (PGI-81/WS/3).
Monnier, Jean. 'La Convention de Vienne sur la succession d'États en matière de biens, archives et dettes d'État'. Annuaire Français de Droit International, 30, 1984, pp. 221–229.
Mozzati, Marco. 'La Battaglia degli Archivi'. La Modernizzazione in Asia e Africa. Problemi di Storia e Problemi di Metodo. Studi Offerti a Giorgio Borsa. Pavia, Italy: Editorial Viscontea, 1989, pp. 213–244.
Oldenhage, Klaus. 'Bilateral and Multilateral Cooperation for the Reconstitutions of the Archival Heritage'. Interdependence of Archives. Proceedings of the 29th, 30th and 31st Conference of the Round Table on Archives. Dordrecht, Netherlands: International Council on Archives, 1998, pp. 129–133.
Pieyns, Jean. Feasibility Study of a Data Base on National Historical Sources in Foreign Repositories. Paris, France: UNESCO, 1981 (PGI-81/WS/24).
Ress, Imre (ed). A Monarchia levéltári öröksége. A badeni egyezmény létrejötte [The archival heritage of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The preparation of the Baden Agreement, 1918–1926]. Budapest, Hungary: Magyar Országos Levéltár, 2008, p. 440.
Stepniak, Wladyslaw. 'Controversies around Legal Grounds for the Settlement of International Archival Claims'. East Asian Archives, 9, Archival Legal Matters and Challenges Confronting Archives in the Region, EASTICA, 2003.
Vattel, Emer de. Le Droit des Gens, ou Principes de la Loi Naturelle Appliqués à la Conduite et aux Affaires des Nations et des Souverains. Neuchâtel (allegedly London), 1758.
2 Making Sovereignty and Affirming Modernity in the Archives of Decolonisation
The Algeria–France 'Dispute' between the Post-Decolonisation French and Algerian Republics, 1962–20151
Todd Shepard
The last decade has seen a number of historians begin to explore what happened to the documents that European authorities produced and collected during decolonisation. Most seek to detail archival developments specific to decolonisation in conjunction with an exploration of how archival questions alter ongoing debates about the mid-twentieth-century 'end of empires'. The most ambitious work to put both into dynamic conversation. In a 2015 forum on 'The Archives of Decolonisation', for example, British historian, Jordanna Bailkin, detailed the movements of archives that anchored her recent study The Afterlife of Empire. She does so to reveal that one effect of 'the era of decolonization' was how 'the notion of what constituted a "secret" was transformed.' This, in turn, allows her to emphasise that 'the violence of imperial collapse was one prized secret, which generated its own mechanisms of archival suppression'. Such histories of 'the archives of decolonization' grapple with questions central to the now flourishing historiography of archives, notably with how it is that we might have access to certain documents. Sephardi Jewry historian, Sara Stein, evokes this question in terms of 'documents retroactively fabricated, left behind, hoarded and sought, guarded, concealed, buried in the sand'. The inspiration to understand 'why some elements of decolonization have been so difficult to see' has led these scholars to draw numerous lessons from vibrant discussions about the archives of empire, sparked by scholars such as the historian Antoinette Burton and the anthropologist Ann Stoler. Bailkin's analysis of her own efforts 'to delve more deeply into the question of why certain sources pertaining to decolonization are or are not available, and how their availability is organized' expands on the work that Stoler and others have done to map the colonial histories that help explain why certain sources and collections are now out of reach.2
Stories about the 'wanton destruction' of archives have drawn special attention, as in Bailkin's revelation that 'in Uganda, eight months before independence, the departing British regime loaded three Land Rovers full of confidential records and dumped them into Lake Victoria'. So have the histories of stolen or disappeared documents been brought to light. Historian of colonial violence, Caroline Elkins, recounts one such discovery, precipitated by a recent court case that drew on the expertise she and other historians could offer about how Britain targeted civilians in its violent effort to crush the 'Mau Mau.' The authority of London's High Court dragged into the public domain (although subjected to numerous restrictions) substantial archival collections that the authorities had first transported from Kenya to Britain or extracted from other collections in Britain and then worked to hide from scholars. As with Bailkin, Elkins links the ways that this history reveals new evidence about how decolonisation unfolded, notably of particular forms of violence the British had embraced in 1950s Kenya, and what it renders visible about 'the processes through which this evidence was first removed from Kenya, subsequently hidden, and then later disclosed through legal discovery.' The intersections between the evidence in the documents and the way in which it was managed, she argues, 'is of great relevance to how we as historians think about British decolonization and the relationship between the state and the construction of its archives.' How to map this relationship remains a pressing question.3
The French-Algerian 'Dispute' ('le contentieux') over the archives of French-ruled Algeria (1830–1962) is usually narrated in terms of the types of spectacular stories that rhythm the frustrated, annoyed, or angry accounts of many historians, of archives drowned, burnt, thrown away and stolen. According to its actors, the Dispute is about what happened at the time of decolonisation to official collections then archived in Algeria and what this means for the writing of history. Conflicting French and Algerian accounts, like those of theft, destruction or loss, share the fantasy that historical truth could emerge if only archival records were made whole and accessible. Concurrently, their disagreement foregrounds the centrality of the nation–state in modern definitions of what histories need to be recounted. Bailkin draws particular attention to how this presumption has shaped 'our ability to know about decolonization' which 'remains circumscribed by the archival structures put into place in the postwar years'. Along with other historians inspired by culturalist analyses and yet drawn to state-produced archives, Bailkin's work on the organization of such collections challenges the presumption they nurture 'that the effects of decolonization could be confined to the realm of high politics. This illusion,' she insists, 'has been sufficiently powerful to constrain our interpretive lenses, to shape the historiography of decolonization, and to interact in complicated ways with the paths of declassification.' This effort to move beyond 'the state', of course, has been fundamental to the work of many historians since at least the 1950s, the very years of the so-called 'era of decolonisation'. This coincidence opens up possibilities to explore whether there were in fact causal links: on the one hand, to give new detail to existing maps of the generative tensions between state archives, the historians who rely on them, and the legitimation of the nation-state and, on the other, to chart certain ways this dynamic changed.4
The history of the Dispute itself, which continues today, offers some sharp insights into the question that Elkins evokes but that even the most expansive discussions of archives usually avoid. 'The institution of the Archives,' as Jennifer Milligan argues in her history of how the Archives Nationales developed into an institutional foundation of the modern French state, is 'just as potent a political tool as its contents – and therefore politically dangerous'. Archives as key institutions of modern states are more than buildings, staff and documentary contents, although those elements help make them so 'potent'. Through their existence and the way they function they help constitute a state insofar as their workings offer proof that it is an emanation of its people, a nation–state, and thus modern. Elkins offers a reading of the visual and affective aspects of how this works when she describes how 'orderliness and authenticity pervade Britain's National Archives at Kew'. She describes how the organisation and presentation of space works to instantiate a certain understanding of how the institution operates:
The doors of its imposing, sterile structure give way to an uncluttered interior governed by a hyper-monitoring system, identification cards, assigned seats, routinized systems for ordering and holding documents, proficient archivists, and security checkpoints. One cannot help but marvel at its benign efficiency, or the rigor with which its rules are enforced.
What interests her is how 'from the carefully managed files, a sense emerges of a coherent decolonisation process, and one that adhered to and imparted the rule of law, just as the colonial administrators and archivists in London adhered, and still adhere, to the rules of document preservation.' Both the visible order and the possibility of access reinforce the argument that Britain is a modern democracy, worthy of trust and capable of exercising authority. Elkins focuses on how the stark differences in appearance and access between the British National Archives and the archives of post-decolonisation Kenya 'would come to reflect the seeming disorder of the postcolony and its archival inefficiencies, rather than any kind of Orwellian fantasy of state-directed purging at the time of colonial retreat.' Her descriptions also offer insights into how the dynamic interplay between the former coloniser and the former colonised allows authorities on both sides to make use of archives to anchor assertions of sovereignty. Such work is particularly clear in the way that two post-decolonisation republics – France and Algeria – built new and 'modern' archives, which each claims should house the archives under dispute. A focus on 'archives-as-institutions' helps explain why, I would suggest, the Dispute about their contents has had political effects on both sides of the Mediterranean and has shaped historical production in ways far larger than missing documents – even in large numbers – can account.5
This history of archives and decolonisation asks how historical production and archives participate in defining what national sovereignty means post-decolonisation. Existing histories of the increasingly complex post-1945 relationship between nation-states and sovereignty examine accusations that the United Nations and other international institutions have arrogated the sovereign rights of states such as the USA; explore the growing displacement of elements of sovereignty from member states to the European Union; or analyse how neo-colonialism radically circumscribes the sovereignty of post-decolonisation nation-states, and neo-liberalism that of all states.6 Yet the work the production of history does in establishing sovereignty in this period is under-examined. Scholars such as Milligan and Bonnie Smith have shown that the play of archives, archivists, historians and history always involves more than the struggle to tell accurate and well-documented histories: this dynamic participates in the constitutive relations linking people to institutions and states to a unique history, reinforcing both claims to sovereignty by and the implication of citizens in the nation.7 The mid-twentieth century 'era of decolonisation' altered this equation, as it shaped, in conjunction with the emergence of new states, novel forms of sovereignty and new archives as well.
Decolonisation participated in the concomitant (and quite dramatic) redefinition, led by professional archivists, of what materials state archives should collect, which crystallised in the late 1950s. This can be shorthanded as a shift from 'archiving the State' to 'archiving the Nation'. Existing accounts of this history celebrate rupture. They tell how official archivists finally broke the chains of a state-centric definition of what documentation mattered, in order to open archival doors and storage rooms to the broader and truer sources of national histories: documentation of social, cultural, economic and associative activity, among others. Krzysztof Pomian, in his article 'The Archives' in Pierre Nora's massive Les Lieux de Mémoire argues that 'beginning in the 1950s, the Archives of France ruptured the identification of the memory and the history of the nation with the history of the State,' which had guided their collection policies until then. It is also noteworthy, although unmentioned by Pomian, that the rupture he describes was synchronic with two other histories, usually told in terms of rupture: the embracing of 'nation building' projects by so many post-decolonisation states and the growing importance of efforts to look 'beyond the state' by so many historians (perhaps most famously by the Annales School, a historical movement that developed in France and which came to international prominence). Pomian notes that the archivistic shift 'also affected the very content of this memory and this history, which are no longer as they previously were, restricted to political, diplomatic, military, and administrative facts.'8
The history of the Dispute suggests that this inspiring contemporary history – of widening collection practices among archivists and of topics and questions among historians – has obfuscated a more troubling history rife with the politics of sovereignty. This past shapes how we do history as well as how post-decolonisation states govern and define people, formerly colonised (such as Algeria) as well as colonising (such as France). Undeniably, a shift to archiving the nation had innumerable benefits, for historians among others. The differences between this approach and a narrower focus on archiving the state, however, resulted at least as much from efforts to institutionalise new forms of sovereignty as from more enlightened thinking. Celebrations of archiving the nation, in short, have avoided grappling with how it participates in the tough and conflictual work of defining a nation, especially in an era that sees the the nation-state as the only type of state possible.
The drama of what happened to the archival collections under dispute helps make the constitutive tensions between the archives and the post-decolonisation French and Algerian republics difficult to see. Take the most arresting vignette. In June 1962, during the final weeks of over thirteen decades of French rule, Pierre Boyer, head of the Regional Archives of Algiers, set off with a group of soldiers on a boat filled with some thirty cartons of police archives, which they planned to sink in the Bay of Algiers. When it became clear that the crates would not stay underwater, they doused them with gasoline and burned them. Another: one week before, on 15 June 1962, the anti-independence French terrorist group, the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), bombed the government building that contained the regional archives (as well as the apartment where Boyer and his family lived). This was part of their 'scorched earth' campaign, which sought to destroy all that (according to their interpretation) France had built in 132 years of occupation before the victorious Algerian nationalists, organised in the National Liberation Front (FLN), could take control. The documentary holdings suffered little damage (forty people died in the bombing; the OAS did far more damage to written sources the previous week, when it targeted the Library of the University of Algiers). Its holdings, however, like those of the most important official archives in Algeria, did not remain intact.9
Beginning in early 1961 and over the months leading up to (and after) the Algerian Republic's declaration of independence on 5 July 1962, French authorities destroyed 'certain documents that,' in French Army Chief of Staff General Le Puloch's interpretation, 'if one-sidedly exploited, could be deleterious to the interests of France.' At the same time, they packed and shipped to France thousands of cartons of archives, containing tons of documents (Algerian archivists today claim 200,000 'pillaged' cartons containing 600 tons of documents; French officials speak of the 'repatriation' of some 53,000 cartons containing 150 tons of documents). The largest quantity (some 8.5 linear kilometres of cartons) arrived at an emergency storage site in Aix-en-Provence, while military archives travelled to Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris (home of the French military archives, now known as the Service Historique de la Défense, or SHD), and archives of French activities in late 1961 and 1962 ended up in Paris, some sent directly to the Archives Nationales de France (French National Archives), most integrated into the documentary holdings of various ministries.10
These vast collections of documents that escaped destruction, and that left Algeria, are at the heart of the Dispute. This case is not the only instance of the mass transfer of archives out of a territory at the moment of decolonisation; the Belgians, for example, acted similarly when they left the Congo. The United Kingdom and its former colonies, notably Pakistan, India and Kenya, all have long-time disagreements about archival questions. French authorities proclaimed that the same principles governed their decisions vis-à-vis archives as they left all their former overseas possessions, and 'repatriated' substantial collections of archives from Madagascar and other sites.11
Yet in most tellings, as the former director of Algeria's Centre des Archives Nationales d'Algérie (the National Archives or CANA) avers, 'the Algero-French dispute is the world's most intractable.' One French historian bitterly complains that this particular post-decolonisation struggle has had international implications that affect all archives: he claims that the Dispute is the tacit reference that led the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives, and Debts (the text that the United Nations relies on in its determinations about archival disputes between member states) to proclaim that 'archives belong to the territory in which they were produced.' This principle is often invoked as a clear legal foundation for Algerian claims that archives produced in colonised Algeria need to be archived in Algeria. The formulation, he affirms, results from the Algerian government's lobbying of the Soviets and their allies, in order to gain a legal imprimatur for their claims against France. The Convention altered, he argues, previous international understandings concerning the 'territoriality' of archives. (Such understandings, his argument presumes, were less politicized because only Western powers, among them many that then had overseas colonies, participated in their formulation).12 Among scholars 'on [the French] side of the Mediterranean,' a 2003 article affirmed, 'it is taken to be true that Algeria has only copies of some archives necessary to study its colonial history, with all the originals in France.' Many scholars across the Mediterranean (and elsewhere) accept such presumptions. In Algeria today, it is the subject of much public outrage, with dozens of articles on the subject appearing in Algerian newspapers in 2012, around the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian Republic's declaration of independence. Claims such as 'France ... keeps fresh this gaping wound that she inflicted on Algerians' collective memory' give some measure of the perceived stakes.13
The clearest implication of the sad tales of the archives sunk into Lake Victoria (or burned on the shores of the Bay of Algiers), and the hopeful aspect of stolen collections – that they will be recovered, or at least made available for research – is that a truer story could have been told if more appropriate archived material had been (could have been) consulted. Similarly, most discussions of decolonisation and colonial archives focus on how documents are lost to study, if not necessarily wilfully, then (and more importantly) structurally, by the reorganisation of archival collections that decolonisation entailed. This is true even of scholars who embrace theoretical and methodological approaches that are explicitly sceptical of empirical positivism. Yet archives exist to do other things than simply contain documents, rich in information. A critical assessment of archives can do more than unpack how those documents have been classified.14
Archives as institutions undergird other structures, notably states. What Milligan shows, through an archival history of the French National Archives, is that the modern centrality of what she terms 'publicité' gives archives as institutions a key role in anchoring a State's claims to represent the nation. 'Publicité,' she analyses, 'meant much more than "renown," or publicity's current connotation of advertising.' Discursively, 'publicité implied a public-ness that both invited the public into the physical space of the Archives and bound the public interest to the contents and workings of the institution – and thus the government that guaranteed the institution.' The drama of the Dispute, from this perspective, deflects attention from how post-1962 archives and the historians that rely on them participate in building republics – and distinct nations – on both sides of the Mediterranean.15
In Algeria today, the Dispute matters far more than it did in the first twenty-five years of independence. This is, in part, because it is one of a constellation of archival questions that seem to impede public knowledge about Algeria's history. This concern has become of great importance since the events of October 1988, when public demonstrations led to the end of one party (the FLN) rule, which opened up debates about the national past and institutions. The Dispute, of course, is a fight with the former colonial power and – in ways similar to ongoing disputes about 'cultural patrimony,' notably artwork and archaeological treasures transferred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from places that Westerners dominated to Western collections – summons people to focus on the still important role that French imperialism (and post-decolonisation attitudes) plays in Algerian affairs. This helps to explain why Algerian elites, political and intellectual, so regularly bring it up.16 Yet popular interest in other debates makes clear that the Dispute remains pressing in Algeria because of how much history matters to (and divides) many Algerians. In spring 2011, the Algerian francophone press (and, I am told, the Arabic press, although to a lesser extent) had front-page articles about two 'affairs': in one, Yaacef Saadi, author of the screenplay for The Battle of Algiers (1965) and former leader of FLN guerrillas in Algiers, accused Louisette Ighilahriz of lying about her wartime membership in the underground FLN; a few weeks later, former Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, in an interview with Jeune Afrique, insisted that he alone, of all the 'first generation' of FLN leaders, had been both a patriot (others were Berberists, he stated, who preferred their ethnic group to the nation) and capable (the others were, to a man, incompetent in his telling). The opposition El Watan newspaper explained to readers what many other Algerians had already claimed: both Saadi and Ben Bella were setting the stage for 2012, when the legal requirement for French archives to open certain previously classified collections to consultation might well reveal that both men had given far more information and assistance to the French enemy than had ever been recognised. It was time for the archives to free Algerians from the heavy weight of official 'revolutionary' history, and the claims of those, such as Saadi and Ben Bella, whose public authority depended on their proclaimed role in the revolution. The archives appear to offer the possibility of returning sovereignty to the people because, many Algerians believe, their contents will undo the myth-making that the revolutionary generation relies on to rule.17
In the intensity of this conflict, as other scholars of the 'archives of decolonisation' demonstrate, the country resembles other post-decolonisation states. After the 1952 revolution declared Egypt finally free of the British control that until then, its authors argued, had remained colonial (even though independence had been announced in 1919), the new government paid particular attention to historians. As Omnia El Shakry describes, official accounts cast the scholars themselves 'as participants freed from a monarchical and colonial past in a national struggle toward postcolonial revolutionary sovereignty.' Just months after the revolution, the regime accompanied such talk with a wholesale reorganisation of the Egyptian state archives. El-Shakry links these developments to the fact that 'as historians have demonstrated, the question of archival compilation, management, and availability has been a perennial feature in the Egyptian press.' As in Algeria, archive questions do more than allow civil society actors to question official histories. El-Shakry goes so far as to argue that, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, the obstruction of post-independence official state archives has tended to make 'the workings of the colonial state far more visible than the operations of the national states that succeeded colonial rule.' She focuses on the impediments placed in the paths of scholars who seek access to information about the past to argue that 'the archive has functioned as a dense locus of postcolonial power, and its impermeability has often masked the precise nature of the political and social debates that went into the consolidation of regimes in the aftermath of decolonization.' Yet is also necessary to note the crucial role of non-historians as actors and audiences in these debates. This emphasizes something different: that the workings of archives themselves, because they offer institutional evidence of a state's relationship to its people, seem to be particularly propitious levers to question the authorities' claims to legitimately exercise sovereignty. While this may be particularly visible in countries that (re)asserted sovereignty after decolonisation, its effects stretch across the coloniser-colonised divide.18
In France, as well, the Dispute has been a matter of intense public debate, most particularly in late 1981, when 'to everyone's surprise,' as a contemporary report put it, 'the so-called Affair of the "Algerian" archives has become the most emotionally fraught archival question France has ever dealt with.' After the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency in May, the French government sought to rebuild strained ties with the country's most important former colony, Algeria. A visit to Algiers by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Claude Cheysson, included a discussion of the 'transfer of the archives of the colonial period to Algeria.' This was a topic that, in early 1980, the previous government had agreed to discuss through a joint Franco-Algerian committee. The then President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, had quickly intervened, however, to proclaim 'these archives are among the constitutive elements of our national patrimony, as well as of our national sovereignty'; they would remain French.19
Giscard d'Estaing's emphatic statement insisted that control of the disputed archives helped constitute French sovereignty. Yet in October 1981, another prominent French minister visiting Algiers offhandedly pronounced it 'normal that Algeria would be concerned about the archives that were transferred in 1962. I think that we can reach an agreement.' A 2012 interview about the role of the Dispute in present-day Algeria seemingly describes what happened next in early 1980s France. According to jurist Mohamed Bedjaoui, disputes between modern states about archives have been quite common in recent history, although usually they interest only small numbers of people. Sometimes, however, 'thanks to an exceptional situation, a whole people suddenly grow passionate about its archives, one of the constituent elements of its collective memory.' In mid-October 1981, public criticisms of what appeared to be a secret deal to send 'French' archives to Algeria exploded. The first volleys came in right wing newspapers and from organisations of 'repatriates' (people who had lived in Algeria under French rule and had moved to France because of the country's independence) linked to the far right. Within days, however, the largest repatriate group, Le RECOURS which had supported Mitterrand in the recent presidential election, also levelled harsh criticisms. Numerous historians, archivists and academic organisations weighed in as well, in near unanimous opposition.20
The most pressing claim, reiterated by scholars, politicians and the 'modest family of workers' who wrote to one newspaper to protest any transfer of control over the 'Algerian Archives,' concerned 'sovereignty.' As the Académie des Sciences d'Outre-mer (the Academy of Overseas Sciences) stated: 'The archives, property of the French nation, are archives "of sovereignty," an extension of metropolitan archives. They cannot be handed over to a foreign government.' This claim has a history. Even as France was still at war in Algeria, a territory it defined as an integral part of the Republic, French archivists proposed a definition 'of sovereignty' in order to explain why certain archives produced in (French) Algeria should be sent to the metropole. It was archivists indeed who made the decision to 'repatriate' the so-called 'archives of formerly colonized territories'; Boyer would reaffirm this for Algeria in an article he published called 'The Repatriated Archives' in 1982, where he wrote that 'the General [de Gaulle] was apprised of the planned operation by M. André Chamson, Director of the Archives of France. The response was that it was up to [Chamson] to assume his responsibility.' Along with the decision to transfer, archivists defined the grounds with a 1961 report to the profession noting that 'the Director General [of the Archives Nationales] had the government adopt a principle of distinguishing between archives "of sovereignty"... "historical" archives ... and, finally, "administrative" archives.' The archivist explained that the first category of archives comprised 'those that concern the work our country did as sovereign power, and which must remain the property of France.' Those in the second 'are connected to the now ended epoch of colonization and must remain French, even if it necessitates giving microfilms to the newly independent countries.' The third group were collections 'necessary to daily life in the concerned countries, and that must as a result remain there.' References to the second of three categories disappeared from subsequent explanations, notably around 1981. Boyer, like others, distinguished between archives 'of sovereignty' and archives he termed 'of management' ('gestion' rather than the earlier 'adminstration').21
The decisions of these French archivists set the stage, or at least the terms, of the Dispute and of public controversies in Algeria as well as France; but histories driven by Algerian actors help explain why they happened. Boyer's account of the process of archive 'repatriation' in 1962 asserts that 'up until then, the question of archives had been of little concern' to the FLN. Archival research shows that he was wrong, at the very least when he spoke of 'Algerian authorities' and 'the FLN.' At the CANA, it is now possible to consult the inventory of the Fonds GPRA-MAE (the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic or the GPRA), which allow researchers to request documents that the FLN leadership collected in exile, in Cairo and Tunis, over the course of the revolution.22 These resources make clear that building an archive of the Algerian nation was a priority for 'l'Algérie Combattante' (Fighting Algeria), for intertwined reasons of 'sovereignty,' 'administration' and 'history.' FLN leaders sent out teams to collect treaties signed with Ottoman or other precursor states and authorities in the territory that by 1954 was Algeria. They sought historical documentation that referenced a space distinct from other territories and peoples. The files they assembled anchored one of their key strategic gambits: to assert the existence of a sovereign Algerian state that preceded the French conquest. 'The restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social' was the heart of the FLN's first Proclamation of 1 November 1962, a stark rejection of French arguments that 'Algeria' existed, legally and territorially, because of French decisions since the conquest. It also was a forthright challenge to international jurists, who argued that no claim to sovereignty had ever been anchored wholly in Algerian territory, which had always been part of a larger (imperial) state, whether Roman, Almoravid, Almohad, Ottoman or French. Historians know that FLN leaders nimbly took advantage of changing international conditions to win recognition for their unprecedented claim to represent both a sovereign nation, which had never existed in international law, and a territory, which they did not control. FLN leaders saw the establishment of an archive as a crucial tool to ground what they knew were innovative claims to Algerian sovereignty.23
The Evian Accords, which France and representatives of the GPRA initialled on 18 March 1962, implicitly recognised the victory of the Algerian nationalists. Still, the French government insisted that Algerian sovereignty would be created by the two referenda the Accords made possible (one in France and the other in Algeria), and not 'restored.' Even as they rejected such colonialist arguments, FLN leaders continued to worry about their need for archives. In the final pre-independence Congress of the umbrella National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA), which took place in Tripoli in late May and early June 1962, long-time nationalist politician, Ahmed Boumendjel, argued that it was necessary to act immediately 'to save archives of the Turkish epoch and that concern the habous question [Muslim charitable foundations].' In the midst of discussions that led to the adoption of a 'Tripoli Program' that denounced the just-adopted Evian Accords as 'neo-colonialist,' one speaker identified the failure of FLN negotiators to bring the 'archives question' into discussions with France as 'one of the greatest failures.' This places Boyer's 1982 argument that 'the [Evian] accords do not even mention' archives in a different light. Soon after independence, the Algerian government asked United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to send an expert to advise them on how to redefine and reorganise the archives 'at every level: juridical, scientific, administrative, etc.'24
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, UNESCO was engaged in an international project to modernise archives, one aspect of a transnational effort to transform state-centric archives into depositories of a far broader range of sources. One of the most prominent French theorists of 'archivistics,' Yves Pérotin, authored the UNESCO report, which announced that all of its recommendations turned around two principles: to maintain the organic continuity of the collections and 'to take advantage of the fundamental changes taking place in Algeria to define a wholly modern archivistic regime.' If the first principle was axiomatic for modern archivists, the second promised both to offer Algerians and historians access to (the Democratic People's Republic of) Algeria's past and to place 'revolutionary' Algeria, here as in so many domains, in a vanguard position. This definition of the 'modern' archive recurred in early 1960s discussions among French archivists. The United States, according to the President of the French Association of Archivists, was the model, a country where 'they passionately pursue, without regard to borders, any written testimonials that might relate to their country.' What, in 1965, became the French Overseas Archives (ANOM), in Aix-en-Provence, was wholly modern in this sense: under the direction of Pierre Boyer (now repatriated from Algeria) it joined together collections taken from existing and now disappeared ministries with those 'repatriated' from overseas. It was to be an archive that gave access to history: a colonial past now concluded. Unlike any existing French state archive it was not designed also to hold materials necessary for 'administration' or 'management.' Algeria's National Archives, too, have focused on collecting any and all documents that speak to Algeria's 'linear' history, from the Roman Empire through to the Revolution, as their former director describes.25
The 'modern' archives of the 1960s took shape in the era of decolonisation and the history they focused on documenting was newly and starkly national: nation-states, which no longer had either an empire or overseers overseas. The history of the Dispute foregrounds an odd and very telling coincidence: while some archivists were redesigning archives, other archivists defined what 'sovereignty' meant. For the definition 'of sovereignty' that governed the division of the Algerian archives was not rooted in decisions made at Westphalia in 1648 or San Francisco in 1945; nor did it reference Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, nor even Carl Schmitt. Rather, in 1960–1961 in Paris, Chamson relied on precedents that a previous Director General had fixed in 1954 (to decide which archives the French would take with them as they left Vietnam) to define what Algerian archives were 'of sovereignty.'26 In a context where states across the world affirmed and also negotiated away sovereignty, archivists in France and Algeria defined what sovereignty was, and therefore what kinds of documents were part of the national history. As a French archivist explained in 2004, in reference to the Dispute, the definition 'of sovereignty' was 'the rights France has to an archival patrimony that corresponds to a chapter of her history.'27
The definition 'of sovereignty' that the ANOM depends on explicitly affirms that France acted in the colonies, the French state made decisions and choices, which shaped shared histories. This certainty, it must be pointed out, did not actually govern which archives remained in Algeria in 1962 and which French authorities took. A group of doctoral students, reporting on their work in Algerian archives in 2002–2004, noted that large quantities of archives that clearly fell under the definition that Chambon and Boyer established as 'of sovereignty' still remain in Algeria. This is especially true for the most recent – and, presumably, the most sensitive – collections. Rather than the principles that supposedly governed the dispatch of archives to France, 'already assembled and classified [pre-1945] archives were easier for the movers to put into boxes. When it came to more recent documentation,' their survey suggests, 'improvisation reigned more often than not.' They make the important point that 'the historian who presumes that the distinction between archives "of sovereignty" and "of management" strictly reflects' what archives remain in Algeria and which the French took 'would be mistaken.'28
Sketchy evidence from the last months of French rule suggest that 'improvisation reigned' at most levels. Even the destruction of documents appears to have resulted from a hasty winnowing that, at least for the armed forces, seemingly aimed to eliminate suspect collections rather than extract particular (and particularly worrying) files. What has yet to come to light is the type of evidence that has emerged in regards to the British withdrawal from Kenya, which offers clear proof, as Elkins argues, that 'the document-purging process was by no means a haphazard one.' As she details:
[The recently uncovered] files reveal in extensive detail the degree to which the British colonial government directed and orchestrated—at home and in Kenya—the purging of evidence pertaining to the formulation and use of systematized violence, the ex post facto attempts at providing legal coverage for abuses committed by British colonial agents, and the manipulations of investigations into these abuses and derogations of law at the time.29
One way to analyse these differences is historiographical: British official efforts to cover up massive and systematic state violence in Kenya (and in other end-of-empire episodes) were much more effective than those of other European imperial powers, notably France, because of their greater efficiency. It remains historiographically commonplace, as well as received wisdom, that Britain's decolonisation was 'successful,' in stark contrast to countries that failed to withdraw with similar grace.30 Violence has been the crucial measure of success, the knowledge that Britain's 'orderly' transfers of power were different in kind from fruitless French wars to keep 'Indochina' (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and Algeria, which produced enormous casualties and human suffering. It is this fantasy of British wisdom and humanity that recent work by scholars such as David Anderson and Elkins has begun to unsettle.31 What is now becoming clear is how hard both countries worked to maintain imperial control, with massive and indiscriminate violence as a fundamental tool. Rather than simple 'efficiency,' however, what might also explain the difference were the different understandings proposed by British and French authorities about sovereignty.
In their preparation for decolonisation, the British authorities in Kenya relied on a system for categorising their archives that was quite distinct from that which French archivists proposed. This is most evident in how they named their categories. As Elkin details 'under what was known as the "Watch" system, all documents in every Kenyan ministry and department were to be divided into two categories: "Watch" and "Legacy." Those documents to be designated as "Watch"' – like those that the French named 'of sovereignty' and 'historical' – 'were papers that would either be destroyed or be sent to Britain.'
The different name British authorities gave to documents similar to the collections the French named 'administration' (or in latter accountings, 'management') is even more striking. As Elkins writes: 'those constituting "Legacy" material were documents that would be handed over to the independent government in Kenya.'32 Whereas the French nomenclature emphasised that those collections to be taken or destroyed – 'of sovereignty,' 'historical' – were foundational to national narratives of the colonial past, the British naming insisted that those left behind, those that concerned the day-to-day operations of institutions offered evidence of British colonial rule.
What the French archivists did do with their vague and inapplicable definition 'of sovereignty' was erase exactly what French authorities, for so long, claimed distinguished Algeria from other overseas possessions, whether of France or any modern state: as part of France, French sovereignty was not just exercised in Algeria, it in part was anchored there too. This idea that Algeria helped make modern France (especially in its republican form), juridically and institutionally, was repeatedly invoked with assertions that twentieth-century France was a 'great Muslim nation,' as one senator put it in 1960. Concretely, the legal definition of French nationality was made (1889) to govern Algeria. Symbolically, it was in Algiers that Charles de Gaulle proclaimed the Provisional Government of the French Republic, which rejected the Vichy State's claims to incarnate France. It was in Algiers that the Fourth Republic fell and that the Fifth (that is, today's) Republic took shape.33
Algerian independence made this past disappear from view. It did this, paradoxically, even as decolonisation also brought into being new archives, in France and Algeria, and, more broadly, helped give form to new ways of archiving. As Pérotin described, only a wholly new country such as Algeria could 'define a wholly modern archivistic regime.' At the very moment that states such as France and Algeria became newly national, archivists sought to shift from archiving the state to archiving the nation. As late as 1956, T.R. Schellenberg's still influential Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques, which focused on the very American and British archivists that French commentators identified as at the forefront of 'modern' practices, continued to insist that state archivists should concern themselves 'with the materials produced by the governments they serve.' The 'active policy' of collecting non-state materials that archivists around the world were just beginning to adopt took shape in just-decolonised countries. Pérotin's report for UNESCO detailed the archival law he proposed for Algeria, the first article of which would 'define the "National Archives Collection [Fonds]." Unknown in Western archivistic theory, this concept is fruitfully simple.' He explained what made it generative:
I chose the term 'national', rather than 'of the State', because it seemed to me to be even broader and less likely to focus only on the administrative machinery of the executive. The national archives must aggressively include the papers of all national organizations, whether they are political, trade unions, economic actors, etc.
Just two years before, the UNESCO mission to newly independent Tanganyika reminded readers that 'sound history is based on a wide selection of sources.' Marcia Wright, an 'American post-graduate historian with experience in archival work,' called for the Dar es Salaam archive to seek out the records of 'independent anthropologists who have worked in the country ... Diaries and papers of long-time residents and missionaries, participants and observers in Tanganyika's development ... African leaders.'
Wright, it must be noted, also proposed that 'everything in Tanganyika argues for a liberal policy regarding restrictions on the use of archives and declassification of colonial records.' This was because 'a new country can only benefit by a reputation for cooperation with scholars whose works, in turn, will increase knowledge of Tanganyika in the world.' Bailkin, too, tracks how 'decolonization prompted new demands for transparency.' She describes how 'one Kenyan archivist considered whether retaining documents for fifty years made sense for a "new" African country: "it is not easy to follow European practice partly owing to the comparatively short period of recorded history in Kenya ..." He successfully proposed,' she remarks, 'a thirty-year rule that was then still five years away in Britain,' yet another indication of the hopes of many that decolonisation would bring both new transparency and modernity to archives world-wide. The phrase that Pérotin used to explain why newly independent countries (such as Algeria) were so important to archivists' efforts to establish a 'wholly modern archivistic regime,' however, tells us more about what has happened since: 'countries whose sovereignty is ancient cannot always allow themselves' to do so.34
Pérotin reminds us at once how tightly archives and sovereignty are bound together in the modern era even as he argues that the (archival) history that countries required was broadly 'national' rather than merely state-centric. While he asserted that this broadening was a form of progress, it was a claim that made sense because of a new context. Decolonisation, we might say, required more attention to the first term of the nation-state, now that imperial state forms were discredited (and even more so as post-war expectations that the future of all states would be supranational largely had disappeared by the early 1960s). New ways of doing history, and the new practices of archival collecting that help make these possible, did emerge during the era of decolonisation. They promised to allow historians to definitively break with Herbert Baxter Adams' nineteenth-century axiom that 'History is [only] Past Politics.' Archives in post-decolonisation Algeria, Tanzania (the country Taganyika formed with Zanzibar in 1964) and Kenya have worked to collect new kinds of sources that will make possible histories of the nation, rather than just histories of the state. Yet the history of access to archives in all three countries has been rather difficult, as Elkins' discussion of the Kenyan archives emphasizes. With a similar mandate, the French ANOM, too, has not given evidence of the promise an American scholar conveyed in 1966 that it was 'meant to be somewhat more accessible than the archives in Paris, where the fifty-year rule is still strictly applied.' The British government, as the recent 'discovery' has made brutally clear, also has been far from forthcoming.35
The turn to archiving the nation, rather than just archiving the state, appeared more true to the past in the same years as decolonised states claimed to be more true to their nations. Both promised more access to truth and freedom and, thus, a less complicated relationship to sovereignty. The history of the Dispute, however, suggests that what emerged were different paradoxes rather than the end of limiting contradictions.
That so many of today's archive controversies concern the mid-twentieth century 'end of empire' is the result of more than just efforts to hide embarrassing pasts. They speak to how much the exercise of sovereignty is shaped by post-decolonisation concerns. Among former colonisers, some of the most pressing concerns result from the steps taken to redefine states and nations as wholly 'European' despite their extra-European histories, as well as how decolonisation shaped the concomitant establishment of modern 'social citizenship' welfare states. Among the formerly colonised, the work done to cement national identities, often accompanied by the elaboration of highly centralised administrations, continues to trouble efforts to link states to people. So, too, have efforts to negotiate relations with their former colonisers, which the end of the Cold War rendered yet more complicated. One response is to pretend that yet more modern archives might open up sources that could fully illuminate all such questions. Yet historians might gain much from the recognition that archival disputes – about what limits national archives place on access to documents; on how they organise and manage their collections – themselves offer telling clues of the ongoing difficulties of thinking 'nation' and 'state' together. For such control offers modern states the rare possibility to exercise sovereignty in ways that link past and present to state-owned facilities and public employees, despite international conventions and the summons of transnational publics. It thus offers rich material for historical analyses that seek to work with as well as against the grain of the archives.
Notes
1 This chapter revises ' "Of Sovereignty": Disputed Archives, "Wholly Modern" Archives, and the Post-Decolonization French and Algerian Republics, 1962–2012,' The American Historical Review 120.3 (2015): pp. 869–883.
2 Bailkin, 2012; Bailkin, 2015, pp. 884–899, 895 and 885; Stein, 2015, pp. 900–919 and 904; Burton, 2006, pp. 1–24; Stoler, 2009.
3 Bailkin, 2015, p. 888; Elkins, 2015, pp. 852–868 and 859.
4 Bailkin, 2015, p. 897; on the post-1945 history of efforts by historians to think 'beyond the state,' see Shepard, 2010, pp. 474–483.
5 Milligan, 2007, pp. 20–35. See also Milligan, 2002; Elkins, 2015, p. 852.
6 Eg. Shepard, 2012, pp. 113–134; Keohane, 2002, pp. 743–765; Robertson, 2003.
7 On 'the political' and archival history, see Smith, 1998.
8 Pomian, 1992, pp. 163–233. Les Lieux, as a number of scholars note, almost wholly erases empire from its exploration of the French past and its memorializations, and Pomian's article is no exception. On the silences of Les Lieux, see Noiriel, 1988.
9 For a recent evocation of the Bay of Algiers and bombing episodes, see Noureddine Khelassi, 'Entre l'Algérie et la France, il y a l'Histoire, la mémoire, des archives et des biens patrimoniaux. Il était une fois les canons et les crânes,' La Tribune (13 June 2012, Algiers); consulted online 23 August 2012, at <http://www.latribune-online.com/suplements/culturel/68950.html>. Details about the role of Boyer from 27 July 2012 interview with Geneviève Boyer about Pierre Boyer's manuscript diary of the events of 1962 (in her possession) and 1 July 2012 interview with documentary filmmaker Frédéric Biamonti, who consulted the memoir during the making of Les pieds noirs: L'amère patrie (2012); and Pierre Boyer, 'Les archives rapatriées,' Itinéraires 264 (1982), 49–67; 61. NB: While I have yet to receive authorisation to cite the memoir, I here am concerned only with the dramatic role this anecdote plays in various depictions of the documentary stakes of 'the Dispute,' rather than its veracity. On effects of bombing, see Pérotin, 1964.
10 'Lettre du general Le Puloch au général commandant supérieur des forces en Algérie' (3 August 1962), cited in Samrant, 2003, pp. 103–110. On the purging of military archives, see Samrant, 2005, p. 105; on the diverging estimates of tonnage, see Boyer, 1996. On the quantities that arrived at Aix, see Mbaye, 2009, pp. 291–299 and 295. In addition to archived document collections (military and others) that had yet to be transferred from the originating services to official archives, the archives of the Governor General of Algeria (GGA) and the regional (until 1958: departmental) archives of Algiers (which shared space with the GCA), Oran and Constantine were affected by the transfer; the archives that had been just recently established in the new departments (1956–1960) were also affected; communal archives were largely untouched. See Dion, 2004, pp. 89–107.
11 Kecskeméti 1977, 5, in UNESCO Archives; consulted online (28 September 2012), 5. For an overview of French treatment of archives in French Africa between 1959–1960, see Bat, 2010, pp. 301–311. NB: in terms of archives, Senegal was the exception; in fact, French authorities sought to keep their agreement to leave the originals in Dakar and use microfilm to make copies for France secret, so as not to anger or inspire people in other former colonies.
12 Badjadja, 2004, p. 645; Kecskeméti, 2004, pp. 41–50; 46–7. On French archivists' understanding of 'territoriality,' see Laroche, 1966, pp. 235–252; and Bautier, 1970, pp. 40–43. NB: My aim here is to emphasise the historical contingency of claims made in reference to legal principles (notably sovereignty), not to legitimise this unsourced claim of back-channel diplomacy.
13 Guignard, Kudo and Bader, 2003, pp. 110–112. The authors make clear what more recent writing (and the ongoing research of scholars from many countries) makes clear: there are growing possibilities to do archival research in Algeria. Hassan Gherab, 'Le contentieux sur la restitution de fonds archivistiques est toujours pendant. Les archives algériennes, une mémoire amputée par la France,' La Tribune (Algiers) (1 June 2012); consulted online (30 August 2012), at <http://www.latribune-online.com/suplements/cahiers_du_week-end/68252.html>.
14 E.g. Stoler, 2009.
15 It is outside the scope of this essay to discuss how archives work to structure or support other groups or communities. Milligan, 2007, p. 20.
16 See esp. Rahal, 2012, pp. 118–51 and Stora, 2000, pp. 109–118. The literature on patrimonial disputes is large; for the French-Algerian case, see Leturcq, 2008, put online 1 October 2011, consulted 29 August 2012. URL: <http://anneemaghreb.revues.org/431>; DOI:10.4000/anneemaghreb.431.
17 'L'historien Mohamed Harbi décortique des épisodes-clés du mouvement national et livre ses verités, "Les archives de la guerre de Libération sont explosives",' El Watan, 26 May 2011; Aït Benali Boubekeur, 'Les Algériens veulent connaitre la vraie histoire, monsieur Ben Bella,' Le Quotidien d'Algérie (19 May 2011). NB: In 2000, Ighilahriz sparked an international discussion about the violence of decolonisation when she described how she had been tortured and raped by French officers during the 1957 Battle of Algiers.
18 El Shakry, 2015, pp. 920–934; 922–923.
19 Lucain, 1981, pp. 641–647.
20 'Le Dr. Mohamed Bedjaoui, membre de la Cour internationale de justice: "Le droit international régi le sort des fonds d'archives",' La Tribune (Algiers) (1 June 2012); consulted online (30 August 2012); Lucain, 'La question des archives.' On Le RECOURS, see Philippe Bernard, 'Le métissage des mémoires: un défi pour la société française,' Hommes et migrations 1247 (2004): 27–35.
21 'Le transfert des documents d'archives aux autorités algériennes. La réaction de l'Academie des Sciences d'outre-mer,' Le Monde (26 November 1981), p. 6 (NB: this organisation had been founded in 1922 as the Académie des sciences coloniales); for letter, see Jean des Cars, 'Affaire des archives: indignation nationale,' Figaro-magazine (14 November 1981), pp. 116–119. The term 'repatriate' in reference to transfers between France and Algeria has a very specific history; see Shepard, 2008, pp. 140–147. Boyer, 1982, p. 55; 'Neuvieme congrès annuel des archivistes français. Paris–Beauvais, 14–17 June 1961,' La Gazette des archives 34–35 (1961), pp. 139–143; 141.
22 Here and elsewhere, I employ multiple terms such as Algerian 'war' and 'revolution' that were used by actors at the time, in order to highlight the many implications and the multiple (and often contradictory) interpretations of what happened. I reject ongoing efforts to invent names, such as the 'Algerian war for independence' or the 'French-Algeria war,' which work to restrict the meaning of what happened in the name of 'science' or objectivity. Such approaches, as Nedjib Sidi-Moussa shows, parallel official efforts to fit this multivalent history into nation-state narratives; see Sidi-Moussa, 2013.
23 Connelly, 2002; Shepard, 2012.
24 '5è séance présidée par Benyahia Mohamed Seddik' of the CNRA Congress of Tripoli, May–June 1962 (1 June 1962), pp. 99–101, in Centre des Archives Nationales d'Algérie, or CANA: Fonds CNRA 1. On the Boumendjels, see Rahal, 2010. Pérotin, Archives publiques, 4.
25 Ibid. Pérotin's most influential work was 'L'Administration et les "trois ages" des archives,' Seine et Paris 20 (1961), pp. 1–4 (translated as 'Administration and the "Three Ages" of Archives,' American Archivist 29, no. 3 [1966]: 363–369). Dousset, 1965, pp. 3–4; on the ANOM (formerly the CAOM), see Mbaye, 2009; Avezou, 1963, pp. 3–4 ; Laroche, 1966, pp. 235–252; Badjadja, 2004, pp. 631–682.
26 Ermisse, 2004, pp. 54–55.
27 Doury-Bonnet, 2012.
28 Ibid.; Bader, Kudo and Guignard, 2004, pp. 158–168. See also Lacroix, Marynower and Vermeren, 2011, pp. 147–149.
29 Elkins, 2015, p. 860.
30 For a classic statement of this argument vis-à-vis France, see Kahler, 1984.
31 Anderson, 2005; see also Bennett, 2007.
32 Elkins, 2015, p. 861.
33 Shepard, 2011, pp. 252–261.
34 Schellenberg, 1956, 15. Pérotin, Archives publiques, 4; on 'active' archival practice, see Manuel d'archivistique, Théorie et pratique des archives publiques en France. Paris, France, 1970; Marcia Wright, 'Report on the government records and public archives of Tanganyika with recommendations for a national archives - (Mission)' Dar es Salaam, 2 November 1962, UNESCO Archives 158073, 24; 17–18; description of Wright: J.R. Ede, 'Development of national archives: Tanganyika - (mission) July 1963–June 1964' Dar es Salaam, 1964, in UNESCO Archives EPTA/TANGANAC/1, 1; Pérotin, Archives publiques, 4; Bailkin, 2015, p. 896.
35 On expectations that the (near) future would be supranational and their collapse, see: Shepard, 2012. See Rahal, 2012; Magaya and Lowry, 2012, pp. 47–58; Coyle Dauphin, 1966, pp. 48–65; 54.
References
Anderson, David. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Avezou, Robert. 'Le "Mot" du Président'. La Gazette des Archives 40, 1963, pp. 3–4.
Bader, Raëd, Akihito Kudo and Didier Guignard. 'Des lieux pour la recherche en Algérie'. Bulletin de l'institut d'Histoire du temps présent 83, June 2004, pp. 158–168.
Badjadja, Abdelkrim. 'Panorama des archives de l'Algérie moderne et contemporaine'. In La Guerre d'Algérie (1954–2004), La Fin de L'amnésie. Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi (eds). Paris, France: Robert Laffont, 2004, pp. 631–682.
Bailkin, Jordanna. The Afterlife of Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.
—. 'Where Did the Empire Go? Archives and Decolonization in Britain'. The American Historical Review 120(3), 2015, pp. 884–899.
Bat, Jean-Pierre. 'Les archives de l'AEF'. Afrique & Histoire 7(1), 2010, pp. 301–311.
Bautier, R.H. 'Définitions générales et problèmes juridiques des archives'. In Manuel d'archivistique. Théorie et pratique des Archives publiques en France. Paris, France: SEVPEN, 1970, pp. 40–43.
Bennett, Huw. British Army Counterinsurgency and the Use of Force in Kenya, 1952–56. PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2007.
Bernard, Philippe. 'Le métissage des mémoires: un défi pour la société Française'. Hommes et Migrations 1247, 2004, pp. 27–35.
Boyer, Pierre. 'Les archives rapatriées'. Itinéraires 264, 1982, pp. 49–67.
Burton, Antoinette. 'Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories'. In Antoinette Burton (ed). Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 1–24.
Connelly, Matthew. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Coyle Dauphin, Joanne. 'French Provincial Centers of Documentation and Research on Africa'. African Studies Bulletin 9(3), 1966, pp. 48–65; 54.
Dion, Isabelle. 'Les services d'archives en Algérie: 1830–1962'. Histoire et Archives 15, 2004, pp. 89–107.
Direction des Archives Nationales. Le Contentieux Archivistique Algéro-Français. Algiers: Publication des archives nationales d'Algérie, 1996.
Doury-Bonnet, Juliette. 'Algérie, l'accès aux sources'. BBF 2, 2004, pp. 125–126. Available at: <http://bbf.enssib.fr/>. Consulted on 28 August 2012.
Dousset, François. 'Le "Mot" du Président,' La Gazette des Archives 48, 1965, pp. 3–4.
Elkins, Caroline. 'Looking beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization'. The American Historical Review 120(3), 2015, pp. 852–868.
El Shakry, Omnia. ' "History without Documents": The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East'. The American Historical Review 120(3), 2015, pp. 920–934.
Ermisse, Gerard. 'L'actualité des contentieux archivistiques'. In Marie Cornu and Jérôme Fromageau (eds). Archives et Patrimoine, v. I. Paris, France: L'Harmattan, 2004, pp. 54–55.
Guignard, Didier, Akihito Kudo and Raëd Bader. 'Un terrain algérien pour la recherché'. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 77, 2003, pp. 110–112.
Kahler, Miles. Decolonization in Britain and France: The Domestic Consequences of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Kecskeméti, Charles. 'L'histoire des contentieux archivistiques'. In Marie Cornu and Jérôme Fromageau (eds). Archives et Patrimoine, v. I. Paris, France: L'Harmattan, 2004, pp. 41–50.
Keohane, Robert O. 'Ironies of Sovereignty: The European Union and the United States'. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 40(4), 2002, pp. 743–765.
Lacroix, Annick, Claire Marynower and Hugo Vermeren. 'Retour sur les archives algériennes'. Vingtième Siècle 110, 2011, pp. 147–149.
Laroche, Carlo. 'Les Archives de l'expansion française Outre-Mer'. Gazette des Archives 55, 1966, pp. 235–252.
Leturcq, Jean-Gabriel. 'La question des restitutions d'oeuvres d'art: différentiels maghrébins'. L'Année du Maghreb [online], IV, 2008. Available at: <http://anneemaghreb.revues.org/431>; DOI:10.4000/anneemaghreb.431. Consulted 29 August 2012.
Lucain, Pierre. 'La question des archives algériennes'. La Revue Administrative 204, 1981, pp. 641–647.
Magaya, Charles, and James Lowry. 'The National Archives of Tanzania Fifty Years after Marcia Wright's Report on the Government Records and Public Archives of Tanganyika'. Comma 2012(1), 2012, pp. 47–58.
Mbaye, Ousmane. 'Le CAOM: un centre d'archives partagées?' Afrique & Histoire 7(1), 2009, pp. 291–299.
Milligan, Jennifer. Making a Modern Archive: The Archives Nationales of France, 1850–1887. PhD Thesis, Rutgers–New Brunswick, 2002.
—. 'The Problem of Publicité in the Archives of Second Empire France'. In Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (eds). Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp. 20–35.
Noiriel, Gérard. Le Creuset Français. Histoire de L'immigration XIXème-XXème Siècle. Paris, France: Seuil, 1988.
Pérotin, Yves. 'L'Administration et les "trois ages" des archives'. Seine et Paris 20, 1961, pp. 1–4 (translated as 'Administration and the "Three Ages" of Archives'. American Archivist 29(3),1966, pp. 363–369.
Pérotin, Yves. Archives publiques: Algérie – (mission) Avril-Juillet 1964, in UNESCO Archives ALG/CUA/2, 9, 1964.
Pomian, Krzysztof. 'Les Archives, Du Trésor des chartes au Caran'. In Les Lieux de Mémoire, volume III - Les France, 3 - De l'archive à l'emblème, Pierre Nora (ed). Paris: Gallimard, 1992, pp. 163–233.
Rahal, Malika. Ali Boumendjel. Une affaire française. Une histoire algérienne. Paris, France: Les Belles Lettres, 2010.
—. 'Fused Together and Torn Apart: Stories and Violence in Contemporary Algeria'. History and Memory 24(1), 2012, pp. 118–51.
Robertson, Robbie. The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness. London, UK: Zed Books, 2003.
Samrant, Thierry. 'Les archives de la guerre d'Algérie: le secret entre violence et mémoire'. In Sébastien Laurent (ed). Archives 'Secrètes', Secrets d'Archives? L'historien et l'Archiviste Face aux Archives Sensibles le Livre. Paris, France: CNRS Editions, 2003, pp. 103–110.
Schellenberg, T. R. Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Shepard, Todd. 'A l'heure des "grands ensembles" et de la guerre d'Algérie. 'L'État-nation' en question'. Monde(s). Revue d'Histoire Transnationale 1(1), 2012, pp. 113–134.
—. 'Decolonization and the Republic'. In Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson (eds). The French Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011, pp. 252–261.
—. '"History is Past Politics"? Archives, "Tainted Evidence," and the Return of the State'. The American Historical Review 115(2), 2010, pp. 474–483.
—. The Invention of Decolonization: The End of French Algeria and the Remaking of France, 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Sidi-Moussa, Nedjib. Devenirs Messalistes (1925–2013). Sociologie Historique d'une Aristocratie Révolutionnaire. PhD Thesis, Université Paris 1-La Sorbonne, 2013.
Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. 'Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Buried Troves: Decolonization and the Multi-Sited Archives of Algerian Jewish History'. The American Historical Review 120(3), 2015, pp. 900–919.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Stora, Benjamin. 'Maroc-Algérie. Retour du passé et écriture de l'histoire'. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 68, 2000, pp. 109–118.
3 Displaced Archives in The National Archives of the United Kingdom
Mandy Banton
This chapter presents an overview of those archival collections held in The National Archives of the UK (TNA) that can be identified as being 'displaced' as a result of varied acts of British imperialism. Using examples of documentation created by the governments or administrations of British or foreign dependencies during the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, it outlines reasons for such 'displacements' or 'migrations'. The first section discusses what we might call historic displacements, detailing four examples of collections held by TNA and its predecessor, the Public Record Office (PRO), for many years: records from Guiana (Guyana), the Ionian Islands, Tangier and Wei-Hai-Wei. The second, more detailed, section concerns the 'migrated archives' deposited at TNA in this present decade: colonial government records removed from British dependencies at 'end of empire'. It reviews contemporary and more recent discussions within responsible UK government departments concerning the legitimacy of such removals, the legal status of the records vis-à-vis UK public records legislation and local archival practice, British responses to international initiatives for restitution, and the concealment of not only the records but knowledge of their very existence. It touches upon the debates in a wider arena that attended the eventual release of these records as scholarly, media and political interest was aroused.
Continuing debates about the definition of 'displaced' or 'migrated' archives throw wide open the possibility that a range of documentation from British government departments not primarily concerned with colonial affairs might fall into such categories. The final section provides some examples and briefly discusses the validity of claims that the internal records of responsible departments of the metropolitan power can also be considered as 'displaced'.
The Historic Collections
The three South American provinces of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice were administered by the Dutch West India Company until 1792. Captured, lost and recaptured by Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the territories were ceded to the United Kingdom (the UK) in 1814 and united as British Guiana in 1831. Records were surrendered to Britain by the government of the Netherlands in 1819 on grounds that they were needed for effective administration. These records were already displaced, having been taken over by the Netherlands government when the company was wound up.1 In contrast, the Ionian Islands, also ceded to Britain in 1814, were transferred to independent Greece fifty years later; the local records of British administration were then removed to London.2 They were among the first records of, or associated with, the Colonial Office to be sent to the PRO. Colonial Office officials were happy with the practice, introduced in 1860, commenting two years later that papers required could be 'obtained at a moment's notice',3 but there was no public access to records dated between 1837 and 1902 until 1948.
The third example is that of Wei-Hai-Wei, which was leased from China in 1898 for use as a naval harbour and returned in 1930. TNA's catalogue states that the Civil Commissioner's records were then taken over by the Colonial Office, but in fact they were stored in the British Embassy at Peking (Beijing) until 1961. They seem to have been forgotten rather than deliberately concealed and swept up during a review of embassy and consular records – perhaps encouraged by the passing of UK public records legislation in 1958 but more probably as a consequence of relocation of the embassy the following year.
In all these cases, locally created documentation was sent to London rather than remaining in situ to support ongoing good governance and provide a local resource.
The case of records from Tangier is different. This Portuguese possession was ceded to England in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II. The cost of maintaining the settlement was exorbitant and after only twenty-three years it was simply abandoned rather than being ceded to another sovereign state. Its harbour and fortifications were destroyed, and its military and civilian residents were evacuated together with the records of its courts and municipal assemblies.
In addition the Colonial Office archive at TNA has long included small collections from three former British territories: Ceylon, Malta and Sierra Leone. There are a few records of the Palestine custodian of enemy property and one volume of papers from the government of Heligoland.4 A much larger collection is that of the British North Borneo Company, which governed present-day Sabah from 1882 to 1942. The company transferred its surviving records to the PRO following the winding-up of its affairs in 1952. Finally, there are small discrete collections from territories held temporarily in wartime: Corsica, Curaçao, Guadeloupe, Havana, Martinique, St Croix, St Eustatius, St Thomas, Santo Domingo and Suriname. In contrast, records of the British administration of Reunion (1810–15) are held in the Archives Départementales de la Réunion (Departmental Archives of Reunion).
PRO staff appear to have regarded these displaced collections as rare and uncontroversial exceptions. In the first guide to Colonial Office records, published in 1964, R. B. Pugh wrote: 'It hardly needs saying that the domestic records of oversea governments do not form part of the ... records.'5 He was presumably unaware of the contemporaneous actions of the Colonial Office in supervising the destruction or removal to London of official records of colonial governments.
The 'Migrated Archives'6
The Background
In 2009, the report of a conference on the 'expatriation' of records noted the 'disparity of power' between the metropole as the recipient of archival materials and the colonial or post-colonial periphery as the source. But, it continued, 'In the UK context, the internal records of former colonial states were routinely passed into the custody of successor national governments'.7 Despite earlier doubts, we were finally disabused of this notion only in April 2011 when a London newspaper reported that: 'Government efforts to cover up one of the darkest episodes in British colonial history have been revealed by the discovery of a vast cache of documents relating to the bloody Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.'8
In June 2009, five elderly Kenyans brought a claim against the British government, alleging mistreatment and torture at the hands of British colonial and military personnel.9 The unrelenting efforts of lawyers and expert witnesses eventually forced the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to admit the existence in the UK of some 1,500 Kenyan government files removed at independence. It subsequently announced that it held files from 37 former dependencies, a collection first estimated at 8,800 items but in fact comprising about 20,000. The FCO commissioned Anthony Cary, a former diplomat, to examine 'what went wrong and what lessons should we draw?' His report emphasised bureaucratic incompetence and loss of corporate memory rather than any deliberate intention to conceal the existence of the archives.10 On 5 May 2011, William Hague, the then Foreign Secretary, informed Parliament that it was his intention 'to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions'.
Inevitably the 'discovery' of these migrated archives attracted considerable media and scholarly attention even before their gradual transfer to TNA and release to the public. Three expert witnesses in the trial published on the Kenya background.11 The present writer used documents already in the public domain to build up a picture of the processes of 'migration'.12 Professor Stephen Howe noted, 'Potentially, almost every part of the narrative of decolonisation ... will have to be rewritten'.13 Attention has continued to be paid to this issue by the media14 while further journal articles have appeared.15 In February 2015, some early work based on the newly released records was presented to a workshop at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.16
My own interest in these 'migrated archives' has been less their content and more the policy behind their 'migrations'; the history of their custody in the UK; ongoing debates as to their legal status; and attempts to secure their return to the independent states.
The Policy
Evolving policy was rooted in earlier concerns for the safeguarding of official papers, a subject re-emphasised in wartime. In June 1939, governors were warned that official publications must not include information of value 'to a potentially hostile power'.17 In 1943, they were instructed to adopt a new file classification system and were sent guidelines designed to ensure that papers were kept from unauthorised persons. Thus in the post-war years, when the primary concern of British authorities was to keep sensitive information from ministers and officials in incoming independent governments, some groundwork was already in place.
The first of the migrated archives sent to the UK came from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which achieved independence in 1948. Failing to find a precedent based on constitutional change in the dominions, India or Ireland, Colonial Office officials entered into anxious discussions. 'Are we entitled to do as we please with these records?' they asked. 'Are they UK Govt. or Ceylon Govt. archives? Are we entitled to withhold them from the Ceylon Government?'18 Their legal adviser thought that Ceylon ministers charged with the direction of government might reasonably argue that they should have access to relevant documents.19 This is the only acknowledgement I have seen in all the Colonial Office files concerning the migrated archives of the principle that records should follow function.20
One Colonial Office official thought that the problem might be shelved by passing files to the British High Commissioner, but another believed that leaving them in Ceylon would cause embarrassment: 'Public interest ... could grow very readily to monsoon dimensions.'21 Furthermore, this could be only a short-term solution. There was no uncertainty about the status of records of British high commissions and embassies. They were (and are) UK public records that could remain in overseas 'posts' only temporarily.
The best option might be to bring the Ceylon records to London: 'Any storm there might be would be directed against the Colonial Office (we are well cast for the role of old enemy), and not against the High Commissioner, who must play the part of new friend.'22
The papers under consideration at that time were not records created by the colonial government, but correspondence between successive governors and London. In an attempt at clarification, an official wrote:
The Governor, while Ceylon was a colony, was partly a piece of the Government of the Colony, and partly the representative there of His Majesty's Government in the UK. It seems to follow ... from this that despatches ... he received in the former capacity should remain with the independent Ceylon Government ... Those he received in the latter capacity can be treated as belonging to HMG in the UK.23
It was impossible to translate such a distinction into the actual sorting of papers into two categories, and 464 volumes of despatches, dating from 1835, were sent to London.24 An assumption seems to have developed that the migrated archives date from the period of decolonisation. In fact there are nineteenth-century papers from 11 territories and records from well before the Second World War for many more.25
Developing policy in the 1950s is obscured by the apparent destruction of files relating to the Gold Coast and Malaya, subsequently described by the Colonial Office librarian as providing the most useful background. We do know, however, that in 1956 an official had stressed that it was not the practice of the Colonial Office to take over archives of governments of dependent territories.26 In 1959, a report of what was done in Malaya was sent to Nigeria for information. In 1956, as the civil service was 'Malayanised', advantage had been taken of office moves and reorganisations to 'withdraw ... papers which could not be handed over.'27
'Disposal' of documents continued to give rise to anxious discussion, but by 1961 a policy had been formulated based on recommendations of a Gold Coast (Ghana) committee. It was sent to Sierra Leone in March 1961 and to the East African dependencies in May. The Colonial Office had moved away from its previously uncertain stance as responsibility was transferred from the geographical departments and library, whose staff had recognised both the significance of documentation to incoming governments and its potential historical importance, to the Intelligence and Security Department (ISD). Staff there had other priorities, informed at least in part by an ongoing liaison with MI5 – the Security Service. In 1963, discussing appraisal of records of the West Indies Federation, ISD stressed that the prime need for financial assistance was 'on grounds of security of material, not on grounds of historical interest ...'28 Security liaison officers played a key role in policy implementation in the dependencies; the 1959 report on Malaya was compiled by one of their number.
The 1961 policy, which may already be familiar, was not specifically concerned with the destruction or removal of records but with the question of what should be kept back from successor governments: documents which,
1. Might embarrass HMG [Her Majesty's Government] or other Governments;
2. Might embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others (such as police agents or informers);
3. Might compromise sources of intelligence;
4. Might be used unethically by Ministers in the successor Government.
However, 'There would be no objection to the transfer ... of secret or lower papers provided that they have been scrutinised and selected by a small committee of, say, a Special Branch officer and two Senior Administrative Officers'.29
Paradoxically, less than six weeks before these guidelines were first circulated, a Colonial Office minister had stated in Parliament that the preservation of official records of each colony or former colony was the responsibility of the individual governments.
The Practice
The uneven application of the 1961 policy can be explained partly by the lack of general guidance on destruction or removal of documentation and partly by the fact that, as Colonial Office officials had so often emphasised, colonies were not governed directly from London; there had always been an 'arm's length' approach resulting in differing policies and practices. Even the 1961 policy was described by one London official as 'almost a standard instruction'.30 And we should not ignore individual inclinations; some officials were reluctant to destroy documentation potentially of lasting value, while others enthusiastically tossed as much as possible into the incinerator or bonfire. An added complication was that the Colonial Office was not the only UK government department concerned; its responsibility for the colonies and protectorates was transferred to the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) as each territory achieved independence, resulting in an awkward overlap. The CRO had for decades also been responsible for certain dependencies closely associated with one or other of the dominions, and the short-lived Central African Office (CAO) supervised the dismantling of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
In 1963, officials of the CAO discussed with their counterparts in Salisbury (Harare) the possible transfer to London of Federation records. They could find no way of doing this without the British Government assuming responsibility, which, they said, 'would obviously not be acceptable'.31 They suggested that the PRO might take them directly from the Federation on deposit. The PRO refused, and the final blow was dealt by Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Federation, who was determined that no records should go to London. He was convinced that nothing could safeguard them from the attentions of British Intelligence. The CAO did not seek Colonial Office advice.
Reports of what happened elsewhere are both complex and uneven; many pertinent Colonial Office files have not survived.32 A few examples must suffice. In some territories new procedures were put in place prior to independence. Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) introduced an interim file classification known as 'WATCH', admired by 'security experts' in London.33 The Kenyan version is described in detail.34 WATCH papers could be seen only by an authorised officer, defined as 'a servant of the Kenya Government who is a British subject of European descent, and who has been security cleared ...' Uganda adopted a similar procedure known as 'Operation Legacy', but officials emphasised that the instruction that a dedicated committee should assess documentation was quite impossible to implement even in the Chief Secretary's Office 'let alone in all the other hundreds of offices throughout the Protectorate'.35 Officials in British Guiana made the same point, although for different reasons: in the greater Caribbean region there were too few expatriate staff to undertake the task.
For some territories there is an indication of the quantity of papers destroyed: Malaya sent five truckloads for incineration in Singapore, while in Northern Nigeria documents were burnt in small quantities on a daily basis over a period of several months. There are few lists of what was destroyed, it seems unlikely that destruction schedules were compiled.
There are occasional lists of files sent to London, some with accounts of their transportation. There is an example of documents sent elsewhere. In 1965, records from Basutoland (Lesotho) were sent to the Oxford Colonial Records Project (OCRP) for deposit in Rhodes House Library.36 The Colonial Office got wind of this and retrieved the files, emphasising that the OCRP collected private, not official, papers. Similarly, a Kenyan politician, Sir Michael Blundell, arranged for his own papers to be deposited in Oxford but shipped them via the British High Commission in Nairobi where they were examined, found to include classified official documents, and sent to the CRO. Blundell was furious, demanding to know why 'his' papers 'are now in the possession of a Librarian in some Office or other in London ...'37
Custody in London: Content and Status of the Archives
The impression given by FCO statements since 2011, supported by the conclusions (although not the detail) of the Cary report, appears to be that the migrated archives, on receipt in London, were warehoused and simply forgotten. However, sixty-six Colonial Office and FCO files released in November 2013, provide an account of sporadic interest and activity within those departments and the PRO/TNA and bring the story up to 2012. There are two main and interconnected themes: content and, most significantly, legal status.
In 1967, when the Kenyan government asked for the return of its records, officials in London insisted that documents removed from Nairobi were the property of the British Government. Thereafter there were sporadic and inconclusive discussions about the status of the archives.
In 1972, an FCO official stated categorically that the Cyprus records belonged in Cyprus. He wrote:
They were not handed over at Independence ... simply because they contain much material which is sensitive and much which is critical of many persons still prominent in ... Cyprus today. But these considerations do not make the records UK public records, any more than are the records of any other former Colonial Government. They were sent to us for safe-keeping, until such time as their sensitivity will have diminished and the records will be able to be handed back to the Government of Cyprus.38
PRO staff, however, thought that they were UK public records. Four years later, still failing to agree, the FCO and PRO referred the question to the higher authority. The Lord Chancellor's Office agreed with the FCO – the records removed from Cyprus were not UK public records.39 By 1982 the PRO and the FCO had reversed their positions. The PRO said that files from Aden were not UK public records. The FCO held that they were.
In the meantime, E. C. Blaney, head of FCO's Library and Records Department, had become involved. In 1978, she asked colleagues if it was correct that colonial records should go to the PRO, and was told: 'It is, of course, our practice to leave records behind on independence – removing only sensitive items. Even then we would hope in ... time to return the comparatively few files ...'40 Eighteen months later Blaney noted that 'a UN committee has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the "third world" countries' and stressed:
We cannot ... ignore this problem indefinitely ... Until [it] is examined in detail it is impossible to recommend an acceptable solution. It would be best to make a start now and not hope that the problem will go away – it just will not!41
The contents of the migrated records were then checked by D. J. Fisher, and the listing improved. Fisher claimed that they were certainly British government property, and stated that 'the fact that we have only 2,000 boxes of material from over 300 years of colonial rule is conclusive evidence that the majority of records were left with the succeeding governments'.42 He clearly failed to recognise that many had been destroyed. He recommended that ephemera be removed, files 'of no value' destroyed and the remainder reviewed for transfer to the PRO or return to the former colonies.
Fisher's work is in 34 unregistered folders now in FCO 141.43 A 1995 FCO minute notes: 'Presumably it was decided to take the precaution not to create files which, when open to the public, might draw attention to migrated records by then destroyed or forgotten.'44 Despite Cary's finding that there had been no attempt to conceal the existence of the migrated archives, it is clear that in 1995 there was no wish to make their existence known. The folders include lists of 'migrated' documents held in a repository at Hayes on the outskirts of London and, in the case of 'top secret' documents, at the Curtis Green building in the heart of the city.45 Each includes a brief constitutional history of the territory concerned, an 'account of action' prior to decolonisation, where known, (that is, action regarding the destruction or transfer of documentation) and an assessment of whether the independent government was aware that the FCO held its records. In most cases it was thought not, although as was pointed out in the case of Uganda, 'A great deal of effort was put into Operation Legacy and there can be no guarantee that an exercise of this magnitude was not known to ministers or local staff'.46 Kenya had claimed its records as early as 1967, and there have been less formal approaches from the Bahamas, Botswana, Swaziland and Tanzania. The government of Israel was aware of the presence in London of certain staff records from the former Palestine.
Fisher also researched the archives legislation in place in 32 Commonwealth countries.47 Much of this had been enacted post-independence but many countries, including Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Mauritius, Nigeria, St Lucia, St Vincent and Uganda, had earlier statutes – some dating back to the nineteenth century. The Colonial Office had always strongly encouraged good record keeping in the dependencies and the provision of adequate archival storage and preservation. There is no explanation of why Fisher went to the trouble of identifying statutes if their provisions were not to be taken into account when considering status. They were ignored at least once; the Bahamas enacted a Public Records Act in 1971, two years before independence. In 1972, however, the governor was instructed not to send further papers to the local record office.48
Are all the documents listed by Fisher now in FCO 141 at TNA? This is not particularly difficult to ascertain, but is a lengthy and tedious task. I checked for the Bahamas, for which there is a list of 110 files held by the FCO in 1980–1981. Subjects include the Black Power Movement, Howard Hughes (the American tycoon), President Nixon's use of the Bahamas as a 'retreat' and CIA representation. There are only thirty-five Bahamas files in FCO 141 among which these subjects are not included. Is this evidence of destruction by the FCO, or the continued withholding of papers? In other folders there is confirmation of destruction of files in London. (Some records may never be accounted for; exhaustive searches for thirteen boxes of top secret files identified as relevant to the Kenya court case revealed that a total of 170 boxes of files recorded as being held in the Old Admiralty Building could not be found.)
By July 1982, Blaney had second thoughts about the wisdom of returning records, and recommended that a decision be postponed until 1998, fifty years after Ceylon's independence. She stressed that even Kenya was not fully aware of the quantity and sensitivity of material in British hands. Any return would set a precedent, act as a warning to territories yet to achieve independence and perhaps provoke further international debate.
In 1995, an FCO official recommended that the Lord Chancellor's Office be asked again 'whether or not we are dealing with public records'. The status of the Cyprus records, he said, had still not been determined although the consensus at the PRO was that migrated records were not public records. 'If they are not public records', he noted, 'we have carte blanche over their fate'.49 The following year a colleague said he had no doubt that the PRO should accept the Kenyan files, at least, on the grounds that they belonged to Government House. This was a common sleight of hand; documents had routinely been removed from colonial government departments to the governor's or high commissioner's office before being sent to London, and their provenance obscured.
At about the same time, a joint FCO/PRO submission to the Lord Chancellor argued that the Hong Kong records 'were not UK public records ... but that any ... that passed into the ownership of the FCO would become UK records on 1 July 1997' (when Hong Kong was returned to China). I have not found a direct response, but a 1997 Annual Report on FCO Documentation Performance states that 'migrated records ... are not in fact or technically proven to be our official public records'. Incidentally, there are no Hong Kong records among the migrated archives at TNA but a huge collection is still with the FCO.
Cary refers to a 2007 'train of emails ... [which] makes clear the uncertain status of the archives'. TNA said then that if the FCO was considering transferring records elsewhere, 'they should not go to another UK repository ... If they are now releasable ... the proper course of action would be to arrange their return to the successor administrations ...' This view was still held in 2009, but in 2011 TNA surprisingly advised FCO to take legal advice – surprisingly since TNA claims to be the authority on what is or is not a public record. The legal opinion received was that the migrated archives are indeed UK public records. The FCO has refused to give me the wording, so I do not know how this opinion was reached. Others disagree. Dan Leader, one of the lawyers acting in the Mau Mau case, told me, 'I agree that the migrated archives in law are the property of the former colonies and real thought needs to go into how to ensure that (at least) copies of these key documents are repatriated.'50
It is worrying that the definition of 'public records' in the 1958 Public Records Act has proved so difficult to interpret. My understanding is that 'Records belonging to Her Majesty whether in the United Kingdom or elsewhere' was included to encompass the records of British diplomatic posts, not those of colonial governments. This was certainly the interpretation reached by the Lord Chancellor's Office in 1976. Guidance issued by the PRO in 1999 stated:
As a broad rule of thumb, if the creator of a record was a central government department, agency or body, or predecessor to a modern department of state, funded from central Treasury funds granted through a parliamentary vote, then its records are likely to be public records falling within the definition and scope of the 1958 Act.
This would exclude the records of colonial governments, but current guidelines on TNA's website are more tentative.51 I wonder if the decision reached by the FCO lawyers in 2011 might be based on a further definition: 'records ... held in any department of HMG in the United Kingdom' – the migrated archives were so held by FCO for decades. There is little doubt about the legal status of the 'historic collections' of migrated archives since public records are also defined as any already in the PRO in 1958. But what about documents held not in the PRO but within UK government departments at that date – as, for example, were those from Ceylon?
International Initiatives for Restitution
The 1970s saw increasing international interest in displaced archives. The 1970 'convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property' included archives among definitions of 'cultural property', but was not retrospective. UNESCO subsequently examined 'the possibility of transferring documents from archives constituted within the territory of other countries' noting:
Archives ... not only document the historical, cultural and economic development of a country and provide a basis for a national identity, they are also a basic source of evidence needed to assert the rights of individual citizens. Changes in territorial boundaries and sovereignty have deprived many countries of at least part of their rightful archival heritage. It is important to all nations and to mankind generally that the problem of providing access to archives, and their restitution ... where ... required, should be dealt with urgently.
The importance of the migrated archives to support the rights of citizens has been demonstrated in the Kenyan case. Records from the British Indian Ocean Territory have been used in claims brought by the Chagossians, but given the existence of a redacted copy of a 1999 FCO minute concerning these records that instructs 'do not disclose the existence of the migrated records' it seems that they were not available to the claimants but used only to support the British case.52
Discussions eventually resulted in the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives and Debts, but it did not come into force, being ratified by too few member states. Britain had emphatically opposed the inclusion of archives in the convention. The FCO legal advisers stressed that its acceptance by a significant number of states, 'could seriously prejudice the claims of H.M.G. to the ownership of' the India Office Library and Records.53 There are examples of obfuscation: in a 1976 reply to a survey requesting details of archival claims, Jeffery Ede, keeper of the UK public records, first sidelined the question by claiming to misunderstand, and then stated that there had been no claims for records in his custody, thus avoiding mention of known claims for documents still held by the FCO.54 He also stated, 'Archives should normally be kept and made accessible for research in the country in which they have accrued as the result of normal administrative practices.'55 The following year a briefing prepared for the British representative on the International Law Commission, involved in drafting the convention, stated that 'with a few small exceptions, all archives accruing in former colonial territories ... have been left in those territories'.56
It was the UNESCO initiative that had inspired Blaney's interest and her fear that any return of records might provoke further international debate. Sporadic debate continued without such provocation. In 1991, the European Parliament, considering a call for the return of certain archives, concluded that it had no authority in the matter but regretted that some member states still held
information concerning the colonial and pre-colonial period in the developing countries, which is not available to those countries but is of major importance both for their cultural identity and their economic development.
It urged states 'to open talks forthwith with the ... countries whose archives they hold, with a view to their return'. The FCO sent me a copy of their file on the subject, which shows that the matter was simply referred to the PRO. There are copies of correspondence between the then Keeper of the Public Records of the UK and his counterparts in Spain and the Netherlands, which I had hoped might lead me to a fuller PRO file, but TNA staff have found nothing. The FCO took no further action.
There are in fact precedents for the return of documentation removed to the UK. Records of the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick (1784–1867) were sent to London when the province became part of the Dominion of Canada; they were returned in 1922. In 1973, records of the superintendent of convicts in New South Wales were returned to Australia; TNA retains microform copies. The Public Record Office Act of 1877, which sanctioned the destruction of 'valueless' documents, also provided that documents of 'insufficient value' to be preserved in the PRO might be disposed of other than by destruction. By an Order in Council of 1908, certain Colonial Office documents were transferred to colonial governments, but in 1912 the Royal Commission on Public Records noted only eight transfers and regretted that further possibilities had not been explored.57
Displaced Archives: Wider Considerations
Both the historic collections of displaced archives and those transferred to TNA in this decade are, as noted, held amongst the records of the Colonial Office and its predecessors and successors. Other UK government departments have amassed records concerning imperial and colonial affairs. The Foreign Office was primarily concerned with the conduct of British relations with independent states but was also a lead player in the forging of those links with indigenous peoples, particularly in Africa, which progressed from treaty-making to annexation. It is a matter of debate whether reports sent from its consular agents overseas – who included David Livingstone and Roger Casement – might be regarded as displaced. British interests and influence also spread into 'informal' empire, which accounts for the presence at TNA of legal records of the British settlement at Shanghai. Like the Tangier records, these perhaps pertain only to the British expatriate community. Another collection previously stored in the Beijing embassy (with the Wei-Hai-Wei records) is of a very different nature: the Chinese-language records of the province of Kwantung seized during the Anglo-French invasion of 1858.58 This example throws up a question about the extent to which documentation, like artefacts, may have been seized during military campaigns. Records of the German Foreign Ministry were captured by the Allies in 1945 and subsequently appraised for filming by a German War Documents Project set up by the British and United States governments in 1946 and later joined by the French. The originals were returned to Germany.59
This chapter has concentrated on those record collections held at TNA, consisting of official documentation removed from British and foreign dependencies and more commonly designated 'migrated archives'. The definition of that term is, however, debatable. Dr Shitla Prasad, who coined it in 1972, stated:
An important part of the archives of most developing countries presently lies in various repositories in developed countries. The former colonial powers have either taken them or else they were created in the colonial powers by the branch of the government concerned with the administration of the colony. Morally these records belong to the developing countries concerned, they are vitally necessary for reconstructing its history.
His identification as 'migrated records' of those records created within the metropoles is problematic. Others argue that records of, for example, the British Colonial Office are primarily concerned with British history in its widest sense. In archival terms, to break up these collections for transfer overseas would destroy their provenance. In practical terms, it would be impossible in the case of series arranged by subject rather than geographically. Whichever line we take, they do include much information about the dependencies – provided by colonial governments and others – which is not now available in the independent countries.
Many other UK government departments have amassed a wealth of information about the British empire and its constituent parts, for example the defence departments and perhaps particularly the Admiralty. The importance of the Royal Navy in exploration and the expansion and defence of empire hardly needs stating. It supported British diplomacy in time of peace; it protected merchant shipping in time of war; it patrolled the seas in search of illegal slavers after British Parliamentary abolition of the trade in 1807; it provided ships and personnel for the Niger expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century. Admiralty records include reports of a punitive expedition against alleged pirates on the River Congo, which include detailed maps and descriptions of waterways and settlements.60 On this occasion and many others, for example treaty-making, Royal Navy officers, in their dealings with indigenous peoples, were filling a role usually fulfilled by diplomats.
Reference has been made to the administration of dependencies by companies rather than government: the Dutch West India Company and the North Borneo Company. A related example is that of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa, 1663–1672, and its successors to 1821, which, although not administrators of overseas possessions, maintained settlements on the West African coast. Their rich records are in the Treasury series T 70.
Although such material may be primarily of historical interest, there is much of current practical concern. TNA records relating to international boundaries, for example, have been of particular importance in recent years to the governments of Guyana, Malawi and Mozambique.
Conclusion
There are difficulties in working on a topic which is evolving and constantly throwing up new questions. I have been looking back at parliamentary statements. In May 2011, William Hague said that FCO officials had briefed the governments of those former British territories that might have an interest in the migrated archives. I know that, in the case of Malta, this briefing was passed on to the government archivist. Was this done elsewhere?
In November 2012, the Minister for Europe reported the existence of what we now know as the 'special collections' or 'non-standard files', a huge accumulation of mainly internal records of the FCO and its predecessors not assessed for transfer to TNA in accordance with public records legislation and dating back to the nineteenth century.61 He stated, 'The FCO has not identified any colonial administration files among these papers beyond those currently being transferred.' That was untrue: a quarter of a million Hong Kong files are included. The Cary report mentions these, and Colonial Office files long in the public domain show that from 1950 onwards, records were microfilmed in Hong Kong and sent to the UK.
On 12 December 2013, an FCO minister announced in the Commons that 'the final tranche of files was opened to the public at the National Archives on 29 November' (a statement repeated in Parliament on subsequent occasions). However, at the time of writing, a further eighty-five files or previously closed extracts have been released. The lack of any formal announcement of such releases is likely to obscure their existence.
Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords have asked pertinent questions about the migrated archives. In the summer of 2013, Lord Boateng62 asked 'what meetings have occurred between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and National Archives officials responsible for decisions relating to the files of former colonial administrations with their counterparts in the Commonwealth countries concerned or with academics from those countries?' The answer, with no further explanation, was that no such meetings had taken place.63 Boateng also asked if the government would discuss the digitisation of the archives of former colonial administrations with the Association of Commonwealth Universities and relevant Commonwealth governments. The answer was basically 'no', but couched as 'There are no current plans to consider digitisation of these archives. Due to the cost of digitisation the Foreign and Commonwealth Office generally releases all of its paper records in their original format.'64
A degree of misinformation and obfuscation in Parliamentary statements has done nothing to inspire confidence in the FCO's claim that it 'is committed to complying with the Public Records Act and to full transparency with respect to our record holdings'. Professor Tony Badger who served as the independent reviewer to oversee the release of the migrated archives, and continues that role in respect of the 'special collections', has said that it is entirely understandable that this new-found transparency will not alleviate the legacy of suspicion created by the failure of the FCO to acknowledge the existence of the migrated archives. But he has also pointed out that what is truly remarkable is not that the migrated archives were concealed for so long, but that they were not destroyed in 1982 or 1996 or 2007 as might well have happened.65
How will the story develop? Kenya has, of course, continued to press for the return of its records; groups such as the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives have maintained an interest over many years; and the matter was discussed at the 2014 and 2015 AGMs of the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Record Managers, which is canvassing members for national opinions and suggestions for ongoing action. In 1981 the International Law Commission noted: 'The removal of archives is a universal and timeless phenomenon. In almost all cases, they are returned sooner or later to their rightful owners, except, it seems in cases of decolonisation. But time has not yet run its full course to produce its effect in this field.'66 Thirty-four years later the matter remains unresolved.
Notes
1 Those relating to Essequibo and Demerara were formerly held in Middelburg, those concerning Berbice in Amsterdam. The residue is in the National Archives at The Hague. R. B. Pugh, The Records of the Colonial and Dominions Offices, London, UK. 1964, p. 52.
2 26th Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, p. 8, PRO 43/26.
3 CO 323/263, cited in Anne Thurston, Sources for Colonial Studies in the Public Record Office, vol. 1, HMSO, 1995, p. 62.
4 Heligoland was captured from Denmark in 1807, ceded to Britain in 1814 and to Germany in 1890.
5 Pugh, 1964, p. 52.
6 In the remainder of this chapter the term 'migrated archives' is used to refer to the collection of 'colonial administration files' removed from former British dependencies at independence.
7 Timothy Lovering, 'Expatriate Archives', Archives, Volume XXIV, Number 121, October 2009.
8 Ben Macintyre, '50 Years Later: Britain's Kenya Cover-up Revealed', The Times, 5 April 2011.
9 Ndiku Mutua and 4 Others v. the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: <https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/mutua-others-fco-judgment-051022012/> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
10 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cary-report-on-release-of-the-colonial-administration-files> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
11 Articles by David Anderson, Hugh Bennett and Caroline Elkins, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011.
12 Banton, 2012; Banton, 2013.
13 Howe, 2011.
14 For example by Ian Cobain in The Guardian, Katie Engelhart in VICE News and Stephen Williams in the October 2014 issue of New African.
15 Anderson, 2015: Edward Hampshire, 'Apply the flame more searingly. The destruction and migration of the archives of British colonial administration, a South-East Asia case study', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2013, pp. 334–352.
16 <http://commonwealth-opinion.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2015/exploring-the-hidden-histories-of-decolonization-at-the-icws/> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
17 FCO 141/1158, Colonial Office confidential circular, 6 June 1939.
18 Mitchell, 1 April 1949, CO 537/4854.
19 K. O. Roberts-Wray, 20 September 1947, CO 54/992/3.
20 In contrast, it is regularly mentioned in papers at the British Library discussing the disposal of Indian records.
21 Mitchell, 1 April 1949, CO 537/4854.
22 Ibid.
23 W.L.D. [Dale?] 6 April 1949, CO 537/4854.
24 At some later stage, records of the Soulbury Commission on Constitutional Reform were added.
25 See appendix.
26 Reported by A. M. MacKintosh, 29 December 1958, CO 1030/691.
27 'Destruction of Records in the Federation of Malaya', 9 September 1957, in DO 186/17, Disposal of Nigerian Government archives, 1959.
28 A. R. Thomas, Disposal of physical assets of the West Indian Federal Government, 1960-62. 23 January 1963, CO 1031/4010.
29 Guidelines were subsequently updated and wording may differ. This is from the version sent to the East African dependencies on 3 May 1961. CO 822/2935, disposal of files in Tanganyika, 1960-62.
30 C. E. R. Darby, ISD, 13 December 1961, FCO 141/19928.
31 N. D. Watson, CAO, 11 November 1963, DO 183/508.
32 For example the file FCO 141/19930, Disposal of classified and accountable documents prior to independence of Colonial territories, cites 18 other Colonial Office files only three of which are at TNA.
33 G. W. Jamieson, CAO, to P. G. Bennett, Lusaka, 5 March 1963, FCO 141/19933.
34 See FCO 141/6957.
35 W. J. Marquand, Uganda, 20 May 1961, FCO 141/19935.
36 See FCO 141/911, Basutoland: destruction, transfer and archiving of files.
37 See correspondence in FCO 141/19931.
38 H. G. F. Harcombe, FCO, to A. J. McDonald, PRO, 18 July 1972, PRO 69/426.
39 T. S. (later Sir Thomas) Legg, Lord Chancellor's Office, to A. W. Mabbs, PRO, 8 March 1976, PRO 69/426.
40 D. Gregory to E. C. Blaney, 24 November 1978, FCO 141/19913, Migrated Records Kenya.
41 Copy [23 June 1980] on FCO 141/19912.
42 FCO 141/19912, D J Fisher, minute, to Mr Smyth, 22 January 1981.
43 An additional folder, FCO 141/19927, Lists of files held in Hayes Repository, Middlesex: Malta, Malaya, Nigeria, East Africa, is retained by FCO under Section 3.4 of the Public Records Act which allows for retention if 'required for administrative purposes or ... for any other special reason'.
44 R. R. M. Hollas, Library and Records Department, FCO, 1 February 1995, FCO 141/19933.
45 The latter were subsequently moved to the Old Admiralty Building; in 1994 the entire collection was moved to Hanslope Park.
46 Undated typescript, FCO 141/19909, Uganda: background report on pre-independence records migrated to the UK; list of records; Operation Legacy, 1961–1984.
47 Listed in Fisher's general folder, FCO 141/19912.
48 FCO to governor, August 1972, FCO 141/19872.
49 R.R.M. Hollas, 1 February 1995, FCO 141/19933.
50 Communication to author, 12 June 2014.
51 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/how-to-identify-a-public-records-body.pdf> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
52 FCO 141/19945, British Indian Ocean Territory [BIOT]: annotated file list, 1999.
53 Ian Mathers, Legal Advisers, minute dated 12 October 1976, FCO 12/195.
54 Correspondence in FCO 12/195.
55 Ede was echoing statements made in Parliament by two secretaries of state for the colonies: Leo Amery in 1929 and Arthur Creech Jones in 1948.
56 Briefing for Sir Francis Vallat, May 1977, FCO 12/195.
57 Cd. 6361, 1st Report, page 19, section 3, paragraph 67.
58 In Foreign Office series FO 931; see David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives deposited at the Public Record Office of London. Cambridge, MA. 1975.
59 Some microfilm copies are at TNA in the 'GFM' series. For a history of the administration and microfilming of the captured archives, including papers on their use in official histories, at the Nuremberg trials and by the US Air Force see Robert Wolfe (ed) Captured German and related records: a national archives conference. Ohio. 1974.
60 ADM 123/121, the expedition against the Congo pirates, 1875–1876.
61 Cary had drawn attention to a significant information management risk: 'Lack of knowledge about the data or information that is held by the FCO including where it is held, why it is held, who has access to it, and how it is used.' An inventory was subsequently compiled and published: <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/foreign-offices-archive-inventory> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
62 Paul Boateng is a lawyer and former Labour member of Parliament and Cabinet minister, subsequently British High Commissioner to South Africa, and now a member of the House of Lords.
63 Hansard 8 July 2013: Column WA20.
64 Hansard 8 July 2013: Column WA19. Boateng had perhaps read Professor Philip Murphy's letter to The Guardian, in which he said 'the UK should bear the costs of making [the migrated archives] freely available in digitised form. This important act of reparation would allow scholars from Britain's former colonies access to key documentation on their countries' struggles for independence.' <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/07/uk-responsibility-mau-mau> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
65 A thirty-minute video by Professor Badger providing an overview of his role as independent reviewer can be viewed at <https://www.gov.uk/colonial-administration-files> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
66 <http://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/3_3_1981.pdf> [accessed 14 Oct. 2015].
References
Anderson, David M. 'Mau Mau in the High Court and the "lost" British Empire archives: colonial conspiracy or bureaucratic bungle?' The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011, pp. 699–716. Print.
Anderson, David M. 'Guilty secrets: deceit, denial, and the discovery of Kenya's "Migrated Archive" '. History Workshop Journal 80 (Autumn) 2015, pp. 142–160. Print.
Badger, Tony. Video providing an overview of his role as independent reviewer. Web. <https://www.gov.uk/colonial-administration-files>
Banton, Mandy. 'Destroy? Migrate? Conceal? British strategies for the disposal of sensitive records of colonial administrations at independence'. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40(2), 2012, pp. 321–357. Print.
Banton, Mandy. ' "Lost" and "found": the concealment and release of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office "migrated archives" '. Government Recordkeeping in Sub-Saharan Africa, Comma 1, 2012, pp. 33–46. Print.
Bennett, Huw. 'Soldiers in the court room: The British Army's part in the Kenya emergency under the legal spotlight'. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011, pp. 717–730. Print.
Boateng, Paul. Hansard, col. WA19-20. 8 July 2013. Web.
Cary, Anthony. Report on the Release of the Colonial Administration Files. 24 Feb 2011. Web. <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cary-report-on-release-of-the-colonial-administration-files>
Elkins, Caroline. 'Alchemy of evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice'. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011, pp. 731–748. Print.
Hague, William. Hansard, col. 24WS. 5 May 2011. Web.
Hampshire, Edward. 'Apply the flame more searingly. The destruction and migration of the archives of British colonial administration, a South-East Asia case study'. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2), 2013, pp. 334–352.
Howe, Stephen. 'Flakking the Mau Mau catchers'. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011, pp. 695–697. Print.
Lovering, Timothy. 'Expatriate archives'. Archives 34(121), 2009, pp. 1–5. Print.
Macintyre, Ben. '50 years later: Britain's Kenya cover-up revealed'. The Times, 5 April 2011. Print.
Pong, David. A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives deposited at the Public Record Office of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1975.
Pugh, R. B. The Records of the Colonial and Dominions Offices. London, UK: HMSO. 1964.
Wolfe, Robert (ed). Captured German and related records: a national archives conference. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. 1974.
Appendix
FCO 141, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and predecessors: Records of Former Colonial Administrations: Migrated Archives (numbers are of items released to November 2013)
Aden, 1949–1967, 47 items
Anguilla, 1967–1972, 274 items
Bahamas, 1962–1973, 40 items
Botswana (listed in catalogue as Bechuanaland), 1921–1966, 304 items
British Indian Ocean Territory and Seychelles, 1930–1976, 275 items
Brunei, 1847–1965, 927 items
Cameroon, 1922–1962, 148 items
Cyprus, 1879–1960, 2859 items
Fiji (see also Western Pacific), 1931–1970, 29 items
Gambia, 1932–1965, 93 items
Ghana (listed in catalogue as Gold Coast), 1932–1964, 274 items
Jamaica, 1927–1963, 352 items
Kenya, 1906–1982, 2726 items (including 915 items from the Kenya Land Transfer Programme, 1955–1982)
Kiribati and Tuvalu (listed in catalogue as Gilbert and Ellice Islands), 1943–1978, 40 items
Lesotho (listed in catalogue as Basutoland), 1909–1966, 771 items
Malawi (listed in catalogue as Nyasaland), 1946–1964, 162 items
Malaysia (listed in catalogue as Malaya), 1884–1963, 821 items
Malta, 1852–1971, 4359 items
Mauritius, 1942–1968, 265 items
Nigeria, 1895–1962, 451 items
Palestine, 1926–1950, 53 items
Seychelles (see under British Indian Ocean Territory)
Sierra Leone, 1943–1961, 64 items
Singapore, 1847–1963, 2934 items
Solomon Islands, 1936–1978, 325 items
Sri Lanka (listed in catalogue as Ceylon), 1835–1948, 694 items
Swaziland, 1888–1968, 339 items
Tanzania (listed separately in catalogue as Tanganyika, 1920–1964, 332 items, and Zanzibar, 1888–1964, 327 items)
Trinidad, 1874–1972, 37 items
Turks and Caicos, 1945–1973, 26 items
Tuvalu (see under Kiribati and Tuvalu above)
Uganda, 1900–1963, 459 items
Vanuatu (listed in catalogue as New Hebrides), 1936–1982, 280 items
West Indies (records of the West Indian Development and Welfare Organisation and the West Indian Federation), 1940–1963, 262 items
Western Pacific High Commission, 1884–191978, 59 items
Zambia (listed in catalogue as Northern Rhodesia), 1924–1964, 583 items
Zimbabwe (listed in catalogue as Southern Rhodesia), 1959–1968, 15 items
4 Indonesian National Revolution Records in the National Archives of the Netherlands
Michael Karabinos
Introduction
The main goal of this chapter is to examine a case of archival displacement in the form of original documents at the Nationaal Archief (National Archive) of the Netherlands in The Hague from Indonesia, recording the war of independence from 1945 to 1949. There will first be a short history of the colonisation and decolonisation of Indonesia, followed by an explanation of how certain government records, personal papers, brochures, pamphlets and posters made in Indonesia came into the hands of the Dutch military. While some of these documents were returned to Indonesia following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the late 1960s, others can still be found in The Hague. I will provide an overview of what these records are and where they can be found. Finally, I will conclude with a look at these records through the archival principles of joint heritage, custody and access.
The collection at the Nationaal Archief is vast, even just including those archival collections concerning Indonesia. Without looking over every single record, it can never be known with absolute certainty whether any study is complete. However, by focusing on key archives and searching for specific terms and phrases, I can increase my chances of finding those displaced archives that are the subject of my research. While my overview may be incomplete, its importance lies not in its ability to be all-encompassing, but rather to use those records I did find to highlight certain principles.
For the purposes of this research, I focused on three main archives: the archive of the Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service, the archive of the Attorney-General of the Netherlands Indies and the Ministry of Defence's archive of the war in Indonesia. While viewing these archives for other research, I noted the existence of what appeared to be original records – in the form of posters, photos, letters and government records – from Indonesia during the national revolution period. The invitation to provide a chapter to this book offered me the opportunity to revisit these archives and ruminate further over their existence, implications and role in the postcolonial relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia.
The Nationaal Archief has, unsurprisingly, a massive collection of Indonesia-related records, including many from the war of independence period. The vast majority of these records were created by the Dutch government in The Hague. The records of the Dutch colonial administration were kept at the Dutch-created Landsarchief (National Archive) in Batavia (Jakarta). After independence, the Landsarchief transformed into today's Arsip Nasional (National Archives of Indonesia), and the records of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch colonial administration stayed in Jakarta.1 Neither archive will be the focus of this chapter. Instead, I will limit my field of research to original records created after Indonesia declared its independence in August 1945, but before it was formally recognised by the Netherlands, slightly over four years later.
First, however, a short overview of the colonial history of Indonesia is necessary to explain the context in which the records were created.2 What is now Indonesia gradually came under Dutch control in a process that lasted from the early seventeenth century until the early twentieth century. For the first 200 years, this was done by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which was founded to control the spice trade. Following the bankruptcy of the VOC in 1799, the colonies passed to the Dutch government which – aside from a brief British interregnum during the Napoleonic Wars – ruled the islands until the Japanese occupation in 1942. The Japanese occupation ended in 1945 and, shortly after, President Sukarno declared independence. A four-year-long military campaign between Indonesian nationalists and the returning Dutch administration followed. The transfer of sovereignty took place in 1949.3 This simplistic version of the past is sufficient for attention to now turn to the Nationaal Archief and its collections of displaced archives.
Inventories available on the website of the Nationaal Archief are not always clear as to which documents are originals and which are copies made from originals at the Arsip Nasional.4 It is also difficult to determine exactly what certain documents are or who their creators were due to unclear descriptions. Determining if a document truly is an original seized record requires requesting it and looking at it first-hand. For historians and other researchers of the early years of the Republic of Indonesia, the extent of displaced archives in the collection is unknown, probably to the detriment of our understanding of this period in Indonesian history. The Indonesian government, which has previously shown a strong interest in archival cooperation with the Netherlands regarding this era, may also be unaware of the records discussed below and have reason to discover more of what is located at the Nationaal Archief.
Djogdja Documenten
In 1942, after the Japanese invasion, the Dutch East Indies government fled to Australia and set up a government-in-exile. The NEFIS was formed at this time as the Dutch military's intelligence agency, gathering intelligence on the situation in the East Indies. After the Japanese capitulation in 1945, the NEFIS' main duty changed to gathering intelligence on Indonesian nationalist groups. Headquartered in Bandung, south of Jakarta, the NEFIS collected, translated, processed and evaluated records. From this information, another unit of the NEFIS was charged with making intelligence reports that were sent to officials in the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands and their allies.5
On 17 August 1945, following the Japanese surrender, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohamed Hatta declared the independent Republic of Indonesia. From this date until the end of 1949, two competing states existed in the archipelago, with frequent military engagements. In December 1948, the Dutch launched the second of their so-called 'police actions' against the Republic of Indonesia. This military action included the invasion of Yogyakarta, which at that time was functioning as the Republican capital. After arresting the Republican leaders and taking control of government offices, the NEFIS officials began the process of evaluating Republican records. The records they seized would form the Djogdja Documenten.
I first became aware of Indonesian government records held in the Nationaal Archief during the initial stage of my doctoral dissertation research in late 2010.6 Amongst correspondence between the two national archives at the Nationaal Archief, I came across letters from Indonesian archivists in the late 1960s to the Dutch government requesting documents known as the Djogdja Documenten.7 These records were created by the Indonesian government after 1945 and had been seized by the Dutch military intelligence agency (the Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Services or the NEFIS) during the occupation of the Republican capital, Yogyakarta, after December 1948. Cooperation between the two countries from 1970 until the mid-1990s resulted in the return of the collection, which can today be viewed at the Arsip Nasional.
Reading the letters from the director of the Arsip Nasional to Dutch archivists and diplomats sent me deeper into the collection at the Nationaal Archief, searching for more references to their seizure. While the returned records of the Djogdja Documenten no longer constitute displaced archives, they serve as a case of formerly displaced archives being returned to the country of origin. This can be used as a possible exemplar for other displaced archives. Furthermore, I can also use them as a starting point for finding other records.
The files that I have found in The Hague make it clear that seized items still exist in the Netherlands, but no inventory or scholarly work gives an accurate portrayal of what exactly remains. Therefore, I want to determine the provenance of these records. I would like to discover if they belong to an expanded definition of the Djogdja Documenten or if they were records seized by other means. I believe that some of the records were from Republican offices and would therefore fit within the Djogdja Documenten, while others were seized at other times and from other original owners.
The Djogdja Documenten, as individual records, were created by various Indonesian ministries and agencies. Their existence as a single entity is only the result of their seizure by the NEFIS in late 1948, early 1949. The NEFIS was the wing of the Dutch military charged with gathering intelligence on the independence movement in Indonesia. Part of this duty involved the seizure of documents from citizens and government alike. Becoming property of the Dutch East Indies government, the NEFIS archive was brought to The Hague in 1949, leaving port in Indonesia a mere four days before the transfer of sovereignty.8
Within the NEFIS archive there are 4,100 files (bestanddelen) labelled 'found, seized and captured'.9 The inventory numbers 3,013–7,112 contain all the records used by the NEFIS during their intelligence gathering on the Indonesian independence movement.10 Each record also has a routing slip created by the NEFIS with details surrounding the record's creation. The records were passed around among high-level officers, and these routing slips kept track of their movements. The inventory gives no indication which records were part of the Djogdja Documenten, only noting that they can be found somewhere between numbers 3,013 and 7,112. There is no mention of how many records were part of the Djogdja Documenten, nor that they were returned to the Arsip Nasional. This, despite the fact that the inventory was written in 2001, years after the repatriation. My own research at the Arsip Nasional has allowed me to determine that the Djogdja Documenten fall between numbers 5,223 and 5,808, but are not the entirety of this range. What is considered the Djogdja Documenten at the Arsip Nasional is only 356 files out of 4,100.
The major shift in Indonesian-Dutch relations that allowed for the return of the Djogdja Documenten began after the regime change from President Sukarno to President Suharto. Whereas Sukarno kept to an anti-imperialist form of nationalism, Suharto made a point of repairing relations with the West.11 Suharto's rise to power led to a cultural agreement in 1968 between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and a specific archival agreement in 1970.12 Indonesian historians and archivists travelled to The Hague to make inventories of Indonesian collections there, thus assuring that – in the words of Dutch ambassador Hugo Scheltema – 'in the future Indonesian researchers need not to make such a long trip anymore to be able to write about the history of Indonesia's independence'.13 Not all records were returned at once, partially due to the fact that the records of the Djogdja Documenten came from so many various archives in Indonesia. Upon shipment to The Hague, some were misplaced or mixed up with other collections.14 The first batch arrived in Indonesia by 1975, with a promise from the new Dutch ambassador, Paul Jalink, that there were 'more to come'.15 In the 1980s, further work was done to bring more of the Djogdja Documenten to Indonesia.16 A few years later, the conversation had essentially ended. It was around this time that the Indonesian national archivist who had spearheaded the cooperation retired, which was soon followed by the diplomatic row between the two nations over Indonesian actions in East Timor that ended the Netherlands' role in Indonesian development aid.17 While archival training and cooperation has since been reinstated, the return of original NEFIS documents has not been a matter of discussion. Thousands of records are therefore still in the NEFIS archive, and viewing their contents makes it difficult to understand why some were returned as part of the Djogdja Documenten and others were not.18
The returned Djogdja Documenten are a small portion of the NEFIS archive, and an even smaller portion of the records removed from Indonesia. Their return, while a positive step and a necessary action, also appears somewhat haphazard. The question of why some records were returned and some were not cannot be answered in a satisfying manner, at least not at this moment. A letter dated 2 April 1987 from the Director of Cultural Services (Netherlands) to the Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Netherlands)19 states that the Arsip Nasional disagreed with the Ministry's strict criteria of 1975 and had a more inclusive definition of the Djogdja Documenten, which required more records to be sent. Cultural Affairs (and the Nationaal Archief) agreed with Indonesia and tried to get Foreign Affairs to agree to send more records. More records were sent, but the transfers were still not comprehensive. The end result was positive in that there was a return of displaced archives, but it is confusing, as the new criteria (while less 'strict') are not clear and leave some archives 'displaced' in the Netherlands. This raises a question about the logic behind the repatriations. It is not a question I will spend time pondering in this chapter, and instead turn to the search for other seized records from the same period.
NEFIS Archive
The rest of the NEFIS archive is perhaps the best place to look, within the Nationaal Archief, for original records created by Indonesians during the revolution, given what is known about the Djogdja Documenten.20 In the course of my doctoral research, the inventory for the NEFIS archive, with the access number of 2.10.62, was updated. As late as 2012, the online inventory gave only a general overview of numbers 3,013–7,112, but no specifics for individual records. To access this information, one had to ask for a more detailed print inventory available only at the Nationaal Archief reference desk. This more detailed inventory has since been made available online, making it easier to determine what is held in the NEFIS archive that was seized or 'found', without visiting the Nationaal Archief. The inventory is still confusing, however, as nearly all records are listed as 'original' despite many being photocopies. In some cases, the originals were those returned to Indonesia as part of the Djogdja Documenten. In other cases, the original may have been destroyed or lost: there is no clear answer.
Furthermore, while it is not reflected in the inventory, there is a distinction between records created by the Indonesian government and any other records creators. Of the 4,100 seized or found records in the NEFIS archive, both governmental and non-governmental records are mixed. Legally speaking, from the Dutch perspective, records that were not created by the Indonesian government would not have necessarily been seen as Indonesian property when records began being returned. They would have been records seized for intelligence purposes and would have become Dutch military property after their seizure. These records include those brought to the Dutch by local informants, other private citizens, or seized from other nationalist and independence-minded organisations such as the Barisan Banteng (Buffalo Brigade).
By sending some of the records back to Indonesia, the Nationaal Archief and the Dutch government distinguished those records they chose not to return. Decisions were made, but it is not entirely clear how. Why were certain records chosen over others? While I have not viewed every document available, those that I have viewed make it clear that this is an archive that needs to be carefully and thoroughly searched in the course of the Arsip Nasional's intermittent search for Indonesian government records in the Nationaal Archief.
Other Archives
Another major source of seized archives at the Nationaal Archief is in the collection of the Procureur-Generaal (Attorney General) of the East Indies. It was in this archive that I found a photo album containing black and white photographs showing officials from the earliest days of the Republic of Indonesia and even earlier in the nationalist movement. These are the people directly involved with the independence struggle of Indonesia; the country's 'founding fathers'. The Nationaal Archief makes their provenance known – in the inventory of the archive it states: 'During the second police action in Yogyakarta, seized photos of Republicans'.21 A note attached to the album from the head of the NEFIS to the Attorney General says that on 19 December 1948, the date the Dutch launched their second 'police action', these photographs were found in various buildings in Yogyakarta. Written on the cover of the album, in Indonesian, is a note to any potential viewer of these photographs. It states: 'If you borrow this, please return it to the owner in order.'22
Some of the photos look like passport photos; others are more candid. The metadata available gives no indication as to what they were used for prior to being seized. After being seized, it could be surmised that they were used to identify leading nationalists, but the metadata lacks sufficient information to confirm this. The file also contains other photographs that appear less related to the national movement, including a wedding photo and an older photograph of the nurses' union of the Dutch East Indies (the PKVB).
A further review of the archive of the Procureur-Generaal contains many other Indonesian-created documents from the period. These, the inventory makes clear, were seized from the archive of the Attorney General of the Republic of Indonesia. The records are related to competitors of the Republic in the independence fight, such as the communists who attempted a coup in Madiun and the left-wing Front Demokrasi Rakjat. This collection includes police reports from the National Police based in Yogyakarta, lists of prisoners after the coup attempt and original propaganda posters. The records in the Procureur-Generaal archive are a mix of Republican government records and those created by private citizens or other, non-Republican nationalist groups. As far as government records are concerned, the archive of the Kepolisian Negara (National Police) is held at the Arsip Nasional, but there are clearly original documents from this organisation in the Nationaal Archief.23
The archive of the Ministry of Defence has some of the most visually appealing records that I came across on my search. Here there are original, hand drawn, full colour posters created and distributed by nationalists in various cities. The inventory describes them as Indonesian propaganda and pamphlets but there is a deeper purpose to their creation that is overlooked in such a description. Posters found in Surabaya are written in English and contain clear anti-colonial, pro-democracy messages. It is possible these were created at the time when Indonesian nationalists expected American troops to drive out the remaining Japanese occupiers. It is well-documented that Surabaya in particular was plastered with messages that evoked the spirit of the American Revolution and American democracy in a bid to persuade the American troops to support Indonesian independence. Instead, Indonesia was occupied by a British colonial army made up mostly of Indian soldiers, who were the first to engage in military action against Indonesian independence fighters in late 1945.24
Other posters in the Ministry of Defence archive are in Indonesian and feature purely Indonesian images, such as the Borobudur temple of Central Java. On one, the text translates to 'we know the feeling of suffering'. Below this phrase is a Dutch flag with the number 350 next to it and a Japanese flag with 3 ½ next to it, representing the years of occupation. From these two flags, a man representing Indonesia arises, holding a sword and looking into a bright sunrise with the new Indonesian flag. The names of their original creators are lost, as there is very little in terms of metadata. Where the NEFIS archive has its routing slips with at least some metadata, these pamphlets and posters sit alone in a folder with very little to contextualise them.25
I must also mention a second NEFIS archive that contains twenty-two boxes of reports and dossiers on hundreds of people. The inventory lists the name of each person but the contents are secret. The entire archive will not be made public until 2026. Reading the inventory description, we are taunted with the fact that the archive contains a 'grote verzameling' (large collection) of documents seized in Yogyakarta in 1948.26
Each one of these archives was the creation of Dutch military engagements in Indonesia. Viewing them through records continuum theory, we can say that by seizing the records in question the Dutch military 're-created' them as a new archive.27 That should not be seen as a justification for the actions of the Dutch or proof of Dutch ownership of the records. It simply explains their existence as a cohesive collection in the Nationaal Archief. Taking these archives and contextualising them using various archival principles is the next step in fully understanding them. In any situation of displaced archives, the difficult concepts of cultural heritage or memory inevitably must be referenced. I will also look at the records through the concepts of custody and access, which are inherently tied to cases of displaced archives.
Heritage
Archives, particularly national archives, are often referred to as memory or heritage institutions. This designation is problematic as it immediately evokes the questions: Whose memory? Whose heritage? Original Indonesian documents in the Nationaal Archief make us question the role of a national archive and its responsibilities and representations. If the Nationaal Archief truly is the 'national memory' of the Netherlands as its website claims, where in that memory is there room for documents belonging to another nation?28 The Arsip Nasional makes a similar claim on its website, showing the competing visions of national memory these records could represent.29
It may be better to look at Indonesian archives in terms of joint heritage. The archive of the Dutch East India Company, for instance, is the cultural heritage of both the Netherlands and Indonesia.30 The seized archives, however, are a more difficult case for a joint heritage argument. Objects made in the struggle to end the colonisation of one group of people by another would certainly be more closely related to, in this case, the heritage of Indonesia. Even if joint heritage is the term used to describe these records, it should not be overlooked that what binds records in joint heritage, in colonial examples, is force.
In the concept of joint heritage, archives cannot be split without damaging their context and thereby, to an extent, their historical value. Writing about joint heritage as it relates to Dutch archives around the world, Dutch archivist Jinna Smit writes:
[Joint heritage] is relevant when archives form part of the national heritage of more than one country and cannot be divided in parts without seriously damaging its legal, administrative and historical value. The concept of joint heritage suggests that in such situations the archives as a whole are kept in one country, which is acting as owner and custodian. However, the countries sharing this heritage have equal rights concerning access, appraisal and conservation.31
Is that what is happening with the records that form the subject of this chapter? Such a statement could be made regarding the VOC records, but its relevance to the NEFIS archive and the other records is less certain. Are they truly joint heritage or are they squarely the heritage of Indonesia seized and held in the Netherlands? The return of certain records, such as the Djogdja Documenten, makes it clear that who is the 'owner and custodian' matters greatly, and that even more may need to be sent to Indonesia. Archival cooperation between the two countries is in a relatively positive place currently. The infrastructure exists for action, or at the very least further discussion, to take place regarding these archives.
Questions regarding joint heritage also have to keep the creator and the context in mind. Are records created by the Indonesian government or other nationalist movements different from the VOC or Dutch colonial records in relation to joint heritage? Considering that these documents or posters were created in direct opposition to Dutch rule, do they hold the same joint heritage as colonial administration records? The return of the Djogdja Documenten would suggest that the context of their creation does make a difference, and that the records of the struggling early independent Indonesia are properly the heritage of Indonesia.
Can there be any argument that these seized or found records are part of Dutch heritage or that they should be Dutch government property? The military engagements in the Indies from 1945 to 1949 may not be a highlight of Dutch history or a particularly proud part of Dutch heritage, but they happened nevertheless. The actions of the NEFIS, the Dutch military and the colonial government are on display through these records; if not in their content, then by the fact of their presence in the Nationaal Archief. If the return of these records is not forthcoming, their existence could still be better explained by both national archives.
Custody
Custody of records created by the Indonesian government would certainly be the purview of the Arsip Nasional. International bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Archives would support this assertion. Both have officially condemned the seizure of archives during military occupation, with UNESCO stating that 'military and colonial occupation do not confer any special right to retain archives acquired by virtue of that occupation'.32 Of course, in practice, this guidance is not always observed, as attested to by the cases described throughout this book.
Any other records at the Nationaal Archief that could be determined to be Indonesian government property would, following the logic applied to the Djogdja Documenten, also be considered for repatriation. Records like the Djogdja Documenten are a class of records completely unlike an example such as Britain's migrated archives.33 In that case, British colonial administration records were removed from their place of creation and shipped to the metropole, where they were kept hidden. Arguments for the continued custody of the migrated archives in the United Kingdom can be tied to the fact that the colonial administrations were the creators. These records at the Nationaal Archief, on the other hand, were quite clearly initially created by the Indonesian government. This situation demands that the Netherlands and Indonesia bilaterally work towards a solution.
The cooperation between the Netherlands and Indonesia shows that archival disputes can be resolved through diplomatic channels. In fact, Leopold Auer's UNESCO RAMP (Records and Archives Management Programme) study from 1998 based on a questionnaire sent to the national archives of eighty-three countries and which details the outstanding archival disputes at that time, mentions the work that took place twenty years earlier between the Netherlands and Indonesia as a successful example of bilateral cooperation in the recovery of disputed archives. Indonesia did not respond to the questionnaire and, therefore, there is no list of what was still in dispute in 1998.34
Access
The question, therefore, is not who owns these records, but rather, who has access to them. Discovering the outcome that maximises access would be the most beneficial. Scanning and making the records available online would be the obvious way to increase access, but the Nationaal Archief has an incredibly long list of records to digitise, and these may not be of a high priority. The fact that it is not an overly large collection does make it logistically feasible to digitise them all, if either side is willing to allocate the time or money necessary. While access is important, in cases of displaced archives ownership and custody will still always be contested for their symbolic significance. If these records were seized by the NEFIS from Indonesia and other similar records were returned to the Arsip Nasional, surely these should be as well.
I want to be clear on the difference between custody and access, and the importance of both. Custody does not guarantee access, while access does not require custody. The Netherlands is giving access to the majority of these records, other than the closed NEFIS archive – access in the sense that anyone can see them with no restrictions. However, access is limited by unclear inventories. Discovering that these records exist and are at the Nationaal Archief takes more work than seeing them once their location is determined. This is a second side to access that is differentiated in the Dutch words toegang and openbaarheid. On the one hand openbaarheid refers to being publically accessible – the records have been made accessible in a legal sense. Toegang, on the other hand, refers to the type of access granted by archival tools. Inventories and indices enable access in the toegang sense. In the toegang sense, some of these records are difficult to access as the inventory makes no mention of them. In some cases, I discovered records relevant to this chapter while looking for something else and would never have found them any other way. From an openbaarheid perspective these records are accessible, as there is no legal barrier to their being viewed by the public at the national archives. The barrier to access comes instead from a toegang perspective, where the tools available do not always open up the records.
For historians and other researchers from Indonesia, accessibility is twice hindered: first, by vague inventories, and a second by the geographic obstacle of the records being on another continent. Geographical inaccessibility is the type Jeanette Bastian describes in the United States Virgin Islands.35 Bastian refers to the 'voicelessness' of the colonised in colonial archives.36 This idea is noteworthy in this case as so many of the Arsip Nasional records are Dutch-created. In such records, the voices of the local population can become lost. The records described in this chapter were created by Indonesians and are the direct voice of the colonised, which is all the more reason that they should be accessible to Indonesians.
Accessibility, in the toegang sense, is further limited by language. Even when the inventories of the Nationaal Archief describe seized records from Indonesia, they do so in Dutch. Indonesian or any non-Dutch researchers would have to know the right Dutch terms to use when searching for such records. Given their content, their context and the idea of a shared past, the Nationaal Archief could begin increasing toegang access through the language used in its inventories for particular archives. Archivists from both national archives, as well as scholars, could work together to continue the work I have begun here in terms of identifying the records and archival collections at the Nationaal Archief that require further action regarding their custody and access.
Conclusion
Past cases show that the framework already exists for cooperation between the Netherlands and Indonesia regarding displaced archives. Continuing the exploration into their shared heritage is something in which both governments have shown an interest. Intensive work was done in the 1970s regarding the repatriation of the Djogdja Documenten, which continued through to the 1990s. The Indonesian collections remaining in the Nationaal Archief show that there are grounds for the cooperation to continue.37 Indonesia still must determine which archives are most important and then work with the Netherlands to agree upon their future. The Netherlands, as the current custodian, must work with Indonesia to improve access, in both senses of the word.
The archives that I described in this chapter, as well as any similar archives yet to be discovered, are crucial to fully telling the story of Indonesian independence. Their content and context should be known. As they exist now, they are displaced archives, seized by occupying military forces in the midst of Indonesia's fight for independence. Geographical and linguistic obstacles exist that hinder their accessibility. These obstacles have existed for far too long. I believe they are not insurmountable. The obstacles of access can be overcome through a continuation of the history of archival cooperation that the two national archives share.
Notes
1 For simplicity's sake, I will refer to both national archives in their native language throughout this chapter.
2 I have previously written about the repatriation of archives from the Netherlands to Indonesia in Karabinos, 2013, pp. 279–294.
3 Excellent English-language histories of Indonesia's colonisation and independence include: Elson, 2008; Gouda and Zaalberg, 2002; Kahin, 1952; Vickers, 2013.
4 The inventories can be searched at www.gahetna.nl
5 Yulianasari, 2012, pp. 58–63.
6 Karabinos, 2015, pp. 372–391 and Karabinos (PhD Dissertation, Leiden University), 2015.
7 The uncommon spelling of Djogdja for the city that is known variously as Yogyakarta, Yogya, Jogjakarta, Jogja, Djogjakarta and Djogja is chosen as it is how the archive is named at the Arsip Nasional.
8 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Netherland Forces Intelligence Service (NEFIS) en Centrale Militaire Inlichtingendienst (CMI) in Nederlands-Indië, nummer toegang 2.10.62
9 NL-HaNA, Marine en Leger Inlichtingendienst, 2.10.62, inv.nr. 3,013–7,112.
10 Inventory numbers were given by the Nationaal Archief and differ from the NEFIS document numbers given at time of processing by NEFIS.
11 This shift came with a human cost that should not be overshadowed by the archival cooperation it allowed, as anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 Indonesians were killed in a reactionary, anti-Communist purge after Suharto took power.
12 Vos, 2000.
13 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Nederlandse Ambassade Indonesië 1962–1974, nummer toegang 2.05.188, inventarisnummer 590.
14 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Tweede Afdeling, nummer toegang 2.14.04 inventarisnummer 266.
15 NL-HaNA, ARA/Tweede Afdeling, 2.14.04 inv. nr., 266.
16 NL-HaNA, ARA/Tweede Afdeling, 2.14.04 inv. nr., 201.
17 Indonesian–Dutch archival cooperation, which included the transfer of documents, began with the work of Ms Soemartini, director of the Arsip Nasional from 1971–1991. Hein de Graff, 'In Memoriam Mevrouw Raden Adjeng Soemartini', Archievenblad (July 2005), p. 9. After comments by Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation, Jan Pronk, regarding the human rights violations of the Suharto government, the Indonesian government would remove the Netherlands from its role in development aid to Indonesia. Baehr, Castermans-Holleman and Grünfeld, 2002, pp. 189–190.
18 Karabinos, 2011, pp. 139–150.
19 NL-HaNA, ARA/Tweede Afdeling, 2.14.04 inv. nr. 201.
20 NL-HaNA, Marine en Leger Inlichtingendienst, 2.10.62, inv.nr. 3013–7112.
21 'Tijdens de tweede politionele actie in Jogjakarta buitgemaakte foto's van republikeinen.'
22 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Procureur-Generaal bij het Hooggerechtshof van Nederlands-Indië, 1945–1950, nummer toegang 2.10.17, inventarisnummer 798.
23 NL-HaNA, Proc.-Gen. Hooggerechtshof Ned.-Ind., 2.10.17, inv.nr.,694.
24 Gouda and Zaalberg, 1997, p. 1.
25 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Ministerie van Defensie: Strijdkrachten in Nederlands-Indië, nummer toegang 2.13.132, inventarisnummer 3397.
26 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, NEFIS, nummer toegang 2.10.37.02
27 Upward,1997, pp. 10–35; Reed, 2005, pp. 18–43; Upward, McKemmish and Reed, 2011, pp. 197–237.
28 National Archives of the Netherlands, 'Home', <http://en.nationaalarchief.nl>, accessed 22 May 2015.
29 Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, 'Vision', <http://www.anri.go.id/detail/36-92-Visi-dan-Misi> , accessed 14 October 2015.
30 The archive of the Dutch East India Company is part of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme and includes archives in the Netherlands, Indonesia, South Africa, India and Sri Lanka. See <http://www.tanap.net/>
31 Smit, 2012, p. 179.
32 Grimsted, 1997, p. 245.
33 See Anderson, 2011, pp. 699–716; Banton, 2012, pp. 321–335; and Hampshire, 2013, pp. 334–352.
34 Auer, 1998, p. 24.
35 Bastian, 2001, pp. 96–114; Bastian, 2002, pp. 76–93; Bastian, 2005, pp. 25–44.
36 Bastian, 2005, p. 28.
37 Indonesia, along with Brazil, Ghana, India, Russia, South Africa and Surinam, were named 'priority countries' by Dutch government's Common Cultural Heritage Policy (2009–2012), which further shows that continued cooperation is possible. Jinna Smit, 2012, p. 176.
References
Anderson, David. 'Mau Mau in the High Court and the "lost" British Empire archives: Colonial conspiracy or bureaucratic bungle?' Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(5), 2011, pp. 699–716. Print.
Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia. Vision. <http://www.anri.go.id/detail/36-92-Visi-dan-Misi>. Web. Accessed 21 June 2016.
Auer, Leopold. Disputed Archival Claims. Analysis of an International Survey: A RAMP Study. Paris, France: UNESCO Report, 1998. Print.
Baehr, Peter, Monique Castermans-Holleman and Fred Grünfeld. Human Rights in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, 2002. Print.
Banton, Mandy. 'Destroy? "Migrate"? Conceal? British strategies for the disposal of sensitive records of colonial administration at Independence'. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40(2), 2012, pp. 321–335. Print.
Bastian, Jeanette. 'A question of custody: The colonial archives of the United States Virgin Islands'. American Archivist 64(1), 2001, pp. 96–114. Print.
Bastian, Jeanette. 'Taking custody, giving access: A postcustodial role for a new century'. Archivaria 53(Spring), 2002, pp. 76–93. Print.
Bastian, Jeanette. 'Whispers in the archives: Finding the voices of the colonized in the records of the colonizers'. Political Pressure and the Archival Record. Margaret Procter, Michael Cook and Caroline Williams (eds). Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005, pp. 25–44. Print.
de Graff, Hein. 'In memoriam mevrouw raden adjeng soemartini'. Archievenblad (July 2005), p. 9. Print.
Elson, Robert. The Idea of Indonesia: A History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.
Gouda, Francis with Thijs Brocades Zaalberg. American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia: US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism 1920-1949. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2002. Print.
Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. 'Captured archives and restitution problems on the Eastern front: beyond the Bard Graduate Center Symposium'. The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property, Elizabeth Simpson (ed). New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1997, pp. 244–251. Print.
Hampshire, Edward. ' "Apply the Flame More Searingly": the destruction and migration of the archives of British Colonial Administration: A Southeast Asia case study'. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2), (2013), pp. 334–352. Print.
Kahin, George. Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952. Print.
Karabinos, Michael, 'Displaced archives, displaced history: recovering the seized archives of Indonesia'. Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 169(2–3), 2013, pp. 279–294. Print.
Karabinos, Michael. 'Returning to the Metropole: The Indonesian National Archives and its changing role at the start of the New Order'. Archives and Manuscripts 39(2), 2011, pp. 139–150. Print
Karabinos, Michael. 'The Djogdja Documenten: The Dutch–Indonesian Relationship Following Independence through an Archival Lens'. Information and Culture 50(3), 2015, pp. 372–391. Print.
Karabinos, Michael. The Shadow Continuum: Testing the Records Continuum Model through the Djogdja Documenten and the Migrated Archives. PhD Dissertation, Leiden University, 2015. Print.
National Archives of the Netherlands. Home. <http://en.nationaalarchief.nl>. Web. Accessed 21 June 2016.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, NEFIS en CMI in Nederlands-Indië, nummer toegang 2.10.62 inventarisnummer 3,013–7,112.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Nederlandse Ambassade Indonesië 1962–1974, nummer toegang 2.05.188, inventarisnummer 590.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Tweede Afdeling, nummer toegang 2.14.04 inventarisnummer 266.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Tweede Afdeling, nummer toegang 2.14.04 inventarisnummer 201.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Procureur-Generaal bij het Hooggerechtshof van Nederlands-Indië, 1945–1950, nummer toegang 2.10.17, inventarisnummer 798.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Procureur-Generaal bij het Hooggerechtshof van Nederlands-Indië, 1945–1950, nummer toegang 2.10.17, inventarisnummer 694.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Ministerie van Defensie: Strijdkrachten in Nederlands-Indië, nummer toegang 2.13.132, inventarisnummer 3397.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, NEFIS, nummer toegang 2.10.37.02.
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Yulianasari, Okeu. Deciphering the NEFIS Archives: Investigating Dutch Information Gathering in Indonesia 1945-1949. MA Thesis, University of Leiden, 2012. Print.
5 Hiding the Colonial Past? A Comparison of European Archival Policies
Vincent Hiribarren
Displaced archives are a common legacy of colonialism. The recent scandal of the 'migrated archives' in the United Kingdom is another reminder to the populations of the former colonial world that a part of their past is still hidden in Europe. The former colonising powers hid – and are sometimes still hiding – parts of their colonial past. Based on my historical research in the British, French and German archives, this chapter will examine the similarities and differences between the 'migrated archives' and their European counterparts (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain). This chapter does not provide an exhaustive summary of the archival policies of each European country, but rather seeks to examine and contrast some of these policies and the political questions these policies continue to raise. I will argue that Europeans have consistently tried to hide their colonial past and that this colonial past is still haunting the political debates in some of those countries while it is noticeably absent from others.
Two fundamental issues must be addressed: sources and definitions. There is a lack of historical literature that directly tackles the question of displaced colonial archives. Historians and journalists have often overlooked this phenomenon or, conversely, have imagined providential documents that could answer all of their questions. The difficulty in gathering evidence about archival policies at the time of decolonisation frequently comes from the fact that only a few introductory lines are devoted to the question of displaced or hidden records in most imperial histories. The following chapter is therefore largely informed by conversations with journalists, professional historians and archivists.
A taxonomic issue is raised by the term 'colonial archives' as this term covers a range of records and archival materials. Even if they are not treated as such in this chapter, a range of alternative documents can be judged as being part of the 'colonial archives'. These could include private files created by the local elite ruling with the colonisers, or documents dealing with the colonies but produced in the metropole. The most commonly used definition and the one adopted in this chapter is that colonial archives are official documents produced in a colonial territory by the European powers. This restrictive definition allows this chapter to focus on the question of displacement in a more systematic manner.
The official focus is also fundamental to understanding the lack of research on the way in which colonial archives have been understood. Scholarship dealing with the question of archival policies generally focus on one country in particular. After all, the 'national' archives in each former colonial power is the principal place where primary sources deriving from government in that country are gathered. This chapter will argue that this national focus obscures the way in which colonial records have been systematically displaced, hidden and occasionally destroyed by a number of colonial powers around the world. One of the key themes of this chapter is thus the location of archives and the importance of them being in their rightful place - in the nations that were formerly colonies. The similar histories of displaced colonial archives demonstrate the extent to which cultures of secrecy pervade the governments of Europe. Strikingly, displaced archives have become more a symbol of the lack of accountability of democratic governments than sources for the study of the late colonial period.
Displacing Archives: A European Habit?
The chapter written by Mandy Banton in this collection analyses in depth the migration of archives from the British Empire to Britain. The British were not the only colonisers to displace records at the end of colonial rule. The French, for example, found a legal rationale for the migration of their archives from Indochina. In 1950, they decided that their 'sovereign archives' would be sent to Paris whereas the 'administrative archives' would stay in Indochina.1 They were labelled 'sovereign' because the documents were generally produced by the highest French authorities in the colonies. As a result, they were supposed to belong to the French state. These files typically related to military operations or political figures that had played a major role during decolonisation. The logic was that these documents should not be left in the hands of the future leaders of the soon-to-be independent nations and that they would prove useful in exerting pressure or as leverage against certain parties. The administrative archives were the remaining files, which were supposed to deal with the day-to-day management of the colonised territories. The documents could be about schools, roads or land tenure, for example, and became the basis of many archive collections in the newly independent countries. This legal distinction set a precedent for the whole of the French colonial empire and gave the illusion of transparency when it came to the migration of colonial documents. Thus, in 1954, the French Indian cities sent their sovereign archives to Paris as did the colonies from French Equatorial Africa and Madagascar between 1958 and 1960.
However, this process was not applied universally. The sovereign archives of the federation of French West Africa remained in Dakar, where they still are, while records created in Algeria were removed. When the last French settlers left Algeria in 1962, they took nearly all the archives with them. Four years later, the Centre for Overseas Archives (CAOM) was created at Aix-en-Provence. The chapter by Todd Sheppard in this book describes how, until the present day, the Algerian government still claim that the French should have left all of their colonial archives to the newly independent nation. Conversely, some documents left in Brazzaville2 or Antananarivo3 could have been considered 'sovereign' and were left behind by the French authorities. Clearly, the French legal framework cannot obscure a certain level of improvisation and a lack of resources during decolonisation.
The Belgians also sent some of their colonial archives to the metropole and, as in the French case, separated their documents between 'sovereign' and 'administrative' archives. As distinct from the records of other European countries, Belgian colonial records became, at a very early date, a part of the story of Belgian colonialism. When, in 1908, King Leopold II handed over his African possessions to the Belgian State, he chose to have all his archives burnt.4 Even if it was possible today to find documents for the beginning of the twentieth century in the Democratic Republic of Congo, research on the early colonial period proves to be challenging. Unveiling the history for the rest of the colonial period (1908–1960) might prove to be easier, though, since the Belgian state chose to keep its colonial records. In 1960–1961, the Belgian administration carefully planned the displacement of their Congolese colonial documents. This operation, called Opération Archives, aimed at relocating the Congolese records to Brussels. This transfer raised important questions about the documents that should remain in Congo and those that should be sent to Brussels and it was eventually decided that all the Congolese documents should be sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because of the size of Congo and the political situation in 1960, only the records concerning the provinces of Léopoldville, Équateur and the Upper-Congo found their way to Brussels. For practical reasons that had nothing to do with the archival policies of Belgium, many records concerning Kasai and Katanga remained in situ, while others were sent to Brussels, thus showing the unequal results of Belgian archival policies.
The documents concerning Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) were treated rather differently. They were divided into two sections and, as in the French case, the 'sovereign' archives were sent to the metropole whereas the 'administrative' archives were left in the territory. This operation, named 'Neven's Mission' after the Congo's archivist, took place between March and June 1961.5 As the transfer was not as improvised as in Congo, and the size of the territory was smaller, the files to be found in Brussels are arguably more coherent than the Congolese records. Yet, despite their differences, Opération Archives and Neven's Mission were responsible for the transfer of a large quantity of colonial documents to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels. These files were not made available to the public before 1997–1998, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs moved to a new location.
Arguably, the Netherlands is where colonial records are most open today. The national archives at Prins Willem-Alexanderhof in The Hague gives access to thousands of documents produced by the Dutch East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 1602–1799), which were available for researchers as early as 1856, whereas the archives of the Ministry of Colonies (1814–1959) were progressively transferred to the national archives and opened in the 1960s and 1970s. The Dutch East Indies records have been widely studied by researchers.6 One notable scholar who has examined the historical and political significance of these records is the American anthropologist, Ann Stoler, who devoted her book Along the Archival Grain to the practical and theoretical meaning of the archives.7 Significantly, the Dutch East Indies Company kept many of its archives in Indonesia. In order to preserve these documents, the Dutch colonial authorities created the Landsarchief in Jakarta in 1892. As a result, most of the documents produced in Indonesia during the nineteenth and twentieth century are still available in that country. The Landsarchief has subsequently become more than a simple storage room and has attracted a range of researchers since the 1930s.8 The fragmentation of the records of the Dutch East Indies Company between different continents has led to the creation of a project partly funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Netherlands and Indonesia to create a database of the Dutch East Indies records.9
This does not mean that the Dutch archives are completely open and transparent. A number of sensitive colonial period records have been transferred to The Hague.10 In December 1948, during the Indonesian war of independence (1945–1949), Dutch troops captured the city of Yogyakarta and seized documents that were transferred to the Dutch national archives. Among the stolen documents, the Pringgodigdo Archive contained information on the elaboration of the Indonesian constitution of 1945. Some other documents directly dealt with the organisation of the young Indonesian Republic and concerned some important political figures. The Indonesian government managed to obtain the repatriation of the Pringgodigdo Archive between 1975 and 1987, but it is unclear to what extent some of the Indonesian archives are still to be found in the documents kept by the Dutch military intelligence agency.11 Similarly, displaced archives from the former colony of Surinam can still be found in the Netherlands. Under the pretext that they could not be accessed in Surinam, many documents were sent to The Hague throughout the colonial period.12 As in the Indonesian case, the archives were digitised at the beginning of the twenty-first century and were sent back to Paramaribo.13
The European powers routinely displaced archives during the decolonisation years. With or without a legal framework, France, Belgium and the Netherlands did not hesitate to transfer documents from their former colonies to the metropole. The question of the true scale of the transfers remains, though.
From Dictatorship to Democracy
The relationship between democracy and the openness of the archive has been stressed by a number of theorists and philosophers.14 Jacques Derrida succinctly evoked this correlation: 'Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation'.15 This section suggests that it is in fact the former dictatorships of Europe that are now more likely to open their colonial archives than those with an unbroken democratic tradition. This is due to the fact that newly democratic governments are often eager to stress the difference between themselves and their predecessors.
The best example is the German case, where the archives have been open since the end of the Second World War. The German colonial period was relatively short-lived, as the 1919 Treaty of Versailles divided German colonial possessions in Africa, China, South-East Asia and Oceania between the Allied powers. In addition, in some cases, as in Northern Cameroon, where the Germans were only present for fifteen years, many of the traces of the German colonial past have more or less disappeared. Nonetheless, even in remote parts of their colonial empire, the German colonial administration produced detailed records that were regularly transferred to Berlin, a phenomenon that explains why the records housed in the Bundesarchiv (the Federal Archives) in Berlin-Lichterfelde are relatively rich on the German colonial period.16
The German willingness to open the archives is very much tied to the legacy of Nazi rule. Both East and West German historians have attempted to shed new light on the atrocities of the first half of the twentieth century, and even if colonial history has often been overshadowed by the study of Nazism, post-Second World War historians from Germany have revised the assumptions about the 'progressive role' played by the Germans in their colonial empire. Among the historians of the German colonial period were those who wanted to find the roots of the Shoah in the first genocide of the twentieth century in Namibia. The connection between the colonial and the Nazi past have been explored by a number of scholars since the beginning of the twenty-first century.17 This renewal of the study of German colonialism is a phenomenon of the beginning of the twenty-first century,18 and has helped to drive the opening of government archives. The federal government was remarkably efficient at answering the demand from researchers and the consequence is that the German colonial archives are now accessible to journalists and researchers.
Italy is another country where the colonial archives were relatively open by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Once again, the democratic regime has opened its records relatively easily since the colonial era is associated with the fascist period, though Italy had acquired colonies before the fascist years. In this early period, record-keeping did not seem to be a central preoccupation of the different administrations in charge of the colonies. Indeed, the 'administration was scarcely aware [...] of its own culture and memory'19 and the archives did not seem to become important until after the colonial period. Officially, Italy lost its African colonies with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1947. Italy was no longer fascist; yet, its colonial archives were still controlled by the bureaucrats who had been responsible for colonial rule in Africa. The Ministry of Italian Africa was closed on 29 April 1953 but some of its former employees carried on working either for the Ministero degli Affari Esteri (MAE) or for the Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana sulla Somalia.20 Indeed, a state decree of 11 January 1952 created the Comitato per la Documentazione Dell'Opera dell'Italia in Africa (Committee for Research on the activities of Italy in Africa). The Committee's apologetic aims were very clear as its members were supposed to 'publish, as the other European colonizing powers did before, the most significant Italian documents pertaining to our colonies ... proving the civilising activities carried out by Italy on the African continent'.21 Some politicians dealing with African affairs in the 1950s tried to build a positive image of the Italian colonial presence in Africa. In one of the first meetings of the Committee, Giuseppe Brusasca, a former resistance fighter who was one of the leading Italian MPs and the Honorary President of the Committee, declared:
The depth and humanity of our actions are clearly attested by the words of admiration and the invitations to cooperate addressed to us by the Negus and his ministers. We can even hear it more from the feelings expressed by the indigenous people who bow to the ground to salute the representative of Italy.22
When the Committee was finally dissolved on 13 March 1984, its members had published relatively little; they had just compiled a selection of colonial documents without any coherence or scientific rigour. Overall, they published 41 books including one study translated into English. Their apologetic endeavour was clear from the start, but the most striking feature of their actions is how they managed to gain a quasi-monopoly over the MAE archives. Historian, Nicola Labanca, refers to this period as a 'private management' of state archives sanctioned by the law. Indeed, the Committee ensured that the colonial archives were placed in a different room than the other MAE documents and they even created a new reference number ('Africa III'), which altered the original classification of the documents. Their control over the archives was ideological, intellectual but also physical. An American historian who managed to obtain access to these archives published a book on Somalia in 1966. At the beginning of his book, he did not talk about the MAE archives but about the 'Committee's historical archives'. The Italian colonial archives are now located at the MAE, Piazzale della Farnesina, in Rome and are available to researchers.
What has been said of Germany and Italy can also be said of Portugal. The end of António de Oliveira Salazar's regime in 1974 triggered the end of the colonial period for Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe. The colonial archives, since they were associated with Salazar's regime, were opened to the public. The archives of the secret police, known as 'the PIDE', were open in 1994, and despite problems linked with their organisation, researchers have access to the colonial archives in Lisbon. These documents are mainly divided between the Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento, the Arquivo Histórico Diplomático, the Direcção-Geral do Tesouro e Finança, the Direcção-Geral da Administração e do Emprego and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino.23
Former dictatorships are more inclined to open their colonial archives because of the clear break between the current political regimes and their colonising predecessors.24 Indeed, stressing the similarities between these countries could lead to the creation of a pan-European history of displaced colonial archives. The European dimension of this question is undeniable and writing a European history of colonial archives would show the similarities between the approaches to displacement adopted by the colonising powers. However, the relative openness of the colonial archives in Germany, Italy and Portugal should not obscure the fact that each former colonising power has its own unique archival history. It is only in the unique national contexts that we can understand the debates surrounding access to those displaced archives today.
Nation-Making or Nation-Destroying Archives?
The argument correlating the advent of democracy with the opening of colonial archives seems to be misleading in the Spanish case. Spain has been a democracy since Francisco Franco's death in 1975 and, yet, historians of the twentieth-century Spanish colonial empire face many problems obtaining access to the colonial archives. Personal communication with historians of the late colonial period reveals that they cannot read material that has been classified as 'reserved'. The word 'complicated' often comes up in their description of how they navigate these archives. There is a lack of political will to open Spain's colonial records, one that appears not to concern Spain's relations with its former colonies. A recent event clearly shows the relationship between modern-day Spain and its former colonies: when Adolfo Suárez, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Spanish Government, died in 2014, only one foreign head of state attended his funeral; it was Teodoro Obiang, the president of Equatorial Guinea.25 The current relationship between Spain and its former colonies in Africa cannot explain the current archival blackout. Instead, the question of the colonial archives is a question about the Spanish state in general. It is worth noting that the 1920s Rif War in Morocco and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Riveira were intrinsically linked. Moreover, General Franco seized power in Spain with the African Army in 1936. Whereas in the United Kingdom only a section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) archives are hidden, in Spain everything that deals with the state can be hidden: historians and journalists tend to see it as a pattern in Spanish history. Opening the archives on the recent colonial period (as opposed to the American empire) would open the doors to archives dealing with the Spanish Civil War, those of the democratic transition or those of the relationship of the state with Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Basque separatist organisation. The question of the archives in Spain is, therefore, not only colonial but also national. As a consequence, the history of the relationship between Spain and its twentieth-century colonial empire still remains to be written.
The question of national sensitivities does not concern Spain alone. The opening of the archives was responsible for the renewal of scholarship on the Belgian colonial period as well, with ramifications for the official narrative of Belgian history. One book in particular was responsible for a debate on Belgian colonial history. The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo de Witte in 1999 (Dutch version) attested to the responsibility of the Belgian government in the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.26 De Witte principally based his study on the archives of the Belgian Foreign Ministry, the United Nations, Frederic Vandevalle, the head of the intelligence services of the colony, Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale and the Minister of Belgian Congo until 1960, August E. de Schryver.27 After the publication of The Assassination of Lumumba, the Belgian government asked for a commission of enquiry, the proceedings of which are now available on the website of the Belgian Parliament.28 For the commission of enquiry, the Royal Palace Archives opened for the first time in history. The government even issued an apology in a speech to the Belgian Parliament on 5 February 2002. The commission's report did not mention all the actions undertaken by the Belgian secret services in Congo but made some precise recommendations in terms of guaranteeing access to Belgian colonial documents.29
The national aspect of the debate has also been important in France. The publication of a PhD thesis in the 2000s on the question of torture in colonial Algeria was the first one to use military files.30 The archives of the prefecture of Paris also revealed the degree of violence used by Maurice Papon, a former French colonial officer who became prefect of the French capital. The question, once again, is about colonial memory interfering with French domestic politics. Indeed, it was revealed that Papon 'actively collaborated' with the Nazis during the Second World War. The question of the colonial past was thus intrinsically linked to another national debate, that of the Second World War.
Oral history and other types of sources have already revealed the chronology of events in the colonial period. Displaced archives will rarely revolutionise our understanding of the colonial period. They will, instead, provide us with some precise details and a clearer understanding that can shed light on important episodes of the colonial past. What the colonial archives reveal is the way colonial history is interpreted and understood throughout Europe. When they can potentially undermine a certain national narrative, they are physically hidden away in various archive centres throughout Europe. When they can harm some relatively young democracies, such as Spain, they remain closed and the late colonial past is glossed over. Displaced colonial archives directly challenge the national narratives in countries such as Spain, Belgium and France. The colonial archives can thus interrogate European history but they also have a direct political impact on European democracies.
Towards More Democratic Accountability?
As colonial archives have become a political problem more than a historical problem, this chapter finally argues that in most European countries, journalists (and not historians) are leading the charge in opening the archives. Most European countries do not have a press as willing to criticise the government as the British press. It might come from a lack of interest or a fear of political power, but the fact is that newspapers such as Libération in France or El País in Spain do not publish many articles dealing with obscure colonial pasts. However, some journalists still try to denounce the silence of the political class. One of the earliest examples comes from the Netherlands, where in 1969 a journalist interviewed a soldier who had fought in Indonesia. The broadcast triggered many publications on colonial Indonesia.31 Interest in the colonial past has waned since then. However, after a 2011 judgment of a court in The Hague required the Netherlands to pay reparations, the press has become more willing to evoke the war in Indonesia. The 2012 publication of photographs of Dutch soldiers killing Indonesian civilians showed to what extent this interest still relies on the ebb and flow of media attention.32
Belgian colonial history has been the subject of many publications in the last twenty years. King Leopold II's rule over Congo (1885–1908) has particularly attracted the attention of historians and the public. For example, a 2003 BBC documentary on the colonisation of Congo revealed the inhumane exploitation of rubber farm labourers in Leopold's personal colony.33 In 2010, the Belgian author David Van Reybrouck proved there was a genuine interest in a past that has not yet been fully explored when his book (Dutch version) on colonial Congo became a best-seller.34 French journalists have also tried to explore the colonial past by using the recently opened archives of de Gaulle's Secretary for African and Malagasy Affairs, Jacques Foccart.35 In Spain, El País entitled one of its articles 'Secrets of State are forever'. One journalist even directed a documentary based on interviews denouncing the Spanish exactions in Equatorial Guinea.36 There are other examples of the journalistic interest in the late colonial period throughout Europe and quite strikingly they tend to show that there is a genuine interest among the public. This interest partly originates from the fact that the archives that serve as the evidence for those stories were painstakingly hidden.
In the British context, the scandal of the migrated archives was partly revealed because of Freedom of Information requests. The last European country where such a law was enacted was Spain (10 December 2013) and throughout Europe a legal framework aiming at more transparency is gradually taking shape. Displaced archives do not only highlight fault lines within national debates, they also speak to government accountability. Their content might not be totally original or even important. After all, many of these documents were technical files and did not have any strategic value. Displaced archives have nonetheless become the symbol of a lack of accountability of European governments and of a certain culture of secrecy. Their very existence not only challenges national narratives but also undermines democratic governments' transparency and accountability.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to show the similarities between the European policies concerning displaced archives. Most European countries share a culture of secrecy that is more likely to be pronounced if the current political regimes are the direct heirs of those who were in power during the decolonisation years. In other words, former dictatorships (with the notable exception of Spain) are more likely to disclose information from their colonial archives.
The question of displaced archives has been heavily politicised in Europe and journalists have tended to be at the forefront of a fight to unveil the late colonial period. There is a genuine public interest in questions that deal with secrecy and the media have seized this opportunity to sell more newspapers, radio shows or historical documentaries. Interestingly, the interest in the displaced colonial archives does not seem to originate from a specific interest in the history of the former colonial world. The displaced archives are a physical expression of the culture of secrecy of most European governments and their existence challenges the legitimate rights of European citizens to a certain type of democratic accountability.
This very culture of secrecy might find an unlikely ally in the recent economic crises. In Portugal, the lack of public funding had direct consequences on the budget of government agencies in charge of the archives, with implications for the staff and resources available for arranging, describing and providing access to the records. In Belgium, it has been suggested that a plan to transfer the colonial records from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Archives Générales du Royaume might make some documents inaccessible for a long period of time given the Archives' limited resources for describing and providing access to the documents. If 'culture of secrecy' is too strong a phrase in these cases, one could certainly talk about a general European 'culture of neglect'. In both cases, petitions signed by archivists and researchers have shown that the question of the colonial archives fuels speculations on the real transparency of European archival policies.37 In addition to the more evident arguments for their repatriation or accessibility, displaced archives ought to be associated with European democratic rights and should simultaneously be studied for their archival, historical and political values.
Notes
1 Cornède, 2010, pp. 313–20; Mbaye, 2010, pp. 291–99; and Bat, 2010, pp. 301–11.
2 Field trip in January 2015, see the website: Jean-Pierre Bat and Vincent Hiribarren, <https://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com/> [accessed 12 October 2015].
3 Field trip in September 2015 and communication with the director of the National Archives of Madagascar, Sylvie Sahondra Andriamihamina.
4 Hochschild, 1998, pp. 294–5.
5 This section is based on an article by Piret, 2015, pp. 419–435.
6 Jeurgens, 2013, pp. 84–106.
7 Stoler, 2009.
8 Lidwina, 2012. <https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/19788> [accessed 15 October 2015].
9 See the structure of the records in particular: <http://www.tanap.net/content/about/heritage.cfm> [accessed 15 October 2015].
10 For a fuller discussion of Indonesia records in The Hague, see Karabinos' chapter in this volume.
11 Karabinos, 2013, pp. 279–94 and Jeurgens, Kappelhof, and Karabinos, (eds.), Colonial Legacy in South East Asia: The Dutch Archives, 2012.
12 Archief van de Gouverneur-Generaal der Nederlandse West-Indische Bezittingen (1828-1845), Gouvernementssecretaris der Nederlandse West-Indische Bezittingen (1830-1847); Archief van de Hoge Raad der Nederlandse West-Indische Bezittingen (1828-1832).
13 Personal communication with Charles Jeurgens, University of Leiden, 26 August 2015.
14 Combe, 1994.
15 Derrida, 1996, p. 4, footnote 1.
16 Hollmann, 2003, Introduction.
17 Schenk, 2013, pp. 164–172.
18 Naranch and Eley, 2014, Introduction.
19 Bertinelli and Pellegrini, 1994, p. 3.
20 Legge n. 430 del 29 aprile 1953 as quoted by Morone, 2010, p. 27.
21 Ascm, Giuseppe Brusasca, b. 71, s.f., copia dell'interrogazione parlementare del 27 Novembre 1951 dell'on. Raffaele Ciasca. Il deputato divenne poi membro di rilevio del Comitato. As quoted by Morone, 2010, pp. 27–28.
22 Ascm, Giuseppe Brusasca, b. 50, f. 305, verbale n. 2 del Comitato, 24 gennaio 1952 as quoted by Morone, 2010, p. 30.
23 <http://arquivos.ministerioultramar.holos.pt/source/presentation/pag.php?pag=0> [accessed on 3 August 2015].
24 Cornu and Fromageau (eds.) 2015.
25 <http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2014/03/31/actualidad/1396294853_515099.html> [accessed on 23 May 2014].
26 de Witte, 1999.
27 de Witte, 2001, p. 206.
28 <http://www.lachambre.be/doc/flwb/pdf/50/0312/50k0312007.pdf> [accessed on 23 May 2013].
29 de Witte, 2001, p. 187.
30 In its published version: Branche, 2001.
31 P.M. Doolan, 'The Hueting Interview and Dutch atrocities in Indonesia' <http://www.pauldoolan.com/2013/04/the-hueting-interview-and-dutch.html?spref=tw> [accessed 15 October 2015].
32 P.M. Doolan, 'Dutch Imperial Past Returns to Haunt the Netherlands', Imperial & Global Forum <http://imperialglobalexeter.com/2014/04/06/dutch-imperial-past-returns-to-haunt-the-netherlands/> [accessed 15 October 2015].
33 White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, 2003.
34 Van Reybrouck, 2014.
35 Histoires Secrètes di Boafra. Foccart s'en va en Guerre, 2002.
36 Montanyà, 2006.
37 For the Portuguese petition: Carta aberta: o Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, a democracia e o conhecimento, 21 March 2014, <http://www.publico.pt/culturaipsilon/noticia/carta-aberta-o-arquivo-historico-ultramarino-a-democracia-e-o-conhecimento-1629251?page=2#> [accessed 15 October 2015]. For the Belgian petition: Les Archives coloniales belges en danger, 22 November 2014, <http://ldh-toulon.net/les-Archives-coloniales-belges-en.html> [accessed 15 October 2015].
References
Bat, Jean-Pierre and Vincent Hiribarren. 'Les archives coloniales de Brazzaville', January 2015. <https://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com>. January 2015. Web. 25 June 2016.
Bat, Jean-Pierre. 'Les archives de l'AEF'. Afrique & Histoire 7, 2010, pp. 301–11. Print.
Bertinelli, Anna and Vincenzo Pellegrini. Per La Storia Dell'Amministrazione Coloniale Italiana. Milan, Italy: Giuffrè. 1994. Print.
Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (eds). German Colonialism in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. Print.
Branche, Raphaëlle. La torture et l'Armée Pendant la Guerre d'Algérie: 1954–1962. Paris, Franace: Gallimard. 2001. Print.
Combe, Sonia. Archives Interdites: Les Peurs Françaises Face à l'Histoire Contemporaine. Paris, France: A. Michel. 1994. Print.
Cornède, Martine. 'Politique d'ouverture des fonds coloniaux'. Afrique & Histoire 7, 2010, pp. 313–20. Print.
Cornu, Marie and Jérôme Fromageau (eds). Archives des Dictatures: Enjeux Juridiques, Archivistiques et Institutionnels. Paris, France: L'Harmattan. 2015. Print.
De Witte, Ludo. De Moord op Lumumba. Leuven, The Netherlands: Van Halewyck. 1999. Print.
De Witte, Ludo. The Assassination of Lumumba. London; New York: Verso. 2001. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Print.
Histoires Secrètes du Biafra. Foccart s'en va en Guerre. Documentary by Joël Calmette. Montreal, Canada: CinéFête. 2002. DVD.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston, MA: Houghton-Milton. 1998. Print.
Hollmann, Michael. Findbucher zu Bestanden, des Bundesarchivs, Reichskolonialamt, Bestand R 1001. Konztanz, Germany: Publication of the German National Archives. 2003. Print.
Jeurgens, Charles. 'The untamed archive history – writing in the Netherlands East Indies and the use of archives'. History of the Human Sciences 26, 2013, pp. 84–106. Print.
Jeurgens, Charles, A. C. M Kappelhof and Michael Karabinos (eds). Colonial Legacy in South East Asia: The Dutch Archives. 's-Gravenhage, The Netherlands: Stichting Archiefpublicaties. 2012. Print.
Karabinos, Michael. 'Displaced archives, displaced history: recovering the seized archives of Indonesia'. Bijdragen Tot de Taal, Land- En Volkenkunde 169(2–3), 2013, pp. 279–94. Print.
Lidwina, Intan. 'Het Landsarchief. De plaats waar de herinnering aan het verleden ligt. The history of the Landsarchief in Indonesia (1892–1942)'. Unpublished Master thesis, Leiden University, 2012. <https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/19788>. Web. 15 October 2015.
Mbaye, Ousmane. 'Le CAOM: un centre d'archives partagées?' Afrique & Histoire 7, 2010, pp. 291–99. Print.
Memoria Negra. Documentary by Xavier Montanyà. Barcelona, Spain: Colombo P.C. 2006. DVD.
Morone, Antonio. 'I custodi della memoria. Il comitato per la documentazione dell'opera dell'Italia in Africa'. Zapruder. Rivista di storia della conflittualità sociale 23, 2010, pp. 24–38. Print.
Piret, Bérengère. 'Reviving the remains of colonization – The Belgian Colonial Archives in Brussels'. History in Africa 42(2015), pp. 419–435. Print.
Schenk, Dietmar. 'Wem gehören die Archive? Archiv-Gemeinschaften und Gemeinschafts-Archive'. In 'Aufheben, Was Nicht Vergessen Werden Darf': Archive vom Alten Europa bis zur Digitalen Welt. Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner, 2013. Print.
Stoler, Ann. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print.
Van Reybrouck, David. Congo: The Epic History of a People. New York, NY: Ecco. 2014. Print.
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death. Documentary by Peter Bate. New York, NY: ArtMattan Productions. 2003. DVD.
6 Expatriate Archives Revisited
Timothy Lovering
In April 2008, a workshop was held at the University of the West of England, Bristol to explore the concept of 'expatriate archives'. This term arose in the context of the Rhodesian Army Archive project, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded programme to catalogue the military records of the white minority regime that unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 and governed what was to become Zimbabwe until 1980. This archive may be placed in the broad category of 'migrated archives', a concept that has been foregrounded by recent revelations surrounding the archives of decolonised former British territories, which were formally acknowledged in 2011 to be held by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) at Hanslope Park. This development has generated intense interest, but this initially focused primarily on the direct question of the British Government's complicity in destroying or hindering access to the material.1 Subsequent scholarship has placed a more intense focus on the role of the British Government and officials in the instigation and the process of migration, and the concomitant destruction of records during decolonisation.2 Nevertheless, the term 'migrated archives' itself has been applied relatively uncritically.
The Rhodesian Army Archive shares multiple parallels with the FCO material, in terms of both content and the context of its migration. In common with other migrated records of colonial governments, it has left a tangible gap in the archives of the successor state. However, its status as a government archive in private hands adds complexity to the issues around migration, raising questions about the interplay between simple geographical displacement, and more complex contested moral interests and ownership. Moreover, the complex history of the archive's movements since 1980 may be seen not simply as a single act of displacement, but rather as an integral contextual element of the life history of the collection. This chapter explores the concepts of migrated and expatriate archives by placing the case of the Rhodesian Army Archive in its wider context.
In 2006, the University of the West of England (UWE) was awarded a major grant to catalogue the Rhodesian Army Archive; the catalogue was to be the principal output of a three-year project entitled Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project (hereafter 'the Archive Project'). I was a research fellow on this project from its initiation in September 2006 to May 2009. The cataloguing project was concluded in 2011. Reflecting the lack of a permanent home for the archive, and the perceived security sensitivities around the collection, the catalogue is not publicly available, remaining on a secure server at UWE.3
UWE's initial news release relating to the project noted that the collection was 'sitting in hundreds of uncatalogued boxes' in the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM), an institution that opened to the public in 2002 but closed to the public in 2008 and was finally wound up as an institution in 2012 in the face of financial pressure and questions about the management of the collections.4 The BECM's existing guide to archive collections described the collection as '[u]nique operational records (restricted access) relating to UDI [the period of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence] [...] [a] very large collection of Army, Airforce, and Civil records covering the efforts to combat insurgency'.5
The Archive Project established that the collection comprised a wide range of records created by units of the Rhodesian security forces, including the Rhodesian Army, Rhodesian Air Force, Combined Operations Headquarters, Special Branch/Central Intelligence Organisation and the Directorate of Military Intelligence. In addition to covering the period after the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in 1965, a smaller number of records originated from the Headquarters of Central Africa Command, the army of the former Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (comprising the present day countries of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi).6 As suggested by this description, these were clearly official records. The main series of records were accompanied by much smaller collections of ephemera, more typical of the holdings of regimental museums in the UK and Commonwealth. The BECM prospectus had noted that the collection consisted of 350 boxes, with 'approximately 700 further boxes to come', which would 'probably be received in March 2005'.7 In fact, the complete collection amounted to around 1,225 boxes, significantly in excess of the project's expectation.8
As indicated by the official title of the collection – 'Rhodesian Army Association'9 – it was clear that the archive had been deposited at the BECM by the Rhodesian Army Association (RAA), probably in or shortly prior to 2001, the year when the collection was formally accessioned. The RAA, one of a number of organisations for former Rhodesian services personnel, appears to have been formed in the UK in early 1989. Unlike many ex-military organisations – which are essentially members' clubs – its constitution foregrounded the historical record. Its initial primary aim was to publish a Military History of the Rhodesian Army covering the period 1964 to 1980; a subsidiary aim was the maintenance of a record of every person who served in the Rhodesian forces.10
In 2001, a new organisation named the Rhodesian Army Association Museum Trust (RAAMT) was established within the framework of the RAA. The timing indicates a direct relationship to the deposit of the RAA collection, underlined by the Trust being formally headquartered at the BECM. Although responsible for all the RAA's museum collections, the RAAMT's aims were clearly focused on the 'preservation of the records of The Rhodesian Army and other related documents or property'. The RAAMT was to be a voluntary, autonomous organisation, though it was stated that membership would consist of 'fully paid-up members' of the RAA.11 Documents obtained from UWE using the Freedom of Information Act show that discussions were ongoing as late as 2011 concerning the transfer of the physical ownership of the collection to the BECM.12 Any such plans were, of course, curtailed by the permanent closure of the BECM in 2012, but the original project proposal stated that copyright vested in 'all material' in the RAA had been transferred to the BECM,13 while the later collaboration agreement between UWE, the BECM Trust and the RAAMT stated that the RAA and BECM jointly retained 'all Intellectual Property Rights' in the archive, a curious statement given the origin of the papers as official records.14
Following the dissolution of the BECM, the Archive Project's principal investigator appears to have suggested that the RAAMT approach Rhodes House Library, Oxford, as a potential home for the collection where it could be accessed by researchers.15 UWE documents show that the RAAMT did express a strong interest in relocating the material to Rhodes House.16 This transfer did not transpire, and it is tempting to speculate that any proposal to place the archive in a public institution would have been at odds with the RAA's amended constitution of 2010, which included an archive committee and archive officer charged with securing access to the archive in the interests of the security and reputations of Rhodesian forces personnel.17 Consequently, as of 2015, the archive remains in the custody of the RAAMT and its physical location does not appear to be in the public domain.18
There was little public indication of how the material had come to be at the BECM in the UK, though the initial UWE press release included an enigmatic reference that it had been 'saved from destruction after independence in 1980 and smuggled into South Africa'.19 Certainly some of the non-archival Rhodesian Army artefacts held at the BECM had been shipped there from Johannesburg in 1998.20 It was also clear that the second – and larger – tranche of records was transferred to the BECM direct from South Africa during the first year of the project.21
As Sarudzayi Chifamba noted in a 2013 article in The Patriot, this raises obvious questions about the location of the archive between 1980 and 1998, and of the bulk of the material down to 2007.22 The detailed history of the archive between 1980 and 1998 was not revealed to the personnel of the Archive Project. However, Afrikaans markings stamped on many of the files showing the 'argief' (archive or collection), 'groep' (group or series) and 'houer' (carton) clearly suggested that they had previously been in the custody of a South African institution. Moreover, the collection was recorded as 'Rhod', a marking that also appeared on the exterior of the boxes, which suggests that the archives had been stored alongside other, non-Rhodesian, collections. As Ivan Murambiwa, the Director of the National Archives of Zimbabwe, has noted, other Rhodesian military records certainly found their way into the custody of the South African Defence Force. Rhodesian Military Intelligence records including information gathered on Zimbabwean nationalist organisations and individuals were discovered in 2002 in the Archives of the South African Defence Department. This archive was controversially returned to the Zimbabwean defence or intelligence establishment in 2004, a step justified in an affidavit of the South African defence minister on the grounds that the records 'had been obtained unofficially by the military intelligence division of the South African Defence Force in 1980', and the move was therefore 'in keeping with the archival principle that official government records remain the property of the originating country and its people'.23 The records had been moved to the Defence Department in 1993. In this context, it is probable that the records that were to become the RAA archive were similarly transferred to the South African military for potential intelligence use, but at the end of apartheid in 1994, rather than continuing in that custody like the intelligence records, they were 'returned' to Rhodesian military personnel.
The ambiguous character of the archive was clear to the UWE project team from the outset. As the principal investigator, Diana Jeater, noted in the first project newsletter:
We quickly realised that there were important ethical and practical issues associated with the Rhodesian Army Archive (RAA) project, which, it seemed, were not peculiar to us. There were various sources of tension and anxiety about display, cataloguing and preservation. There were also significant concerns about the uses of the material, including issues of copyright, confidentiality and access.24
The latter observations reflected a tension around the status of the archive; as a collection of official records spanning a self-governing colonial territory, a regional federation and an unsanctioned regime in rebellion against the colonial power. The legitimacy of its provenance, whether removed with the knowledge of the government, of a subset of the government, of military commanders acting on their own initiative or otherwise was unknown. Indeed, it was not clear whether the migration took place under the Government of Rhodesia, the short-lived regime of Zimbabwe Rhodesia (June to December 1979), the brief restoration of British colonial control as Southern Rhodesia (December 1979 to April 1980) or after the independence of Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980. In this context, the decision to focus the project's second workshop on migrated or 'expatriate' archives was a simple one.25
As Mandy Banton has noted, the concept of 'migrated archives' appears to have been coined in 1972 by the director of the Indian National Archives, Shitla Prasad. Prasad included in the definition both records 'taken' from former colonial territories by the metropolitan governments, and those records 'created in the colonial powers' that concerned those territories.26 This latter emphasis was reflective of the long-standing claim of the Indian and Pakistan governments on the India Office Library now maintained under the British Library.27
The repatriation of these categories of migrated records has been a key focus of attention for African archivists and scholars from the 1960s onwards.28 Writing on 'migrated archives' with a conscious focus on Africa, Nathan Mnjama identifies six categories of post-colonial 'archival claims'. These categories build directly on definitions identified by Leisinger in 1982,29 and include:
1. government records generated and maintained in the metropolitan centres of the colonial powers;
2. local records of colonial administrations transferred to the metropole at independence;
3. records moved between the administrations of different territories;
4. records of regional bodies that relate to multiple states;
5. private and organisational papers relating to colonial territories; and
6. records of national liberation movements.30
The first four of these categories are clearly reflective of the major types of archives identified by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 'Consultation group to prepare a report on the possibility of transferring documents from archives constituted within the territory of other countries'.31 Reflecting the colonial and post-colonial context of the migrated archives concept, these categories largely exclude from scope those archives migrated as 'spoils of war', which have typically been captured under the term 'displaced' archives.32
Mnjama's first category, comprising records that were created by central government agencies of the colonial powers in the metropole, directly represents the second of the two major categories cited by Prasad. This includes both those departments that directly oversaw the affairs of overseas territories, such as Britain's Indian Office, Colonial Office, Foreign Office and Dominions Office, and those that otherwise operated overseas, such as the War Office. Mnjama notes that such records 'were at no stage removed from the colonies', and that the creating entities therefore have a legitimate interest in maintaining them.33 While the position that these are not true migrated archives is difficult to argue with, insofar as they have not been physically migrated from the state in which they were created or compiled, the identification and copying of such records has in fact been a key focus of activity for African archives recovery programmes from the 1970s onwards.34
The second category – which are identified by Mnjama as the true 'migrated archives' – are those official records that were created or compiled as the internal records of colonial administrations, but were subsequently removed by the colonial power, typically during the process of decolonisation.35 The preeminent example of this phenomenon is the body of records that is known as the 'migrated archive', maintained by the UK FCO. Following previous denials, the existence of this collection was publicly acknowledged by the FCO in 2011. This came in the face of demands for access to records, which would potentially support court cases concerning the alleged abuse of detainees during the Mau Mau 'emergency' in colonial Kenya.36 Although presented as a revelation in the popular press, a FCO internal report written by Anthony Cary acknowledged that the Kenyan government had sought the repatriation of their records as early as 1967, repeating the request in the 1970s and 1980s.37 The admission of the existence of the migrated archive raised significant public and academic debate around the failure of the British government to meet its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, the apparent censorship of the historical record, as well as the specific revelations exposed in the content of the records.38
Since the initial disclosure, the migrated archives have been transferred to the National Archives as record series FCO 141, Records of Former Colonial Administrations: Migrated Archives. The final scope of the series clearly indicates the extent of the practice of migration, encompassing files removed from at least forty territories, certainly including all the significant colonial territories proper that were decolonised between 1948 and the late 1970s.39 Similar migrations of local records took place under other colonial powers; Todd Shepard, for example, notes that France '"repatriated" substantial collections of archives from Madagascar and other sites'.40 Similarly, a disputed, but certainly substantial volume of records was removed from Algeria to France at the close of the War of Independence, where they were either sent to specialist repositories or 'integrated into the documentary holdings of various ministries.'41 Banton further reminds us that a number of smaller migrations of local colonial records to the metropole took place before independence, including the legacy archives of the predecessor Dutch administration of British Guiana, the Ionian Islands protectorate and the naval port at Wei-Hai-Wei.42
Mnjama notes as a key feature of this category that they were 'illegitimately removed from the territories from where they were created'.43 This echoes the view espoused by Prasad that 'morally these records belong to the developing countries concerned' and 'must be restored to them', a position consistently maintained by archivists in the post-colonial states of Africa since the late 1960s.44 It is also reflective of the position set out in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives, Debt, which states that 'archives having belonged to the territory to which the succession of States relates and having become State archives of the predecessor State during the period of dependence shall pass to the newly independent State', effectively a principle of uti possidetis juris for information.45 As Banton has described in detail, the Vienna Convention never came into force;46 however, Shepard reminds us that the Convention has nevertheless become an important point of reference for the principles it enshrines, particularly in the context of Algerian claims over the archives removed to France in 1961–1962.47
The detailed revelations around the FCO Migrated Archives problematise the concept of migrated archives as it has been understood by archivists in post-colonial states. The Kenyan Government's claims to the records removed at independence, outlined in Cary's report, were clearly founded on the basis that the migration was illegitimate and thus, by implication, outside the scope of established conventions or precedent.48 Cary revealed that clear instructions were issued to the colonial Kenya Government not to transfer to the successor government papers that might embarrass the British Government, embarrass members of the police, armed forces or public servants, comprise intelligence sources or be used unethically by the successor government.49 Edward Hampshire notes almost identical instructions and criteria in operation in the case of Sarawak and North Borneo in 1962, following on from similar but simpler criteria in use in Malaya in 1957.50 Banton's research suggests that the practice of removing archives to Britain was part of an established, policy-driven process that may have been conceived in time for the independence of Ghana in 1957, and shows in detail how it was implemented in Nigeria.51 Hampshire goes further, dating the first significant migration under the Colonial Office to the decolonisation of Ceylon in 1948,52 and describing the influence of this process on subsequent migrations.53 Moreover, it is clear that the preceding practice as exercised in the cases of India and Pakistan had been not to simply transfer to the successor governments, but also large scale destruction of records, a process which continued in tandem with migration after 1957.54 Shepard describes a similar process and motivations behind the destruction and migration of the records of former French colonies.55
The evidence therefore suggests that the migration of sensitive records by the colonial powers was a standard practice alongside extensive destruction. At the same time, there are clear suggestions that the British government vacillated in its position towards migrated archives. Banton notes the claimed position of the Colonial Office in 1956 that it was 'not their practice to take over archives of Governments of dependent territories'.56 In the face of the Kenyan requests for the return of records from 1967, the UK position was that the materials were the property of the British Government, and indeed related to British interests. However, by the early 1980s, the position of the Public Record Office was that the migrated records were 'not UK public records'; rather 'but for concern over their safety, [they] would have been handed over to the incoming government on independence'.57 The British position on the status of the records remained ambiguous thereafter until they were transferred from the FCO to the National Archives between 2012 and 2014. Shepard similarly notes a significant exception to the French position, insofar as Senegalese records remained in place on decolonisation.58 These complexities, of course, do not affect the moral principle set out by Prasad, but they may lead us to re-evaluate the precise status of the true 'migrated' archives.
Mnjama's third category is defined as records created in one territory and moved to another. In principle, this may be interpreted as an extension of the second category, insofar as it represents a movement of records from their place of origin, typically by the colonial power. The primary examples provided by Mnjama are the records of the British protectorates of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Basutoland (now Lesotho) and Swaziland, the so called 'High Commission territories' adjacent to South Africa that were governed through the British High Commissioner for South Africa. Records of these territories were moved to Southern Rhodesia in 1948, shortly after the Government Archives of Southern Rhodesia had expanded its remit over the adjacent territories of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1946, to become the Central African Archives (CAA).59 During 1948 and 1949, the CAA appear to have been actively involved in providing records and archive management advice to Basutoland at the request of the High Commissioner, so that the transfer may be seen as part of a wider expansion of the institution's role in the region, underpinned by Southern Rhodesia's nominal status as itself subject to the High Commission.60 The apparent transfer of the Rhodesian Military Intelligence records to South Africa in 1980 reflects a similar process, albeit without the context of imperial intervention.
Mnjama's fourth category comprises records of regional bodies, colonial and post-colonial, which either directly controlled or represented the interests of multiple territories. In fact, the examples given cover two distinct entities; regional bodies such as the East African Community, whose records remain in Arusha as the location of its headquarters, and true federal entities.61 Examples of the latter include the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, many records from which remained in the Central African Archives (later the National Archives of Zimbabwe) in Harare, and the West Indies Federation, the records from which are maintained in the Federal Archives Centre at the University of the West Indies in Barbados (there is also significant number in the migrated archives collection in FCO 141).62 These cases have been less contentious, particularly where the archives have remained in the place of their creation. Nevertheless, steps have been taken to repatriate the content of these records, including a major microfilming project in the early 1980s to provide copies of Rhodesia and Nyasaland records for the national archives of Zambia and Malawi.63
The fifth category comprises private papers of individuals and organisations operated in colonial territories, but which are now maintained overseas. Numerous examples of such records exist in the university libraries of the UK. This really constitutes at least two distinct categories, first the corporate papers of organisations that may have substantially operated in the territories concerned, and second the genuinely private papers of individual colonialists. The former include many organisations in which the substantial interest is in the former territory concerned, including missionary records as well as the archives of commercial organisations. Such collections have often been systematically removed from their place of creation in a process akin to the official migrations described above. The latter group of 'personal' papers typically includes the small personal collections of former colonial officials. However, such archives can be contentious when they involve figures of national significance, such as the Roy Welensky papers, relating to the former prime minister of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which are currently held at Rhodes House Library in Oxford, or the Ian Smith papers held at Rhodes University in South Africa, and in fact consist largely of official records of the Rhodesian Cabinet and related material.64
Mnjama's sixth and final category is records of liberation movements, where these are maintained outside the relevant territory. Many of these are really distinct from other non-governmental papers only insofar as they were created and subsequently maintained by organisations or proto-governments in exile. Where they were created outside the borders of the territory concerned, these records may share with the first category the distinction of being migrated in a physical sense.65
Mnjama does not include the concept of 'displaced' archives in his typology. As noted above, this term has typically been applied to cases of archives 'looted' as 'spoils of war' during conflict, particularly in the context of Nazi and subsequent Soviet expropriations during the Second World War.66 Reflecting this context, the concept has been intimately bound up with wider questions of restitution of cultural artefacts.67 The preeminent example of this category has been the collections of archives from across Europe that were captured by Soviet armies, particularly in the context of attempts at their recovery following the dissolution of the USSR and the passing of the 1998 Russian law 'On Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation'.68 More recent examples have included records and archives seized by coalition forces in the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequently removed to the United States and other US controlled locations.69
The Rhodesian Army archive does not fit neatly into any one of these categories, though it shares commonalities with many of them. In terms of the second category, in common with the FCO archive, the RAA archive was unambiguously created as official records of the pre-independence government, and has left a tangible gap in the archives of the successor state; to this extent it certainly qualifies as a 'migrated' archive as much as any public collection would under the same circumstances. Indeed, given our new understanding of the systematic processes of destruction and migration that were applied by the British authorities at decolonisation, we may speculate that the predominantly secret and top secret intelligence papers maintained in the archive are of precisely the category that would – in different circumstances – have met the Colonial Office's criteria for removal or destruction. Reflecting the third category, the archive was migrated between territories, being moved from Rhodesia to South Africa in 1980. Indeed, much of the RAA collection dates from the late-1970s; consequently the bulk of its lifecycle may have been as official records of the South African rather than the Rhodesian forces. The collection contains a significant number of records of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, overlapping with the fourth category. Finally, the archive has been presented and operated as a private collection, thereby meeting the definition of the fifth category.
In confronting these complexities, the term 'migrated' archives appears to be an unsatisfactorily passive euphemism for the systematic, deliberate removal of archives from their place of creation. These archives had explicitly been deracinated from their place of origin; they had been expatriated. The concept of 'expatriate' archives is also in simple opposition to the idea of repatriation, which is a persistent theme in the discourse of migrated archives.
However, the archive's journey after leaving South Africa, and its custody in the hands of the Rhodesian Army Association, remind us that questions of migration and expatriation are not one-dimensional. At one level, as a body of material in the custody of an organisation that represents the interests of a well-defined community, the RAA collection has features in common with community archives, particularly as the archive's current custodians are in many cases both the authors and the subjects of the material. In this context, Andrew Flinn has defined a community as 'a group who define themselves on the basis of locality, culture, faith, background, or other shared identity or interest,' a description which is certainly apt for the RAA.70 Underlining this perspective, the RAA has operated substantially as a community history group, supporting the development of (sometimes hagiographic) unit and campaign histories, and memorialising members of its community. Further, the RAA archive as a whole has functioned in accordance with the common model of the community archive, actively collecting documentary materials from members, and making no distinction in its constitution between the migrated official records, personal archives and relevant ephemera.71
This argument can be taken further. While the migration of the archive can be understood as an appropriation of Zimbabwe's history, there is little doubt that to its current custodians it represents a tangible locus of Rhodesia's history, not just at community but at national level. The Archive Project's final project report notes, 'The material is ... of course, of enormous significance to the dwindling band of former members of the Rhodesian military, their families and contacts of the regimental associations'.72 As described by Onslow and Berry in their final report in the Archives Project's related oral history project, the RAA archive is one among a number of symbols for ex-Rhodesians who experience 'a deep-felt sadness for a country and a home that no longer exists' and feel 'the lack of public space to memorialise Rhodesia'.73 This echoes the foundational role of the archive in the nation state. As Shepard argues, 'Through their existence [archives] help constitute a state insofar as their workings offer proof that it is an emanation of its people'.74 For the ex-Rhodesians, their 'nation' state is gone and all that remains is the archive, a repository not just of history but also of identity. This creates a duality of interests between the nation state of Zimbabwe on the one hand, and the RAA on the other, that is quite distinct from the archetypal migration from periphery to metropole. The RAA collection, therefore, is not only expatriated, it is also the archive of an expatriate community, indeed of a doubly expatriated community, once exogenous as colonisers in Zimbabwe, now exogenous in a worldwide Rhodesian diaspora.
That this community is a finite one, insofar as there can be no more de jure Rhodesians, inevitably raises the practical issue of what will happen to the archive as the numbers of its current custodians decline, an issue on which the constitution of the RAAMT simply states that in the event of the Trust being wound up, the assets would 'be given to such other organisation having similar objects as may be decided'.75 If the dichotomy set out in the previous paragraph is accepted, it would seem inevitable that the moral interest in the archive will shift further towards the extant nation state of Zimbabwe. However, the RAA itself continues to recruit as affiliate members 'All descendents [sic] or dependents of full members', implicitly establishing the possibility of the archive remaining in private hands.76
The term 'expatriate' was ultimately selected as representing the duality apparent in the RAA archive's status as an expatriated body of material that in content clearly constitutes an element of the national archive of Zimbabwe, yet is also intimately intertwined with the exogenous or expatriate community of former Rhodesians. It is proposed that this specific duality provides a valuable perspective on the ambiguities inherent in wider categories of migrated archives. In contrast to 'migration', it signifies a fundamental imbalance between subject and place. At the same time, it recognises the plurality of interests, of colonised and coloniser, that is embedded in all archives of colonisation.
Notes
1 Anderson, 2011, pp. 699–716; Badger, 2012, pp. 799–807.
2 Banton, 2012, pp. 321–335, doi:10.1080/03086534.2012.697622; Edward Hampshire, 2013, pp. 334–352, doi:10.1080/03086534.2013.799349.
3 'Wars of liberation, wars of decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Research databases and models', Research Councils UK Gateway to Research, accessed 27 October 2015.
4 'UWE wins £423K grant to catalogue Rhodesian Army archive', University of the West of England, 21 September 2006. The RAA Project was significantly impacted by the closure of the BECM as a public museum in 2008, which was followed by final closure in 2012, amid serious questions about the museum's approach to the ownership of its collections. This paper is not about those events, but the context sheds light on the absence of key information about the removal of the collection from Zimbabwe and its subsequent movements, both this paper in particular and the RAA project in general. See Grosvenor, 2012; 'The British Empire & Commonwealth Collection', Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives, accessed 4 July 2015; McCann, Pinfold and Wallace, 2012; Morris, 2012.
5 Duffy, 2006, p. 27.
6 Lovering, 2009, p. 1; 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Newsletter.' University of the West of England, February 2008.
7 Duffy, 2006, p. 27.
8 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Research Databases and Models', Research Councils UK Gateway to Research, accessed 4 July 2015.
9 Duffy, 2006, p. 27.
10 'Rhodesia Army Association', The Rhodesian Forces Website, captured 11 August 2004.
11 'Rhodesian Army Museum Trust', The Rhodesian Forces Website, capture 25 August 2004.
12 Meeting, 23 March 2011 (University of the West of England Freedom of Information request).
13 Resource Enhancement Proposal, Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project, 24 November 2005 (University of the West of England Freedom of Information request).
14 Collaboration agreement relating to the Rhodesian Army Archive Project, 14 January 2009 (University of the West of England Freedom of Information request).
15 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Research Databases and Models', Research Councils UK Gateway to Research, accessed 4 July 2015.
16 Email from archivist, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, 31 May 2011 (University of the West of England Freedom of Information request).
17 'Rhodesia Army Association', The Rhodesian Forces Website, accessed 1 August 2015.
18 Chifamba, 2013.
19 'UWE wins £423K grant to catalogue Rhodesian Army archive', University of the West of England, 21 September 2006.
20 Storey, 2013, p. 8.
21 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Newsletter', University of the West of England, February 2008'.
22 Chifamba, 2016.
23 Murambiwa, 2008.
24 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Newsletter', University of the West of England, April 2007'.
25 Lovering, 2009, p. 2.
26 Shitla Prasad quoted in Banton, 2012, p. 322.
27 Banton, 2012, p. 331.
28 Mnjama, 2011, pp. 15–34.
29 A. Leisinger, 'Disputed Archival Claims: A Persistent and Urgent Problem', ESARBICA 7 Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives held in Harare on 13–17 September, 1982, cited in Mnjama, 2011, p. 20.
30 Mnjama, 2011, pp. 20–24.
31 Banton, 2012, pp. 330–331.
32 For example Grimsted, 1997 pp. 27–74, doi:10.1017/S0960777300004045.
33 Mnjama, 2011, p. 20.
34 Mnjama, 2011, p. 17.
35 Mnjama, 2011, p. 21.
36 See Anderson, 2011; Badger, 2012; Elkins, 2011, pp. 731–748, doi:10.1080/03086534.2011.629084.
37 Cary, 2011.
38 Cobain and Norton-Taylor, 2012; Cobain and Norton-Taylor, 2012; Badger, 2012.
39 'Eighth tranche of colonial administration records released', The National Archives, 29 November 2013.
40 Shepard, 2015, pp. 869–883 doi:10.1093/ahr/120.3.869, p. 873; see also Shepard's chapter in this book.
41 Shepard, 2015, p. 872.
42 Banton, 2012, p. 322.
43 Mnjama, 2011, p. 21.
44 Shitla Prasad quoted in Banton, 2012, p. 322; Mnjama, 2011, p. 16.
45 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives, Debt, 1983, Art 28 1(a).
46 Banton, 2012, pp. 331–332.
47 Shepard, 2015, p. 873.
48 Cary, 2011, p. 2.
49 Cary, 2011, p. 1; Banton, 2012, p. 325.
50 Hampshire, ' "Apply the Flame More Searingly" ', p. 340, 342. Banton, 'Destroy? "Migrate"? Conceal?', 2013 p. 328.
51 Banton, 2012, p. 325.
52 Readers should also see Banton's discussion of this migration in her contribution to this volume.
53 Hampshire, 2013, p. 336.
54 Banton, 2012, p. 328.
55 Shepard, 2015, p. 872.
56 Banton, 2012, p. 327.
57 Cary, 2011, p. 2.
58 Shepard, 2015, p. 873.
59 Mnjama, 2011, p. 23; Dritsas and Haig, 2014, p. 36.
60 Simbawachi, 2013.
61 Mnjama, 2011, p. 23.
62 The University of the West Indies W.I. Federal Archives Centre, accessed 15 July 2015.
63 Mazikana, 1986, pp. 273–277.
64 Murambiwa, 2009.
65 Mnjama, 2011, p. 23.
66 Grimsted, 1997, p. 27; Grimsted, 2010, pp. 291–333, doi:10.1017/S0940739110000123.
67 Akinsha, 2010, pp. 195–216, doi:10.1017/S0940739110000093; Akinsha, 2010, pp. 257–290, doi:10.1017/S0940739110000111; Sandholtz, 2010: pp. 147–176, doi:10.1017/S094073911000007X.
68 Grimsted, 2010, pp. 291–292.
69 Cox, 2011, pp. 451–481.
70 Flinn, 2007, pp. 151–176, doi:10.1080/00379810701611936, p. 153.
71 'Rhodesia Army Association', The Rhodesian Forces Website, accessed 1 August 2015.
72 'Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project: Research Databases and Models', Research Councils UK Gateway to Research, accessed 4 July 2015.
73 Onslow and Berry, 2010, accessed 14 November 2014, p. 14.
74 Shepard, 2015, p. 870.
75 'The Rhodesian Army Association Museum Trust', The Rhodesian Forces Website, accessed 23 October 2015.
76 'Rhodesia Army Association'. The Rhodesian Forces Website, accessed 1 August 2015.
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7 A Proposal for Action on African Archives in Europe
Nathan Mnjama and James Lowry
Introduction
Archival displacement is acutely evident in many African archives and has been of concern to many African governments since the end of the colonial period. It has been at the forefront of the minds of archivists from the East and Central African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ECARBICA) from the time of their first meeting in Nairobi in 1969. Since then, the issue has been discussed and resolutions passed by ECARBICA and its successor, ESARBICA (the Eastern and Southern African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives). Notwithstanding these resolutions, the records removed from Africa during the process of decolonisation still largely remain in the custody of European powers. Why are African nations interested in displaced archives? The Africa Studies Association's Archives-Libraries Committee Resolution on Migrated Archives in 1977 stated:
Archives are recognized as an essential part of any nation's heritage providing documentation not only of the historical, cultural, and economic development of a country thereby providing a basis for a national identity, but also serving as a basic source of evidence needed to assert the rights of individual citizens.
As we will show, these assertions echo the ESARBICA resolutions. Furthermore, the ESARBICA resolutions give a sense that archival displacement is an unresolved injustice of colonialism.
In this chapter, we will discuss displaced archives as a phenomenon of decolonisation in Africa, using examples from the British Empire and the Commonwealth of Nations to illustrate a broader issue that effects many African and European countries, though we recognise that each case has its own particular context and circumstances. We sketch out the process of displacement before and during decolonisation and the underdevelopment of archival services in colonial administrations. We survey various efforts to locate, copy or repatriate displaced archives, observing a general lack of progress on the resolution of the question of African archives in Europe, and finally propose that European archivists could usefully take a position on the matter.
The Nature of the Problem
According to Nomsa Nsibandze, migrated archives are archives in exile or archives unjustly transferred from one country to another.1 Francis Garaba argued that 'whether one employs the term "fugitive archival material", or "missing documents", "migrated archives", "removed" or "displaced archives", the common factor is that they are not where they are supposed to be, in their rightful place of custody'.2 These definitions foreground the ethical implications of the movement of records while stopping short of demarcating the nature and context of the records and their removal. This is more helpful than it might seem. There have been a number of attempts at categorising displaced archives, such as Albert Leisinger's classifications, which drew on the work of Morris Rieger.3 Nathan Mnjama has discussed how these categories manifest in the African context.4 While this work is helpful in illustrating the range of issues implicit in the phenomenon of archival displacement, typologies tend towards abstraction – efforts at deriving broad principles or formulas sideline the unique circumstances, records, histories and personalities that result in archival displacements, claims and resolutions. This chapter is concerned with records removed to Europe from the African territories in which they were created, regardless of factors that might allow them to be defined more precisely. The ambiguities in the definitions given by Nsibandze and Garaba acknowledge the ethical, or even moral, aspects of claims on archives in the post-colonial context, while leaving room for dispute and discussion about the scope and circumstances of particular claims. We are concerned here with archives created in Africa and removed to Europe.
Archival Displacements
Under British colonial rule, the transfer of records from the colonies to Britain was sanctioned by the Colonial Office for the preservation of the records. A letter dated 2 January 1929 from L. S. Amery, the Colonial Secretary, stated:
If there are any early official records in your custody which it is considered essential to remove in order to ensure their preservation, I shall be glad if you will furnish me with detailed particulars including the lineal space which they would occupy.5
Further advice was sent out to the colonies in 1936:
It may be that the best measures that are practicable locally for the preservation of records cannot be achieved in some cases, on account of climatic conditions etc being otherwise than adequate; in that case consideration should be given to the question of transferring some of these records to the Public Record Office in this country.6
The extent to which transfers for preservation were made is unclear. There have also been claims that colonial administrators removed records in breach of regulations. More than thirty years ago, P.M. Mukula, then Director of Zambia National Archives, argued that:
Government Officials took an oath of allegiance and are supposed to be loyal, truthful, honest and sincere. They were required to maintain records properly and were not supposed to remove copies produced in the course of official duty. On departure the officials were expected to leave all types of correspondence intact and no records or copies whatsoever were to be taken home. Nothing official was to be used for personal glory or private collection. Yet surprisingly enough, some colonial administrators had no respect for the administrative code under which they operated. General orders cautioned them against removal but they removed documents stealthily without permission. Their offence is no different from that of an official who has been sent to prison on charges of theft or for breach of official secrecy. These officers took or sent to their home countries official correspondence, reports and findings which can now be found listed in the Manuscript Collection of Africana in Rhodes House Library, Oxford. There is no good reason why these records cannot be repatriated, they are public records, although they have been classified as historical manuscripts.7
The ad hoc compliance with official guidance continued as independence approached and colonial governments began a programme of selecting records to be sent to Britain. Although this unfolded differently in the various colonies, archival displacements during decolonisation commonly happened without any formal selection criteria, or criteria were applied unevenly. Mandy Banton has shown how this happened in the British empire, and Todd Shepard, Vincent Hiribarren and Michael Karabinos have shown that this was also true in other European empires.8 Some records were removed, but others, perhaps due to their bulk as much as lack of utility, were either abandoned or destroyed by burning, causing significant gaps in the records that remained.
The reasons for the removal of records were varied but chiefly, as Kago Ramokate, a former director of Botswana National Archives, stated 'the colonial powers took away some of the records because they were "too sensitive and might cause unrest if left with the natives" '.9 The 'discovery' of the 'migrated archives' in the UK government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office has drawn attention to British policy on the disposition of records during decolonisation: this policy centred on the concern that records that might embarrass governments or public servants should not be handed over to successor governments.10
European refusals to return displaced archives suggest that there is a view that they are properly European archives and constitute an element of the imperial heritage, but by that logic we would see European claims for the colonial records that could not be evacuated from Africa, which we do not. Commenting on the removal of African records to European countries, S. Sowoolo, a former director of National Archives of Nigeria, posited that:
This is not merely a matter of African-related archives in Europe but of authentic African archives which should be in Africa and nowhere else. The archives find themselves in Europe because they had been – for whatever reason – deliberately transferred there by the former colonial powers. The view of African Archivists on this matter is that such archives should be repatriated – in their original to their original owners.11
African archivists often share this view. In 2015, Mnjama conducted a survey of directors of national archives in the ESARBICA region. When asked to comment on the impact of the removal of archives from Africa on their respective countries, one director responded:
[T]he removal occasioned major gaps in our archival holdings. The country lost a natural part of its documentary heritage. This scenario evidently denied our citizens and research scholars access to critical information and data relating to British colonial administration in our country and by extension impacting negatively on the compilation of our country's history.12
Another respondent claimed that 'these records, the country recognises, are of enormous potential value to the nation in terms of historical research and therefore the greatest justification for their return brings forth the very real possibility of rewriting our history.'13 Yet another commented that due to the transfer of records to European cities, 'endeavours meant to hold the colonial administration accountable for its actions have been difficult to pursue due to the scarcity of information occasioned by this removal.'14 Whether removed for the preservation of the records, or for political, diplomatic or intelligence reasons, or illicitly, there is a strong feeling amongst African archivists that records removed from Africa should be returned.
Colonial Administration and the Genesis of Archival Underdevelopment in Africa
A common feature of British colonial administration in Africa was its failure to develop effective archival practices. Except for South Africa, where an archival service was operated by the white regime, and in Zimbabwe, where an archival service was established in 1934 for the preservation of white settler history, in all British colonies in Africa, archival services only began to emerge in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Colonial administrations paid little or no attention to the development of archival services to the extent that at the independence of many African countries, their archival services were still in their infancy. Although the Colonial Office occasionally issued circulars on the management of records, Abiola Abioye has shown how, in Nigeria, these circulars were largely ignored, leading to a weak legal and administrative foundation for the National Archives of Nigeria.15 Derek Charman and Michael Cook, who, as the first chief archivist of the Kenya National Archives and the first archivist of the Tanzania National Archives respectively, were able to speak with some authority on the pre-independence situation, noted in the mid-1960s that 'in Uganda and Kenya the colonial governments had made rather perfunctory efforts to create archives organizations, but to all appearances rather to appease the Colonial Office than out of any real conviction.'16 African nations were left not only with gaps in their collections arising from displacements, but with inadequate archival institutions, laying the foundations for the argument that displaced archives are safer in foreign hands. Though archives in Africa often still face resource constraints that are rooted in the colonial period, and colonial period records may be at risk in these conditions, the practical challenges should be faced in concert with the legal and ethical questions, rather than serving as a rationale for the retention of African archives in Europe.
Efforts to Locate, Copy and Retrieve Displaced Archives
The impact of underdeveloped archival services and the problem of locating and retrieving records removed from Africa, generally, remain unresolved. While some African countries such as Botswana, Kenya, Ghana and Zimbabwe have made efforts to locate some of their records held outside their boundaries, others are yet to initiate such programmes.
In the East and Southern African region, concerns over displaced archives have been raised regularly at the biennial conferences of ESARBICA (and previously ECARBICA). Archivists from the ESARBICA region have passed several resolutions calling for the return of records removed from their countries, the first being in 1969 during the inaugural ECARBICA conference in Nairobi, at which it was
resolved to seek through the International Council on Archives the moral support of the United Nations and its agencies and OAU [Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner to the African Union] in persuading governments and national bodies presently possessing such records to secure their return or the supply of photocopies of them and also to seek financial support of the United Nations and its agencies in mounting a programme of copying where governments are unable or unwilling to finance themselves.17
Five years later in Lusaka, Zambia, the participants in the ECARBICA conference urged member states to 'make concrete efforts to retrieve migrated archives from the former colonial powers'. It was further recommended that 'governments of the participating countries formulate policies for the retrieval of records originating from the countries of East and Central Africa and held in former metropolitan and other cities'.18 The lack of action on these resolutions prompted Peter Mazikana, who was then the principal archivist of Zimbabwe National Archives, to say:
I am painfully aware that many resolutions have been passed on this subject and that precious few have ever materialized. It is therefore not my wish to encourage more of them which may be pious and high sounding but whose terms may be so broad as to defeat implementation, or whose aspirations may be so lofty as to elude the securing of adequate resources for implementation. From Zimbabwe standpoint, I see the issue as twofold: there is the question of central African material largely located in Zimbabwe, which is of interest to our neighbours and possibly to others outside this region, secondly there is the question of the acquisition of material located outside this region, largely in the United Kingdom. What we must do is to thrash out a pragmatic, viable and unambitious regional strategy which must take full account of our regions aspirations and yet not gloss over the limited resources at our disposal.19
Although no such regional strategy has appeared to date, available evidence indicates that some of the member states in the East and Central African region made efforts to implement the resolutions. In August 1978 and November 1979, Kenya undertook surveys of records relating to Kenya held in Britain. The findings of the two surveys indicated large amounts of Kenyan records held in Britain, so the Kenya government decided to open a cultural office in its High Commission in London with the sole objective of copying Kenyan records held in Britain. Two officers from the Kenya National Archives were posted to this new office and they worked closely with National Archives staff in Nairobi and members of the history department at the University of Nairobi. The collaboration with the history department ensured that Kenyan scholars were kept abreast of newly copied records from Britain. Despite the many challenges faced by the Kenya National Archives in locating and copying its records in the UK, it was satisfied with the collaboration and support it received from archivists in Britain, but less so with the support of the British government. Speaking at the Pan African Conference on Archival Policies and Programmes in Africa held in Abuja, Nigeria in 1994, Musembi, the former director of the Kenya National Archives and Documentation Service, noted:
Generally speaking, we have continued to receive sympathy and support from archivist and librarians in the UK and USA. We thank them most sincerely. However, [the] attitude of the former colonial powers has not been very helpful.20
Other African countries that have been involved in microfilming projects include Botswana, which began listing and copying records held at the UK's Public Record Office/National Archives in 1980. As early as 1976, Ghana embarked on acquiring microfilm copies of records relating to Ghana from the Danish Royal Archives. Ghana also obtained financial assistance from the Dutch Government to carry out a survey of records relating to Ghana held at the Dutch National Archives. Tunisia too has been engaged in a microfilming project. Between 1981 and 1983, major microfilming of Tunisia related records held in Paris was undertaken and some 2,483 35mm reels were added to Tunisia National Archives.21 Though the majority of our references in this chapter concern the British colonial and post-colonial context, these few examples serve to remind us that archival displacement from Africa concerns numerous European countries.
Apart from the refusal to return archives to their countries of origin, there have been suggestions that European countries have not cooperated with African countries in their search for and copying of displaced archives. In Mnjama's 2015 survey, one of the respondents stated:
They give you what they want to give you and those that they feel you should not view are kept from you. We purchased practically all our colonial reports from the Commonwealth Office. The records from the National Archives were microfilmed at a price and we have them in our repositories. We know for a fact that they did not give us everything pertaining to our country.22
African governments were very hopeful that problems with displaced archives would be addressed through the efforts of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Archives, particularly through international microfilming initiatives and the Vienna Convention, the latter being a particular source of disappointment. The Vienna Convention arose from the United Nations Conference on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts held in Vienna in 1983. At the end of the conference, the Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives and Debts was adopted, but has received too few signatures to enter into force. Charles Kecskeméti, the then executive secretary of the International Council on Archives, suggested that among the reasons for this rejection was the fact that the Convention 'was compiled without taking into account some basic archival principles and issues'. He concluded:
[T]he Vienna Convention is of no assistance to the archival institutions of the countries it was supposed to help and did not achieve the breakthrough with respect to international archival law.23
Realising that not much could be achieved through the Convention, ECARBICA, at its 1986 conference held in Mbabane, Swaziland, passed a new resolution intended to take the issue forward by other means:
Realizing that the convention as it stands now will not achieve the intended objectives on the settlement of problems arising from the succession of states in respect of archives, this conference urges national archival institutions to submit for the consideration of governments possible initiatives for filling the legal gaps which will still persist concerning disputed archival claims and devolution of archives in cases of succession of states.24
In effect, the resolution called for a continuation of bilateral approaches. Yet, almost two decades later, it was still deemed necessary to push for action: in 2003, during the seventeenth ESARBICA General Conference held in Maputo, Mozambique, the following resolution was passed.
Bearing in mind that the issue of migrated archives still remains unresolved in most of our member states, this conference urges them to:
1. Explore the possibility of initiating joint programmes for the selection and acquisition of migrated records, and,
2. Seek the support of NEPAD25 in promoting the return of our cultural heritage from former colonial powers.
The highest level at which the issue of displaced archives was ever discussed within the East and Southern African region was during a meeting of government ministers responsible for records and archives, held on 20 October 2003 in Cape Town. The government ministers gathered there noted:
1. That the archival heritage of Africa, in all its aspects – oral and written – was ignored, marginalised, transferred and denied during the colonial era;
2. That in the post-independence era urgent competing priorities and limited resources unfortunately resulted in further neglect of our archival heritage;
3. That steps are being taken with Africa and the region to promote co-operation in the preservation of Africa's archival heritage and in the improvement of records management practices, both paper-based and electronic; and
4. That Africans have lacked access to records created in colonial capitals about African history and that this has resulted in the disempowerment of the African peoples.26
The ministers recommended that 'the African Union, through NEPAD [the New Partnership for Africa's Development], authorize the establishment of an archival steering committee to promote co-operation in archival matters including that of ensuring that all the archival material taken from or within Africa in whatever form should be repatriated to countries of origin'.27 But again, no action was taken and no such steering committee has been established.
Challenges Related to Copying Displaced Archives
Mazikana has argued that while some repatriation did take place, 'By and large ... the former colonial powers remained steadfast in their claims on the records and instead encouraged the copying of these records to give the new nations access'.28 In the face of inaction on restitution, copying seems an alternative that at least provides access to the information contained in records, but even copying comes with challenges. One of the major limitations that African countries face relates to access periods. Until the enactment of the Freedom of Information legislation in the UK, access to records was limited to archival material that was at least thirty years old. During the Kenyan initiatives of the late 1970s, efforts to copy Kenyan records less than thirty years old and which were of major interest to Kenyan researchers failed due to the thirty-year closure period. During discussions at the ECARBICA conference in 1982, Michael Roper of the UK's Public Record Office explained the Public Record Office position. Roper stated:
I am afraid the 30 year rule is the 30 year rule as far as the Public Record Office is concerned. It is always open to departments that have transferred to give access to records within the closed period. This is a political decision between the Government of Kenya and the Government of the United Kingdom between our two foreign offices and nothing to do with the archives – the PRO has no status in this at all and unless the Foreign Office says go ahead we cannot give any access within the 30 year rule.29
Despite the UK's current transition from a thirty-year rule to a twenty-year rule, records are routinely retained in agencies under the Lord Chancellor's Security and Intelligence Instrument, which can limit access to records of relevance to African claims.30
Another challenge that African countries face in locating and copying their displaced archives stems from the lack of comprehensive guides on sources in Britain relating to Africa. When Kenya first made a request for the return of records held by the British government, the Foreign Office suggested that Kenya should compile a list of the records it wished to obtain. This was an impossible task as no records had been left behind indicating which files had been removed to Britain. In recognition of the need for adequate findings aids in their own countries, the delegates to the seventh ECARBICA Conference called upon the directors of National Archives:
[T]o encourage the idea of preparation and publication of finding aids to bring under adequate administrative and intellectual control materials already in their custody as an essential preliminary to the development of appropriate mechanisms for the acquisition of complementary material wheresoever located.31
Lack of information on the nature and volume of records held in the UK remains a challenge. Mnjama's 2015 survey indicated that many of the national archives in the East and Southern African region are unaware of the nature, volume and formats of records removed from their countries. There is a sense among the archivists of Africa that there is still much more to be disclosed by European governments about the records that were removed from the colonies.
Copyright restrictions also inhibit the possibility of copying, especially for privately held archival collections. This was particularly so for various collections held at Rhodes House Library, Oxford University. Locating the copyright holders or their legitimate heirs became a major challenge for the Kenyan researchers as some of the copyright holders had died or moved. Copyright clearances had to be obtained for each copyright holder indicating the terms under which permission to copy the materials had been granted, access restrictions (if any) and whether the national archives receiving the copies had any right to provide copies to bona fide researchers.
The costs involved in locating and copying displaced archives have been and remain a critical factor contributing to the slow progress in resolving problems associated with displaced archives; costs affect both the amount of copying that can be done and may also influence what can be acquired.32 Many respondents to Mnjama's survey suggested that the costs of repatriating or copying archives should be borne by the UK government: 'As the UK Government bore the initial cost of taking them from our country and keeping them all this time, it would be a welcome gesture if the same Government took upon itself the responsibility and cost of returning them to our country',33 or rather more forcefully: 'In my thinking, it should be the former colonialists [who should pay] because they had no business removing our national documentary heritage from our countries.'34
A Proposal for Action on African Archives in Europe
In light of the revelation of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's migrated archives, what other secrets lie in the African papers scattered across Europe? When will we see them? The problem of records removed from Africa remains unresolved over half a century after many African countries achieved independence. The ESARBICA resolutions offer proof of the deep desire for the return of these records. The theoretical and legal debates around displaced archives often obscure the human element: the people of Africa want their archives back; do the people of Europe feel so strongly about keeping them?
Digitisation offers a compromise, much like microfilming did, but it comes with similar problems of copyright and cost. As Mnjama has reported, there is a consensus among the national archivists of Africa that the country of origin should hold the originals and own the copyright, with digital surrogates funded by the former colonial power and then retained for their own use.35 To date, African efforts at repatriation and copying have been limited, slow and expensive. The governments of Europe have done little to aid this work, though the archivists of Europe have been more responsive. It is, therefore, to them that we make our proposal for action on African archives in Europe. We call on the international archival community to adopt – whether through the International Council on Archives, other networks or on institutional bases, but publicly – an official position on archives displaced from Africa. Furthermore, we ask colleagues in Europe to aid in the settlement of archival claims through:
1. Assisting in the location of displaced archives, and compiling and publishing guides and inventories of archival materials removed from their countries of origin.
2. Exerting direct pressure, in their personal and professional capacities, on their own governments to address archival claims.
3. Working through professional associations and networks to lobby their governments for action on repatriation.
4. Pushing for and facilitating digitisation projects that would see the content – if not the material – of the records returned.
5. Using the International Council on Archives as a vehicle for facilitating dialogue between governments with a view to reaching bilateral agreements on archival repatriation.
The archivists of Africa have made resolution upon resolution concerning the repatriation of displaced archives, and these have been unknown or ignored in Europe. Past efforts to address problems of displaced archives at the international level by UNESCO, the International Council on Archives and others, have not yielded solutions, as the failure of the Vienna Convention illustrates. As many of the chapters in this book have argued, professional principles and 'international' (i.e. European) customary law support the return of displaced archives to the places of their creation. It is time for the former colonial governments to open bilateral discussions and institute measures for the return of African records to their places of origin, and for European archivists to fulfil their professional and ethical obligations in respect of African archives in Europe.
Notes
1 Nsibandze, 1996, p. 86.
2 Garaba, 2011, pp. 26–43.
3 Leisinger, 1982, pp. 1–7.
4 Mnjama, 2011.
5 Retrieved from Swaziland National Archives Files RCS 903/14 and RCS 1–29 82/29 Custody of Public Records and Destruction of Public Records. Reproduced in ESARBICA Journal Vol. 6, 1983, pp. 80–83.
6 Circular letter W Ormsby Gore to the Officers administering the Governments of ... Retrieved from Swaziland National Archives Files RCS 903/14 and RCS 1–29 82/29 Custody of Public Records and Destruction of Public Records. Reproduced in ESARBICA Journal Vol. 6, 1983, pp. 80–83.
7 Mukula, 1982, p. 26.
8 See their chapters in this book.
9 Ramokate, 2004.
10 Banton, 2012, p. 37.
11 Sowoolo, 1977, p. 3.
12 Mnjama, p. 49.
13 Ibid.
14 Mnjama, p. 49
15 Abioye, 2012, pp. 15–26.
16 Charman and Cook, 1967, p. 70.
17 Mnjama, 2012.
18 Mnjama, 2007, p. 147.
19 Mazikana, p. 31.
20 Musembi, 1996, pp. 125–126.
21 Fakhfakh, 1996, pp. 127–128.
22 Mnjama, 2015, p. 50.
23 Kecskeméti, 1998, p. 197.
24 Mnjama, 2007, p. 164.
25 New Partnership for Africa's Development, a technical body of the African Union. Available at <http://www.nepad.org>.
26 ESARBICA Declaration on Archives in Africa Cape Town, South Africa, 20 October 2003, reproduced in Bibliotheek- en Archiefgids 80(3), 2004, p. 43. ISSN 0772-7003.
27 Ibid.
28 Mazikana, 1997, available at <http://www.unesco.org/webworld/wirerpt/wirenglish/chap11.pdf>; accessed on 2 December 2015.
29 Roper, 1982, p. 16.
30 The Lord Chancellor's Security and Intelligence Instrument is available at <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/signed-instrument-for-the-retention-of-public-records>.
31 'Resolutions', 1982, p. 194.
32 Musembi, 1982, p. 13.
33 Mnjama, 2015, p. 51.
34 Ibid.
35 Mnjama, 2015, pp. 45–54.
References
Abioye, A. 'Milestones in Archives Administration in Nigeria'. Comma: Journal of the International Council on Archives 1, 2012, pp. 15–26.
Banton, M. ' "Lost" and "Found": The Concealment and Release of the FCO "Migrated Archives" '. Comma: Journal of the International Council on Archives 1, 2012, p. 37.
Charman, D. and M. Cook. 'The Archives Services of East Africa'. Archives, October 1967, p. 70.
Circular letter, W. Ormsby Gore to the Officers administering the Governments of ... Retrieved from Swaziland National Archives Files RCS 903/14 and RCS 1–29 82/29 Custody of Public Records and Destruction of Public Records. Reproduced in ESARBICA Journal 6, 1983, pp. 80–83.
ESARBICA 'Declaration on Archives in Africa'. 20 October 2003. Reproduced in Bibliotheek- en Archiefgids 80(3), 2004, p. 43.
Fakhfakh, M. 'The Microfilm Programme of Tunisia'. Janus: Archival Review 1, 1996, pp. 127–128.
Garaba, F. 'Provenance, Identification, Restitution and Management of the Liberation Struggle Heritage in the ESARBICA Region'. Journal of the Society of South African Archivists 44, 2011, pp. 26–43.
Kecskeméti, C. 'The "Vienna Convention" of 1983'. In Kukubo, R. (ed), Proceedings of 9th Biennial General Conference, Mbabane, Swaziland, 3–8 November 1986. Roma, Lesotho: University Press of Lesotho, 1998, p. 197.
Leisinger, A. 'Disputed Archival Claims: A Persistent and Urgent Problem'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September, 1982, pp. 1–7.
Mazikana, P. 'Africa'. Information Services Worldwide, Paris, France: UNESCO, 1997. Available at: <http://www.unesco.org/webworld/wirerpt/wirenglish/chap11.pdf>. Accessed on 2 December 2015.
Mazikana, P. 'Migrated Archives: The Position of Zimbabwe'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September 1982, pp. 30–37.
Mnjama, N. 'A Chronology of the East and Southern African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives Resolutions, 1969–2005'. ESARBICA Journal, 26, 2007, p. 164.
Mnjama, N. 'Migrated Archives Revisited'. ESARBICA Journal 30, 2011, pp. 24–31.
Mnjama, N. 'Migrated Archives: The African Experience'. Journal of the South African Society of Archivists, 44, 2015, pp. 45–54.
Mnjama, N. 'Migrated Archives'. In Ngulube, P. (ed), National Archives 75@30: 75 Years of Archiving Excellence at the National Archives of Zimbabwe. Harare, Zimbabwe: National Archives of Zimbabwe. 2012, pp. 67–77.
Mukula, P. 'Migrated Archives and the Position of Zambia'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September, 1982, pp. 24–28.
Musembi, M. 'Retrieval of Migrated Archives: The Kenyan Experience'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September 1982, pp. 8–20.
Musembi, M. 'The Microfilm Project of Kenya'. Janus: Archival Review, 1996, pp. 125–126.
New Partnership for Africa's Development, a technical body of the African Union. Available at: <http://www.nepad.org>.
Nsibandze, N. 'Southern African Archives in Exile'. SA Archives Journal 38, 1996, pp. 84–87.
Ramokate, K. 'Botswana Recovers Migrated Archives'. Mmegi, 15 January 2004. Available at: <http://allafrica.com/stories/200401160269.html>, accessed on 5 December 2015.
'Resolutions'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September 1982, p. 194.
Roper, M. 'Discussion on Migrated Archives (First Two Papers, Monday 13 September)'. ECARBICA 7, Seventh Biennial Conference and Seminar of the East and Central Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives. Harare, Zimbabwe, 13–17 September 1982, p. 18.
Sowoolo, S. 'Archives and Manuscripts Relating to Africa'. In Progress in African bibliography: SCOLMA Conference [Held at the] Commonwealth Institute, London, 17–18 March 1977, Proceedings. London: SCOLMA, 1977, p. 3.
The Lord Chancellor's Security and Intelligence Instrument. Available at: <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/signed-instrument-for-the-retention-of-public-records>.
8 Displaced Archives in the Wake of Wars
Leopold Auer
Introduction
Archives, being mobile property, are very liable to all sorts of displacements, the causes of which may range from administrative reforms to the effects of war. In the event of armed conflicts, the displacement of archives may occur both for their protection and due to belligerent action. In any case, archives have often been coveted as loot because of their financial, legal, informative or cultural value. Consequently, the examples of archives destroyed, plundered and removed through military operations are innumerable. This was emphasised by the members of a preparatory group for the meeting of the Society of American Archivists in 2013:
[N]ations and peoples have suffered throughout history from the removal of their documentary heritage. Records have been removed during war, revolution, and other conflicts for purposes ranging from plunder to propaganda, to intelligence, to documenting of war crimes, to the rescue of archives threatened with destruction. Such 'displaced archives' are scattered in institutions across the globe; access to such records and their long-term disposition remain central controversies in international archival affairs.1
This definition covers most of the ground, although one must add other categories of displaced archives in the wake of war or other armed conflict. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, there existed marked trends towards archival centralisation. State administrations regarded themselves as entitled to concentrate archival repositories at the seat of government. Local and regional archives very often were transferred to the capital, and ecclesiastical archives secularised.2 The same attitude has manifested in the handling of colonial archives or of archives of occupied and newly acquired territories. With the acceptance of the principle of provenance and with the growing awareness of the unalienable rights of social entities to their cultural heritage, including archives, a gradual change of opinion has taken place, sometimes resulting in the restitution of archives to their original legal owners. Thus, the nineteenth-century trend towards centralisation has been replaced by a strategy of decentralisation and regionalisation that may lead to a restitution of records from central to regional archives such as in Bavaria or, still more recently, in France or Spain.3 In other cases, the needs of state succession have brought remedy to former centralisation, rendering once legitimate displacements an issue for restitution in the wake of war and of subsequent changes of sovereignty over a given territory. Thus, issues of war and state succession are, in effect, closely intertwined.4 In some cases, we may even speak of displaced archives although no displacement has occurred at all. If we assume that there is a rightful place for archives, archives could be said to become displaced as soon as the link with their creator – individual or institution – is severed.5
A particular problem is constituted by archives of military administrations in occupied territories. According to the practice of international law until recently, these archives should be repatriated if possible.6 Depending on whether the principle of administrative or territorial provenance is applied, occupation records belong respectively to the occupiers who created them or to the people and territory that was occupied. In practice, often the principle prevailed that such records were kept by the power that gained control over them, a principle that favours the victor to the detriment of the losing side, and one that is not really governed by legal considerations. The principle was also sometimes applied by colonial powers to records created by them in the colonies, although this interpretation is certainly disputable and has not been accepted by many former colonies.7 The destiny of archives of military occupation, as well as of archives in the case of major migrations or the resettlement of populations, requires further international attention and at least the drawing up of provisional guidelines, particularly in the light of the experience after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of former Yugoslavia with its 'ethnic purification'.
The Early Modern Period
The issue of displaced archives in the wake of wars has a long history. Notable examples comprise looted archives from practically all over the world.8 In the war between Charles V and rebellious Protestant princes, parts of the archives of Philip of Hesse fell into the hands of imperial troops; the Bavarian general Tilly abducted parts of the archives of the deposed Count Palatine, son-in-law of James I, from Heidelberg to Munich; and in the battle of Nördlingen in 1634, the victorious imperial army took the archives of the enemy as booty. The Swedes were perhaps the first to practice the large-scale looting of archives in wartime, and, then as in later cases, this practice represented a policy of imperialism and aspirations for greater status. Equally, during the Thirty Years War, the Swedes captured archives of the Emperor in Prague and of the Elector of Mainz, which is the reason why Luther's letter to the Elector accompanying his famous ninety-five theses and correspondence between Emperor Ferdinand III and his brother Leopold Wilhelm are, today, kept by the Swedish Riksarkivet. A decade later, Swedish troops captured various archives in the Baltic region and in Poland, among them the Polish Crown Archives, and transported them likewise to Stockholm. The troops of Louis XIV took parts of the archives of the Imperial Chamber Court in Speyer as booty to Paris. The capture and subsequent displacement of archives is not limited to wars but may occur in other forms of armed conflicts. When the town of Messina revolted against Spanish domination in 1678, the Spanish viceroy, while putting down the revolt, captured the municipal archives and had them taken to Spain, to deprive the town not only of its rights and entitlements but also of its collective memory. It was not until 1994 that these truly displaced archives were returned to Sicily.9 Far less is known about examples outside Europe in the early modern period. We know very little about archives in India or in the Arab world, which had a highly developed archival system at its disposal, and next to nothing about displaced archives in those regions.10 In ancient China, the archives of the central government were often destroyed as soon as they had served their purpose as source material for the official historiography.
The legal situation regarding international law until the end of the Ancien Regime is ambiguous. In the early modern period, taking archives as booty was far from condemned. Despite some voices to the contrary, the eminent legal expert Hugo Grotius explicitly allowed the harm of an enemy both in his person and in his property. 'In a public war anyone at all becomes owner, without limit or restriction, of what he has taken from the enemy'.11 Restitutions were subject to settlements in peace treaties.
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars
The eighteenth century showed an increasing interest in the protection of cultural property, including records, in cases of armed conflict. Johann Jacob Moser questioned the legitimacy of capturing the records of an enemy sovereign,12 and Emmerich de Vattel called the destruction of cultural property in war times 'the act of a declared enemy of the human race'.13 Cultural property, including libraries or collections of scientific interest, was increasingly protected, or at least not targeted, as long as it did not directly serve military purposes. However, this development was interrupted by a number of belligerent events towards and after the end of the century. After the Third Partition of Poland, the Polish state archives were transported to St Petersburg.14 The coalition wars in the wake of the French Revolution and above all the campaigns of Napoleon saw a hitherto unknown degree of archival looting.15 Napoleon's project to create a huge centralised European archive in Paris, to foster historical research, resulted in a gigantic archival plunder that probably inspired similar activities during the Second World War. The project had been suggested to the Emperor by the French general archivist Daunou, who saw that it would appeal to his ideas of French glory and grandeur. However, it may be also regarded as a result of the encyclopaedic interest of the Age of Enlightenment. Notwithstanding these scholarly motives for the displacement of archives in the Napoleonic period, for a later successor of Daunou during the Second Empire it constituted the introduction of an incorrect principle.16
For the implementation of his project, Napoleon ordered the transfer of captured archives to the French capital from various territories occupied by his troops. Archives of the central institutions of the dissolved Holy Roman Empire, in themselves archives of European significance, were abducted from Vienna during the French occupation in 1809, followed, in 1811, by large portions of the diplomatic correspondence kept by the archives of Simancas. Perhaps most strikingly, the Vatican archives were transported to Paris, when the papal state was annexed to the French Empire. All these archives together comprised many thousands of crates. Napoleon's Empire collapsed before his idea of a European archive could fully materialise. Demands for restitution were put forward immediately after the fall of Napoleon, but the restitution remains incomplete. The last parts of the captured Spanish archives were returned only in 1941 and in 1976, after a state visit of King Juan Carlos to Paris. Parts of the Vatican archives are still kept in the Archives Nationales because the Vatican authorities are not prepared to cover the expenses for their transport back to Rome. In some cases, restitution remains incomplete because of losses during the period of displacement. It goes without saying that the displacement of archives is always liable to disorder, damage and can even cause the destruction of records. The process of restitution is often difficult and time consuming. After a certain lapse of time, it may not be possible to identify captured fonds, files or single documents with absolute certainty. As has been shown by the example of the Vatican archives, the expenses of the return must be taken into account.
The archival plunder by Napoleon constituted the most spectacular displacement of archives of the period. However, apart from these abductions under his command, wars and political changes have caused many other archives to be transferred to other places. For reasons of safety and to protect them against capture by French troops, the archives of the central government of the Austrian Netherlands were transported to Vienna, and in 1805 and 1809 parts of the Viennese archives were evacuated to Temesvar for the same reason.17 The archives of the Elector of Mainz went through a real odyssey that ended with their partitioning between Austria and states of the later German Confederation.18 Political changes in the course of the wars of the French Revolution and the secularisation of the ecclesiastical and municipal territories of the Holy Roman Empire, brought about changes of ownership of various other archives and eventually a centralisation of most of them in German capitals. Mention must also be made of the Venetian archives that were transported to and temporarily kept in Vienna after the Peace Treaty of Campoformido.19
With the defeat of Napoleon and the break-up of his empire, the restitution of displaced archives became a predominant issue in the negotiations for the return of cultural property. Whereas, before this period, the possession of captured and displaced archives was not, apparently, challenged, defeated France was confronted with a number of demands for restitution by the coalition powers. Several of them set up special commissions to pursue the return of archival loot to its place of origin.20
Road to The Hague Conventions
Displacements of archives and disputed archival claims during and after the Napoleonic Wars contributed to the development of international law with respect to archives and other cultural property, increasingly refuting their characterisation as lawful booty. Leading diplomats of the period such as Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich stressed the need to keep documents necessary for the purpose of administration with the producing agencies. For his colleague, Lord Castlereagh, the removal of works of art was 'contrary to every principle of justice and to the usages of modern warfare'.21 In reaction and with reference to the extensive confiscations of the Napoleonic period, nineteenth-century manuals on international law paid increased attention to the issue of cultural property in the event of wars and showed a tendency to regard categories such as works of art or collections of scientific importance as inviolable, recommending protection against destruction and looting.22 In his Elements of International Law, Henry Wheaton states – with reference to the plunder committed by Napoleon and the restitution after 1815 – 'that monuments of art, and repositories of science are exempted from the general operations of war'.23 Even more explicit with regard to archives are the Anglophone experts in international law, Henry Halleck and Sir Travers Twiss, when they argued that no state should allow its troops in wartime to seize or destroy state papers, public archives or historical records, as this would mean to wage war 'in a manner not sanctioned by the modern practice of nations'.24 On the other hand, more or less at the same time, the American jurist Francis Lieber, in his instructions for the United States army, asserts the right to seize and remove works of art, libraries and scientific collections from conquered territory, though he states that they should not be destroyed, injured or privately appropriated.25
These discussions paved the way for the Brussels Convention of 1874 and eventually to the conventions and regulations of The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The Fourth Convention of the Hague Conference of 1907 on Land Warfare and its annexed regulations codified, for the first time, existing international practice with respect to the protection of cultural property in case of war, condemning explicitly its confiscation and limiting the right to booty with regard to movable property to those things that were regarded as necessary for military operations.26 Although these provisions do not mention archives explicitly, it has been argued that they confine wartime capture and post-war seizure of archival material to public records that are necessary for legitimate military intelligence, military operations or purposes of military administration. But even then, captured archives should not be displaced but exploited at the place of their origin. In the light of wartime evacuations and the necessity of protecting archives against the ravages of war, it is very often impossible to comply with this demand. Probably still more often, the necessity of protection is put forward as a reason for displacement. With regard to private archives, The Hague Convention reflects a strict respect for private property and demands that the property of municipalities and of institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, even when state property, be treated as private property. This does, however, not apply to private property that, at the outbreak of war, is already situated in an enemy country. As the Fourth Convention and its regulations do not explicitly refer to archives, subsequent interpretation differs.27 That archives may be covered by the provisions of the Fourth Convention on Land Warfare is shown inter alia by several references to article 56 of The Hague Convention during the First World War.28
The Two World Wars and Their Aftermaths: Displaced Archives and Their Restitution
Despite The Hague Convention, the First World War saw numerous cases of the destruction and capture of cultural property, including archives, from occupied territories.29 However, the First World War's most noteworthy feature with regard to archives is the return and restitution, in its aftermath, of previously displaced archives to their places of origin through the stipulations of the various peace treaties and archival conventions. Thus, displacements of archives due to both armed conflicts and administrative measures, sometimes reaching back as far as to eighteenth century, were remedied. In the first instance, mention must be made of the treaty of Saint-Germain between the allied powers and Austria, providing inter alia for the return of the Bohemian crown archives to Prague and for the return of parts of various Italian archives disputed between Austria and Italy since 1866.30 Of equal importance was the Treaty of Riga in 1921 between Poland, Russia and Ukraine, by which the Polish archives removed to St. Petersburg were, at least in part, restituted.31
Probably the largest mass movement of archives, however, was accomplished during the Second World War for reasons of politics, ideology, military strategy and state intelligence.32 Large quantities of public and private archives were removed, evacuated and seized – at first by the authorities of the Axis powers, later, when their forces were retreating, by the armies of their allied adversaries. Archives in practically all parts of Europe were afflicted, being, at one time or another, under foreign occupation. Archives in Asia, such as those of China, Indonesia or Japan were also affected. Apart from the wishes of all of the powers involved to secure important intelligence material, additional motives for this mass movement of archives included ideological reasons and research needs with regard to the First World War on the part of the Axis powers and, after 1945, the need for material to prepare the Nuremberg trials.33 During the seventy years since the Second World War, many of these displaced archives have been returned to their rightful owners, yet the problem is still an issue that is far from being completely settled. Over the last two decades, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has presented both archivists and experts of international law with new problems of restitution. To achieve progress towards a solution demands not only the good will of all parties concerned but also a careful study of all the legal, political and professional aspects involved.
German authorities removed or microfilmed archives and records captured in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, on the eastern front, in Yugoslavia and in Fascist Italy. Probably the most extensive plunder and devastation of archives by Nazi authorities took place in Eastern Europe, where various agencies such as the Künsberg brigades from the German Foreign Office, the Military Archives (Heeresarchiv), Rosenberg's Special Command (Einsatzstab) and others plundered archives for anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic propaganda and for strengthening control over various enemies of the regime.34 When these captured archives were in turn captured by Allied forces, together with innumerable German records, an extensive process of confiscation and restitution was set into motion.
Restitution started, quite naturally, with the records captured by the armies and authorities of the Third Reich. However, the restitution process was far from comprehensive, the Allied powers restituting archives in the first instance to their respective friendly countries, while the enemy camp had to wait. As for the Western allies, French, Belgian and Dutch records were immediately returned in 1945, Italian records in 1963. An extensive American restitution of archival materials to the Soviet Union took place between 1945 and 1948, comprising archives removed by the Germans from Novgorod, Pskov, Riga and Kiev.35 On the other hand, pre-revolutionary Russian consular records held in the US National Archives were not returned to Moscow until 1989, parts of the communist party archives of Smolensk not until 2002, as discussed in this volume and elsewhere.36
The majority of German records that fell into the hands of western Allied troops remained on German soil, and only those of military and political significance were sent to Great Britain or the United States. Restitution to Germany started as early as 1951 and continued through to 1957. Systematic return by semi-annual shipment, however, was accomplished chiefly during the decade from 1958 to 1968. The legal basis for the restitution of records to Germany from the United States was the proposition for disposal of these records in compliance with the US' Records Disposal Act of 1943. According to a congressional approval of 1953, the records thus authorised for disposal were to be donated to the Federal Republic of Germany or, in the case of materials relating to the occupation of friendly countries by Germany, to the respective friendly countries. Between 1956 and 1968, thirty-five shipments comprising more than 8,000 linear metres of German records were returned. German Foreign Office archives and records of the Reichskanzlei of the Third Reich were returned from Great Britain between 1956 and 1958, German naval archives from Great Britain, between 1959 and 1968.37
From the German records that fell into the hands of the Red Army, Soviet authorities returned substantial portions to the German Democratic Republic between 1950 and 1960 and again in the late 1980s. In 1990, parts of the Hanseatic city archives of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck were restituted to the rightful owners in exchange for the Tallinn City Archives, which were returned to Estonia from the German Bundesarchiv.38 The disintegration of the Soviet Union opened the possibility of negotiations for the restitution of foreign material kept in the Moscow Special Archive.39 This material, including, as most prominent booty, French intelligence and counter-intelligence records, had been captured by the Germans and subsequently fallen into the hands of Soviet troops. In 1992, restitution agreements were signed with Belgium, France, Liechtenstein and the Netherlands. However, only France had received any of its archives when, in 1994, restitution was halted due to a resolution of the Russian parliament to suspend further action until the preparation of a comprehensive act on the settlement of all questions relating to cultural property transferred to the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Since then, continued negotiations have led to further restitutions, in particular to France and Austria.40
The archives of German occupation forces were not restituted, nor were the repatriated archives of the Allied occupation forces in Germany. The records of the German commander in France (Militärbefehlshaber Frankreich) were turned over to France. There are also still some seized German textual and non-textual records in US federal custody. Innumerable seized German documents have been incorporated into American files, most notably in the Nuremberg and other US war crimes trial records and into the records of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which leaves only the choice between destroying the integrity of the original German or of the later American file. The victorious powers also seized private records from firms and individuals, for the purpose of war crimes prosecutions. Mention may be made of the confiscation of the records of the IG Farben chemical company for having knowingly engaged in building up German military capacity. Similarly, records of the German Patent Office were seized and transported to the United States.41
The restitution of archives and records after 1945 has not been confined to Europe and not to issues resulting from the Second World War, either. Claims for restitution came up between France and former colonies (Algeria, Vietnam), between France and India on behalf of the former French possessions, between Britain and its former colonies (e.g. Kenya) or between the Netherlands and Indonesia.42 Ethiopian cultural property, including state archives looted during the Italian occupation after 1935, was partly returned in execution of the peace treaty with Italy of 1947 and the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1956.43 Claims to cultural property, looted by the Japanese army after 1937, although without specific reference to archives, have been put forward by China.44 On the other hand, many of the Japanese records seized during the American occupation were held in the United States until 1956.45
After the end of the Second World War, endeavours to prevent the looting of cultural property in the wake of wars gained momentum in the framework of the newly created system of United Nations agencies. Relevant activities with respect to archives have been carried out under the aegis of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), alone and in co-operation with the International Council on Archives (ICA).46 Both organisations have set up structures for promoting discussions on and the resolution of issues of displaced archives. The ICA devoted several of its conferences to the topic of displaced archives and disputed archival claims.47
An important achievement was the UNESCO-monitored Hague Convention of 195448 which gives a precise definition of cultural property that includes archives and tries to maintain a balance between the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflicts, on one hand, and military necessity on the other.49 However, it is limited to provisions for the protection of cultural property in times of war, but does not deal with problems of restitution or return. Further progress was achieved by the Second Protocol to The Hague Convention, issued in 1999,50 which defines more precisely, and thus restricts, the cases of military necessity that allow acts of hostility against cultural property, and which introduces penal provisions for serious violations of the Convention. Moreover, it led to the creation of an Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.51 Recent developments include principles recommended by two UNESCO experts meetings in Paris on the settlement of disputes concerning cultural heritage displaced during the Second World War,52 and, in accordance with the recommendations of The International Congress on Archives 2004, the setting up of a displaced archives working group in the framework of ICA.
Political versus Professional Aspects
Throughout history, the capture and restitution of archives has had political motivations. Securing intelligence material and refuting or supporting war crime charges were ever-present motives for the capture of records; state interests and political friendship, for their restitution. National pride, national interest, mass media campaigns or even, as in the case of the restitution after the Napoleonic wars, the reluctance of custodial institutions to return seized archives53 may be sometimes a greater obstacle to overcome than the legal questions. Practice does not always obey principle; therefore, regardless of what legal principles and guidelines may exist or may be adopted in the future, most fundamental is a spirit of international cooperation and goodwill between the countries involved that, however, may only exist under adequate political conditions.
The illicit removal of records and archives is not always easy to prove. There may be uncertainty about the legal validity of former agreements or treaties authorising the transfer of documents. Individual looting and subsequent purchase in good faith may be obstacles to legal claims for restitution. This is, above all, true where private documents are concerned. In the course of events, and in particular in the course of military operations, public records may fall into private hands and, by subsequent bona fide purchase, become private property. In countries where private property is protected by the law, the state may not have the legal power to force private owners to return archival documents unless it can be proved that national laws have been violated. National legislation, however, may differ considerably with regard to purchase in good faith, even where the legal acquisition of state property by individuals is concerned. According to the nature and stipulations of national legislation, restitution or return in such cases may be achieved only through consent by the private owners and in return for compensation.
The first necessary step with regard to displaced archives is their identification. Very often displaced archives are kept hidden, only known to a restricted number of persons. To keep the secret, free access and use have to be denied, which makes them, in the literal sense of the word, useless material for anybody other than their holders, and even they must avoid referencing the material. At the beginning of the process of identification, there may only be circumstantial evidence, perhaps no more than gaps in the archives. The next step must be a precise description of the records involved with reference to the process of their creation as well as to the circumstances of their displacement to permit appropriate claims or to dismiss inappropriate ones.54 This includes, of course, information about their location at the time when claims are raised. It is equally necessary to know about existing legal agreements with regard to the records in question and about any legal factors that may affect their proprietary status. Not least of all, a thorough knowledge of international legal precedents and of relevant international legislation and discussion (such as United Nation documents) will be needed, as well as knowledge of the literature on the subject.
The preparation of a dossier for claims of restitution and the negotiations for a settlement of such claims are very time-consuming. The time factor also plays an important role insofar as it becomes more difficult to gather information on displaced archives and the possible path of their migration if a long time has passed since their displacement. Also, for this practical reason, it may not seem sensible to raise claims for restitution or return of archival material beyond a certain limit of time. Nobody today would probably think of claiming records captured during the Thirty Years War, quite apart from the fact that those plunders have been sanctioned by the Treaty of Münster. What may also render the task of identification more difficult is the possibility that documents may have become integrated into a foreign file context, for instance, in the case of the Nuremberg trials. Apart from the difficulty of identification, integration in foreign files may raise the question of whether restitution is justified at all, or whether the exchange of quality microform or digital copies and their finding aids would not be an equally satisfactory means of resolving such disputed claims.
Conclusion
The issue of displaced archives has not been brought under normative acts in international law, perhaps due to the lack of interest by the states involved, or fearing for the effects upon their rights of sovereignty. A preference for bilateral and multilateral agreements between states is discernible. A relatively recent example is the agreement between the successor states of the Soviet Union of 6 July 1992 that, although recognising Russia as successor to the Soviet Union with regard to the archives of its central institutions, retains the right of all participating governments to the return of archival holdings created within their territories and having been taken from within their borders. In any case, the transfer of state property cannot take place in a legitimate way without a special legal agreement.55
Restitution or non-restitution may be a controversial issue, but what should be achieved, however, is unrestricted access to displaced archives in the interest of individuals who may be concerned, and for the sake of scholarly research. In the unwanted event of future conflicts involving occupation and/or transfers of territory, it should be made a binding rule that every occupying power that exploits captured archives is obligated to maintain archival and file integrity by leaving all documents in their existing file context. A possible plan of action may include the compilation of a list of displaced archives and of guidelines for the promotion of bilateral or multilateral agreements to overcome the regrettable lack of agreement on generally accepted and recognised principles for the solution of archival claims. Digital technologies provide possible solutions; we look to the ICA's new expert group for leadership in renewed efforts to resolve outstanding archival claims.56
Notes
1 Roundtable Endorsements. SAA, 2013. Cf. also Cox, 2011, pp. 451–481.
2 Kecskeméti, 1976, pp. 311–322, here at p. 313 is speaking of 'le phénomène centralisateur'.
3 Jaroschka, 1979, coll. 41–50; Liess, 2001, pp. 123–154.
4 This aspect is emphasised by Fitschen, 2004, p. 22.
5 This was the case when in 1499 the Swiss gained control over the law-court in the canton of Thurgovia whereas its archives remained in the town of Constance or when, during the war against the count of Tyrol in 1415, they captured the Habsburg family archives at Baden to which they could lay no legitimate claim. Cf. Maurer, 1982, pp. 489–500, here at p. 492ff and p. 499f note 58 and 59.
6 Fitschen, 2004, p. 206, based upon Auer, 1998, pp. 172–178, here at p. 173f.
7 Fitschen, 2004, p. 265f. See now the unpublished thesis by Karabinos, 2015, and his contribution to this volume.
8 For the following European examples of the early modern period cf. Meyer-Landrut, 1953, pp. 45–120, here at pp. 56–58. For Sweden see also Emil Schieche, 1967, pp. 111–133, and Auer, 1992/2, pp. 265–269, here at p. 267.
9 Esch, 1999, pp. 129–147, here at p. 136.
10 Still fundamental are the essays edited by Berque and Chevallier, 1976, and Ghose, 1963. Archives were displaced mainly for reasons of safety or because of the lack of an archive administration as in Morocco; cf. Ayache, 1976, pp. 37–46, here at p. 40f., and El Fasi, 1976, pp. 47–54, here at p. 50f. Examples for archives displaced in the wake of wars, though not for the early modern period, are given by Carrère d'Encausse, 1976, pp. 245–256, here at p. 246 (records of the emirate of Khiva abducted to St. Petersburg and restituted to the Uzbek archives in Taschkent), and at p. 248 (papers of the Tartar leader Ismail Bey Gasprinski abducted to Istanbul). In India parts of the Mughal archives seem to have been included in the material looted by British troops during the mutiny of 1857. Their later destiny is unknown or at least not yet explored, some records are suspected to be kept in the Jaipur State Archives; Ghose, 1963, p. 21 and 29f.
11 Quoted by Toman, 1996, p. 5.
12 Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 58.
13 Quoted by Toman, 1996, p. 5 n. 11.
14 Fitschen, 2004, p. 71.
15 The topic was discussed at a conference in Paris on 1st and 2nd July 2013: Annexer la mémoire, centraliser le savoir dans l'Europe napoléonienne. Archives et bibliothèques de l'Europe à Paris; so far no proceedings have been published. For literature on the issue cf. Ritzler, 1963/64, pp. 144–190; Conde Villaverde and Andrés Díaz, 1996, pp. 119–129, here at p. 120; Fitschen, 2004, pp. 74–78; Auer, 2010, pp. 1–13; Potin, 2013, pp. 84–85. Some interesting examples of displacements of smaller Italian archives during the rule of Napoleon are given by Ernst, 2003, p. 275f.
16 Laborde, 1867, p. 188.
17 Fitschen, 2004, p. 69; Bittner, 1936, p. 20*f.
18 Auer, 1990, pp. XVII–XXIX, here at pp. XVII–XXI; cf. also Fitschen, 2004, p. 70 with note 128.
19 Fitschen, ibid., p. 69f with nn. 124 and 130; Maleczek, 2009, pp. 455–478.
20 Fitschen, 2004, pp. 75–78.
21 Quoted by Toman, 1996, p. 5, and by Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 59 (original version in French).
22 Meyer-Landrut, ibid., pp. 67–69; Fitschen, 2004, pp. 78–81.
23 Quoted by Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 68.
24 Fitschen, 2004, p. 79.
25 Tomán, 1996, p. 7f. Lieber's position is consonant with the American practice as shown by the seizure of archives in Mexico in 1847, and in the Philippines in 1899; cf. Philip Brower, 1963, pp. 191–207, and Montgomery, 2012, pp. 326–370, here at pp. 333f.
26 There exists an abundance of literature on The Hague conferences and their follow-up with respect to cultural property; cf. Fiedler and Turner, 2003, and the select bibliography furnished by Toman, 2009, pp. 846–886. On the Fourth Convention in particular see Laun, 1947; Schindler and Toman (eds.), 2004, pp. 63–98; Die Haager Landkriegsordnung, 2010 (cf. bibliography). The most relevant stipulations are contained in art. 23g, 53 and 56 of the regulations annexed to the Fourth Convention.
27 For the discussion see Fiedler, 1996, pp. 175–183; Toman, 1996, pp. 10–13; Fitschen, 2004, pp. 202–206.
28 Two examples are furnished by Meyer-Landrut, 1953, pp. 61 and 72 note 85, with further reference to additional literature. Cox, 2011, p. 460, draws attention to the head of the State Archives of Antwerp who claimed immunity of his archives from seizure by German authorities with reference to the Hague Convention.
29 Notable examples comprise ministerial archives and archives of the Belgian general staff, seized by the German authorities in Brussels, and restituted due to art. 38 II of the Treaty of Versailles, and captured German records taken into American custody; Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 62, and Brower, 1963, p. 206.
30 Fitschen, 2004, pp. 112–120. See also Auer, 2013, pp. 179–193.
31 Czapliński, 1998, pp. 148–153; Grimsted, 2001, p. 86f.; Fitschen, 2004, p. 128f.
32 The passages relating to World War II and its aftermath, and the sub-chapter on politicial versus professional aspects represent a slightly revised and annotated version of Auer, 1998.
33 The mentioned research activities on World War I intended to exonerate Germany and Austria-Hungary from their responsibility for the outbreak of the war. For the role of captured archives during the Nuremberg war tribunal see Taylor,1974, pp. 92–100. Cf. also Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 66.
34 Meyer-Landrut, ibid., p. 65; Grimsted, 2001, pp. 198–206, 282–299, 318–329.
35 Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 66; Grimsted, 2001, pp. 222–224 and pp. 224–236.
36 Grimsted, ibid., pp. 240–242; Cox, 2011, p. 455.
37 Still fundamental on these issues are Pomrenze, 1974, pp. 5–30, and Wolfe, 1986, pp. 292–302. See also Eckert, 2004; Grimsted, 2001, pp. 243–247, and Fitschen, 2004, pp. 199–205.
38 Grimsted, 2001, pp. 307–309, and Fitschen, 2004, p. 209.
39 On the material kept in the Moscow Special Archive see Browder, 1992, pp. 424–445, Jena and Lenz, 1992, col. 457–467, and Grimsted, 2001, pp. 296–307.
40 Cœuré, 2007; Ermisse and Martinez, 2007, pp. 89–106, here at p. 93f., and Auer, 2011, pp. 51–61, here at p. 53 n. 11.
41 Meyer-Landrut, 1953, p. 207.
42 For archival policies with respect to former colonies see the contribution by Vincent Hirribarren in the present volume, for the disputed archival claims between France and Algeria, see also Ermisse and Martinez, 2007, pp. 90–92.
43 Paper by Richard Pankhurst presented to the Unesco Expert Meeting on the Settlement of Disputes Concerning Cultural Heritage Displaced During the Second World War, Paris, 29–31, May 2000.
44 Paper presented to the UNESCO expert meeting as above. See also Ando, 2003, pp. 14–28.
45 Montgomery, 2012, p. 335, and Cox, 2011, p. 479f.
46 Cf. the surveys by Evans, 1998, pp. 69–78, and Kecskeméti, 1998, pp. 79–85.
47 Warsaw 1961, Cagliari 1977, Thessalonica 1994, Washington 1995; cf. Grimsted, 2001, pp. 88–91, and 104–109.
48 Fundamental for all further research is the comprehensive commentary by Tomán, 1996.
49 For discussion on this issue cf. Tomán, ibid., pp. 74–82.
50 A comprehensive commentary is furnished by Toman, 2009.
51 Cf. art.6, ch. 4 (art. 15–21), and art. 24 of the Second Protocol; Tomán, 2009, pp. 84–120, 245–387, 492–533.
52 Cf. the final reports CLT/2000/CONF/601/3 and CLT/2002/CONF/602/3.
53 Obviously and perhaps understandably, archivists often seem to have problems seeing themselves not as keepers but as dispensers of records.
54 For the need of a thorough description see also Grimsted, 2001, pp. 221–224.
55 Kecskeméti, 1992, pp. 132–140.
56 For a possible future plan of action see also Auer, 1998, pp. 22–24, and Grimsted, 2001, pp. 125–128.
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Karabinos, Michael. The Shadow Continuum: Testing the Records Continuum Model through the Djogdja Documenten and the Migrated Archives. Doctoral thesis, Leiden, 2015.
Kecskeméti, Charles. 'La problématique actuelle des archives'. Les Arabes par leurs archives (XVIe – XXe siècles). Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (eds). Paris, France: Éditions du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1976, ch. XXV, pp. 311–322.
Kecskeméti, Charles. 'Displaced European Archives. Is it Time for a Post War Settlement?' The American Archivist 55, 1992, pp. 132–140.
Kecskeméti, Charles. 'Activities of UNESCO and ICA since 1976. Part Two'. Interdependence of Archives, Proceedings of the 29th, 30th and 31st International Conferences of the Round Table on Archives. Dordrecht, Netherlands: International Council on Archives, 1998, pp. 79–85.
Laborde, Léon Emmanuel Simon Joseph Marquis de. Les Archives de la France, Leurs Vicissitudes Pendant la Révolution, Leur Régénération Sous l'Empire. Paris, France: Librairie Veuve Renouard, 1867.
Laun, Rudolf. Die Haager Landkriegsordnung, 3rd ed. Wolfenbüttel-Hannover, Germany: Wolfenbütteler Verlagsanstalt, 1947.
Liess, Albrecht. 'History of reorganisation and rearrangement of the holdings of the state archives in Bavaria'. Archivalische Zeitschrift 84, 2001, pp. 123–154.
Maleczek, Werner. 'Das Hin und Her der Archivalien zwischen Österreich und Italien. Von der Mitte des 18. bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts'. Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 53, 2009, pp. 455–478.
Maurer, Helmut. 'Die Entstehung der deutsch-schweizerischen Grenze und das Problem der Extradition von Archivalien' in Festschrift für Berent Schwineköper. Helmut Maurer and Hans Patze (eds). Sigmaringen, Germany: Thorbecke, 1982, pp. 489–500.
Meyer-Landrut, Joachim. 'Die Behandlung von staatlichen Archiven und Registraturen nach Völkerrecht'. Archivalische Zeitschrift 48, 1953, pp. 45–120.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'Saddam Hussein's Records of Atrocity: Seizure, Removal, and Restitution'. The American Archivist 75, 2012, pp. 326–370.
Pomrenze, Seymour. 'Policies and Procedures for the Protection, Use, and Return of Captured German Records' Captured German and Related Records. A National Archives Conference. Robert Wolfe (ed). Athens, OH: Ohio Uiversity Press, 1974, pp. 5–30.
Potin, Yann. 'L'Europe à Paris: les archives comme tribut impérial'. Napoléon et l'Europe (exhibition catalogue). Emilie Robbe et François Lagrange (eds). Paris, France: Somogy, 2013, pp. 84–85.
Ritzler, Remigius. 'Die Verschleppung der päpstlichen Archive nach Paris unter Napoleon I. und deren Rückführung nach Rom in den Jahren 1815–1817'. Römische Historische Mitteilungen 6/7, 1963/64, pp. 144–190.
'Roundtable Endorsements: SAA [Society of American Archivists] 2013'. Available at: <http://www2.archivists.org/groups/human-rights-archives-roundtable/roundtable-endorsements> [accessed 11 October 2014].
Schieche, Emil. 'Umfang und Schicksal der von den Schweden 1645 in Nikolsburg und 1648 in Prag erbeuteten Archivalien'. Bohemia 8, 1967, pp. 111–133.
Schindler, Dietrich and Jiří Toman (eds). The Laws of Armed Conflicts: A Collection of Conventions, Resolutions and Other Documents, 4th ed. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 2004.
Taylor, Telford. 'The Use of German Captured and Related Records in the Nürnberg War Crimes Trial'. Captured German and Related Records. A National Archives Conference. Robert Wolfe (ed). Athens, OH: Ohio Uiversity Press, 1974, pp. 92–100.
Toman, Jiří. The Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Paris, France: UNESCO, 1996.
Toman, Jiří. Cultural Property in War: Improvement in Protection. Paris, France: UNESCO, 2009.
Wolfe, Robert. 'Sharing records of mutual archival concern to the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America'. Archivum 32, 1986, pp. 292–302.
9 Pan-European Displaced Archives in the Russian Federation
Still Prisoners of War on the 70th Anniversary of V-E Day
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
The Second World War – with the National-Socialist regime and accompanying Holocaust – wrought the greatest archival destruction and dislocation in history. When combined with retaliatory seizures by the Soviet regime, post-war boundary changes and the Cold War split between East and West, the catastrophe of archival displacements was magnified. Western Allied post-war archival seizures from Germany were likewise of historic proportions, but their restitution to West Germany in the 1960s for the most part, with detailed description and filming before return, is now more transparent. The account by Astrid Eckert, The Struggle for the Files, or in German Kampf um die Akten, provides a helpful overview of the politics involved.1
The full story of the archival devastation and displacements on the Eastern Front is much less known, and many key sources in Russia remain suppressed to this day. It was only with the opening of Soviet archives in the late 1980s and the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1991 that the subject could be openly addressed. The volume Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder and Recent Restitution Issues (2007) with its 'Afterword 2013' could only begin to recount the extent to which the archival heritage of many nations was displaced to the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War and many components returned to Eastern Europe before its collapse.2 It was only with the simultaneous emergence of an independent Russian Federation with its own archival administration at the beginning of 1992, that serious negotiations for returns to Western Europe were possible. Having been closely involved with the revelations about the wide range of captured European archives remaining in Russia in October 1991, to be discussed below, I have been following the fate of 'displaced' archives in Russia ever since. (Western archivists would usually use the term 'captured records', but Russians prefer the less accusatory term 'displaced'.)
The present account provides an updated summary, with a few examples to reflect some of the perplexing problems in wartime dispersal and remaining hoped-for restitution.3 While emphasis here is on the fate of archives centralised in Moscow's Central State Special Archive (Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi arkhiv SSSR, or TsGOA SSSR), it should not be forgotten that the captured archives brought to the USSR were dispersed to archives throughout the country. For example, while significant collections of socialist and revolutionary records were destined for the Central Archive of the Communist Party, materials of Russian émigré or exile provenance, or archival Rossica, as they are often known, were deposited in secret divisions of other central state archives in Moscow and Leningrad; but neither of those categories, even if clearly of foreign provenance or ownership, were – or are today – considered candidates for possible restitution.4
A day after the rest of Europe celebrated the Seventieth Anniversary of V-E Day on the 7 May 2015, Russia celebrated the Seventieth Anniversary of the Soviet Victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, with the largest ever military parade through Red Square. It was as if the Soviet Union had fought and triumphed in a unique and different war. The discrepancy in dates, and the fact that Western leaders shunned the Moscow celebration, were but more symbols of the persisting, and recently intensified, continental divide.
Meanwhile across the city, the remaining 'displaced' archival 'trophies' gathered in the wake of the victorious Soviet march to Berlin, were being transferred to the main building of the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv or RGVA). By the end of the summer of 2015, the building on Vyborgskaia ulitsa, constructed by German prisoners-of-war for the former Special – or, in Russian, Osobyi – Archive (TsGOA) to house the millions of captured foreign archives brought to Moscow, was handed over to the neighbouring Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI).5 While the greatest bulk of captured records – or 'trophy' archives – long 'displaced' in that Moscow building have now been returned to their European homes, victory in Europe is still not complete: all too many archival prisoners-of-war from countries throughout the continent remain far from home – many twice captured during the war and its aftermath. Despite Soviet victory seventy years ago and Russian celebration today, they remain a symbol that the war is still not over, even as they are further integrated into the RGVA.
Yet it is important to remember that the Western leaders who understandably shunned the Russian victory celebration in 2015 will still have to contend with a resurgent Russian Federation if they want to see more of their archives, books and other cultural treasures come home. It took presidential-level politics to produce the diplomatic agreement in November 1992 that brought two-thirds of the seven linear kilometers of displaced French 'trophy' archives home before the Russian Duma (parliament) curtailed restitution in May 1994 and sent the French trucks home empty. Chief archivist of the Netherlands, Eric Ketelaar, may have been the first (in March 1992) to sign an agreement for return of the captured Dutch archives, but most of them made their homeward journey only a decade later in 2002 and 2003, when Queen Beatrix drank a toast with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin after the final official Government Decree was enacted permitting their return.6
Displaced foreign cultural treasures held in Russia have been one of the dramatic revelations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, while Russia's failure to return them to the countries of their provenance, and the lengthy negotiations for those returned, have been one of the thorniest elements in Russia's foreign relations. Archives constituted a small percentage of the overall Soviet cultural plunder. Unlike art, however, many foreign archives were seized more for potential intelligence utilisation and political control, and hence should hardly be considered 'compensation', 'compensatory restitution' or 'cultural reparations'. For example, early in April 1945, Soviet NKVD security chief, Lavrentii Beria, recommended to Viacheslav Molotov, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, a special mission 'to search thoroughly through all German archives and libraries ... and bring to the Soviet Union materials ... that have scientific-historical and operational significance for our country'.7 Estimates of the quantity of archives captured by different Soviet agencies are still virtually impossible. Various shipments were measured alternately in freight cars, crates or tons, and many included printed books and art – or in one case, nine freight cars of steel document cases and shelving – along with the records themselves.
After the Khrushchev thaw in the late 1950s, many 'trophy' cultural treasures from East Germany and Eastern Europe were returned to their homelands in the Communist bloc. Simultaneously, as the Soviet Union became active in the International Council on Archives, many millions of files 'saved by the Soviet Army' were restituted to Eastern-bloc countries before 1991. Such returns were positively portrayed as the Soviet role of 'helping other countries reunify their national archival heritage'.8 As publicly expressed in 1968,
in strict adherence to international legal norms and respectful of the sovereign law of peoples and their national historical and cultural legacy, the Soviet government transferred to the Democratic Republic of Germany archival materials rescued by the Soviet Army after the defeat of Hitlerite Germany ... more than two million archival files (from the 14th century to 1945).9
Although the international legal norms have not essentially changed, the Russian respect for archives as the inalienable 'national historical and cultural legacy' of foreign countries has noticeably dwindled after more became known abroad about the captured records still in Moscow.
As glasnost took hold in February 1990, a Russian journalist's 'Five days in the Special Archive' broke the sensational story and publicly revealed the extent of captured German National-Socialist (N-S) period records that remained in that building. She was the first to have mentioned the top-secret Central State Special Archive (TsGOA SSSR) in print a year earlier, when microfilms of the long-suppressed 'death books' from the Auschwitz concentration camp were finally turned over to the International Red Cross.10 But it was another year and a half before the world knew that there were also captured state and private archives in Moscow from countries all over Europe, including long-lost French military intelligence and national security records, to say nothing of voluminous Masonic files and private papers of prominent Jews. An October 1991 interview with me by a Russian journalist friend, Evgenii Kuz'min, first revealed to the public over seven linear kilometres of French records that had been hidden for half a century.11 When, a year earlier, I first found a Soviet file about the discovery of French archives in a German Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office - RSHA) Amt IV intelligence centre in a remote village in Czechoslovakia and Beria's orders for their transport to Moscow in July 1945, I had no idea what had happened to them, nor did my Russian archival colleagues. I privately queried a prominent French archivist I knew, only to find the French did not know either, or at least were not prepared to reveal their suspicions.
A week after the interview with me was published in Moscow, Anatolii Prokopenko, the director of the top-secret Special Archive confirmed and elaborated on the findings of the 'well-known "archival" spy Grimsted,' in a follow-up interview entitled 'Archive of French spies revealed on Leningrad highway!12 As Western journalists rushed to Moscow, followed by archivists and researchers, word came back: Yes, there were indeed archives also from Belgium, the Netherlands and the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein. Even the Rothschild family was well represented in the Special Archive. I was not permitted in the archive for another year, by which time Prokopenko was no longer director.
Soon after the story of captured French records became front-page news, the International Council on Archives convened a colloquium in Paris in June 1992. When Russian deputy chief archivist, Vladimir Kozlov, stepped off the plane, the director of the Archives Nationales queried his Russian counterpart, 'How soon can we send transport to pick up our archives?'13 Although Franco-Russian diplomatic agreements were rushed to signature in November 1992, providing for the return of French archives by the end of 1993, the full return of the French archives took another ten years. Indeed today, some important French files still remain in RGVA.14
Nevertheless, restitution in the archival world from Russia has fared much better than has been the case with art and library books. While we still know much less about all the 'hidden treasures' in museums, libraries and private collections, we now know much more about the foreign archives brought to the Soviet Union at the end of the war, even if many of the descriptions remain rudimentary. Yet, it was not until 2001 that RGVA and the Russian archival agency, Rosarkhiv, issued an official unannotated list of fonds (record groups) covering most of the foreign holdings in RGVA 'displaced as a result of the Second World War'. Published with German support, that volume lists fonds, usually with names of their creating foreign agencies in the original language. Regrettably, the online version of that 2001 RGVA publication has not been updated to take account of the considerable restitution since 1992.15 Meanwhile, in March 1999, the former Special Archive, euphemistically re-baptised in 1992 as the Centre for the Preservation of Historico-Documentary Collections (TsKhIDK), was abolished as a separate repository and merged with the RGVA nearby.16
When accepted as a member of the Council of Europe in January 1996, the Russian Federation was required to commit itself to the restitution of cultural treasures and specifically archives – among a number of other intents – namely '(§ xiv) to settle rapidly all issues related to the return of property claimed by Council of Europe member states, in particular the archives transferred to Moscow in 1945'.17 Such promises were never publicised in Russia and were blatantly overlooked by the Duma. Restitution hardly moved rapidly. Indeed, Russia has not been prepared to hand archives – or any other cultural property – over to their legitimate owners without a complicated claims process involving lengthy state-to-state negotiations, often as long as ten years, for 'compensation' and 'exchange' of Rossica in return, even for those identified as owned by Holocaust or other Nazi victims.
With the collapse of the Iron Curtain and more open Russian contacts with the Western World, reform-minded Russian archival leaders were quick to lament the extent of Russian archival and manuscript heritage that had been alienated abroad. Eager hands went out for lost fragments of the Russian archival legacy, dispersed through exile or emigration of Russian cultural and political leadership, even if created abroad, backed by a Russian law supporting return to the homeland. Already in 1992, while foreign archivists preached the importance of restitution, Rosarkhiv viewed their captured or 'trophy' archives in Moscow as 'capital' for potential exchange for important components of archival Rossica from claimant countries.18
Upward of two-thirds of the French archives had gone home by 1994, for which France had paid almost half a million dollars for 'storage charges', microfilming and other fees, along with some significant archival Rossica in 'exchange' from France. At that point, however, France was the only country to have received any of its archives from Moscow since 1991, despite other signed agreements. Then the Duma abruptly put restitution on hold for several years while it debated a law to nationalise all the cultural valuables 'displaced to the Russian Federation as a result of the Second World War'. Nevertheless, there was a sign of progress with the return of the Liechtenstein archives in July 1997, although billed as an 'exchange' for rather costly Rossica the Grand Duchy was required to purchase. And then, despite the restitution stalemate, the Duma agreed to permit the return of the twice-captured records of British expeditionary forces, copies of which had been turned over to British authorities earlier.19
It took ten years from the revelations about displaced cultural treasures for the Russian Federation to develop a legal basis and procedures for processing restitution claims. After three years' debate, the Duma almost unanimously passed a law that President Boris Yeltsin (earlier vetoed) was obliged to sign in 1998 that essentially nationalised the cultural and archival booty 'displaced' to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. With its May 2000 amendments that President Vladimir Putin signed, the law prohibits restitution of any cultural treasures (with no distinction for archives) to Germany and its wartime allies (including Austria and Hungary).20 The provisions for restitution to 'victims of the Nazi regime and those who fought against it' – although the term was rather 'exchange' – are carefully limited as noted above, involving 'exchange' and usually high financial charges by the Russian side, including storage, appraisal, microfilming and processing fees. Subsequent directives provided for implementation with required approval of each instance through an Interagency Council on Restitution, along with various elaborate supplemental governmental regulatory acts along the way. In Russian law, the return of archives was never singled out differently than other cultural valuables.
While the restitution of art and library books has faltered, between 1993 and 2009 archives have been returned to seven countries – France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Austria and Great Britain, as well as the Rothschild family archives from Austria to The Rothschild Archive in London (the only return – qua 'exchange' – to a private family).21 All were carried out under the terms of the 1998/2000 law, even if several took place before the law was signed. The archival returns to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, along with the Rothschild family are all described by archivists responsible for the negotiations in the book, Returned from Russia, first published in 2007.22
The Austrian Case
Because Austria had been part of the German Reich, restitution of the extensive Austrian component from the Special Archive was more complicated, even requiring a new Duma law, and has yet to be completed. Most of the over 100 Austrian fonds were identified in an annotated guide in 1996, compiled by Austrian specialists Gerhard Jagschitz and Stefan Karner.23 The first major restitution to Austria in 2009 transferred 51 fonds with 10,770 files, comprising approximately 80 per cent of the Austrian archives in Moscow. Austria paid 'compensation' of €400,000, according to an Austrian press account, calculated according to the 1998 law, for storage fees, microfilming and related charges.24 Yet, even with the 2013 updated paper edition of Returned from Russia, we could not include a chapter on Austria, because at least thirty-two more archival fonds of Austrian provenance, most of them Jewish, were still being prepared for transfer, first planned for the end of 2010, but still pending in 2016.25
One matter complicating restitution negotiations with Austria is that some of the Hebrew manuscripts from the Jewish Community in Vienna – Israëlitische Kultusgemeinde (IKJ – fond 707k) and other Jewish sources that arrived in Moscow from Silesia in 1945 – were transferred in the late 1940s from the Special Archive to the Lenin Library, now the Russian State Library (RGB). Obviously, those should go home with the rest of the IKG legacy. In a few cases, contingent parts of the same manuscript can be found in the RGB and the RGVA, as is apparent in an illustrated catalogue published in Moscow in 2005, sponsored by the Commission on Art Recovery (New York) in the 'Heritage Revealed' series.26 Those manuscripts were not catalogued in the RGB until recently, and some were allegedly stolen and sold off to under-the-table dealers. A part of one fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscript that emerged from Israel on auction in New York was confiscated by US Customs and returned to Vienna in 2003 – the first IKG manuscript to be returned since the war.27 Austrian Jewish archivists who visited Moscow were permitted to examine and verify the Austrian Jewish manuscripts still in the RGB, but it remains unclear if they all will be included in the next transfer to Austria. When I recently queried the RGVA directors about the possible cause for delay, I was told that Austrian Jewish specialists had not come for long enough to identify adequately all the Jewish files of Austrian provenance to be claimed for return.
Greece: Jewish Community and Related Records
One of the most vocal in a series of ICA efforts to promote archival restitution in the wake of the Moscow revelations was the 1994 Conference of the International Round Table on Archives (CITRA) in Thessalonica, devoted thematically to divided and displaced archives. The concluding resolution of that conference, passed almost unanimously by the heads of the world's national archives, declared that archives should not be used as 'trophies' or 'objects of exchange'.28 Having been invited by the ICA as a guest specialist, I was sitting near the Russian delegates and happened to notice they were among only three countries to abstain from the vote. Nonetheless, since the ICA 1994 resolution, I have noticed professional archivists in Russia usually seem to avoid the term 'trophies', despite its regular use in the media!
Not mentioned during the CITRA proceedings were the dispersed records of the Thessalonica Sephardic Jewish Community, almost 95 per cent of whom perished in the Holocaust. Neither I, nor probably any of the world archival leaders assembled, were aware at the time that 297 files from the Thessalonica Jewish Community were in Moscow, where they remain today. Some of them even contain community registration photographs of many individuals who perished in the Holocaust. And there is a small fond of records from the Jewish Community in Athens, and a few other fragmentary Greek fonds as well from the former Special Archive.29 I first learned about them after I received a telephone inquiry from Greece, and then they were mentioned as an example at the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998.
The current dispersal of the Jewish community archives from Thessalonica is an unusually complicated case, but a blatant example of the wartime archival catastrophe. The 297 files in Moscow comprise but one of several widely displaced portions. A large shipment from Thessalonica of the initial batch of books and archival materials, seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in 1941, went to the NSDAP Institute for Research on the Jewish Question (IEJ) in Frankfurt. Some of those found after the war were brought to the US Army run Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) outside Frankfurt and returned to Greece in 1946, together with fragmentary files from other Greek Jewish communities.30 When the decimated Jewish communities in Greece were not prepared to provide for their appropriate archival care in the immediate post-war period, they were sent on deposit to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem. Today they constitute a special Greek Collection, with 462 files from the Thessalonica Community Archives.31
Another segment of Thessalonica Jewish Community archives, apparently found after the war in Berlin, were transferred to the Institute for Jewish Research in New York City (YIVO). Recently, YIVO has digitised those original Thessalonica files and generously transferred digital copies at no cost to the community in Thessalonica.32 When I recently inquired of one of the RGVA directors about the delay in the return of Greek files, he retorted that the United States had yet to return the original Thessalonica files to Greece. I told him I was not aware of any formal claim from Greece to YIVO in New York, and that the US government could not require a private institution, such as YIVO, to turn over archives they held that I believed were legitimately acquired after the war.
In the meantime, RGVA had already sold the right to film copies of the Greek files to a project at Tel Aviv University, as well as complete microfilm copies to the US Holocaust Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. English-language finding aids have been prepared by Devin Naar for the copies from Moscow in Washington, as well the other original segments in New York and Jerusalem, in connection with his doctoral dissertation.33 Reportedly, RGVA subsequently proposed charging the Greek Government for another set of microfilms to be retained in Moscow (where no one can read the Ladino in Sephardic script, in which many of the documents are written), before letting the originals return home. Negotiations have continued but the formal Greek claim, submitted in 2008, was countered with a Russian demand for the Greek government to return some pre-revolutionary Russian consular records discovered in Greece.
In the meantime, indicative of the complexity of dispersal, Dutch archivists found a few additional fragmentary Jewish files from Thessalonica intermixed with Dutch Jewish files returned to the Netherlands from Berlin in the 1970s, and a few more among the fond from RGVA devoted to Jewish organisations in the Netherlands, returned from Moscow in 2003. In August 2008, Dutch archivists personally delivered the originals of those files to the Jewish Community in Thessalonica – the first received from the twice-plundered Moscow-held Greek archives to return home.
Why should it take over twenty years to negotiate the return of the files from the Greek Jewish Community of Thessalonica, of which 95 percent of its consistency were deported and murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War, after its library and archives were seized by a special commando of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg? When I posed the question to the head of the Greek Foreign Ministry Archives in Athens in June 2014, she assured me that the Greek archives would be home from Moscow by the end of the year. She and her colleagues had been negotiating for their return since the mid-1990s. Presumably, however, the return of the displaced Greek archives were not a high agenda priority during more recent meetings between Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Masonic Files Still Unidentified in RGVA
Another blatant example of the complex dispersal of files from Austria and Greece, and even remaining files from France, is the largest collection of Masonic archives ever assembled, large parts of which remain in Moscow today. Masonic archives from all over the European continent were brought together during the Second World War by the Seventh Office (Amt VII) of the RSHA. First collected in the buildings of the two largest Masonic lodges in Berlin that were taken over as Gestapo headquarters, the collection was evacuated to Silesia in 1943. A Masonic research centre occupied one of Himmler's favourite castles on the Schlesiersee (post-war Polish Sława) until January 1945. Most of the Masonic archival collections, however, together with some portraits and regalia, ended the war in a former brewery in the RSHA archival evacuation site in the village of Wölfelsdorf (post-war Polish Wilkanów) further southeast, and were all brought to Moscow on Beria's order in the autumn of 1945.
Those Wölfelsdorf collections also included some of the Masonic archives that had been among the first ERR seizures from France and Belgium that the ERR were subsequently required to transfer to the RSHA. The ERR, however, retained some of its Masonic archives until the end of the war, many of which they had evacuated with their research collections to Ratibor (post-war Polish Racibórz), including Masonic files from Paris and Bordeaux. Most of those were captured a second time at the end of the war by Soviet trophy scouts: part went in a major shipment of 54 freight train cars of books and archives to the Belarus capital of Minsk, while others went together with the large group of ERR archives to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Those foreign Masonic files were ordered to Moscow in the early 1950s, but somehow contingent fragments remained in Minsk and surfaced only recently, as reported by a Belarus historian in Paris in 2015.34 As an example of further post-war dispersal, another small segment of French Masonic files found in Silesia by the Poles after the war were presented by the head of the Polish archives to his French counterpart in 1960 and are now held in the French National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.35
Many German Masonic files were returned from Moscow to the German Democratic Republic towards the end of the Soviet period, and many Masonic fonds devoted to files from specific lodges in the former Special Archive have been returned to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg since 1991.36 Of particular concern in Moscow today is the voluminous pan-European Masonic collection (RGVA, fond 1412k). Even following the transfer to the Netherlands in 2003 of 290 Dutch Masonic files identified from that fond by Dutch Masonic archivist Evert Kwaadgras, the collection still contains 14,291 files from all over Europe, including many from Germany.37 Two Austrian Masonic scholars, Helmut Reinalter and Helmut Keiler, were responsible for the publication of a German translation of the six-volume Russian-language finding aids (opisi) for that collection in 2002. Regrettably, however, the files themselves were not examined in connection with that publication, and hence the many incorrect file descriptions (and provenance attributions) found in the Soviet-period finding aid are unfortunately perpetrated in the German edition.38
Significantly affecting delay in the Austrian archival return, RGVA archivists report that no Austrian Masonic specialist has come to examine and submit their official list of files to be claimed, some from fonds for specific lodges and others within that collection (fond 1412k). Jagschitz and Karner reported some 4,660 files from 45 Austrian Masonic lodges in 1996, but they were unable to complete the descriptive task and suggest further verification is needed of many more.39 Thus far, the 290 Masonic files returned to the Netherlands are the only files to have been withdrawn from the massive pan-European collection, but there are still more files of Dutch provenance left behind.40
During the past five years, Norwegian Masonic historian and archivist, Helge Horrisland, has diligently combed fond 1412k for files of Norwegian provenance, in the course of long hours on many expensive, and often frustrating, trips to Moscow. He uncovered 'close to 5,000 Norwegian files', seized from Oslo in 1941 and 1942. In late 2011, according to Rosarkhiv procedures, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry filed a provisional list to be claimed. When I visited his lodge in Oslo in the summer of 2013, Horrisland assured me that I would be invited again when the Norwegian files returned home (then expected by 2014). I have yet to receive an invitation to Oslo because, in the meantime, RGVA archivists questioned 151 files on Horrisland's list, for which he since prepared lengthy counter explanations. The controversy was apparently resolved by autumn 2015, and a formal diplomatic claim was submitted in early 2016, with hopes for the long-awaited transfer soon.
A conference on 'anti-Masonry' brought Horrisland and me together in October 2010 in the Canonbury Masonic Centre in Islington, North London, where, following my keynote lecture and Horrisland's illustrated presentation on the fate of Masonic archives during the war, we also spread the word about the Moscow collection to Masonic specialists from several other European countries. Horrisland has since identified some '50 Greek files, some quite bulky' in the collection at the request of a Greek Masonic brother who took part in that conference and learned for the first time that there were Greek Masonic files in Moscow. To be sure, a Greek Masonic specialist should identify those, so they can be included in the still unfulfilled Greek archival claim. In addition, Horrisland 'found scattered material from former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and as well as many files from lodges in Germany and Austria'. He also noted 'several hundred files registered in the finding aid from Denmark and Sweden, but that is a registration error,' he claims. 'Neither of these countries were robbed of their Masonic archives.... They remain intact both in Copenhagen and Stockholm. As far as I can see those files are mostly German archivalia that have been wrongly identified' in the Soviet finding aids.41 Even given restrictions on restitution under the 1998/2000 Russian Cultural Property Law, all of those files captured by the Nazi regime from declared Masonic 'enemies of the Reich', should be eligible for return to their homelands.
Remaining Archival Prisoners-of-War
'How many "trophy" files from how many European countries were part of the recent transport from the original Special Archive building to the main RGVA building?' I queried RGVA deputy director, Vladimir Korotaev, who has long been in charge of the foreign captured records from the former Special Archive. 'The number has not changed for several years', he explained. Thus presumably RGVA still holds 593 fonds of captured records, with more than 234,000 file units, dating from the fifteenth century to 1945, as recorded earlier in the ArcheoBiblioBase description.42 That figure is down from the estimated four and a half million files of captured records when the Special Archive first emerged from its top-secret wraps and opened to researchers in June 1992 as the TsKhIDK.
Archival materials of provenance in Germany and Poland are the most voluminous national components remaining today in RGVA. Return to Germany is forbidden by Russian law, although that law contradicts the Soviet-German Treaty on Good Neighbourliness, Partnership and Cooperation signed in 1990, the additional Agreement between Rosarkhiv and the Bundesarchiv signed in July 1992, and the Russian-German Cultural Agreement of 1993, all clearly providing for restitution to Germany. German and Russian archivists are not optimistic about a change of Russian government policy, given the vehemence of anti-restitution sentiment in Russian political circles and in the public at large. Photocopies have been handed over for some of the Nazi concentration-camp records remaining in Russia, such as those from Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz (now in Poland), but the originals – even including Auschwitz card files and death books – remain in RGVA. Details are still not openly available about additional files from German concentration camps that are held by the Federal Security Service (FSB; successor of the KGB), which are known to contain more Sachsenhausen and Trawniki files among others.
Despite Russian recalcitrance for repatriation of German archives from the N-S period, a positive cooperative step between German and Russian archivists is exemplified in the joint project for microfilming and database description of the records of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG/SMAD). Despite the announced 'success' of that project, some vital files from the SVAG/SMAD remain classified in Moscow. Legally, those are Russian agency records, although considered of 'joint heritage', as opposed to captured records of German agency provenance.43 For example, of crucial importance for other countries as well as for Germany, still-classified SVAG files contain scattered documentation about many Soviet-seized cultural valuables, including archives that were transported to the Soviet Union under SVAG auspices – to say nothing of major reparation shipments.
Even more essential for tracing Russian wartime cultural losses and post-war retrieval, the SVAG records also contain a crucial series of files documenting Western Allied restitution to the Soviet Union from Germany. Regrettably, many of the most important relevant files are now reclassified – albeit also displaced – in the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE). Recently, a large group of long-lost files from the SVAG Administration for Reparations and Deliveries (Upravlenie reparatsii i postavok SVAG), and its subdivision for Restitution were identified among records of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade in the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE, fond 413, opis' 16), finally declassified after 2006.44 Since my discovery and identification of those documents in the summer of 2009, however, the entire series has been reprocessed in RGAE, and almost all of the RVAG documents relating to the restitution and retrieval of cultural valuables have been withdrawn from the separate 'collection' that now replaces the earlier opis' 16 within that fond; currently reclassified, they are again closed for public research.45 Given recent Ministry of Culture regulations against communication of documents relating to post-war restitution and retrieval of cultural property, RGAE has not publicly acknowledged their SVAG provenance. Nor have they been willing to transfer those files to the neighbouring State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF) so they could be united with the other records of the same SVAG Administration for Reparations and Deliveries.46
The most complete list of fonds for what Soviet archivists referred to as the 'German Division' of the Special Archive is now found – not on the RGVA website where researchers would expect it – but rather on the unofficial German website 'Sonderarchiv' maintained by Sebastian Panwitz in Berlin (which also includes Austrian records). Some of those listings conveniently render German versions of the original Soviet finding aids.47 Problems still arise for researchers, however, because many of the files in Moscow are not optimally arranged or accurately described in sufficient detail. Most crucial for research, they need to be correlated and integrated with other segments of the same record groups now held in Germany or elsewhere.
The extensive German N-S period wartime records held in Moscow deserve particular attention in this connection, because many are essential for research on various topics relating to the Nazi period, and specifically for our focus on research about Nazi-era displaced cultural assets. In contrast to Soviet authorities, it should be remembered, in the 1960s, the British and Americans returned almost all the German (including N-S period) records they had captured to West Germany, many of which came from the same German agency record groups captured by the Red Army in 1945 and 1946 that still remain in Moscow.48 For example, records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, including SD and Gestapo), the Reichsarchiv, the Heeresarchiv (Military Archives), and the ERR all belong to contingent files in corresponding record groups in the Bundesarchiv. Those were all prominent German agencies of archival plunder, and hence their continuing location in Moscow seriously impedes and complicates research.49 The much larger component of ERR files in Kyiv (captured by Ukrainian authorities at the end of the war) have been available online since 2011, with improvements in their description still pending.50 For example, French military archivists have recently been trying to analyse German 'utilisation' of the Russian-captured French military records returned to France, but their findings will remain incomplete without careful study of the German-prepared wartime inventories of those French records and related documents that still remain with the Heeresarchiv fonds in Moscow.51
Even under the restrictive 1998 Russian law on cultural property that forbids cultural returns to Germany, the return of private German Jewish archives and some others that were clearly 'enemies of the N-S regime' should nonetheless be legally possible. These should include the personal papers of prominent German cultural leaders who fled to France and were stripped of their German citizenship. Despite the initiative of archivists from the Bundesarchiv together with Jewish archival specialists from Berlin in identifying the displaced German Jewish files remaining in the RGVA in the past decade, the German government has not pressed a claim for those important Jewish documents. In part, the German government does not want to recognise the 1998 law that goes against the Soviet-German and Russian-German treaties and agreements. Besides, priority German concern with a much higher stake rests with the unsuccessful negotiations for the return of art masterpieces of German provenance and other German cultural treasures seized at the end of the war, many of which remain still unidentified and inaccessible in the Russian Federation.
'Why Haven't the Polish Archives Come Home?'
Return of all of the Polish records displaced as a result of the Second World War in the RGVA, by contrast, should be much more legitimate under terms of the same Russian law. Already in April 1992, Poland was among the first to sign an Agreement on Archival Cooperation with the Russian State Archival Committee (Roskomarkhiv, now Rosarkhiv), which provided for 'return of documents to their legal owners ... on the basis of appropriate agreements'; it is still listed today on the Rosarkhiv official website among active Russian archival agreements with foreign countries and quoted in an official 2010 Russian publication.52
So then 'Why Haven't Polish Archives Come Home?'53 The Polish case, alas, is much more complicated. Poland was clearly part of the Communist bloc before 1989 and should have benefited from the internationalist archival restitution policies in which Soviet authorities indulged, as publicly explained in Soviet archival and historical journals.
A more detailed Polish account of Soviet revindication of archives through 1964 appeared in 1982.54 Recently, Rosarkhiv chief, Vladimir Kozlov, estimated that in the years 1956–1958, 1961, 1963 and 1967, Soviet archival authorities transferred no less than 100 fonds and about 300,000 files to Poland.55 The Polish Archival Directorate (NDAP) Director-General Władysław Stępniak suggested a smaller number, and noted many of the Soviet-period transfers were incomplete, 'sterilized' fonds. Portions of the same fonds not returned were kept in secret until the collapse of the Soviet Union, but are now publicly described in some detail.56
As telling examples of a lack of humanitarian concern, it was 1989 before Russia gave copies of prisoner-of-war and concentration camp files from Poland to the Red Cross. Indeed, the original Auschwitz construction records remain in Moscow, although Poland did receive limited, selected microfilms for the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum.57 Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did Poland finally receive the death books (1941–1943) from Auschwitz, which were also captured when the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in 1945.58
While the Russian 2001 list of fonds in the RGVA provides no annotations, in the case of Poland, ninety Polish fonds in the RGVA are much better described in a book-length Polish-language guide published in 2000 in Warsaw by the NDAP, prepared in bilateral archival collaboration.59 Most of those records were captured by Soviet authorities rather than the Germans, yet all of those listed in the RGVA should be subject to return under the 1998/2000 Russian law. However, the Russians are raising rather curious difficulties for some of the materials. For example, they are arguing that the seventy-nine remaining files from the records of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig (Senat der Freien Stadt Danzig – fond 1353k) should not be returned to Poland because Danzig (now Polish Gdańsk) was not part of Poland before 1945. Given their provenance, however, on what grounds should they remain in Russia? In fact, other portions of the same group of records were returned to Poland during the Soviet period and are now held in the State Archive in Gdańsk, which obviously would be a more appropriate archival home for the remaining files of the Danzig Senate than in the RGVA in Moscow.
The Polish-published 2000 guide to records in Moscow, also describes the voluminous 103 fonds of Polish provenance now held in the GA RF. Polish archivists, understandably, also insist in claiming those records from the post-partitions period of Russian imperial rule created on Polish territories before 1918, which should have been returned under earlier treaties and bilateral archival agreements. That issue complicates the matter, because those records, most of which were evacuated east during the First World War, are not covered by the 1998 law. As the Polish guide carefully demonstrates, however, other parts of the same record groups returned earlier from the Soviet Union are held in the Archive of Contemporary Records (Archiwum Akt Nowykh – AAN) and local archives in Poland.60
Given the seriousness of the dispersed Polish archival heritage, particularly as a result of the partitions and many subsequent boundary changes, Poland was singled out by the ICA and the European Union (EU) during the 1990s for a much more comprehensive pilot project for 'The Reconstitution of the Memory of Poland', an extensive database inventory of archival documents for the history of Poland in European countries, covering the period starting with the Polish partitions at the end of the eighteenth century.61 Now based at the University of Warsaw with NDAP and EU sponsorship, the database continues to expand, in an effort to overcome wartime destruction and dispersal of archives over the centuries.
From the even earlier pre-partition period, the record books of the Lithuanian and Crown Metrica, clearly of provenance first in Vilnius and then in Kraków, still remain in the Russian State Archive of Early Acts (RGADA) in Moscow. Most of those records were captured by order of Catherine the Great, following the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, and slated for transfer to Poland according to the 1921 Treaty of Riga. Although finally open to researchers from all countries since 1992, Russians still consider them off-limits for restitution to the country of provenance. Nevertheless, they should be considered of 'joint-archival heritage' for Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, even while Russia claims predominant interest because many of the lands covered became part of the Russian Empire.62
Such examples of 'joint heritage' contrast to the many important groups of records for which there could well be legitimate claims from other independent nations that were part of the Russian and/or Soviet Empires. Currently, such claims prove next to impossible to realise, however, faced with the Russian unilateral position, as formulated in 1992, of non-devolution of centrally created records of imperial rule to any of the former Soviet republics, and even separate fonds totally of territorial provenance within the former republics. Signatures were required by members of what was then considered the Commonwealth of Independent States.
My 2001 monograph, entitled Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution, discusses relevant international law and usage relating to archives, with abundant examples of the now 'displaced' Ukrainian archival legacy. An initial chapter discusses the minimal Russian sensitivity to the archival pretentions of former Soviet republics.63 Unfortunately, Poland also must contend with such Russian archival policies for successor states of the Russian Empire, given the fact that large parts of Poland were for centuries part of that empire. The Polish insistence on 'territorial provenance', and often even 'territorial pertinence', has in many cases been ruled out, which means that archival restitution claims from Poland for pre-1918 records will remain much more difficult than claims from Western Europe for records acquired during and since the end of the Second World War in the former Special Archive that have successfully Returned from Russia. Today, however, when even Polish apples are among the Russian retaliatory sanctions on imports, the prospects for speedy archival restitution do not look bright.
Conclusion
The archives of foreign provenance brought to Russia, along with the voluminous other cultural 'spoils of war', represent symbols of the victory that Russians celebrate in what many still call the Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland. Many Russians overlook the fact that the 'trophy' archives – hidden away for fifty years – are in reality the official records of other European countries – many of them Soviet wartime allies – who also fought in the same war against the Nazi regime and who also suffered severe wartime losses and destruction. In many cases, they represent the memory of individuals and institutions that were clearly victims of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, to say nothing of 'their national historical and cultural legacy', as Soviet archivists publicly acknowledged.
Too many Russian politicians, government officials, as well as the population at large, remain convinced that they got back all too little of what was plundered by the invader, and that whatever foreign-owned cultural treasures still remain in Russia are inadequate 'compensation' for their country's cultural losses, to say nothing of their lost loved ones. Soviet, and more recently Russian Government rhetoric and archival restrictions reinforce such attitudes. Sources open abroad today clearly demonstrate the extent of restitution to the Soviet Union by the Western Allies, and especially the United States.64 Other sources demonstrate the extent of Soviet retrieval of cultural property seized by the German invaders from the Russian Federation and other Soviet republics – although unlike private property in the West, most of the major German seizures were from state institutions.
The Russian regime today apparently wants to preserve the belief that 'nothing was returned' by classifying sources that would tell otherwise. Indeed, today in Russia many of the archival sources and publications that tell a more complete story are not easily available, and such information has not reached the body politic. The recent increased 'reclassification' of relevant Russian sources, such as the SVAG reparations and restitution files, impedes the needed research that could result in a more balanced account and contradict the 'nothing was returned' arguments of Russian nationalist politicians. Meanwhile restitution remains an almost taboo principle in the Russian Federation, particularly if it refers to the potential Russian return of cultural property 'displaced as a result of the Second World War' to victims abroad. Yet how can files from another country's archival heritage 'compensate' the Russian nation, and who in Russia can read the Ladino documents of the Thessalonica Jewish Community, most of whom were exterminated in the Holocaust?
Notes
1 Eckert, 2012.
2 Grimsted, Hoogewoud and Ketelaar, 2007; paper edition 2013, with 'Afterword–2013' by Grimsted.
3 The present chapter draws heavily on my earlier related publications, including Grimsted, 1997, pp. 27–74; <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081612>; earlier versions appeared in Janus (1996) and IISG Research Paper, no. 18. See 'Displaced Cultural Treasures as a Result of World War II and Restitution Issues: A bibliography of publications by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted'; <http://socialhistory.org/en/russia-archives-and-restitution/bibliography>, with digital texts of many, including some listed below.
4 See summary details in Returned from Russia, pp. 94–98. Regarding the Russian non-return of Rossica, see Grimsted, 2004, pp. 107–39; serial edition as Slavic & East European Information Resources 4, no. 4, 2003, pp. 107–39.
5 See more details and pictures of the Special Archive building in Returned from Russia, p. 91 and p. 113.
6 See Ketelaar, in Returned from Russia, pp. 241–49, and the picture of Queen Beatrix and President Putin, facing page 241.
7 Beria to Molotov, 6 April 1945, and Kruglov to Beria, 5 April 1945, State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF). 5325/10/2025, fols 4–5.
8 See, for example, Baskakov and Shablovski, 1958, pp. 175–79; Tikhvinskii, 1979, pp. 11–16.
9 Kapran, 1968, p. 33.
10 Maksimova, 1990, based on an interview with TsGOA director Anatolii Prokopenko. A notice by Maksimova, 'Arkhivnyi detektiv', Izvestiia, no. 177, 24 June 1989, was the first mention of the Special Archive in print in connection with the transfer of microfilms of Auschwitz records to the Red Cross.
11 Kuz'min, 1991, p. 13; publication of that interview was delayed for almost a year and was permitted in print only after August 1991.
12 See the interview with TsGOA director, Anatolii Prokopenko, in Maksimova, 1991.
13 As recounted to me by Kozlov. Among many newspaper accounts in Paris about the French archives, see, for example, Thierry Wolton, 1991.
14 Regarding the seizure and return of the French archives, see especially Coeuré, 2007 and second paper edition, 2013. See also the French chapter with appended lists of fonds returned and some that remain in Moscow, together with additional bibliography in Returned from Russia.
15 Ukazatel' fondov inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia i Glavnogo upravleniia po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh NKVD-MVD SSSR Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo voennogo arkhiva, comp. T.A. Vasil'eva, et al; V.P. Kozlov and V.N. Kuzelenkov, eds, Moscow: Rosarkhiv, RGVA, 2001; <http://guides.rusarchives.ru/browse/GuidebookCard.html?id=123>. Regarding published descriptions of holdings from the former Special Archive, see Returned from Russia, Chapter 5, especially pp. 106–112, and the bibliography, pp. 311–328. Typescript file-level opisi are available for all fonds in RGVA, including those already returned to their home countries. Fonds returned to western European countries are listed with current locations and finding aids in Returned from Russia, Chapters 6–10.
16 See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv/Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), in ArcheoBiblioBase, B-8: <http://www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B-8.tab1.php?b=B.php%23B-8>. Since the merger, fond numbers the former TsGOA/TsKhIDK now have the added letter 'k'.
17 Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Opinion No. 193 (1996): 'On Russia's request for membership of the Council of Europe', 25 January 1996, when Russia was admitted to membership on its basis. Another paragraph in the admission document signed by Russia committed it 'xi. to negotiate claims for the return of cultural property to other European countries on an ad hoc basis that differentiates between types of property (archives, works of art, buildings etc.) and of ownership (public, private or institutional)'. At: http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=13932&lang=en.
18 See the Russian version of my report on the Russian retrieval of archival Rossica, P.K. Grimsted, 'Tsel' vyiavleniia zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki: politika ili kul'tura?', in Zarubezhnaia arkhivnaia Rossika: Itogi i perspektivy vyiavleniia i vozvrashcheniia. Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, 16–17 noiabria 2000 g., Moskva, ed. Vladimir P. Kozlov (Moscow, 2001; Rosarkhiv, Rossiiskoe obshchestvo istorikov-arkhivistov); an expanded English version was published as 'Archival Rossica/Sovietica Abroad—Provenance or Pertinence, Bibliographic and Descriptive Needs', Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique 34, no. 3 (1993), pp. 431–80.
19 See more details in Grimsted, '"Trophy" Archives and Non-Restitution: Russia's Cultural "Cold War" with the European Community', Problems of Post Communism, 45, no. 3 (May/June 1998), pp. 3–16, with a cover picture of Prince Hans-Adam of Lichtenstein at the opening the Moscow exhibit following the 'exchange'.
20 Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation, No. 64-FZ of 15 April 1998 (with amendments), trans. Konstantin Akinsha and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, in Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage: The Russian Cultural Property Law in Historical Context, published as International Journal of Cultural Property, 17, no. 2 (2010), pp. 413–26. See also Grimsted, 'Legalizing "Compensation" and the Spoils of War: The Russian Law on Displaced Cultural Valuables and the Manipulation of Historical Memory', pp. 217–56: http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FJCP%2FJCP17_02%2FS094073911000010Xa.pdf&code=0c75497dded19b105eecd461067b11c3.
21 See Grimsted, 2010, pp. 291–334.
22 See Returned from Russia (2013), above note 2. See more details on the French return by Maure, 2012, pp. 327–338; from the same conference, see also Le Clech and Richard, 2012, pp. 339–355; and Mazet, 2012, especially pp. 364–369.
23 Jagschitz and Karner, 'Beuteakten aus Österreich': Der Österreichbestand im russischen 'Sonderarchiv' Moskau (Graz, Vienna: Selbstverlag des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, 1996) = Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, vol. 2. See additional details in Grimsted, 2005, pp. 107–47; http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/mercury.pdf.
24 Steiner, 2009; http://diepresse.com/home/kultur/kunst/485745/index/do.
25 In addition to Jagschitz and Karner, many of those fonds were described in more detail in Kuzelenkov, Kupovetskii and Fishman, 2005, English edition, 2010, although that volume fails to cover many Austrian Jewish archives in RGVA.
26 Rukopisi i arkhivnye dokumenty Evreiskoi obshchiny goroda Veny v rossiiskikh sobraniiakh. Katalog/Manuscripts and Archival Documents of the Vienna Jewish Community Held in Russian Collections: Catalogue (Moscow: 'Rudomino' 2006; Proekt 'Obretennoe nasledie'/Project 'Heritage Revealed'); http://www.old.libfl.ru/restitution/catalogs/catalog3.pdf.
27 See details in Grimsted, 2005, pp. 125–128, and Henry, 2004, p. 48 (with colour photograph). See more details in Richler, 2014, p. 222.
28 The proceedings with the resolutions were published in the ICA journal Janus, 1995, and as a separate volume: Archival Dependencies in the Information Age, CITRA 1993–1995.
29 A sample is pictured in Returned from Russia, p. 130. The Thessalonica Community records (RGVA, fond 1428k; 297 file units; 1919–1941) and those from Athens (fond 1427k; 112 file units; 1901–1942); two smaller fonds comprise records of Zionist offices in Thessalonica involved with assisting the emigration of Jews to Palestine (fond 1435k and 1437k). There are a few additional files of Greek Jewish provenance, such as files of B'nai B'rith from Greece and Yugoslavia (fond 1225k). Copies of all of the Greek fonds are now available in USHMM.
30 A transfer document to Greece of 41 crates with 8,511 items comprising unspecified books and archives is found in the OAD Administrative Records, subseries Cultural Object Restitution and Custody Records, file Greece OAD 9, within RG 260 (OMGUS), NACP dated 9 November 1946, together with a bill of lading from the shipping firm in Hamburg (displayed on Fold3.com, from NARA Microfilm Publication M1942).
31 See the folder list: 'Salonika list.pdf' on the CAHJP website: https://cahjp.huji.ac.il/content/salonika-community-archives. See the Israeli chapter (2015) of my ERR Archival Guide: http://www.errproject.org/guide.php, Section 4.3.1., fond RI-33 Salonika Community Archives (GR/Sa).
32 The Thessalonica holdings in YIVO (New York) constitute RG 207, with a microfilm at USHMM (RG-67.018M); with a finding aid, 'Guide to the Records of the Jewish Community of Salonika, Greece, 1912–1954, RG 207', comp. Devin E. Naar; ed. Trudy Balch, New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2008.
33 The Thessalonica holdings on microfilm in USHMM are assigned in: RG-11.001M.51 (RGVA, fond 1428k) RG-11.001M.42 (RGVA, fond 1437k), and RG-11.001M.53 (RGVA, fond 1435k). See Devin Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.
34 The French Masonic files from Paris and Bordeaux that remain today in Minsk were the subject of a report at a colloquium in Paris on 10 September 2015 by Belarus historian Anatole Steburaka, now published as 'Les archives françaises confisquées par les nazis during la Seconde Guerre mondiale et conservées en Biélorussie', Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, no. 10 (November 2016): http://bbf.enssib.fr/matieres-a-penser/les-fonds-francais-de-minsk_67072. As Steburaka has shown, the Masonic documents still in Minsk are an integral part and belong with those returned earlier to France from Moscow. My own report about the Nazi-looted foreign books in Minsk appears in the same issue: Grimsted, 'Livres et archives pillés en France par l'Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR): La Bibliothèque Tourgueniev et les fonds français déplacés à Minsk', BBF: http://bbf.enssib.fr/matieres-a-penser/livres-et-archives-pilles-en-france-par-l-einsatzstab-reichsleiter-rosenberg-err_67074.
35 AB/XIX/3367: 'Documents emportés par les Allemands durant la Seconde Guerrre mondiale et retrouvés en Pologne, don de M. Altmann, directeur des Archives de Pologne, 1876–1940'. Given the rather obscure reference, French Masonic archivists were unaware of this lost segment, described in the French chapter (January, 2017) of Grimsted, Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder. A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot, available at http://www.errproject.org/guide.php.
36 For German returns see Endler and Schwarze, Die Freimaurerbestande in Geheimen Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Vol. 1: Grosslogen und Protektor: Freimaurerische Stiftungen und Vereinigungen; Vol. 2: Tochterlogen, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994–1996; = Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Forschungsstelle Demokratische Bewegungen in Mitteleuropa 1770–1850, vols. 13 and 18. For other countries see full listings appended to those country chapters in Returned from Russia.
37 The 14,291 figure appears in a notation dated 15 May 2003 at the end of the sixth volume of Opis' 1 for RGVA, fond 1412k, as confirmed by this author 10 June 2010. No other files, and indeed none from Austria, have been extracted since. See the reference to the Dutch Masonic files found by Evert Kwaadgras in Returned from Russia, p. 244 (and note 11).
38 Helmet Reinalter, ed., Die deutschen und österreichischen Freimaurerbestände im Deutschen Sonderarchiv in Moskau (heute Aufbewahrungszentrum der historisch-dokumentarischen Kollektionen) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002; = Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Forschungsstelle, 'Demokratische Bewegungen in Mitteleuropa 1770-1850', vol. 35). See Returned from Russia, pp. 110–111. Several Masonic archivists, including those from the Netherlands and Norway, who have examined files within the fond have found many erroneous attributions in the published German translation, and in some cases even compounding the inaccuracies of the Russian opisi.
39 Many of the Austrian Masonic files are listed with lodge of provenance by Jagschitz and Karner, above note 23, pp. 212–232. See also Chapter 5 below, pp. 110–111. Professor Karner briefed me regarding the extensive research he believes still needs to be done to identify more Austrian Masonic files so they can be returned to their homeland.
40 See more details in Returned from Russia, p. 111 (with notes 32 and 33).
41 Helge Horrisland, e-mail to the author, 15 March 2011 (quoted with permission), as well as subsequent conversations and e-mail exchanges.
42 Interviews with Vladimir Korotaev, most recently in June 2016. See the recent interview with Korotaev by Kerstin Holm, 'Lifting the Veil on Moscow's Secret Archives', in Echoes of Exile, Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, ed. Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 67–73. See the description and bibliography of reference literature for RGVA (B8) in ArcheoBiblioBase, the Russian archival directory and bibliography: http://www.iisg.nl/abb/index.php. It should be noted that the number of foreign fonds may be misleading, because many of them now hold only a few documents, along with their opisi, since most were returned to their countries of provenance.
43 Regarding the SMAD/SVAG project, see the report of Kai von Jena, 'Die Verwirklichung des Deutsch-Russischen Gemeinschaftsprogramms zum Studium, zur Auswertung und zur Reproduktion der Akten der SMAD', Mitteilungen des Bundesarchiv, 2003, Heft 2, pp. 39–44; see the Russian-language listing for publications from and relating to the SMAD/SVAG on the GA RF website: http://www.statearchive.ru/387, including the latest Handbook for SVAG records (note 44 below): http://www.statearchive.ru/427.
44 Cultural restitution and retrieval functions under SVAG were handled under the same SVAG Administration, subordinated to the more important economic and industrial reparations priorities that were coordinated and directed from Moscow by the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Another small series (opis') of 12 files of more purely administrative reports from that same SVAG division, including some of Zorin's retrospective reports, remain among other more voluminous SVAG records in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF, fond 7317, opis' 26). See Christiane Künzel (Kh. Kiuntsel'), 'Upravlenie reparatsii i postavok SVAG', Sovetskaia voennaia administratsiia v Germanii, 1945-1949. Spravochnik, edited by Jan Foitzik (Ia. Foittsik), T.V. Tsarevskaia-Diakina, and A.V. Doronin, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, pp. 363–376; http://www.statearchive.ru/427; German edn: SMAD-Handbuch. Die Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland 1945–1949 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009). That chapter cites fond 7317, opis' 26, but Künzel was unaware of the larger group of SVAG files from that same Administration mixed in with the 541 files that constituted Series 16 of the Soviet Foreign Trade records (RGAE, fond 413 – MVT SSSR, opis' 16).
45 Based on my personal analysis of these materials in RGAE.
46 GA RF, fond 7317 (SVAG), opis' 26 (Otdel/Upravlenie reparatsii i postvok); see above, note 44.
47 Sebastian Panwitz lists German (including Austrian) records starting with fond no. 500k: at http://www.sonderarchiv.de. Dates are provided for those transferred to the GDR during the Soviet period and other subsequent transfers to the countries of provenance.
48 Regarding the Western returns, see Eckert, 2004 (in German Kampf um die Akten).
49 See Grimsted, 2013, 'Afterword – 2013', pp. A19–A23.
50 See the 'Rosenberg Collection' in Kyiv at the TsDAVO website: http://err.tsdavo.gov.ua, with more English access to the extensive Russian guide-index pending. See the updated Introduction, 'Alfred Rosenberg and the ERR: The Records of Plunder and the Fate of Its Loot' (2015), in Grimsted, Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder. A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot updated chapters available at: http://www.errproject.org/guide.php; the updated Ukrainian chapter is forthcoming.
51 French military archivists reported at a conference in Strasbourg in October 2010 describing the French processing of the returned records, and their analysis of German 'utilisation' of the files, but they unfortunately were not aware and had not examined the important German records of their capture and processing of the files held in Moscow. See, for example, Returned from Russia, pp. 20–31.
52 'Soglashenie o sotrudnichestve mezhdu General'noi direktsiei Gosudarstvennykh arkhivov Pol'shi i Komitetom po delam arkhivov pri Pravitel'stve Rossiiskoi Federatsii', 27 April 1992, as quoted by Władysław Stępniak, 'Arkhivnoe nasledie', in Belye piatna – Chernye piatna. Slozhnye voprosy v rossiisko-pol'skikh otnosheniiakh, A.V. Torkunov and A.D. Rotfel'd, eds., Moscow: Aspekt press, 2010, p. 725. The Polish version or a printed text of the Agreement has not been found. That Agreement was reinforced in Article 11 of the 25 August 1993 cultural Agreement – 'Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel'stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel'stvom Respubliki Pol'sha o sotrudnichestve v oblasti kul'tury, nauki i obrazovaniia', Varshava, 25 avgusta 1993 g. – with specific mention of the return of archives, available electronically: http://www.businesspravo.ru/Docum/DocumShow_DocumID_86597.html.
53 See my article 'Restitution Progress for WW2 Captured Archives in Moscow, but Why Haven't Polish Archives Come Home?', prepared for the Kraków conference 'Looted–Recovered. Cultural Goods – the Case of Poland', in November 2014; publication of the conference proceedings in both Polish and English is expected later in 2017.
54 Wróbel-Lipowa, 1982.
55 Kozlov, p. 718.
56 Stępniak, 2010, pp. 728–29. As explained by Stępniak, 'Preface', in Archiwalia polskiej proweniencii terytorialnej przechowywane w Państwowym archiwum Federacji Rosyjskiej i Rosyjskim państwowym archiwum wojskowym, ed. Władysław Stępniak, Warsaw: Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Państwowych, 2000.
57 Gerald Fleming, 1991, pp. 9–12, gives a short popularized account of findings among the archival remains held by the former Special Archive. See the Polish account of the archival holdings in the Oświęcim-Birkenau Museum by Jarosz and Śliż, 'Zbiory dostępne dla wszystkich', 1996, pp. 60–62.
58 Russian specialists have compiled a name index of Soviet children who were killed as registered in the Auschwitz (Pol. Oświęcim) deathbooks from a database in the former Special Archive: L.I. Kudriavtseva et al, comps., Knigi smerti Osventsima: Deti Belorussii, Rossii, Ukrainy, pogibshie v Osventsime v 1942–1943 gg.: (Po knigam registratsii smerti uznikov Osventsima), Moscow, 1995; Rosarkhiv; TsKhIDK. The Auschwitz death records preserved do not extend beyond 1943, nor do they include those who perished in the gas chambers, whose identities were not recorded. In most cases the recorded cause of death was fabricated.
59 Archiwalia polskiej proweniencii (above, note 56). Provides brief annotated description of captured records from the interwar Republic of Poland and the Gdańsk (Ger. Danzig) region in the former Special Archive now part of RGVA (pp. 107–144); see especially fonds1353k and 1422k.
60 As explained by Stępniak, 'Preface', in Archiwalia polskiej proweniencii, pp. 14–15 (English); pp. 11–12 (Polish); and pp. 17–18 (Russian). Stępniak develops many of these points in 'Arkhivnoe nasledie', in Belye piatna – chernye piatna, p. 729.
61 See, for example, an initial report issued by the Head Office of State Archives (NDAP), Reconstruction of the Memory of Poland: Sources to the History of Poland and Poles (1772–1945) in the European Countries' Holdings (Warsaw, 2000). See also the speech by the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, opening the exhibition 'Reconstruction of the Memory of Poland', Council of Europe, Strasbourg, November 2004–May 2005; http://www.coe.int/t/e/com/files/cm_chair-sessions/chair/poland/disc_inauguration_expo.asp.
62 See, for example 'L'URSS et la restitution des archives. Le cas polonaise: 1921–1939. Autour du traité de Riga', in Saisies, spoliations et logiques de restitution, pp. 165–176.
63 See Grimsted, 2001, especially ch 1: 'Defining the Archival Heritage of Ukraine: Russia and the Pretensions of Successor States', pp. 1–50.
64 See, for example, Grimsted, 2002, pp. 27–41; http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/spring/spoils-of-war-1.html; condensed from the "Introduction" to the NARA CD-ROM, U.S. Restitution of Nazi-Looted Cultural Treasures to the USSR, 1945–1959: Facsimile Documents from the National Archives of the United States, compiled with an Introduction by PKG; Foreword by Michael J. Kurtz, CD-ROM edn, Washington, DC: GPO, 2001; Prepared in collaboration with the National Archives of the United States.
References
Archival Sources
France
Archives nationales, site de Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.
Série AB/XIX: Documents isolés et papiers d'érudits
[Isolated Documents and Papers of Scholars]:
"Documents emportés par les Allemands durant la Seconde Guerrre mondiale et retrouvés en Pologne, don de M. Altmann, directeur des Archives de Pologne, 1876–1940."
Israel
Arkhiyon ha-merkazi le-toldot ha-'am ha-Yehudi.
[Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People] (CAHJP), Jerusalem.
Fond RI-33: Salonika Community Archives (GR/Sa)
Russian Federation
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GA RF), Moscow.
[State Archive of the Russian Federation]
Fond 5325 – Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie pri Sovete ministrov SSSR (Glavarkhiv SSSR). Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie pri Kabinete ministrov SSSR.
Fond 7317 (SVAG), opis' 26 – Otdel/Upravlenie reparatsii i postvok.
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), Moscow
[Russian State Archive of the Economy]
Fond 413, opis' 16 – Ministerstvo vneshnei torgovli SSSR (Minvneshtorg SSSR), Kollektsiia dokumentov Upravlenii po postavkam iz Vengrii, Germanii, Rumynii, Finliandii za 1941–1952 gody
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), Moscow
[Russian State Military Archive]
Fond 500k – Glavnoe upravlenie imperskoi bezopasnosti (RSKHA) (g. Berlin) [Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Berlin)]
Fond 1225k – Velikie lozhi evreiskogo ordena "Bnei-Brit" v Iugoslavii i Gretsii i ikh dochernie lozhi [Great Lodges of the Jewish Order "Bni Brith" in Yugoslavia and Greece and their Daughter Lodges], 1913–1940
Fond 1353k – Senat vol'nogo goroda Dantsiga, 1898–1939
[Senate of the Free City of Danzig]
Fond 1412k – Dokumenty Masonskikh lozh evropeiskikh stran, 1761–1941
[Documents of Masonic lodges in European countries]
Fond 1422k – Dokumenty iz Danzigskogo gosudrstvennogo arkhiva, 1583–1940
[Documents from Danzig State Archive]
Fond 1427k – Evreiskaia obshchina (g. Afiny) [Jewish Community (Athens)]
Fond 1428k – Evreiskaia obshchina (g. Saloniki) [Jewish Community (Thessalonica)]
Fond 1435k – Sionistskoe palestinskoe biuro (g. Saloniki) [Palestinian Zionist Bureau (Thessalonica)]
Fond 1437k – Aktsionernoe obshchestvo 'Saloniki-Palestina' (g. Thessalnica) ['Salonica-Palestine' AS (Thessalonica)]
Ukraine
Tsentralynii derzhavnii arkhiv vyshchikh organiv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukraïni (TsDAVO)
[Central State Archive of Highest Agencies of State Power and Government of Ukraine]
'Rosenberg Collection'. Web: http://www.err.tsdavo.gov.ua
Fond 3206: Reikskomissariat Ukrainy, Rovno
Fond 3674: Shtab imperskogo rukovoditelia (reikhslaitera) Rozenberga dlia okkupirovannykh zapadnykh oblastei i Niderlandov, Brussels
Fond 3676: Shtab imperskogo rukovoditelia (reikhslaitera) Rozenberga dlia okkupirovannykh zapadnykh oblastei, Berlin, Kiev
United States
National Archives of the United States, College Park, MD (NACP).
RG 260 – Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS). Offenbach Archival
Depot (OAD) Administrative Records, subseries Cultural Object Restitution and Custody Records, file Greece OAD 9. Available in NARA Microfilm Publication M1942. Microform. Web: Fold3.com.
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, NY.
RG 207: Jewish Community of Salonika
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Russian Federation. 'O kul'turnykh tsennostiakh, peremeshchennykh v Soiuz SSR v rezul'tate Vtoroi mirovoi voiny i nakhodiashchikhsia na territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii': Federal'nyi zakon ot 15 aprelia 1998 g., no. 64-FZ. Sobranie zakonodatel'stva RF, 1998, no. 16 (20 April), st. 1879, pp. 3624–28. Also published in Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 April 1998. Original text. Web:http://www.old.libfl.ru/restitution/law/law9.html.
The law 'O kul'turnykh tsennostiakh, ... ' as revised (25 May 2000, no. 709-FZ)) is available electronically:http://www.old.libfl.ru/restitution/law/law3.html.
—. English translation (with subsequent amendments): 'Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation', No. 64-FZ of 15 April 1998 (with amendments). Translated by Konstantin Akinsha and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted. In Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage: The Russian Cultural Property Law in Historical Context, published as International Journal of Cultural Property, 17, no. 2 (2010): 413–26. Print.
—. 'Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel'stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel'stvom Respubliki Pol'sha o sotrudnichestve v oblasti kul'tury, nauki i obrazovaniia', Varshava, 25 avgusta 1993 g. Web: http://www.businesspravo.ru/Docum/DocumShow_DocumID_86597.html.
—. 'Soglashenie o sotrudnichestve mezhdu General'noi direktsiei Gosudarstvennykh arkhivov Pol'shi i Komitetom po delam arkhivov pri Pravitel'stve Rossiiskoi Federatsii', 27 April 1992. Quoted by Władysław Stępniak, 'Arkhivnoe nasledie', in Belye piatna – Chernye piatna. Slozhnye voprosy v rossiisko-pol'skikh otnosheniiakh, A.V. Torkunov and A.D. Rotfel'd (eds.), Moscow, Russia: Aspekt press, 2010, p. 725.
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English edn: Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow: A Guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2010. Print.
Endler, Renate and Elisabeth Schwarze. Die Freimaurerbestande in Geheimen Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Vol. 1: Grosslogen und Protektor: Freimaurerische Stiftungen und Vereinigungen. Vol. 2: Tochterlogen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994–1996. = Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Forschungsstelle 'Demokratische Bewegungen in Mitteleuropa 1770–1850', vols. 13 and 18.
Jagschitz, Gerhard and Stefan Karner. 'Beuteakten aus Österreich': Der Österreichbestand im russischen 'Sonderarchiv' Moskau. Graz, Vienna: Selbstverlag des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung. 1996. = Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, 2. Print.
Naar, Devin E. 'Guide to the Records of the Jewish Community of Salonika, Greece, 1912–1954, RG 207'. Edited by Trudy Balch. New York, NY: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 2008.
Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow: A Guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. 2010. Print. Russian edn: Dokumenty po istorii i kul'ture evreev v trofeinykh kollektsiiakh Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo voennogo arkhiva. Compiled and edited by V.N. Kuzelenkov, M.S. Kupovetskii and David E. Fishman. Moscow, Russia. 2005. Print.
Panwitz, Sebastian. 'Sonderarchiv Moskau'. Web: http://www.sonderarchiv.de/.
'Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv/Russian State Military Archive (RGVA)'. ArcheoBiblioBase, B-8. Web: http://www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B-8.tab1.php?b=B.php%23B-8.
Rukopisi i arkhivnye dokumenty Evreiskoi obshchiny goroda Veny v rossiiskikh sobraniiakh. Katalog/Manuscripts and Archival Documents of the Vienna Jewish Community Held in Russian Collections: Catalogue. Moscow, Russia: Rudomino. 2006; Proekt 'Obretennoe nasledie'/Project 'Heritage Revealed'. Print. Web: http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/catalogs/index.html.
Ukazatel' fondov inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia i Glavnogo upravleniia po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh NKVD-MVD SSSR Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo voennogo arkhiva. Compiled by T. A. Vasil'eva, et al. Edited by V. P. Kozlov and V. N. Kuzelenkov. Moscow, Russia: Rosarkhiv, RGVA. 2001. Print. Web: http://guides.rusarchives.ru/browse/GuidebookCard.html?id=123.
Other published sources
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Belye piatna – Chernye piatna. Slozhnye voprosy v rossiisko-pol'skikh otnosheniiakh: Nauchnoe izdanie. A.V. Torkunov and A.D. Rotfel'd (eds.). Moscow, Russia: Aspekt Press. 2010. Print.
Cimoszewicz, Włodzimierz. Exhibition inauguration speech: 'Reconstruction of the memory of Poland'. Council of Europe, Strasbourg, November 2004 – May 2005. Web: http://www.coe.int/t/e/com/files/cm_chair-sessions/chair/poland/disc_inauguration_expo.asp.
Coeuré, Sophie. La memoire spoliée. Les archives des Français butin de guerre nazi puis soviétique (de 1940 à nos jours). Paris, France: Editions Payot-Rivages. 2007; paper second edition, 2013. Print.
Eckert, Astrid. The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives After the Second World War. Translated by Dona Geyer. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Originally published in German as Kampf um die Akten: Die Westalliierten und die Rückgabe von deutschem Archivgut nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner. 2004. Print.
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—. 'Archival Rossica/Sovietica abroad – provenance or pertinence, bibliographic and descriptive need'. Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique 34, no. 3, 1993, pp. 431–80. Print.
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—. 'Restitution progress for WW2 captured archives in Moscow, but why haven't Polish archives come home?' Prepared for the conference 'Looted–recovered. cultural goods – the case of Poland', Kraków, Poland, November 2014; publication forthcoming 2017.
—. 'Russian attitudes towards archival Rossica abroad: cultural reintegration or political agendas?' Russian and East European Books and Manuscripts in the United States: Proceedings of a Conference in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture. Tanya Chebotarev and Jared S. Ingersoll (eds.). New York, NY: Haworth Press. 2004, pp. 107–139. Serial edn as: Slavic & East European Information Resources 4, no. 4, 2003, pp. 107–139. Print.
—. 'Spoils of war returned: U.S. restitution of Nazi-looted cultural treasures to the USSR, 1945–1959'. Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 34, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 27–41. Print. Web: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/spring/spoils-of-war-1.html.
—. Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute. 2001. Print.
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—. 'Tsel' vyiavleniia zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki: politika ili kul'tura?' Zarubezhnaia arkhivnaia Rossika: Itogi i perspektivy vyiavleniia i vozvrashcheniia. Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, 16–17 noiabria 2000 g., Moskva. Vladimir P. Kozlov (ed.). Moscow, Russia: Rosarkhiv, Rossiiskoe obshchestvo istorikov-arkhivistov. 2001. Print.
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Rotermund-Reynard, Ines (ed.). Echoes of Exile, Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945. Berlin. Germany: De Gruyter. 2014. Print.
Saisies, Spoliations et Logiques de Restitution. Archives et Bibliothèques au XXe Siècle (Actes du Colloque International, Strasbourg, 22–23 Octobre 2010). Alexandre Sumpf and Vincent Laniol (eds.). Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 2012.
Steburaka, Anatole. 'Les archives françaises confisquées par les nazis during la Seconde Guerre mondiale et conservées en Biélorussie'. Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, no. 10, November 2016. Print. Web: http://bbf.enssib.fr/matieres-a-penser/les-fonds-francais-de-minsk_67072.
Steiner, Edward. 'Moskau gibt erstmals geraubte Kulturgüter zurück'. Die Presse, 8 June 2009. Print. Web: http://diepresse.com/home/kultur/kunst/485745/index/do.
Stępniak, Władysław. 'Arkhivnoe nasledie'. Belye Piatna – Chernye Piatna. Slozhnye Voprosy v Rossiisko-Pol'skikh Otnosheniiakh. A.V. Torkunov and A.D. Rotfel'd (eds.). Moscow, Russia: Aspekt Press. 2010, pp. 724–36. Print.
Tikhvinskii, S.L. 'Pomoshch' Sovetskogo Soiuza drugim gosudarstvam v vossozdanii natsional'nogo arkhivnogo dostoianiia.' Sovetskie Arkhivy, no. 2, 1979, pp. 11–16. Print.
Wolton, Thierry. 'L'histoire de France dormait à Moscou'. L'Express, 21 November 1991. Print.
Wróbel-Lipowa, Krystyna. Rewindykacja Archiwaliów Polskich z ZSRR w Latach 1945–1964. Rozprawa Habilitacyjna. Lublin, Poland: Uniwersytet Marii Curie Słodowskiej. 1982. Print.
Appendix
Acronyms
AAN | Archiwum Akt Nowykh (Archive of Contemporary Records), Poland
---|---
CAHJP | Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem
CITRA | Conference of the International Round Table on Archives
ERR | Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Operational Staff Reichsleiter Rosenberg)
FSB | Federal'naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service), Moscow; successor of the KGB
GA RF | Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow
IEJ | Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for Research on the Jewish Question), Frankfurt am Main, later Hungen
IKG | Israëlitische Kultusgemeinde (Jewish Community), Vienna
MVD | Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Moscow
MVT SSSR | Ministerstvo vneshnei torgovli (Ministry of Foreign Trade), Moscow
NACP | National Archives of the United States, College Park, MD
NARA | National Archives and Records Administration
NDAP | Head Directorate of Polish Archives
NKVD | Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs)
OAD | Offenbach Archival Depot, near Frankfurt am Main, under OMGUS
OMGUS | Office of Military Government, United States
RGADA | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (Russian State Archive of Early Acts), Moscow
RGAE | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (Russian State Archive of the Economy), Moscow
RGALI | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), Moscow
RGB | Rossiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (Russian State Library), Moscow, former Lenin State Library
RGVA | Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (Russian State Military Archive), Moscow
RSHA | Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office)
SVAG/SMAD | Sovetskaia voennaia administratsiia v Germanii/Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (Soviet Military Administration in Germany)
TsDAVO | Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv derzhavnoi vlady ta upravlinnia Ukraïny (Central State Archive of the Highest Agencies of State Power and Administration of Ukraine), Kyiv (Kiev)
TsGOA SSSR | Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi arkhiv SSSR (Central State Special Archive), Moscow, after 1992 – TsKhIDK, now part of RGVA
TsKhIDK | Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental'nykh kollektsii (Centre for the Preservation of Historico-Documentary Collections), Moscow, now part of RGVA, before 1992 – TsGOA SSSR
USHMM | United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
YIVO | Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Institute for Jewish Research in New York City), before 1939 in Wilno, Poland; after 1940 in New York
10 Iraq and Kuwait
The Seizure and Destruction of Historical Patrimony
Bruce Montgomery
Introduction
In the August 1990 invasion and subsequent occupation of Kuwait, Iraqi forces prosecuted a mass campaign of pillage of Kuwait's financial and cultural assets with the aim of annexing the emirate as part of greater Iraq. In response to Iraq's invasion and plunder of Kuwait, a US-led coalition of countries ousted Saddam Hussein's armed forces from the small emirate. Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf War precipitated more than a quarter century of near continuous war, rebellion and internal upheaval, resulting in the repeated plunder and seizure of Iraq's own cultural and historical patrimony. The scale of destruction, confiscation and displacement of its archival heritage by internal and foreign forces has been perhaps unprecedented in recent times. Nonetheless, unlike Saddam Hussein's probable obliteration of Kuwait's archives as part of his campaign to annex the emirate, most of Iraq's archives from the Saddam era survived and have been preserved by the Pentagon and US research institutions.
Iraq's Seizure of Kuwait's National Archives: The First Gulf War
The immediate antecedents of Iraq's current social and political disintegration, however, lay in the events surrounding Saddam Hussein's almost decade-long conflict with Iran. Saddled with billions of US dollars in war debt following the war with Iran, Saddam aimed to alleviate his ruined economy and shore up his rule by seizing Kuwait's vast oil wealth and financial assets. Saddam also sought to exploit Iraq's historical grievances against Kuwait as a basis for invading the emirate and reclaiming it as Iraq's lost nineteenth province.
The origins of these grievances date to 1875 when Kuwait became part of the autonomous Ottoman province of Basra in what is now southern Iraq. In 1914, Kuwait broke from the Ottoman realm after receiving assurances of statehood under British protection. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, the British established colonial rule over the region and subsequently, in 1923, drew the geographical borders of Iraq, Kuwait and the territorial core of Saudi Arabia. The borders between Iraq and Kuwait, however, were poorly drawn, leaving a bitter legacy of dispute between the two countries. The British also gave Kuwait the barrier islands of Warba and Bubiyan, which partly block Iraqi access to the Gulf waters, as well as the now immensely profitable Rumaila oil field – territorial possessions that further fuelled Iraq's historical grievances against the emirate.1 The explosive legacy of these grievances gave Saddam convenient justification for invading Kuwait, claiming that he was righting the historical wrongs of British imperialism and rightfully reclaiming Kuwait as Iraq's nineteenth province.2
Saddam's predatory invasion of Kuwait thus ventured beyond plundering Kuwait's vast oil wealth to extinguishing and absorbing it altogether as part of greater Iraq. With this aim in mind, Iraq aggressively prosecuted the dismantling of Kuwait's financial, economic and cultural assets: the despoiling of its cultural treasures assumed particular importance. Kuwait was once home to one of the most significant collections of Islamic art in the world. Under the direction of Iraqi curators who were conversant with Kuwait's cultural treasures, Iraqi troops seized thousands of Kuwait's finest cultural objects, burning what they could not take back. They torched cultural institutions housing artefacts, libraries and archives, including Kuwait's National Museum and House of Islamic Arts.
Reminiscent of the Nazi plunder of Europe and Russia or the retributive Soviet trophy brigades that looted Germany after the Second World War, the Iraqis sent truckloads of cultural loot back to Baghdad in violation of international law. Among the cultural spoils was Kuwait's national archives. The Kuwaiti government, with the support of United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions, has repeatedly demanded the return of the archives. But more than a quarter of a century later, Kuwait's archives – the embodiment of its past and memory – remain missing.
It is understandable that Kuwait demanded the restitution of its archives, which comprised sensitive executive, diplomatic, intelligence, national security, economic and other vital information. Of particular importance were the archives of the Amiri Diwan, the Diwan of the Crown Prince and the Diwan of the Prime Minister – vital seats and symbols of Kuwaiti authority and sovereignty.3 The demand for the return of these archives echoed the nationalist sentiments of the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War when it passed a resolution in October 1949 calling for the Allies to repatriate all of its captured records and archives.4 The West German government protested that the Allies had carried off German national history – a sentiment shared by Kuwait, which had been robbed of its history by Saddam's Iraq.5 The demand for the missing archives signified one way of regaining political sovereignty after the 1990 Gulf War. After all, the archives embodied the history of a once-colonial territory and its emergence as an internationally recognised independent and sovereign state. It constituted Kuwait's historical narrative against Iraq's counter-narrative that involved more than a half century of claims over Kuwaiti territory that had been stolen from Iraq under British imperial rule.
In the immediate sense, the Kuwaitis feared that their diplomatic and other sensitive documents would be exploited by Iraqi intelligence to the possible detriment of the emirate's national and international standing. For example, this concern appeared in a 2007 Wikileaks cable from UN coordinator, Yuri Vorontsov, to the US embassy in Kuwait. Under UN auspices, Vorontzov was facilitating efforts to locate still missing Kuwaiti people and third party nationals and property, including the archives, from the 1990/91 war. His cable noted that the Kuwaitis were 'nervous that sensitive government records may still emerge in Iraq with the potential to cause embarrassment to Kuwait'.6
In 2007, Iraq was still labouring under onerous UN sanctions following the 1990/91 war. It was obligated to compensate Kuwait billions of US dollars for its economic ruination and, among other things, to return looted Kuwaiti property, including the emirate's archives. These sanctions were imposed in March 1991 when the UN Security Council adopted Resolutions 686 and 687, mandating the 'return of all Kuwaiti property seized by Iraq'.7 This obligation was reinforced in Security Council Resolution 1284, passed in December 1999, demanding that 'Iraq return in the shortest possible time all possible Kuwaiti property it had seized'. The resolution provided that the Secretary General should report to the Security Council every six months on the status of this matter, including the 'archives seized by Iraq'.8 The UN subsequently appointed a high-level coordinator to facilitate efforts with Iraq to locate missing Kuwaiti and third-party country nationals and missing Kuwaiti property.
In the following years, the search for the missing archives under UN auspices proved futile. Several scenarios may explain what happened to the archives: 1, American forces may have inadvertently confiscated the archives in the 2003 war; 2, the archives may have perished in the 1991 Shiite uprisings in southern Iraq, or in the aerial bombings of Iraq in 1993 or 2003; and 3, Saddam may have intentionally destroyed the archives to wipe out Kuwait's history and identity. Legal scholar and blogger, Douglas Cox, has termed the missing archives a 'cold case'. He speculates that the emirate's archives, if taken to Iraq, may have been swept up in the US 2003 invasion of Iraq when millions of Iraqi documents were seized from Saddam's ministries in the frantic hunt for evidence of weapons of mass destruction and other battlefield imperatives. According to this thesis, the archive may be buried or mixed in with the 120 to 150 million pages of documents in the Pentagon's possession at the media processing centre in Qatar – constructed during the war to sift through, digitise and analyse captured documents from Iraq.9
This is a plausible scenario. The majority of these records were seized in the early days of the war and transferred to the media processing centre in Qatar for analysis. The processing of these materials proceeded slowly. By 2006, US analysts had advanced through less than 15 per cent of the captured materials.10 It is unclear whether further progress has been made in processing and analysing the remaining records, which became less vital after US intelligence analysts concluded that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction and after the departure of the last American troops in December 2011.
Nevertheless, the archives also may have been destroyed in the coalition bombing of Iraqi government buildings, including Saddam's intelligence headquarters, foreign affairs ministry and other sites in the 2003 war, or in the plunder and destruction of government property by Iraqi citizens.11 Or, the archives may have perished in the looting and burning of government buildings in the 1991 Shiite uprisings immediately following Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf War, or perhaps in the US bombing of Iraq's intelligence headquarters in 1993 in retaliation for Saddam's attempted assassination of former President George Bush.
A more probable scenario is that Saddam intentionally obliterated Kuwait's archives to erase its history and identity with the aim of annexing it as Iraq's nineteenth province.12 During Iraq's seven-month occupation in 1990/1991, Kuwaiti officials condemned Saddam's efforts to 'wipe out the Kuwaiti identity by changing the demographic composition of the country', including burning the 'archives of many ministries dealing with citizens' affairs, including some departments of the Ministry of the Interior.'13
The day before the Iraqi invasion, Kuwaiti officials smuggled the emirate's population registers, stored on computer disks, to New York where they were deposited with the UN Secretary-General as the 'legal and official instrument to be relied on when Kuwait was liberated from the desecration of the invaders.'14 Kuwait's representatives condemned Saddam's efforts to 'eradicate the national identity of the Kuwaiti people by destroying its archaeological landmarks, plundering libraries and historical documents, and destroying Kuwait's achievements'. Kuwaiti officials accused Iraq of embarking on a 'novel process of depopulating Kuwait from its own inhabitants, confiscating identification documents, and settling Iraqi families in Kuwaiti homes' in efforts to 'change the demographic structure of Kuwait and erase the very identify of the country'.15
Two post-war UN fact-finding missions substantiated these allegations. One mission, which visited Kuwait from 16 March to 4 April 1991, reported on the vast devastation of Kuwait's economy and infrastructure. It noted the orchestrated plunder of the country's cultural heritage, including the destruction and pillage of 'most official records'. Among the ruination, the government Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Interior, Planning, Education and Finance, their subsidiary departments and agencies, and the National Assembly had been pillaged, ransacked, damaged or destroyed with the aim of eliminating Kuwait's state institutions. Another UN fact-finding mission to Kuwait from 23 to 27 March 1992 confirmed that there could be 'no doubt that a deliberate attempt was made to extinguish Kuwait, its national identity, the pride of its people in their history and achievements'16
Given Iraq's historical grievances, which Saddam sought to exploit as part of his justification for the invasion, and his aim to dismantle the emirate altogether by laying waste to its infrastructure, seizing its financial, economic and cultural assets, annihilating its national identity and history, it is probable that Saddam or his factotums ordered the destruction of the archives, which chronicled Kuwait's emergence as an autonomous state. This explanation would accord with the findings of both UN fact finding missions to Kuwait, one of which concluded that there was no doubt that Iraq purposely sought to extinguish Kuwait's national identity.
There is another compelling reason to believe that Kuwait's national and sovereign archives was destroyed. In the 1991 Gulf War, as Saddam faced the decimation of his forces by aerial bombing and the spectre of an Allied ground invasion, he ordered his troops to retreat. As his final act of aggression against Kuwait, he ordered the wholesale desecration and destruction of what was left of Kuwait. Iraqi forces carried out a systematic campaign of murder and mayhem aimed at leaving a crippled land to the ruling al-Sabah family. Retreating Iraqi troops cut electrical transmission lines, demolished or severely damaged buildings, power stations, oil refineries, communications facilities, water desalination plants and other vital infrastructure. Hundreds of oil wells were set ablaze or sabotaged, contaminating the desert with streams of oil coursing toward the sea. Saddam also may have destroyed Kuwait's archives as one of his final acts of violence.17
Anfal Files
Saddam's ignominious defeat in the 1991 Gulf War perilously weakened his authoritarian grip on power in the face of the restive Shiites and Kurds in Iraq, who had suffered grievously from his regime's political violence. On 27 February 1991, the US and Allied forces ended Operation Desert Storm after decimating the Iraqi military and liberating Kuwait. Iraq's defeat ignited a massive uprising among the anti-Saddam Shiites in the south of the country. As the rebellion against his regime spread, Saddam dispatched forces from the north to southern Iraq. With the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from the north, in March 1991, the long oppressed Kurds seized their opportunity and rose in popular revolt against Saddam Hussein, storming and burning secret police stations, prisons and torture centres throughout the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. Within three weeks, Saddam Hussein sent reinforcements to crush the Kurdish rebellion after having put down the uprising in the south.
By April, Iraqi troops had retaken several key cities and towns, taking brutal revenge on civilians and sending more than a million people in desperate flight across the mountains to neighbouring Iran and Turkey. In mid-April, the US, Great Britain and France intervened on behalf of the Kurds by establishing a safe-haven beginning at the Turkish border and extending to the thirty-sixth parallel north, the circle of latitude that served as the northern limit of the no-fly zone in Iraq from April 1991 until the end of 1996. The safe-haven allowed many among the displaced Kurdish population to return to their homes. By October 1991, Iraqi forces were unable to reassert central government control and withdrew unilaterally from most of the Kurdish areas, with the exception of the strategic oil-producing city of Kirkuk.
In the early March 1991 Kurdish uprising, massive quantities of Iraqi state documents were seized from several cities and towns throughout Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds overran the cities of Sulaimaniyah, Duhok, Zakho, Shaqlawah and Kirkuk, capturing the headquarters of the secret police, intelligence agencies and Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party before the Iraqis could destroy or remove the files. Amid the chaos, many of the documents were burned or destroyed, but the Kurds spirited most of them away to remote mountain hideouts before Saddam's security forces returned from the south after subduing the Shiite revolt.18
Peter Galbraith, a member of the staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan in March and April of 1991 to study the plight of the Kurds. While in northern Iraq, Galbraith heard of the mass seizure of the secret police files – the largest captured collection of war crimes evidence since the Second World War. In a meeting in Iraqi Kurdistan with Jalal Talabani, founder of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Galbraith learned of the PUK's seizure of the documents.19
The Kurds' initial interest in the documents lay in discovering whether their community had been penetrated by Iraqi intelligence, but they soon realised the documents' larger significance in revealing evidence about the Anfal genocide, which had ended just two years earlier. Human rights researchers, moreover, immediately saw the files as an unprecedented windfall in the investigation of Iraqi atrocities during the genocidal Anfal campaign. Since the files appeared to chronicle grave violations of humanitarian law against the Kurdish population, Galbraith proposed to Talabani that the documents be transferred to the US for safe-keeping and analysis for evidence of war crimes. Talabani agreed to the proposal with the understanding that the documents would remain the property of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Similar arrangements were negotiated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Kurdish Socialist Party, both of which captured smaller caches of documents in the uprising.
As a result, the Pentagon airlifted the files out of northern Iraq in 1992 and 1993 to American soil. While the Senate Foreign Relations Committee assumed formal responsibility for the files, they were transferred to the physical custody of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for analysis. The DIA subsequently hired Arabic linguists to digitise and produce English language screening sheets to the documents. The DIA also entered an unusual arrangement with Human Rights Watch (HRW), permitting the New York-based group exclusive access to examine the files for a possible case of genocide against the Saddam Hussein regime under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The convention, which outlaws repression and killings intended to destroy 'in whole or in part' any national ethnic group, was signed by Iraq in 1959.20
The term 'Anfal' refers to an incident in the Koran in which the followers of the prophet Mohammed attacked and pillaged non-believers.21 According to HRW, the Anfal campaign waged against the Kurds (29 March 1987 to 23 April 1989) constituted genocide and crimes against humanity – the culmination of decades of Kurdish persecution. The Iraqi Kurds have suffered a difficult history under Arab Iraq. The Kurds stand as one of the world's largest stateless ethnic groups, numbering approximately 30 million people spread since antiquity across today's Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. About six million people live in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds have their own language, which is part of the Indo-European family of languages. The majority are Sunni Muslim, although there are also Shiites in Iraq and Turkey.22
For a brief period, the Kurds obtained an independent state under the 1920 Treaty of Sveres, one of the post-First World War treaties that established the modern states of Iraq, Syria and Kuwait. In 1925, the League of Nations rescinded Kurdish statehood at the insistence of the British government and granted oil-rich Mosul to the newly formed state of Iraq. This act of betrayal repeatedly sparked open revolt among the Kurds in the decades that followed. In 1970, two years after Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Socialist Party seized power, the Kurds forced what appeared to be the granting of quasi-autonomy to the majority Kurdish provinces in Iraq's north-eastern region. In reality, the Ba'ath Party granted the Kurds little power. The manifesto on Kurdish autonomy involved little more than a strategy to quell the fighting until the Ba'ath Party could consolidate power. Soon after, in the early 1970s, Iraq began its Arabisation campaign, expelling the Kurds from their villages and confiscating their land for Arab settlement. By 1977, Baghdad had crushed the Kurdish rebellion, forcing tens of thousands to flee to Iran.23
With the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980, Saddam Hussein redeployed many of his forces from Iraqi Kurdistan to bolster military operations in the south. As an apparently conciliatory gesture, the Iraqi regime allowed thousands of resettled Kurds to return to Kurdistan. This conciliatory policy ended in 1988 as the war with Iran drew to a close. On 20 August, one day following the ceasefire, Saddam Hussein's military forces attacked the Kurds – bombarding Kurdish rebel forces and civilians with chemical weapons and systematically razing towns and villages, 'expelling their inhabitants, and sending large numbers to camps in model villages in the plains of the Kurdish Autonomous Regions, and to the South where many of them reportedly vanished without a trace'.24
The apparent motivation for the Anfal genocide stemmed from the Iran-Iraq war. After 1986, the Iranians began backing the KDP and PUK, the two main Kurdish factions that joined Iranian forces in military raids against Iraqi government positions. Nonetheless, the Anfal was the culmination of Iraq's decades-long effort to subdue the Kurds and a campaign of vengeance to punish the Kurdish resistance for its alliance with Iran. In 1993, Joost Hilterman, a Dutch researcher for HRW who investigated the Anfal in Iraqi Kurdistan, concluded that in 'Anfal alone, perhaps as many as 180,000 people disappeared, thousands of whom were shot and buried in mass graves in a prison in the desert'.25 Iraqi security forces also made indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Kurdish civilians. In March 1988, for example, Iraq's armed forces bombarded Halabja with poison gas, killing 5,000 civilians.26
The captured Anfal documents became a vital component in the evidentiary trail of the Kurdish genocide. Between 1991 and 1993, after the various Kurdish political factions established control over the rebel enclave, human rights researchers entered Iraqi Kurdistan to examine the scale of the mass graves that were being uncovered by the Kurds in northern Iraq. Together with extensive interviews with survivors and forensic missions by human rights researchers, the study of the documents revealed a convincing case that Saddam's security forces had carried out a deliberate campaign of genocide against the Kurdish population.27
Once on American soil, the Anfal documents gave rise to several possibilities for bringing Saddam and his senior leadership to justice. According to Galbraith, consideration was given to bringing the Saddam regime before the International Court of Justice under the 1948 genocide convention, or having the UN Security Council establish a special tribunal on the model of Nuremberg.28 Nonetheless, HRW and other non-governmental orgnaisations (NGOs) were unable to secure at least two sponsoring governments, a requirement under international law for bringing a formal case of genocide against a regime.29
In 1997, following the scanning and analysis of the files by the DIA and HRW, the documents were transferred to the Archives of the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder) with the permission of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the same time, CU-Boulder obtained a digital copy of the DIA's digital database of the 5.5 million-page Anfal archive. Upon the transfer of the original files, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stipulated that the files belonged to the Kurds and that any request for their return must be honoured.30
As US and international officials deliberated on how to proceed against the Iraqi regime under international law, the legitimacy of the Kurdish seizure of the files was not questioned. On the contrary, according to HRW, 'obtaining access to official records became a Holy Grail for researchers'. The documents constituted a windfall in the investigation of Saddam's atrocities. The protected status of Iraqi Kurdistan after the Gulf War offered human rights investigators unprecedented access to northern Iraq. With the opportunity to interview survivors, exhume mass graves and then to read the official account of what transpired in the Iraqi regime's own words, while 'the regime that had carried out the outrages was still in power, was unique in the annals of human rights research'.31 Further, the laws of war do not prohibit the capture of state security documents by internal dissident forces during hostilities, or loaning them to a third party – in this case the United States – that remains in a state of hostility with the originating country.
In December 2003, following the US-led invasion of Iraq, American troops captured Saddam when searching a compound in the town of Adwar, about ten miles from his hometown of Tikrit.32 The capture of Saddam ended one brutal era of Iraqi history, while beginning another. Saddam remained in the custody of US forces until his trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) on 9 December 2003. The tribunal, consisting of five Iraqi judges, tried Saddam on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. In preparation for the Anfal genocide trial, the US Justice Department assigned the Regional Crimes Liaison Task Force, established under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to investigate crimes committed by elements of the Saddam regime and assist the new Iraqi government in the trial of senior officials of the former central government.33
In 2005, the CU-Boulder Archives turned over the original Anfal archives to the task force for use in the Anfal genocide trials in Baghdad. It is unclear what has happened to these original files; it is most probable that the records were transported to the Pentagon's media processing centre in Qatar, where they could be readily searched and accessed under secure conditions. In other words, it is likely that the original documents remain under US military control. If so, the documents continue to belong to the Kurds under the prior agreement that allowed for their removal to the US for analysis and safe storage.
In September 2014, the University of Colorado-Boulder repatriated a digital copy of the files to a high-level delegation from Iraqi Kurdistan, representing the Kurdish Regional Government and the Zheen Archive Centre in Sulaimaniyah. Barham Salih, former Vice Premier of Iraq and head of the government of the Kurdistan region who played a central role in spiriting the documents out of Iraq, termed the restitution of the digital files an 'extraordinarily important event'. He stated that an examination of the records by independent experts conclusively found that the events of the Anfal military campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan constituted genocide; the younger generations in Kurdistan, he stated, would now have access to these documents to study and understand the history of their persecution and to shape their future anew.34
Documents Seized in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to eliminate Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction resulted in the largest documents seizure since the Second World War. In the chaos and confusion surrounding the fall of Baghdad on 9 April 2003, coalition forces, Iraqi opposition groups and individuals confiscated millions of Iraqi state documents from Saddam's government ministries, state security and intelligence agencies, military garrisons and other sites across Iraq.35 With the rapid advance of US troops, Ba'athist officials fled their government posts, leaving behind sensitive and self-incriminating state security files documenting the regime's acts of political violence and human rights crimes. While some officials also carried away and concealed documents in their homes, later abandoning them in public buildings as military defeat became imminent, other records in cities and towns throughout Iraq were shredded and burned. Still other files perished in the wartime aerial bombing and in the mass looting and destruction of government property in the days and weeks following the invasion.36
Despite the failure to secure Iraq's state security records in the early days of the invasion and occupation, US mobile collection teams nevertheless swept up millions of documents as potential sources of intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and other battlefield imperatives. The nature of the documents also weas politically explosive in that they named thousands of security agents and informants of Saddam's Ba'athist regime, posing a danger of retributive violence if publicly exposed. The capture of the documents was permissible under Article 53 of the 1907 Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annexed regulations, which permit the seizure of moveable government property for military operations and necessity. Under the 1907 convention, such seized moveable government property becomes the property of the occupying power.37
The Pentagon constructed the Combined Media Processing Centre at Camp As Sayliya in Qatar to house, process and exploit the materials for actionable intelligence. In addition to the capture of millions of intelligence and state security files, US forces seized thousands of audio and videotapes, computer hard drives, devices and peripherals from Saddam Hussein's ministries, military and industrial sites and other locations. The captured materials played a central role in the frantic hunt for weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged connections to global terrorism. When the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and links to global terrorism failed to yield any evidence by the end of 2003, US intelligence then turned to examining the Iraqi regime's own documents for the smoking gun.38 Aside from this immediate imperative, the files also held strategic and operational significance for continuing battlefield operations, intelligence and counter-intelligence, psychological operations, location of mass graves and evidence of human rights crimes for prosecution. Ultimately, after scouring the country for weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had terminated his nuclear weapons programme in 1991.39
In 2006, the captured documents became politicised in the crossfire over the war's rationale. The Bush-Cheney administration justified the US-led invasion of Iraq on the basis of preventing Saddam from distributing his alleged weapons of mass destruction to anti-American global terrorist networks. But with no evidence to support the administration's war narrative, the Bush-Cheney administration pressured the US intelligence community to make the scanned captured Iraqi documents available on the web so that the public could find what the intelligence analysts allegedly could not. This ill-advised experiment was quickly shut down after the Office of National Intelligence published, on a website run by the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office, documents that included a basic guide to building an atom bomb.40
With no constraints under international law on how the seized wartime documents could be exploited, the US Defense Department contracted the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-funded think tank, to establish a digital centre to make available for research, digital copies of declassified and unclassified records as well as audio and video recordings captured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. With the strong support of Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense, the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) began operations in 2009 in a few windowless offices at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. The plan aimed to leverage the expertise of leading academic researchers from around the world to provide insights about the inner workings of Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes and terrorist networks. This initiative recalled a similar effort after the Second World War, when the US government microfilmed, declassified and fostered research and study of massive caches of captured German and Japanese documents.41
Ba'ath Party Archive
Iraqi cultural officials condemned the CRRC as an instrument of American cultural imperialism. The director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, Saad Eksander, decried the availability of the records to American researchers as violating the rights of the Iraqi people (including their right to privacy), the rights of victims and the social sensitivities of Iraq. Only Iraq, he implied, should determine access to the files and their legitimate use according to its own sensibilities. This US initiative constituted little more than 'cultural imperialism' by the 'conqueror' or 'occupier' over the 'conquered' and 'occupied' in the service of the Pentagon.42 But to argue that Iraq should control the intellectual content and use of the captured archives according to its own sensibilities was no more reasonable than to contend that research in the archives of Nazi Germany should accord with the sensibilities of the German people.43
Eksander and other Iraqi cultural officials also denounced the US for aiding and abetting the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a private nongovernmental organisation and registered US defence contractor led by the long-time Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya, which entered Iraq immediately after the invasion to save Saddam Hussein's legacy of atrocity, for plundering and removing millions of pages of Ba'ath party documents to American soil.44 The Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists concurred, issuing a joint statement in April 2008 alleging that the IMF's taking of the Ba'ath party archive may have constituted pillage under the 1907 Hague Convention.45 Although these allegations were perhaps understandable given the unusual circumstances surrounding the removal, the charges had little grounding in international law. The laws of armed conflict permit the capture of enemy records for strategic advantage and necessity, and are silent on whether defence contractors acting on behalf of invading and occupying forces may do the same.
The Ba'ath Party archive was discovered in 2003 by a US soldier in a warren of rooms in the basement of the Iraqi secret police headquarters. The files carried particular importance in chronicling Saddam's web of collaborators during his final years in power and the extent of Ba'ath Party authority throughout Iraqi society. The CPA agreed to turn over the files to the IMF rather than to the Pentagon for intelligence or the CPA's Office of Human Rights and Transitional Justice, which aimed to gather evidence for Saddam's prosecution.46
The IMF also vied with various Iraqi groups to acquire looted records from the central government's bureaucracies and ministries after the fall of the Ba'ath Party regime.47 The looting of government records by Iraqi citizens and groups was animated by various factors: retribution, blackmail, the search for missing relatives or profit from their sale in a thriving black market for Saddam documents. The IMF, moreover, employed a network of contacts to locate and recover records, bringing them to its headquarters in the heart of Baghdad's international Green Zone.48
Makiya planned on making the documents in his possession the centrepiece of a public memorial centre in the heart of Baghdad devoted to exposing Iraqis to their authoritarian past. Just days before sovereignty was transferred to the Iraqi interim government on 30 June 2004, the IMF won the first of several US defence contracts, spanning 2003 to 2009, to create a video archive of witness testimonies and collect records detailing the atrocities and crimes of the former Ba'athist regime of Iraq.49 The IMF intended to edit the video testimonies for a series of documentaries that would air on Iraqi television. The US government saw the production of the documentaries as a counter-intelligence operation – as a way to counter pro-Saddam, pro-Ba'athist propaganda. The Pentagon also contracted the IMF to 'collect documentary evidence of atrocities and crimes committed by the former Ba'athist regime of Iraq.'50 To maintain the viability of these contracts, the IMF also won authorisation for its possession of the Ba'ath Party archive from the Iraqi president's office after the CPA's transfer of sovereignty.
But Makiya's hopes for creating a memorial centre collapsed with the rise of the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation and sectarian civil conflict. Amid the ensuing chaos, Makiya sought to remove the documents to safer ground; he convinced the Pentagon of their probable intelligence value for understanding the Sunni insurgency, and in an unusual arrangement, the archive was transported to the US rather than to the media processing centre in Qatar for digitisation and analysis by the DIA before return to the IMF after peace was re-established.
Makiya then struck a five-year deposit agreement, in 2008, with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to house the millions of Ba'ath Party records with the support of Iraqi officials in the president's office with whom Makiya leveraged his personal influence. The Hoover agreement ignited international controversy and allegations of pillage by Makiya and the IMF. Amid demands for their return by Iraqi cultural officials, professional archival associations and others, the State Department disavowed any US government responsibility for the records, considering it a private matter between the Iraqi government, Hoover and the IMF.51
In May 2010, a three-member Iraqi delegation met with US State Department and Pentagon officials in Washington to demand the return of the documents captured in the 2003 war. The Iraqi delegation characterised the documents as 'stolen.'52 The Americans countered with 'taken' – a word found in Article 53 of the 1907 Hague Convention that permits the wartime confiscation of enemy government moveable property, including records, for military advantage. Both sides agreed on the word 'seized', which means to take possession of by legal authority and which plays to US advantage if it decides to withhold some or all of the records.53
The same delegation also met with officials at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The parties agreed that the Ba'ath Party archives was Iraqi property and that its return was vital for national reconciliation, democratisation, justice and the establishment of the rule of law in Iraq. There also was agreement that Hoover would consult with the State Department in future negotiations regarding their restitution to Iraq.54
In early 2014, before Iraq's swift descent into sectarian bloodshed and the rise of ISIS in Anbar province, the US and the Iraqi government were negotiating the possible return of the captured Saddam-era documents from the 2003 war. In January 2012, the State Department issued a press release regarding a joint statement by the US-Iraq Political and Diplomatic Joint Coordinating Committee. The joint statement aimed to reaffirm the strategic partnership between the two countries. The press release noted, among other things, that the 'United States and Iraq discussed the ongoing process of repatriating archives and documents which are part of the patrimony of the Iraqi people'.55 The press release mentioned no further details regarding these discussions, but one researcher observed that the use of the terms 'archives and documents' suggested that the negotiations referred not only to the millions of records seized by US forces in the 2003 invasion, but also the contested Iraqi Jewish archives.56
Iraqi Jewish Archives
The Iraqi Jewish archives was discovered in May 2003 when a US mobile exploitation team was diverted from its mission in hunting for weapons of mass destruction to rescue a rumoured ancient Talmud, a Jewish holy book, in the basement of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters.57 After arriving at the Mukhabarat, the soldiers found the basement flooded with three or four feet of fetid water and littered with debris, resulting from broken pipes from US aerial bombing. The search team failed to find the ancient Talmud, but instead discovered and rescued 2,700 other Jewish holy books, Torah scrolls, commentaries and books on Jewish law, and many other water-damaged documents and materials – an invaluable archive of a now dead Jewish community that had been one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Some of the material was centuries old.58 The materials were evidently seized in 1984 from the Bataween synagogue in Baghdad.59 With the assistance of Vice President Richard Cheney's office, the archive was sent to the US for expeditious conservation treatment for mould contamination and other water related damage.60
The archives' transfer to the US followed an agreement between the CPA and the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH).61 The CPA-SBAH memorandum of understanding provided for an initial two-year loan of the materials under the US Immunities from Seizure Act (IFSA), a law that gave statutory means to import the archives to the US while protecting it from possible seizure by outside claimants. Congress enacted IFSA in 1965 to facilitate cultural exchange and exhibits among the world's cultural and educational institutions. For the most part, the act immunises owners of cultural materials from efforts to seize them in US courts. The law protects any work of art or other significant cultural object borrowed from outside the United States, either privately or publicly owned. In so doing, the law prohibits state and federal courts from entering any judgment, decree or order for the purpose of depriving foreign custodial or ownership institutions or individuals of custody or control of cultural objects or materials. By enacting the immunity law, Congress sought to invigorate international cooperation and enrich public appreciation and education of other cultures.62
When transferring governmental sovereignty to the Iraqis in June 2004, the CPA also gave the Ministry of Culture the prerogative to demand the return of the archives upon written request.63 These arrangements presumed Iraq the rightful owner of the archives. Nonetheless, the archives soon became contested between Jewish groups and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora on the one hand, and Iraqi government officials on the other. Iraqi officials claimed the archives as an indisputable part of Iraqi cultural heritage. As the controversy over the archives' fate intensified, Iraqi cultural officials demanded the prompt return of the archives. The State Department gave assurances that the US government had every intention of doing so after the materials underwent conservation treatment.
The State Department's stated intent to return the archive to Baghdad, however, met stiff opposition. Jewish groups challenged the premise that the archive belonged to Iraq. In 2010, the New York Times reported that the Jewish Agency for Israel, an international non-governmental group that aims to mobilise world Jewry on behalf of Israel, was 'working with the Americans to obtain Jewish archives that were seized by the Iraqi government'.64 B'nai B'rith, the oldest and largest global Jewish services organisation, appealed to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to ban the return of the materials.65 The World Organization of Jews from Iraq, founded to protect, preserve and promote Iraqi Jewish heritage, also lobbied against returning the archives.66 Moreover, one scholar questioned why a 'society that barely tolerated and then expelled its Jews, and that loathes and forbids the presence of Jews now, should be given 27 cases of Jewish documents and books'.67
The archives are particularly poignant, symbolising the tragic history of persecution, expulsion and dispossession of Iraqi Jews following Iraq's creation as an independent Arab state in 1932. The Iraqi Jews were of ancient lineage, dating to the sixth century BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judea and exiled most of its population to Babylonia.68 For more than 2,500 years, they endured an ever-changing series of rulers and empires. For a brief time beginning in 1917, Iraqi Jews prospered economically and advanced in government posts under British colonial rule, but this progress abruptly ended with the creation of Iraq as an independent state. Soon after, Iraqi Jews began to be dismissed from government posts and were murdered in anti-Jewish riots, including in the 1941 pro-Nazi pogrom, an incident that augured the future destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community.69
The repression redoubled following the 1948 founding of Israel, leading tens of thousands of Jews to flee Iraq. Under successive regimes, the Iraqi state persecuted Jews into penury. They were excluded from civil society, subjected to random searches and interrogations, dismissed from jobs, prohibited from higher education and restricted to cities. Moreover, Iraqi authorities restricted their travel abroad, disconnected their telephones, put them under house arrest and surveillance for extended periods, subjected them to a series of anti-Jewish deprivation laws and expropriated their property. Those fleeing Iraq were limited to taking $140 and 66 pounds of luggage; they were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and personal property, including photographs, papers, books, jewellery, family heirlooms and other assets.70
In 1951 and 1952, Israel and the US organised an emergency airlift of more than 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel under Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, one of the largest such population resettlements in history.71 The repression of the remaining 5,000 to 6,000 Jews culminated on 27 January 1969, when Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party declared a national holiday and attracted a crowd of 500,000 to see the hanging of nine Jews in the public squares in Baghdad on trumped up charges of spying for Israel.72 By the time of the 2003 US invasion, there were only a small handful of Jews left in Iraq, almost all of them old, in frail health and living in a single Baghdad neighbourhood, near a synagogue that rarely opened.73
Until the toppling of Saddam in 2003, the Iraqi state considered its dwindling Jewish population and their culture as an alien presence warranting obliteration. The seizure of their cultural materials and their sequestering in the bowels of the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters recalled the Nazi seizure of Jewish cultural materials and artefacts and their plan to create a series of research institutions for the study of the Jewish problem. The prospect of the US State Department returning the dispossessed archives to the land of Iraqi Jewish destruction not only raised the spectre of a second dispossession, but also promised to legitimise an historic crime against an ancient people whose origins predated Islam by more than a thousand years. It seemed ironic that Iraqi officials would consider the Iraqi Jewish archive as part of Iraq's cultural patrimony only after the State expunged its Jewish population. Nonetheless, the State Department was now legitimising this second dispossession through its stated intent to return this private religious and communal property to Baghdad rather than to the Iraqi Jewish diaspora.
The critical question was to whom did the archive belong? Whose heritage was it? Did it belong to Iraq, the country of origin, or to the Iraqi Jewish diaspora, the culture of provenance?74 There was precedent to follow in how the US addressed the disposition of heirless Jewish property of extinct Jewish communities after the Second World War. Few considered sending heirless Jewish cultural property back to the European states where entire Jewish populations had been exterminated or forced to flee. Because of the annihilation of much of European Jewry, the US enlisted the assistance of Jewish non-governmental organisations to accomplish the difficult task of distributing heirless religious and cultural materials to new centres of Jewish learning and spiritual and cultural activity in Palestine and the United States, where so many surviving European Jews had found refuge.75
Even so, the moral imperative of returning the archives to the Iraqi Jewish diaspora whose culture and religion it represented was overshadowed by the American diplomatic convenience of maintaining good relations with Iraqi government officials, who considered the archives as Iraq's exclusive cultural heritage. Following the painstaking conservation and restoration of the archive by the National Archives and Records Administration, highlights of the Iraqi Jewish archives were exhibited in New York and Washington, and embarked on a tour of other American cities. In 2014, both the House of Representatives and Senate proposed resolutions requesting the State Department to renegotiate the 2003 agreement it signed with the Iraqi government to return the archives to Iraq after their restoration. In May of that same year, the Iraqi Embassy in Washington reiterated its insistence on the return of the archive. 'We consider the history of Jewish communities in Iraq to be an integral part of the history of our country – one that we honour and cherish – and nothing can erase the history, nor change our commitment to preserving its memory', said an Iraqi press release.76 At the same time, as Iraq descended further into chaos and violence, Iraqi officials and the US State Department announced an agreement that the archives would remain in the US for an additional two years.77
The Ravaging of Iraq's Cultural Heritage by ISIS
Iraq's descent into renewed bloodshed and perhaps irreversible disintegration began soon after the departure of the last American troops in 2011, leaving the country in the authoritarian hands of Nouri al Maliki's majority Shiite government. The arrest, imprisonment and torture of thousands of Sunnis by Maliki's security forces and the disenfranchisement of Sunnis from power sharing in Baghdad left Iraq vulnerable to the extremist forces of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), a Sunni 'armed militia with neo-medieval political aspirations in war-torn Syria and Iraq'.78
While many of Iraq's Saddam-era records and archives seized in the various wars and upheavals have been preserved by the US Defense Department and American research institutions, the same cannot be said of the ancient manuscripts, objects, cemeteries and archaeological sites ravaged and destroyed by the extremist forces of IS. The destruction of Assyrian sculptures and other artefacts in the museum of Mosul and the bulldozing and ransacking of the ancient sites of Nineveh, Nimrud and Hatra, among others, has represented an indescribable tragedy for human history and culture.
The destruction of ancient archaeological remains and manuscripts has been animated by religious fanaticism with the aim of purging idolatry. But IS also has turned attacks on ancient sites, as well as libraries and archives, into an explicit war strategy to terrorise populations under its control and finance its armed hostilities. The group, for example, has transformed its 'looting brigades into large-scale businesses'.79 It is able to finance its war strategy through various sources of income, including from the sale of oil on the black market, bank robberies, kidnap ransoms, fees at roadblocks, 'taxes' imposed on traders living in IS-controlled areas and the looting of ancient archaeological sites. In general, IS destroys ancient historical sites only after seizing and removing everything of value.80
It remains to be seen how much damage the Islamic State's war on civilisation will inflict on Iraq's cultural heritage. If nothing else, the international laws of armed conflict – specifically the Hague conventions and protocols that purportedly safeguard cultural property in war – have proved woefully inadequate and out of date regarding the actions of non-state actors. The second protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention added protection in civil wars, but Iraq, Syria and other countries never signed it. But even if they had, it would scarcely have made any difference in curbing the destruction and pillaging of ancient cultural sites seen by the IS as, on the one hand, deviant and, on the other hand, lucrative sources of income. Further, UN officials have conceded that the drafters of the second protocol to The Hague agreement never foresaw deliberate destruction by non-governmental extremist groups.81
Conclusion
In more than a quarter of a century of near continuous war and internal upheaval following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the state security archives of Saddam Hussein have been repeatedly seized, taken and removed to the United States. The chaos of repeated war and sectarian internal strife also have seen many other of the regime's documents perish in the mass looting and destruction of government property by Iraqis and in aerial bombing campaigns by US and coalition forces in the two Iraq wars. Even so, unlike Saddam's probable destruction of Kuwait's national archives, the overwhelming majority of Saddam regime documents seem to not only have survived through capture by Kurdish and US forces and are now in the hands of the Pentagon and US research institutions; many of these records also have been made available to scholars and researchers for the writing and understanding of Middle Eastern affairs and world history, albeit amidst charges of cultural imperialism.
With Iraq's social and political disintegration, the question is whether Iraq will survive as a unified state. This question has considerable relevance regarding whether Iraq's state security documents can or should be returned and to whom. To repatriate the documents to the majority Shiite government in Baghdad would be to put them in the hands of the Shiite security forces as well as Shiite militias and Iranian proxies, which likely would exploit them against their Sunni sectarian adversaries. The fracturing of Iraq along sectarian lines, the unlikelihood of reconciliation, the continuing war against the Islamic State and the unravelling of Iraq as a cohesive nation state make the prospect of restitution of the Saddam regime's state security files increasingly unlikely.
Notes
1 See Draper, 1992. Also, see Schofield, 1993, p. 60.
2 Draper, 1992; and Schofield, 1993, pp. 60–61.
3 See Al Diwan Al Amiri, http://www.da.gov.kw/eng/historiccenter/historic-doc-center.php (accessed 27 July 2014).
4 See Eckert, 2012, p. 2.
5 Ibid.
6 This concern for the return of the missing archives 'appears in a 2007 Wikileaks cable telling the US embassy in Kuwait that Kuwait remained "focused primarily on the return of missing Kuwaiti government archives" because the "Kuwaitis are nervous that sensitive government records may still emerge in Iraq with the potential to cause embarrassment to Kuwait" '. See Cox, 'More on Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives,' Document Exploitation blog, 23 January 2012, http://www.docexblog.com/2012/01/more-on-finding-kuwaits-missing.html (accessed 28 July 2014).
7 See United Nations Security Council Resolution 686, Adopted by the Security Council at its 2978th meeting on 2 March 1991, S/RES/0686, 2 March 1991.
8 See United Nations Security Council Resolution 1284, Adopted by the Security Council at its 4084th on 17 December 1999, S/RES/1284.
9 See Cox, 2012.
10 Cox, 2012.
11 See Stuart Jeffries, 2008.
12 See Montgomery, 2015, pp. 61–84.
13 Research Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge International Documents Series, Vol I, The Kuwaiti Crisis: Basic Documents, 1990, p. 148.
14 Letter from the Permanent Representative of Kuwait to the United Nations, addressed to the Secretary-General, 15 September 1990, The Kuwaiti Crisis: Basic Documents, p. 270.
15 Letter from the Permanent Representative of Kuwait to the United Nations, addressed to the Secretary-General, 15 September 1990, The Kuwaiti Crisis: Basic Documents, p. 270.
16 Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait led by Under-Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari, 28 March 1991, UN Security Council Doc. S/22409, p. 13.
17 Karsh, 1996, pp. 754–57.
18 See Hennerbichler and Montgomery, 2015.
19 Hennerbichler and Montgomery, 2015.
20 United Nations, United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948, entered into force 12 January 1951.
21 See Makiya, 1992, pp. 56–57.
22 See following published investigative field reports: HRW/Middle East and Physicians for Human Rights, Unquiet Graves: The Search for the Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan (1992), p. 5; and HRW/Middle East, Whatever Happened to the Iraqi Kurds? (11 March 1991), p. 4. Also see Human Rights Watch, Iraq's Crimes of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, New Haven and London, 1995, p. xvi.
23 HRW/Middle East, Unquiet Graves, p. 6.
24 HRW/Middle East, Unquiet Graves, p. 6.
25 Miller, 1993, Section 6, p. 15.
26 See HRW/Middle East, Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. xvii.
27 See Montgomery, 2001, p. 77.
28 See transcript interview with Peter Galbraith, 'Saddam's Documents Show Kurd Genocide,' Weekend All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 24 May 1992.
29 Montgomery, 2012, p. 353.
30 Letter to Bruce Montgomery from Senators Jessie Helms and Joseph Biden, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 1997.
31 HRW/Middle East, Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. xx.
32 Shishkin and Trofimov, 2003.
33 See The Justice Coalition's Victims' Advocate, January 2007, p. 8, http://www.justicecoalition.org/newspaper/January2008/VAjan08.pdf (accessed 14 June 2015).
34 See Hennerbichler and Montgomery, 2015.
35 Mufti, 2004.
36 Ibid.
37 Article 53, 1907 Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its Annexed Regulations, www.icrc.org/ijl.nsf/full/195, (accessed 19 June 2015). Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I also permits the seizure of enemy materials in pursuit of military advantage. It is noteworthy that the US was not a signatory to the treaty during the 2003 Iraq war.
38 See Montgomery, 2014, p. 569.
39 See Montgomery, 2014, p. 569.
40 Borger, 2006; and Broad, 2006.
41 See Statement by Brigadier General Anthony Cucolo III, Director of Joint Center for Operational Analysis, and Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Woods, Project Leader and Principal Author of Iraqi Perspectives Project, US Joint Forces Command, 'The Iraqi Documents; A Glimpse into the Regime of Saddam Hussein, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on International Relations,' House of Representatives, 109th Cong., 2nd Sess., 6 April 2006, 16.
42 Eksander, www.essays.ssrc.org/minerva/2008/10/29/eskander (accessed 3 May 2013).
43 Montgomery, 2012, p. 583.
44 Eskander, www.essays.ssrc.org/minerva/2008/10/29/eskander (accessed 5 May 2013).
45 SAA/ACA Joint Statement on Iraqi Records, 22 April 2008, www.archivists.org/statements/Iraqirecords.asp (accessed 15 February 2012).
46 Montgomery, 2012, p. 353.
47 Montgomery, 2012, p. 353.
48 See Register of the Hizb al-Ba'ath al-Arabi al-Ishtiraki In Iraq Ba'ath Party] Records, Hoover Institution On War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, 2012, [http://cdn.calisphere.org/data/13030/g3/c84j0cg3/files/c84jocg3.pdf, (accessed 7 February 2013).
49 See Iraqi Memory Foundation, Soliciation/Contract/Order for Commercial Use, Solicitation Number W-4V8H-04-T-009, Code 3V9P5, awarded 18 June 2004. See Douglas Cox blog on document exploitation, www.docexblog.com/2012/01/Iraq-memory-foundation-defense.html (accessed 23 January 2013).
50 Ibid.
51 Kenyon, 2012.
52 Spurr.
53 Ibid.
54 See Baneje, 2010.
55 Douglas Cox, 'U.S./Iraq Negotiations on Iraqi Archives and Documents,' Document Exploitation Blog, 2 September 2012, www.docexblog.com/2012/09/significance-of-new-draft-iraqi-law.html (accessed 27 September 2012).
56 Ibid.
57 Miller, 2003; and Evyatar, 2010.
58 Miller, 2003; Evyatar, 2010 and 2003.
59 'Much-Debated Jewish Archive Won't Return to Iraq—For Now,' The Algemeiner, 20 May 2014, http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/05/20/much-debated-jewish-archive-won%E2%80%99t-return-to-iraq-for-now/# (accessed 6 July 2015).
60 See Memorandum from Donald Rumsfeld to Steve Cambone, 31 May 2003, http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/1808/2003-05-31%20steve%20cambone%20re%20documents.pdf (accessed 14 August 2014); and National Archives and Records Administration, 'Iraqi Jewish Archive Preservation Report,' http://oichicago.edu/oi/iraq/mela/iraqijewisharchivereport.htm, October 2, 2003 (accessed 28 June 2014).
61 WikiLeaks, Cable Communication, Embassy Baghdad, 'Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) and the Iraqi Museum Actively Engaged with Donors but the Security Situation Still Impedes Progress,' http://www.cablegatesearch.net//cable.php?id05baghdad4968, 13 December 2005 (accessed 4 April 2014).
62 H.R. Rep. No. 89-1070 (1965), reprinted in 1965 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3576.
63 Kessler, 2010, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index1&sid1&srchmode2&vins (accessed 29 April 2014).
64 See Myre, 2003.
65 Fordham, 2014.
66 Fischbach, 2010.
67 Joffe, 2014.
68 Joffe, 2008.
69 Levin, 2001, pp. 4–5, 809–10.
70 See Levin, 2001, p. 29; 'Immigration to Israel: Operation Ezra and Nehemiah—The Airlift of Iraqi Jews,' JEWSIS Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/ezra.html (accessed 5 July 2015); and Montgomery, 2013, pp. 187–88.
71 'Immigration to Israel: Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.'
72 Ledger, 2005, pp. 795–826.
73 Myer, 2003.
74 Montgomery, 2003, p. 185.
75 Montgomery, 2003, pp. 191–93.
76 'Much-Debated Jewish Archive Won't Return to Iraq—For Now,' The Algemeiner, 20 May 2014, http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/05/20/much-debated-jewish-archive-won%E2%80%99t-return-to-iraq-for-now/# (accessed 6 July 2015).
77 Ibid.
78 See Bauer, 2015, p. 1.
79 Eakin, 2015.
80 Ruthven, 2015.
81 Eakin, 2015.
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Ledger, Dana. 'Remembrance of things past: The Iraqi Jewish Archive and the legacy of the Iraqi Jewish community'. George Washington International Law Review, 37, 2005, pp. 795–826.
Levin, Itamar. Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries. Translated by Rachel Neiman. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.
Makiya, Kannan. 'The Anfal: uncovering an Iraqi campaign to exterminate the Kurds'. Harpers, 284, no. 170, May 1992.
Miller, Judith. 'Iraqi documents on Israel surface on a cultural hunt'. New York Times, 7 May 2003. http://nytimes.com/2003/05/07/international//worldspecial/07fi (accessed 29 April 2011).
Miller, Judith. 'Iraq accused'. The New York Times Magazine. 3 January 1993, Section 6, p. 15.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'The rape of Kuwait's national memory'. International Journal of Cultural Property, 22(1), February 2015.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'Rescue or return: the fate of the Iraqi Jewish archive'. Journal of Cultural Property, 20, 2003.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'U.S. seizure, exploitation, and restitution of Saddam Hussein's archive of atrocity'. Journal of American Studies, 48, 2014.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'Saddam Hussein's records of atrocity: seizure, removal, and restitution'. The American Archivist, 75, Fall/Winter 2012.
Montgomery, Bruce. 'The Iraqi Secret Police files: A documentary record of the Anfal genocide'. Archivaria, 1(52), 2001.
Myer, Greg. '52-year separation ends as Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel'. New York Times, 28 July 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/international/middleesast/28isra.html (accessed 2 June 2012).
Mufti, Hania. Iraq: State of Evidence. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, November 2004.
Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait led by Under-Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari, 28 March 1991, UN Security Council Doc. S/22409, p. 13.
Research Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge International Documents Series, Vol I, The Kuwaiti Crisis: Basic Documents, E. Lauterpacht, March Weller and Daniel Bethlehem (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Grotius Publications Limited, 1991. Statement of the Permanent Representative of Kuwait to the United Nations General Assembly, 27 November 1990.
Ruthven, Malise. 'Inside the Islamic State'. New York Review of Books, 9 July 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/inside-islamic-state.
SAA/ACA Joint Statement on Iraqi Records, 22 April 2008. http://www.archivists.org/statements/Iraqirecords.asp (accessed 15 February 2012).
Schofield, Richard. Kuwait and Iraq: Historical Claims and Territorial Disputes, 2nd ed. London, UK: Middle East Program, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1993.
Shishkin, Philip and Yarsolav Trofimov. 'U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein'. Wall Street Journal, 15 December 2003. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10714006529014900 (accessed 14 June 2015).
Spurr, Jeffrey. 'A report on the activities of the Iraqi delegation'. Iraq Crisis Listserv, 19 May 2010.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 686. Adopted by the Security Council at its 2978th meeting on 2 March 1991, S/RES/0686, 2 March 1991.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1284. Adopted by the Security Council at its 4084th on 17 December 1999, S/RES/1284.
11 Networking Records in Their Diaspora
A Reconceptualisation of 'Displaced Records' in a Postnational World
Anne J. Gilliland
Introduction
In line with contemporary critical postnationalist discourse, this essay proposes that the archival notion of displaced records and associated arguments about their inalienable relationship to sovereign states are overly predicated upon outmoded physical- and nation states-based thinking. It frames this proposition with regard to evolving ideas about records as concepts, rather than physical entities, that have specific innate properties that extend beyond the limits of sovereign states or institutions, and the affordances of networked structures and infrastructures of the twenty-first century. These structures and infrastructures permit records to have a simultaneous digital presence and to be variously represented and understood in any number of geographic, political, social and intellectual spaces.
Certainly, there will always be cases where records have been removed from or placed outside the space of accessibility of a sovereign nation or community in violation of applicable laws and international conventions and these cases require appropriate remedy,1 whether that be in the form of international intervention, replevin actions and physical or digital repatriation, or by other means. There will also be cases where records are clearly at risk and measures such as temporary removal or escrowing of copies may be pursued.
In the larger picture, however, the essay posits that it may be more appropriate and useful today for the archival field to acknowledge, respect, advocate for and act upon the realities of always-in-motion diasporas of records in which multiple parties have rights, interests and diverging points of view, than to try to negotiate ownership, protection and physical relocation of records across complex and contested histories and boundaries, power imbalances and stewardship capabilities. Such an acknowledgment moves archival discourse about displaced records away from institution- and nation-state-based ideas about singular provenance, sovereignty, inalienable ownership and physical custody. It focuses instead on records as plural and contingent co-created objects that have certain inalienable and universal characteristics. It also promotes the development of mechanisms for providing pluralised access to them regardless of where they are located and addressing future disputes that may arise over records that are generated, transmitted and stored through transnational networking and cloud-based technologies.
The essay lays out some of the fundamental tenets of postnationalism and discusses ways in which these resonate with constructs drawn from recent expositions of and developments in records theory that have potential for problematising and reformulating the notion of 'displaced records'. Using examples drawn from the history of Yugoslavia and its successor states, the essay concludes with a discussion of how a participative archival network approach that exploits contextual and agentive trajectories as well as biographies of official and personal records might support the needs of communities both local and global, at home and in diaspora in finding, 'claiming' and accessing records, regardless of where they are physically located. This approach takes into account the key role of metadata such as classification schemes and local or 'niche' archival description in ascertaining the presence or absence of records as well as in supporting transnational awareness and presenting a more pluralised and dynamic view of historical events as reflected through records and a diversity of archival representations. It could potentially also uncover new information about actions and individuals and facilitate the discovery of alternate copies and forms of lost or undisclosed evidence.
Postnationalism and Records Theory
Over the past two decades, there has been increasing scholarly attention given to both the process and the state2 of postnationalism as it relates to changes in geopolitics and economics that are largely driven by the processes of globalisation. Economic systems, enterprise and trade are globally interconnected and inter-dependent. Media and other forms of cultural exchange also span the globe in terms of their reach and their influence. Further strands of postnational research and policy-making address postnationalism that is a result of either grassroots movements or supra-national factors or bodies (e.g. the United Nations, world courts, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – or NATO), and its implications for such concerns as national and cultural identities, the relationships and loyalties of diasporic populations3 (what cultural critic, Donald Pease, refers to as 'deterritorialized and extraterritorial peoples'4) with countries of home and of settlement, the concept and assignment of citizenship, national and international security and the prosecution of human rights violations and war crimes. One manifestation of postnationalism in these respects is the emphasis placed by major human rights instruments and international human rights bodies on rights associated with 'personhood' rather than those associated with specific citizenship.5
In this regard, it should be noted that postnationalism does not assert that nationalism no longer exists or is no longer relevant. Rather, postnationalism is understood as co-existing in tension with nationalism, underscoring that people have multiple belongings, and that boundaries can be both blurred and constantly shifting, and doing so in ways that defy temporal continuities. In such a framing, however, the nation-state can no longer serve as the single or even, as Pease notes, 'an operative model either for the regulation or the disruption of these processes'.6 Noting that the proximately contemporaneous rise of modern nationalism and that of modern archives was not a coincidence and citing the integral role that archives have historically played in racial politics within nations such as Germany, legal scholar Douglas Cox states:
Archives can thus enhance the same nationalistic tendencies that, in turn, constitute one of the most invidious threats of intentional destruction to other nations' archives as part of a larger plan of ethnic cleansing, as was graphically illustrated in the former Yugoslavia ... the view of archives as irreplaceable national identity intensifies debates over their 'repatriation' and complicates the resolution of such disputes. The cultural and historical nature of archives can thus be both among their most valuable attributes and the source of their greatest vulnerability to seizure and destruction.7
A turn toward postnationalism in the context of thinking about displaced records, therefore, has the added benefit of acknowledging both the political and affective presence of nationalism, while countering some of its darker relationships with archives.
One of the most prominent facilitators of postnationalism in this century is information technology – specifically evolving networked and cloud-based bureaucratic and social technologies that allow for economic, social and cultural exchange and interchange. These technologies not only serve as the infrastructure whereby records are created, distributed or shared, stored and accessed, they also offer generative spaces for coping with issues raised by historically displaced or dispersed records.8 This may seem to be a fairly self-apparent assertion. However, taking a more critical stance, one might reasonably ask: if records are in various ways a reflection or shadow of a person or body and the processes and places in which they were engaged, then might not that give them similar multiple identities and belongings to those of that person or body? One might further ask, if humans have certain inalienable rights associated with their personhood beyond their citizenship, in other words that are essential to their very nature as a human, then might not records similarly be approached in terms of their characteristics as a record rather than in terms of the 'citizenship' of particular bodies of records with regard to national claims or physical presence? In other words, can records transcend their national identities or material manifestations and be considered postnational because of their universal characteristics?
If we turn to contemporary records theory to try to answer these questions, we can find considerable discussion of how records can have multiple manifestations, belongings and interpretations. They also move across all sorts of definitional, blurred and shifting boundaries, and do so in ways that may defy temporal continuities. Much of this discussion revolves around the complex of contexts within which a record resides and related ideas about provenance.
The importance of context with regard to understanding records is widely acknowledged. For example, it lies at the heart of traditional archival precepts for arrangement and description such as respect des fonds and the principle of original order and is thus embedded in the structure and explications of archival finding aids. But what does 'context' actually comprise and what does it tell us about the record and how it might be located, understood or claimed, especially as we move away from paper or other tangible forms of the record? Sue McKemmish writes:
The loss of physicality that occurs when records are captured electronically is forcing archivists to reassess basic understandings about the nature of the records of social and organizational activity, and their qualities as evidence. Even when they are captured in a medium that can be felt and touched, records as conceptual constructs do not coincide with records as physical objects. Physical ordering and placement of such records captures a view of their contextual and documentary relationships, but cannot present multiple views of what is a complex reality.9
The studies carried out by the International project on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) and its successor projects over the past two decades, have drawn upon principles in diplomatics theory to categorise five different types of context pertaining to the actions in which a record participates: juridical-administrative, provenancial, procedural, documentary and technological.10 Potentially, even in non-digital contexts, each of these contexts might fairly quickly lead us outside the jurisdiction or control of a single records-creating institution or state. The inverse is also the case – with adequate knowledge about them, we should be able to trace any of these contexts to a record. Indeed, the latter notion lies at the heart of business process or functional analysis and macro appraisal approaches that have been pioneered for identifying and appraising records, especially in distributed digital environments. This underscores what all archivists know – that the records themselves are only nodes in much wider contextual webs that might be used to identify other copies of the same records that have been integrated into other documentary contexts, or other records that are related in terms of one or more of these contexts.
Gilliland-Swetland and Eppard, also writing of the InterPARES studies, further assert that:
Records are temporally contingent – they take on different values and are subject to different uses at different points in time. Records are also time-bound in the sense that they are created for a specific purpose in relation to a specific time-bound action.11
Records continuum theory, first developed in the mid-1990s in Australia, holds that whether locally, nationally or societally, records, record-keeping processes and record-keeping agents exist, often simultaneously, across multiple dimensions in time and space and each can be simultaneously situated within multiple communities.12 As McKemmish notes, 'Both the relationships amongst documents in a recordkeeping system or accumulation of records, and between records and their contexts of creation and use, are multiple and dynamic'.13 As a result, records can have multiple simultaneous and parallel provenances and multiple parties can be seen to be co-creators of or to be co-present in those records and thus should have rights in their management and disposition. Fundamental to traditional archival principles upholding the singular provenance and belonging of records, however, is an unchallenged construct of singular agency in records that substantially limits what rights additional parties should or might have in decisions relating to all aspects of record-keeping, thus limiting the ability of archival practices to shift into a postnational paradigm.14 Gilliland and McKemmish have consequently argued that archives need to develop along more participatory lines, becoming a negotiated space in which different communities share stewardship and recognising that the records they hold or to which they provide access are created by, for and with multiple communities, according to and respectful of community values, practices, beliefs and needs.15
One other relevant thread in recent archival research argues that records have an identifiable social life or biography and move, and sometimes morph, through time, space and zones of control in ways that are both interactive and interdependent. The notion of displacement here is quite different from that of, for example, the objects held in museums. Instead it could be argued that records that one might characterise as displaced – records that were perhaps stolen, looted, appropriated or rescued – have been recognised as having some sort of value to another party and have entered or are being activated in a different phase of their lives specifically qua records. This research is influenced by applications of object ethnography in anthropology, sociology, education and the arts and humanities, as well as work in sociology and the information fields on the social life of documents. Cultural theorist, Arjun Appadurai, argues that such study is crucial to understanding social and cultural contexts and processes.16 Object biography focuses on individual, classes or discrete groups or communities of objects and contemplates their shifting nature, and their agency in shaping people and cultures and mediating social relationships.17 Such approaches study 'things-in-motion' (e.g. commodities that cross cultural, social or political boundaries)18 as well as boundary objects. Anthropological archaeologist, Severin Fowles, in reviewing critical approaches to 'things', points out a dichotomy in how objects and their status have been regarded:
On one hand, things are said to be powerful members of society that 'make people' no less than people make them. And yet, on the other hand, things are said to be subalterns who have been held down by the imperialist discourse of humans and who somehow require our defense. Well ... which is it? Are things powerful makers or are they powerless victims? It seems we want to argue both points at once ... The more interesting question, as I see it, is to ask what work is accomplished by the writing of objects as subalterns. And further, what work is accomplished when we elevate these objects to the status of subjects, albeit colonized subjects whose rights and honor it is for to us to defend?19
John Seeley-Brown and Paul Duguid's 1996 exposition of theories on the social life of documents emphasises the importance of documents in the formation of communities, especially among disparate and dispersed groups of people, stating that, 'Seeing documents as the means to make and maintain social groups, not just the means to deliver information, makes it easier to understand the utility and success of new forms of document.'20 However, those groups may not all understand the meaning of a document in the same way or may employ differing interpretive strategies, or the document may become the basis of negotiation over meaning. Documents can also be boundary objects between communities and can serve as catalysts for coordinating common practices.21
An important example of how this thread has been used in recent archival research is Michelle Caswell's investigation into the genesis and subsequent social life of the infamous mugshots taken by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodian prisoners at Tuol Sleng Prison before they were interrogated, tortured and killed.22 Caswell details how the mugshots have subsequently moved across different documentary contexts, geographic and institutional spaces and material forms, as well as how they are differently understood, commodified and deployed and have different affective capacities from community to community and across generations.
What then can we say about characteristics that might be universal and inalienable to records that might inform ideas about displaced records, and/or enhance postnational understandings about the import of contested records and their locations to multiple parties? We can say that records are always more extensive than is evident simply from their physical manifestations and content. They all have biographies that can take them, in various forms, far beyond their original place and circumstances of creation and use. Displacement and the events and agents associated with it, therefore, are also a part of the biography of records. By the same measure, all records are created and participate within webs of context that extend beyond the immediate place and circumstances of creation. All records can have agency – they can make things happen – whether that be in a juridical or procedural manner, or in ways that cause a community to coalesce around them, or because they function as mediators between different communities, perspectives, time periods, administrations, generations and so forth. All records are subject to multiple and shifting interpretations and value judgments as they move across time, space and communities. And all records are associated with a complex of agents – while whoever is acknowledged to be the provenance of a record and whoever has physical possession of a record have both been historically and legally accorded considerable power in determinations of ownership, disposition, location and interpretation, more people are involved in the creation of a record, either as co-creators or as subjects with substantial presence (for example, the tragic prisoners in Caswell's study) than are currently acknowledged in archival practices. Of course, nothing in any of these statements is specific to records that are born digital, but the networked digital world throws them into relief especially when considering the nature of and contestations over displaced records.
Setting aside nationalist political agendas, the most important consideration about 'displaced records' is that the communities that must rely upon them to be able to carry out essential functions must have ready access to them. The relevance of and need for records can stretch across centuries, generations, geographies and record-keeping systems. With these characteristics in mind, the final section of this essay uses examples drawn from twentieth century Yugoslavia to lay out a possible archival approach to providing more effective access to displaced and dispersed records.
Participative Networked Approaches for Locating and Accessing Displaced and Diasporic Records
The culturally rich, ethnically and religiously diverse and administratively layered history of the variously constituted and named region of south eastern Europe that between 1946 and 1991 comprised the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), has experienced multiple colonial empires, the rise of nationalism, two world wars, major political transitions, brutal civil wars between 1991 and 2001, worldwide human diasporas caused by both economic and forced migration, and the ongoing construction and reconstruction of nations, national identities and political and economic systems. Associated with many of these events have been the movement, removal, disappearance or widespread dispersal of historical and contemporary records, both official and personal. Official records relating to the region up until the end of the Second World War can be found in countries outside the region including Turkey, Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and England. Records pertaining to the SFRY and its antecedents can be found in former state (now national) archives or remain with reconstituted and defunct state bodies and organisations within the independent republics formed after the break-up of Yugoslavia, as well as in the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Serbia. Personal or private records may have moved in an even more widespread documentary diaspora, carried by waves of emigrants and millions of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) across the region, Europe and the globe and preserved by private individuals, families, community archives and various other types of collecting repositories. Beyond this, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which gathered several million pages of evidence, petabytes of digital materials and tens of thousands of hours of videotaped courtroom proceedings and eye witness testimony, as well as copies of relevant records created by the various parties involved in the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, is another notable location of records of and pertaining to the former Yugoslavia.23
Only in certain cases would any of these records be considered to be displaced records according to international treaties and conventions, or be subject to replevin claims or requests for repatriation by archival bodies. Nevertheless, in most if not all cases, the widespread scatter and lack of systematic mechanisms for locating, accessing or collating these records, whether or not they are officially designated as 'displaced' present problems for those needing to locate or access them, not to mention for ensuring the ongoing preservation and integrity of records that remain at risk of further loss. Key records in the region remain largely non-digital, while service infrastructures are frequently inadequately resourced and may also be idiosyncratic or unresponsive, and individuals as well as archives lack ways to preserve and share trusted copies of their own records so they might not be destroyed or damaged in the future. The displacement and diaspora of records also raise important ethical dilemmas and affect relating to shifting and contested identities, jurisdictions and histories, inadequate trust and cooperation between agencies and nations, the use of multiple languages and scripts and the continual interplay of past and present.
If we consider first the five contexts that were identified by the InterPARES Projects, we can gain a good sense of how complex and dispersed the records picture is, pertaining to this region.
1 Juridical-administrative contexts would include records created under Ottoman, Venetian, Austro-Hungarian, Napoleonic and Italian rule, as well as those of the federal and constituent republic administrations in SFRY and nationalised industries and other state bodies and of the independent republics that were established in the 1990s. There was also religious institutional record-keeping by the four main religions in the region.
2 Provenancial contexts (encompassing both creators and collectors) would include government agencies, business, religious institutions, schools, community organisations, diasporic communities, families and individuals and also, since the start of the Yugoslav Wars, the ICTY (and all the various provenances associated with its holdings) and independent documentary initiatives.
3 Procedural contexts and requirements would be delineated through administrative procedures, record-keeping protocols, requirements relating to sensitive or confidential documents and classification rules and schemes. The existence of records or correspondence copies of key documents in locations as far-flung as Istanbul, Graz, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Padua, the Vatican and Paris illustrate the flow of imperial and ecclesiastical information and bureaucracy.
4 Documentary context refers to the various possible relationships that might exist between documents, for example, those with the same provenance, those that participated in the same action or business process, those that dealt with the same subject matter, those created on the same date or in the same year and copies or different versions of the same record. Even before the age of digital networking records existed in multiple copies, and the information they contained existed in multiple forms and versions. However, they may conform to different record-keeping traditions, be filed in different contexts, or be described not only according to diverse institutional practices but also according to local perspectives and historical narratives. An agreement was signed last year by all the successor republics to the SFRY to digitise and describe the records of the former Yugoslavia located within their states, but it is unclear how this will be financed, what descriptive structure might be used, or how current differences in closure and opening periods might be resolved.
5 Technological context is relevant to understanding the circumstances of creation and preservation of accessed records and thus their trustworthiness, especially when those are in digital form, as are many of the ICTY records.
Within the independent states and new political economies that emerged out of the former Yugoslavia and in the global diaspora of peoples from the region there are pressing governmental, enterprise and personal needs for records from previous administrations. Inalienability as a concept is often used to underscore the incapacitating effect on a state of not having access to its own records. The new states emerging out of the SFRY are in a position where they inevitably do not hold all the records pertaining to them within their own borders. Still in the throes of making difficult political and economic transitions from state to privatised economies, businesses and industry also require access to earlier records. In the case of the millions of individuals still in the process of recovering, returning or resettling after the wars of the 1990s, access to official records (especially those relating to establishing or obtaining residency or citizenship; proving, reclaiming, transferring or ascertaining ownership of land, homes or other property; obtaining work permits, pensions or veterans' benefits; proving the right to vote or to run for office within a particular jurisdiction; and producing evidence of particular credentials or qualifications such as having completed high school or obtained a medical degree) are also priorities.
What then might be considerations, possibilities and requirements for facilitating ready and effective findability and access to such records, while at the same time navigating continuing political sensitivities and lack of trust, explicating different bureaucratic practices and accommodating variant levels of archival resources and technological capabilities? Research in other domains points to the potential and robustness of entropic networked archival approaches for addressing many of these issues.24 Rather than constrain such a network by limiting it to particular repositories and requiring the use of prescribed standards, an unbounded, decentralised (i.e. where no single agency or other party takes the lead role) and evolving network encourages trust and participation by allowing each participant to relate the biography or story of, as well as describe the content they are contributing in their own way. A participatory approach should also enable other organisations, communities and individuals to upload and share content, together with their own descriptive and trust metadata. It should also engage with co-creators and others who are present in the records and be responsive to their interests, concerns and rights. Creating a networked environment that is also supportive of independent tool development, sharing and deployment (e.g. by providing open source application development tools) would permit others to contribute or juxtapose parallel descriptions that reflect their own perspectives and interpretations, as well as to mine, map or develop visualisations across different content. Another possible use of tools would be to discern gaps in records as well as to lead users to alternative sources of evidence or information.25
Networked approaches also map well onto the contextual structures in which records are embedded. Wendy Duff and Jessica Haskell for example, propose applying Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, 'an open, nonhierarchical, and acentric system, as opposed to the arborescent model that currently informs and structures the way archivists arrange, describe, and provide access to their archival materials'.26 They see the facets of the rhizome to be 'nonhierarchical, nonstructured, dynamic, ceaselessly connected, acentric, and accessible at multiple points'.27 A rhizomatic approach also increases the possibilities of the serendipitous discovery of relevant records. Ricardo Punzalan suggests a structure for how archivists might approach making evident the biographies or telling the stories of their holdings. Exploring the notion of diasporic or dispersed records in relation to photographic collections, he identifies four dimensions of archival dispersion – geographical, temporal, provenancial and material that 'simultaneously act as barriers for providing consolidated representation' of dispersed items. He argues that it is essential for archivists to understand the context and nature of dispersion to represent the items effectively. He uses the term 'Archival Diaspora' specifically to draw attention to the complicated nature of distributed collections.28 Adapting Kim Butler's five dimensions of diaspora research to the archival domain, he suggests that such representation should ask:
What are the reasons for, and conditions of, the dispersal of archival records? What is the relationship of dispersed records to their source communities? How have records come to be understood, used, or assimilated into new collections in the institutions or communities where they currently reside? What is the relationship between the various resultant collections? What do various iterations or cases of dispersed collections tell us about the nature of archives?29
By the same measure, it is also essential that those wishing to locate and use the items also understand the context and nature of dispersion. For example, typical questions that arise when an individual today is looking for Yugoslav records include the following: What record do I need and under which authority and in which language might they have been created? Were such records in fact ever created? If so, do they still exist today and where might they be? How will I identify them (are they described in a way that I can find the documents I need?) Can I trust the records I find/receive? If such records never existed, or no longer exist, or exist but are not accessible, does the same information exist in any other form that I might use and if so where, etc.? If not, is there an earlier version of the record somewhere else? Or another process I can go through to reconstruct the record or otherwise support my need?
Beyond following the biography of the record and tracing the various formal contexts outlined above, several other contextual paths could be envisioned, some easier to generate than others and some raising more questions of ethics and vulnerability than others. These might include being able to follow the trajectory or career of a particular actor or agent, for example, a politician, emigrant or refugee, or of a specific record or set of records relating to a particular event. Although it would almost always be easier to trace the trajectory of a major figure, with enough digital content and robust granular description and searchability of documents less prominent individuals and their experiences might become easier to trace.30 The still disputed assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austrian throne, and his wife in Sarajevo in June 1914 that precipitated the outbreak of the First World War, provides an interesting example of an event where one might wish to trace the documentary context that developed around the event as well as to follow the life of the records involved.31
If we are to fully exploit the context of the records, then as much as possible of the metadata that is created about the record during its life (e.g. procedural documentation) must be captured and exposed. At the same time, descriptive metadata should be maintained (with attribution and date of creation) without attempting to impose external normalisation structures and standards (e.g. a reconceptualised, de-institutionalised approach to the creation and maintenance of authority files would be necessary) that would limit the ability to represent records and their content according to local or national points of view. Finally, high-level linking such as is possible through linked data should be used to help the user move between and collate or trace diverse content and metadata.32 Two other requirements would be the development of a new trust metadata regime required for uploaded materials (e.g. based on document and use history, certification, comparison with related documents) and the implementation of differentiated access protocols and other relevant constraints to address concerns about privacy and security.
Summary: What Is to Be Gained by This Approach?
Mindful of the effects and potential of digital networking for records creation and access, this essay has proposed an approach to the problems presented by displaced and dispersed records that is rooted in the recognition and exploitation of the various contexts and other characteristics that are inherent to records. It is also rooted in a commitment to pluralisation in terms of respecting and revealing the different ways in which the same act, event, community or individual have been characterised, historically and archivally by different parties and at different moments, and in supporting new social as well as political interpretations of the past. The benefits of such an approach include recognising and accommodating national, extranational and supranational interests in records (in this case, relating to the former Yugoslavia); enhanced locatability and accessibility of records and possible record-substitutes where the records cannot be located or no longer exist; exposure of records that are not there and generally making it harder for records to be hidden or evidential traces destroyed because their absence can more easily be discerned; the ability to upload alternative descriptions of or commentaries on records and the subjects to which they pertain and juxtaposing these with other descriptions and commentaries on the same records or subjects; and a mechanism for sharing additional or surviving materials of community, personal or sentimental value.
Two final concerns should be addressed in proposing this approach. The first of these relates to the hazards of invoking universalism. Just as there are tensions between nationalism and postnationalism, there are always tensions between universalism and the kind of pluralism that this essay seeks to encourage. The universalism asserted here is supposed to parallel that accorded today to individuals in terms of their human rights. Caswell points out a different dichotomy between nationalism and universalism in her article on the fate of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party records following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Nationalism and universalism in this context refer to the ideas that cultural property is seen as either belonging to a nation or to all of humankind.33 Her suggestion is to propose
a third, postcolonial approach to cultural property that takes into consideration the reality of power relations between colonized and colonizer, asserts the sovereignty of states in spite of outdated nationalist constructs, and yet still acknowledges the universal appeal of cultural property in an increasingly globalized world.34
The intent with the framework proposed here, however, is to avoid creating a new hegemony that invokes such a dichotomy, and instead allows for pluralism that not only recognises institutional, nationalist and postcolonial interests and agendas, but also supports all the other communities and dynamic interpretations that the records' biographies and contexts engage, precipitate or invoke.
The other concern that a reader might have is why, in such high stakes discussions, should archivists be looking to records theory and network infrastructures and not simply to the law or international conventions? One immediate response is that archivists understand much more about these characteristics of records than do lawyers, international bodies, politicians or institutional leaders. They are able to educate such individuals about those characteristics and how they might come into play in disputes over displaced records. Another response might be to point out again that certain archives have been complicit in or the target of nationalism, and finding a way to frame issues relating to the displacement of records that moves them beyond arguments about sovereignty, inalienability and national identity is one way to combat such concerns. Finally, premising actions regarding displaced records on a more solid understanding and articulation of the characteristics of records allows archivists to be more proactive in addressing the realities of digital networking and globalisation, where it will become increasingly difficult to frame future actions based around experiences with physical records and nation-state-based understandings of the past.
Notes
1 See UNESCO, 1954, <http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/armed-conflict-and-heritage/the-hague-convention/>, and 1970, <http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/illicit-trafficking-of-cultural-property/1970-convention/>.
2 Hernández-Durán, 2016.
3 See Appadurai, 1998, p. 166.
4 Pease, op. cit., p. 12.
5 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 'The Core International Human Rights Instruments and Their Monitoring Bodies', <http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CoreInstruments.aspx>; Koopmans and Statham, 1999, pp. 652–696; Saskia, 1996.
6 Pease, op. cit., p. 11.
7 Cox, 2010, p. 1009.
8 Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, 2005. Huskamp Peterson (2001) makes similar arguments about the role of national archives and nationalism: <http://trudypeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/downloads/Nasty%20Truth%20Korea2.pdf>.
9 McKemmish, 1994, pp. 187–203: <http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/groups/rcrg/publications/smcktrc.html>.
10 InterPARES Glossary, p.2, <http://www.interpares.org/book/interpares_book_q_gloss.pdf>. Technological context was introduced by InterPARES was identified as a relevant form of context by the InterPARES projects because it was felt that it had implications for the creation, trustworthiness and preservation of digital records.
11 Gilliland-Swetland and Eppard, 2000: <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/eppard/07eppard.html>.
12 Upward, 1996, 1997 and 2005.
13 McKemmish, op. cit.
14 Gilliland, 2016, pp. 31–73.
15 Gilliland and McKemmish, 2014, pp. 79–88.
16 Appadurai, 1986, pp. 3–63.
17 For example, see Preda, 1999, pp. 347–366; Steiner, 2001, pp. 207–232; Nicholas Thomas, 1991; Hoskins, 2006, pp. 74–84; and Carrington and Dowdall, 2013, pp. 96–107.
18 Berta, 2014, p. 34.
19 Fowles, 2016, pp. 9–27: <http://www.academia.edu/404148/The_Perfect_Subject_Postcolonial_Object_Studies>.
20 Seeley-Brown and Duguid, 1996: <http://pear.accc.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/466/387>.
21 Seeley-Brown and Duguid, op. cit.
22 Caswell, 2014.
23 United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, Archives of the International Criminal Tribunals: <http://www.unmict.org/en/about/archives-international-criminal-tribunals>.
24 Demetrius and Manke, 2005, pp. 682–696.
25 Two interesting precedents (historical and contemporary, respectively) for this are the International Military Tribunal that was convened after World War II, which made an unprecedented effort to gather together all surviving documentation and which determined that the records kept by the Third Reich were so comprehensive and strictly classified that it was often possible to reconstruct events and operations even when certain central files had been destroyed; and the Declassification Engine, directed by historian Matthew Connelly, which is analyzing classification policies and patterns at the same time as building a corpus of US government documents and using data mining techniques to infer what must exist but is classified.
26 Duff and Haskell, 2015, p. 38.
27 Duff and Haskell, op. cit., p. 50.
28 Punzalan, 2014, p. 326.
29 Punzalan, op. cit., p. 327.
30 For example, using 230,000 records contained in its Provenance Index databases, the Getty Research Institute has been able to construct a 'Network Diagram of Agents Connecting the British, Belgian, Dutch and French Auction Markets from 1801–20', www.getty.edu/research/tools/provenance/zoomify/index.html. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (<http://www.slavevoyages.org/>), which provides details and visualisations of 34,948 trans-Atlantic voyages, has been built using multi-source machine-readable data derived by historians from the 1960s onwards from archival sources in different European countries and ports.
31 These might include, for example, documentation about arrangements for the visit and the visit itself (located in Sarajevo and Vienna); Austro-Hungarian dispatches and documentation of the subsequent investigation of assassination events (Vienna and Sarajevo); documentation of anti-Serb pogroms in Bosnian and Croatian cities; Austrian imperial communications prior to declaring war with Serbia (Germany, the Vatican, Kingdom of Serbia); German communications with Russia and France, then Belgium; British communications with Belgium and France; Serbian records originally held in Belgrade, and then taken to Berlin by German forces who occupied the Serbian Archives during World War II and then to Moscow by Russian forces after they entered Berlin at the end of the war; documentation of the removal and funeral of the bodies of the Crown Prince and his wife (Montenegro, Trieste, Vienna, personal accounts); documentation about the conspirators (school records, police records); and materials in private hands (observers, participants, etc.).
32 Gilliland and Willer, 2016, pp. 217–228.
33 Caswell, 2010, p. 237.
34 Caswell, op. cit., p. 238.
References
Appadurai, Arjun (ed). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1986, pp. 3–63. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1998. Print.
Berta, Péter. 'Proprietary contest, business ethics, and conflict management'. Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities. Donald Wood (ed). Bingley, UK: Emerald. 2014, pp. 31–64. Print.
Carrington, Victoria and Claire Dowdall. ' "This is a job for Hazmat guy!": global media cultures and children's everyday lives'. International Handbook of Research on Children's Literacy, Learning, and Culture. Wiley. 2013, pp. 96–107. Print.
Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin. 2014. Print.
Caswell, Michelle. ' "Thank you very much, now give them back": cultural property and the fight over the Iraqi Baath party records'. American Archivist 74(1), 2010, pp. 211–240. Print.
Cox, Douglas. 'Archives and records in armed conflict: international law and the current debate over Iraqi records and archives'. Catholic University Law Review 59, 2010, p. 1009. <http://www.dcoxfiles.com/iraqarchives.pdf>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Demetrius, Lloyd and Thomas Manke. 'Robustness and network evolution—an entropic principle.' Physica A 346, 2005, pp. 682–696. Print.
Duff, Wendy and Jessica Haskell. 'New uses for old records: a rhizomatic approach to archival access'. American Archivist 78(1), 2015, pp. 38–58. Print.
Fowles, Severin. 'The perfect subject (postcolonial object studies)'. Journal of Material Culture 21(1), March 2016, pp. 9–27. Print.
'Network diagram of agents connecting the British, Belgian, Dutch and French auction markets from 1801–20'. Getty Research Institute. <http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/provenance/zoomify/index.html>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Gilliland, Anne J. 'Archival and recordkeeping traditions in the multiverse and their importance for researching situations and situating research'. Research in the Archival Multiverse. Melbourne, Australia: Monash University Press. 2016, pp. 31–73. Print.
Gilliland-Swetland, Anne J. and Philip Eppard. 'Preserving the authenticity of contingent digital objects: The InterPARES Project'. D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. <http://www.interpares.org/book/interpares_book_q_gloss.pdf>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Gilliland, Anne J. and Sue McKemmish. 'The role of participatory archives in furthering human rights, reconciliation and recovery'. Atlanti: Review for Modern Archival Theory and Practice 24, 2014, pp. 79–88. Print.
Gilliland, Anne J. and Mirna Willer. 'Implications of the information multiverse for bibliographic and archival information organization'. Ogledi O Informacijskim Znanostima: Zbornik Radova U Čast Tatjane Aparac-Jelušić. Sanjica Faletar Tanacković and Martina Dragija Ivanović (eds). 2016, pp. 217–228. Print.
Hernández-Durán, Ray. 'What is postnationalism?' Hemisphere (n.d.) 13. <https://repository.unm.edu/bitstream/handle/1928/13704/Nunn_What_is_Postnationalism.pdf?sequence=3>. 11 November 2016. Web.
Hoskins, Janet. 'Agency, biography and objects.' Handbook of Material Culture. C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds). London, UK: Sage, 2006, pp. 74–84. Print.
Koopmans, Ruud and Paul Statham. 'Challenging the liberal nation-state? Postnationalism, multiculturalism, and the collective claims making of migrants and ethnic minorities in Britain and Germany'. American Journal of Sociology 105, 1999, pp. 652–696. Print.
Latham, Robert and Saskia Sassen (eds). Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005. Print.
McKemmish, Sue. 'Are records ever actual?' The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years. Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott (eds). Clayton, Australia: Ancora Press in association with Australian Archives, Clayton, 1994, pp. 187–203. Print.
Peterson, Trudy Huskamp. 'The nasty truth about nationalism and national archives'. Proceedings of the 5th General Conference of EASTICA. 2001. <http://trudypeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/downloads/Nasty%20Truth%20Korea2.pdf>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Preda, Alex. 'The turn to things: arguments for a sociological theory of things'. The Sociological Quarterly 40(2), 1999, pp. 347–366. Print.
Punzalan, Ricardo. 'Archival diasporas: a framework for understanding the complexities and challenges of dispersed photographic collections'. American Archivist 77(2), 2014, pp. 326–349. Print.
Sassen, Saskia. Losing control? Sovereignty in An Age of Globalization. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1996. Print.
Seeley-Brown, John and Paul Duguid. 'The social life of documents'. First Monday 1(1), 1996. <http://pear.accc.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/466/387>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Steiner, Christopher. 'Rights of passage: on the Liminal identity of art in the border zone'. The Empire of Things. Fred Myers (ed). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. 2001, pp. 207–232. Print.
Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1991. Print.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. <http://www.slavevoyages.org>. 19 June 2016. Web.
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UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,1970. <http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/illicit-trafficking-of-cultural-property/1970-convention>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Upward, Frank. 'The records continuum'. Archives: Recordkeeping in Society. Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (eds). Topics in Australian Library and Information Studies 24, 2005, pp. 197–222. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies. Print.
Upward, Frank. 'Structuring the records continuum (Part One): postcustodial principles and properties'. Archives and Manuscripts 24(2), 1996. <http://infotech.monash.edu/research/groups/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum-fupp1.html>. 19 June 2016. Web.
Upward, Frank. 'Structuring the records continuum (Part Two): structuration theory and recordkeeping'. Archives and Manuscripts 25(1), 1997. <http://infotech.monash.edu/research/groups/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum-fupp2.html>. 19 June 2016. Web.
12 Revisiting the Law and Politics of Compromise
Douglas Cox
In 2011, France and South Korea signed an agreement for the return of nearly 300 volumes of Korean royal archives dating from the Joseon Dynasty. French military forces had seized the archives in 1866 and France subsequently held them in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF).1 The agreement to return the archives, after years of unsuccessful negotiations, did not provide for their permanent restitution, but was instead a five-year renewable loan to South Korea.2
At first blush, this compromise seemed precisely backwards. The value of the return of a displaced portion of South Korea's history was saddled with the indignity of a loan agreement that denied it legal ownership over its own cultural heritage. At the same time, the agreement left the BnF, which had argued for retaining the archives to make them available to the broadest pool of international researchers, with what appeared to be the least useful consolation: technical legal ownership, but not custody.
Yet in retrospect, the agreement between France and South Korea exemplifies a successful compromise. Neither side received precisely what it wanted, but the result was an improvement over the status quo. The compromise, in fact, was unique and creative, and has proven thus far to be remarkably successful. The impending transfer of the archives spurred the BnF to accelerate a project of digitising the manuscripts, which are available online to researchers everywhere as part of the BnF's Gallica digital library. At the same time, South Korea refused to let the loan arrangement dampen the significance of the repatriation of the archives, which were greeted with parades, ceremonies and renewed study.3
As this volume illustrates, the Korean archives are just one in a long line of disputes over displaced records and archives, some extending back decades, which are challenging to resolve. Recent years have also brought invaluable, in-depth case studies illustrating the complexity and dynamics of displaced archives negotiations, including Returned from Russia,4 which explored negotiations over various European archives displaced during the Second World War that were held in Russia, and Astrid Eckert's masterwork on the return of captured German records, The Struggle for the Files.5
The international community – including, the International Council on Archives (ICA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – has a long history of efforts to advance the resolution of archival disputes. The efforts have included raising awareness of the importance of archives as a part of cultural heritage; identifying relevant historical practices and advocating for international norms – including the concepts of 'archival inalienability' and 'joint heritage' – to guide the resolution of archival disputes; and pursuing practical initiatives such as microfilming projects and funding initiatives.
Despite these efforts, disputed archival claims continue to be difficult to resolve. This chapter will critically examine relevant international initiatives both to assess their influence in resolving disputes and to suggest how such efforts might be renewed and revitalised. In particular, this chapter critiques the focus of the international archival community on issues of sovereignty, inalienability and ownership of archives based both on the law and on the effect such concepts may have on the negotiation of displaced archives disputes. Finally, this chapter recommends a balanced, practical approach that stresses the broad pool of stakeholders in foreign archives, maximises flexibility and encourages creative approaches to resolving, or at least ameliorating, the effects of archival displacement.
Displaced Archives Realpolitik
As a threshold issue, a realistic assessment of solutions to displaced archives controversies requires an honest acknowledgment of the unavoidably political nature of such disputes. Given that archival controversies arise from armed conflict and occupation, colonisation and decolonisation and even peacetime espionage, the often heated and political nature of these disputes is unsurprising. States seize, capture, remove, withhold, purchase, steal and hack the records and archives of other states to gain strategic, tactical, technological, political, military, intelligence and/or economic advantages, or to prevent other states from gaining them. At the same time, such records and archives can legitimately constitute irreplaceable national patrimony and their removal and displacement unquestionably implicates issues of sovereignty, self-determination and national pride.
These factors drive, and complicate, determinations about whether to return displaced archives or even whether to acknowledge custody of foreign records held in secret. Simply put, states are reluctant to transfer foreign archives when there is either a perceived advantage to withholding them or perceived risks to returning them. As a result, protracted negotiations, delay, neglect and inertia are more the rule than the exception.
The most important factor in resolving displaced archives disputes, in fact, appears to be political and economic alignment – or realignment – between the states concerned. In post-conflict scenarios, for example, captured enemy archives are most often returned when new, post-war governments are formed that are allies rather than foes. The return of captured German records following the Second World War, for example, was based in part on a US policy to 'promote friendly relations with the Federal Republic of Germany on a normal basis'6 Similarly, as Michael Karabinos describes in this volume and previously, the return by the Netherlands of seized records from Indonesia corresponded to renewed relations between the two countries.7
Moreover, while the international archival community has properly criticised the use of displaced archives as diplomatic bargaining chips, this remains one of the most successful means of resolution. The agreement for the return of the Korean royal archives from France to South Korea, for example, occurred in the context of economic negotiations between the two countries during the 2010 G20 Summit.8 Even the seemingly intractable debate between France and Algeria over colonial archives held in the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer has seen potential signs of progress in the context of a closer political relationship between the two countries. A 2012 state visit to Algeria that involved the signing of financial, industrial and defence cooperation agreements, heard French President Francois Hollande calling for French archives 'to be opened up' and for greater cooperation between French and Algerian historians.9
Revisiting International Efforts
Acknowledging such realities does not mean that the fate of displaced archives must be abandoned to the vagaries of political expediency, and the international archival community has sought to identify more useful and principled guidelines for resolving such disputes. Seeking to revitalise such efforts provides an opportunity to reassess and, where necessary, recalibrate these principles.
Historical Treaties, Diplomatic Practice and the Rise of State Intelligence
One area of special focus has been a series of extensive historical studies of diplomatic practices and legal instruments in post-annexation, post-war and post-colonisation contexts to inform current negotiations and advocate for consistent international norms.
The ICA summarised conclusions drawn from this research in its 1995 position paper. It described 'a diplomatic routine for settling disputed archival claims' that was 'progressively established from the time of the Treaty of Westphalia onwards', which provided the following principles:
1 treaties relating to changes of sovereignty over a given territory included clauses dealing with the surrender or exchange of archives;
2 lists of archives to be transferred or copied as a result of such treaties were specifically agreed between the two parties;
3 documents necessary for the conduct of current business and for administrative continuity were almost invariably handed over by the predecessor state to the successor state either in original form or as copies;
4 archives captured or displaced during hostilities were returned once peace was concluded; and
5 archives of temporary military authorities of occupation remained the property of the occupying powers.'10
These principles seem both reasonable and useful in providing guidance in the resolution of displaced archives disputes. Yet reliance on such historic treaty practice to establish customary norms about what the resolution of more modern archival claims ought or must be is more complicated.
First, the treatment of archives in historical treaties does not necessarily reflect a benign international custom, but may indicate the unequal bargaining power of the parties. As UN rapporteur, Mohammed Bedjaoui, described these treaties in his extensive International Law Commission study: 'All, or almost all, annexation treaties in Europe since the Middle Ages have required the conquered to restore the archives belonging to or concerning the ceded territory.' Bedjaoui expressly noted that such negotiations were 'generally based not so much on equitable decisions as on political solutions reflecting the power relationship of victor and vanquished.'11 Archivist Ernst Posner evocatively described the negotiations of the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919, for example, stating, 'Austria's bargaining position was extremely weak' and therefore 'she had to sacrifice archives, without which people can live, to get bread and other food, without which they cannot live.'12 Such historical treaties may arguably reflect the same forces of political power and leverage that drive more modern diplomatic agreements.
Moreover, as the ICA acknowledges, practices appear to have changed during the last century. As the ICA describes, the 'traditional practice of devolution and restitution of archives was abruptly abandoned in 1945' following the Second World War, leaving an 'unprecedented accumulation of unresolved problems concerning' displaced archives.13 This conclusion finds support in other sources. The 1958 UK manual on The Law of War on Land acknowledged, for example, that victorious troops often allowed surrendering enemy forces certain privileges and rights as a matter of respect, including permitting 'that civil and military archives shall remain in the custody of the officials of the vanquished party'. The manual hastened to clarify, however, that:
This is not the usual practice in modern warfare as belligerents place considerable importance upon the capture of civil and military documents belonging to the enemy. They provide the victor with political, military, technical, etc., information relating to the causes of the war, the conduct of hostilities, the conditions prevailing in the territory of the defeated party, and other questions. Considerable use is made of documents relating to scientific methods, technical equipment and research activities of the enemy. Special units are nowadays assigned to armies, whose task is to prevent the destruction of such documents and seize them for their governments.14
Indeed, the rise of, and expanding role for, state intelligence operations has become a powerful driving force both in creating displaced archives disputes and complicating their resolution. Whether during war, occupation, decolonisation or peacetime espionage these forces create irresistible incentives to simply carry away as many foreign archives as one can transport. The same forces discourage restitution for fear of relinquishing an intelligence advantage or, worse, creating a security risk. This is illustrated in Robert Livingston's description of US reluctance to return to Germany the Stasi 'Rosenholz' files, which the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) obtained under questionable circumstances following the fall of the Berlin Wall:
To visiting German intelligence officers who inquired about return of the files, the CIA gave the standard answer of all espionage services when pressed to disclose information in their possession: 'We must protect sources and methods.' In cases such as Rosenholz, which had not been meticulously examined, a service's worry is that the materials may include information about the service that the service has itself has not detected but that those to whom the information is passed may.15
Archival Inalienability and Legal Norms
Consideration of historical diplomatic practices leads to the related and more complicated issue of what laws, both international and domestic, properly govern the resolution of displaced archives disputes. As Bautier said in 1961: 'It can hardly be denied that for centuries there has existed, if not an "international law on archives," at least a problem of "archives in international law." '16
The international archival community has thus sought to identify relevant legal norms. In particular, the ICA has invoked the principle of the 'inalienability and imprescriptibility of public records', as a guide for addressing disputed archival claims. 'National laws agree in conferring the status of inalienable and imprescriptible public property on public records', the ICA states, and therefore the 'transfer of ownership of public archives especially in the case of succession of States can therefore only occur through a legislative act of the State which created them'.17 UNESCO similarly endorsed the concept, stating, 'public archives constitute the inalienable and indefeasible property of the national community which is represented by the State'.18
This principle of 'archival inalienability' has unquestionably influenced the framing of displaced archives debates. A 2008 call by the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists for the transfer to Iraq of various collections of displaced Iraqi records in US custody, for example, expressly invoked the 'inalienable character of national records'.19 Similarly, in 1992, France and Russia entered an agreement for the return of French archives held in Moscow that had been displaced during the Second World War. The agreement recited that, in accordance with 'international practice, the Sides recognized the inalienable nature of public archives and shall return such of these as, being in the possession of the Sides, ought to belong to the other'.20
Inalienability has an undeniable appeal as it provides a clearly defined, understandable norm. The central problem, however, is that this concept oversimplifies the complexity of the legal status of displaced archives. It also oversimplifies the legal positions of states involved in such disputes. This can have the negative effect of encouraging overly aggressive assertions of ownership and legal rights and, in turn, encouraging inflexible negotiating positions and discouraging compromise. The frequency with which disputes involve allegations that archives were 'stolen' or 'pillaged' or 'plundered' may be evidence of this. Even in situations in which such allegations are accurate, they are rarely useful in negotiations.
Aggressive demands for the return of displaced archives must also be attune to what Mohammed Bedjaoui referred to as the 'incriminating aspect to the act of restitution'.21 That is, the country that returns archives must not be forced into admitting that they were wrongfully in possession of them (even if they were).
The oversimplification of the concept of archival inalienability can be remedied by simply acknowledging the complexity of the factors that affect the legal status of displaced archives. The circumstances in which such disputes commonly arise implicate several different, highly complex legal regimes that, each in their own way, challenge and limit a state's sovereignty over its archives, the overriding principle that archival inalienability represents.
First, records and archives displaced during war and occupation trigger the application of the law of armed conflict. As this author and others have argued, while national laws may treat state archives as inalienable state property, these laws do not necessarily trump the law of armed conflict pursuant to which belligerents may capture and permanently appropriate enemy state property where there is military necessity.22 The central complexity is that 'enemy' records and archives constitute a special property category somewhere between enemy property, whose capture the law permits, and cultural property, which enjoys more robust legal protections, although still subject to exceptions for military necessity.23
The current Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict of the UK Ministry of Defence summarises the basic standard for archives in war: 'Official documents and papers connected with the armed conflict may be seized, even if they are part of official archives, because they will be of military significance. However, other types of archival documents, as well as crown jewels, pictures and art collections may not be seized.'24 Determining the lawfulness of the seizure of archives can thus become a complicated, fact-intensive inquiry.
Second, the movement of records during colonisation, decolonisation or the creation of new states implicates the separate, but equally complex, legal regime of state succession. The central issue becomes determining the proper division of state property between predecessor and successor states. Charles Kecskeméti notes that archival claims in such situations are 'particularly complex' and that 'there is no possibility of achieving any real progress unless the full complexity of the problem is understood'.25
The primary international attempt to codify relevant legal principles came through the 1983 diplomatic conference on the Vienna Convention on Succession of State in respect of State Property, Archives and Debts, which attempted to address the transfer of archives between and among predecessor and successor states in several contexts.26 The ambivalence of the international community towards the principles of this Convention, however, is illustrated by the fact it has not entered into force due to the limited number of state parties. Moreover, the Convention was also challenged by prominent members of the international archival community, who concluded that the Convention did 'not provide an adequate basis for dealing with succession of States in respect of archives.' In particular, the archivists expressed serious concern that in certain circumstances the Convention contemplates the automatic transfer of archives even in the absence of a specific agreement between the states. 'Such a conception,' the archivists concluded, 'disregards the very nature of archives'.27
Third, displaced archives disputes arise in the context of espionage during war or peacetime. 'Espionage is often nothing but a "paper war"', noted Mohammed Bedjaoui, 'which enables the more successful to obtain the enemy's – or even the ally's – plans, designs, documents, secret treaties, and so forth'.28 The CIA's surreptitious procurement of the Stasi 'Rosenholz' files, mentioned above, which were not returned to Germany until a decade later, provide a compelling illustration.
While acts of espionage, such as the secret taking of foreign government records, may clearly violate the domestic law of the state whose records are removed, the question of whether espionage violates international law is still hotly debated. On the one hand, espionage appears manifestly inconsistent with the basic rights of states to sovereignty and territorial integrity. On the other hand, given that all, or nearly all, states engage in foreign espionage, it is arguably an internationally accepted practice. The debate among legal scholars includes one group that concludes that peacetime espionage is legal under international law, another that it is illegal and a third group 'straddled between the other two, maintains that peacetime espionage is neither legal nor illegal'.29
Fourth, human rights norms can – and arguably more often should – place limits on a state's sovereignty over its own records. Indeed, unqualified acceptance of a state's power over its records can have negative effects such as reinforcing regressive legal restrictions on access and facilitating repressive regimes in their destruction of inculpatory records documenting its human rights abuses. In contrast, a report on behalf of UNESCO and ICA on archives of the Security Services of Former Repressive Regimes, for example, outlined a spectrum of relevant collective and individual rights related to human rights records.30 Others have persuasively argued for more robust legal obligations in international human rights law for states to disclose records documenting abuses.31
Moreover, the return of displaced records of a former repressive regime can raise human rights concerns over their possible use, especially during transitional periods where a lack of security may predominate. Bruce Montgomery, for example, describes the dangers of 'returning intelligence documents to a successor state government that may exploit them against dissidents, or entire populations, or religious groups'.32 Some situations may argue for an archival analogy to the international human rights concept of non refoulment in which detained foreign citizens are not returned to their home country when repatriation presents risks of torture or mistreatment. In the context of archives, this could include concerns about the safety of the records or concerns about the receiving government's use of these records.
Finally, resort to national laws in determining the legal status of archives is a double-edged sword that can actively create obstacles to resolving archival claims. Finding a resolution to the issue of the Korean royal archives in France, for example, was impacted by the decision of a French administrative tribunal that held that the manuscripts had become, under French law, an inalienable part of French cultural heritage.33 Similarly, negotiations for the return of German records seized by US forces during the Second World War, was complicated by the fact that 'legal title' to some portion of the records had transferred to the US government and were subject to the US Federal Records Act. Returning the records therefore required action by the US Congress and was characterised as a 'donation' to Germany.34
The Limits of Legal Solutions
These various legal regimes governing displaced archives create several problems. First they are impossibly complex to navigate, subject to varying interpretations, and their application requires a fact-intensive analysis where contested facts are the norm. In fact, the complexity of determining their precise legal status has frequently left displaced archives lost in 'legal limbo'. The Cary Report on 'migrated archives' from former British colonies, for example, describes the 'confusion over ownership' over the records as a result of which 'the Kenyan migrated archive was left in limbo' for decades.35 Similarly, thousands of boxes of records from Panama, seized by US forces in 1989 from the regime of Manuel Noriega, which remain in US custody, have been subject to the same uncertainty about whether they are properly Panamanian or US property.36
Even in situations where the applicable law may be clearer, an ever-present problem with legal norms in international disputes is the lack of enforceability. This both limits the options of those seeking to enforce them and limits the deterrent effect for those violating them. The availability of international forums to bring archival claims is extremely limited. As for national courts, governments enjoy various forms of immunity in their own courts and judges are often wary of weighing in on issues that bear on foreign policy.
As one illustration, during a controversy over records seized by US forces in Haiti in 1994, the US Congressional Research Service analysed the legal issues and concluded: 'Haiti has a reasonable case that the seizure of the documents violated its rights under international law.' Yet the analysis also noted Haiti's limited remedies both in US courts and the International Court of Justice, concluding, 'It is doubtful' that Haiti 'will be able to have the controversy resolved in a judicial forum.'37
In the end, the complexities and restraints of the various legal regimes and the reality that disputes are often mired in contested details of historic events, create an environment where the chance of creating a stalemate, in which the parties have conflicting, but plausible legal interpretations, approaches certainty. While it seems counterintuitive given that archival disputes are invariably characterised as predominantly legal disputes, the end result is that law may play little role in successful resolutions. In the negotiations over French archives displaced to Moscow following the Second World War, for example, Jean-Claude Kupermine notes: 'The Russians considered themselves to be the legal owners of the captured French material in Moscow, whereas the French considered them to be receivers of stolen goods.'38 Yet putting this disagreement to the side, the parties ultimately concluded an agreement couched in the language of mutual respect and cooperation.
Joint Heritage
A related principle more conducive to compromise and endorsed by both the ICA and UNESCO is the concept of 'joint heritage' or 'common heritage'. For archives 'where succession is shared between several States, and which cannot be broken up,' the ICA states, the archives should be 'physically integrated into the archival heritage of one of the States', but the 'other States sharing a common history' should have 'a right of access to these fonds and a right to copy them.'39 Such situations are especially prevalent in cases of decolonisation where records of a newly created (or reborn) state may be part of, and interfiled with, the central records of the state to which the territory previously belonged.
An example of the explicit use of this concept is the 2001 agreement between successor states of the former state of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The agreement treated certain archives 'as common heritage of the States which shall have free and unhindered access to them', allowed each State the right to 'make copies of the archives in question on an equitable cost-sharing basis', and required that the State in custody of the originals observe 'the principle of respect for the integrity of groups of SFRY State archives so as to facilitate full access to and research in those groups of archives'.40
In his 1998 RAMP study, which surveyed existing archival disputes, Leopold Auer highlighted those claims where the 'concept of joint heritage' might prove useful 'to facilitate the solution of the claim'. Yet based on responses from the states involved, Auer noted that a 'solution through the concept of joint heritage is favoured by only a minority, but it seems to be an increasing minority, which leaves some hope for the future'.41 This assessment, however, was arguably too narrowly drawn. While the specific invocation of 'joint heritage', as precisely defined by the ICA, might be limited, the broader animating principle has had an enormous influence in resolving archival disputes.
Understood more broadly, in fact, the principle can be seen in the most common form of resolution of archival disputes: one state possessing originals and the other state receiving copies. This result is, in essence, shared ownership, because it provides both states with control over access to the information, which is a central, if not dominant, part of the bundle of rights that comprise ownership.
Towards Practical Solutions and Avoiding Stalemate
Given the analysis above and the continuing difficulties presented by displaced archives disputes, what follows are some provisional thoughts, both conceptual and practical, on refreshing and revitalising efforts to maximise compromise and find flexible, mutually agreeable resolutions.
Rethinking First Principles: Archival Internationalism
As an initial matter, it is worthwhile to consider the fundamental question of whether, in attempting to resolve displaced archives disputes (with limited success), we should alter the way we think about displaced archives. Anne Gilliland argues in this volume, for example, for reconceptualising the notion of 'displaced' records consistent with postnationalism and challenging arguments focused on ownership and custody.
Another useful concept familiar to debates over cultural property more generally is the dichotomy between 'cultural nationalism' and 'cultural internationalism'.42 Cultural nationalism emphasises cultural property as national property that is part of the heritage of a specific nation. Cultural nationalism is a force that drives 'demands for the "repatriation" of cultural property' to their country of origin.43 Cultural internationalism, in contrast, treats cultural property more as a part of 'common human culture, whatever their places of origin or present location, independent of property rights or national jurisdiction'.44 The concept is exemplified by the preamble of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which declares that 'damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind'.45
Grafting this distinction onto the issue of displaced archives – using the terms 'archival nationalism' and 'archival internationalism' – is rather straightforward. Archival nationalism is represented by the concepts in the foregoing discussion: national laws, sovereignty, inalienability and the restitution of displaced archives to the state that 'owns' them. The narrower conception of 'joint heritage', confined only to the specific states involved in state succession, also arguably reflects this. Archival nationalism appears to represent the more common view and it is a reasonable one, especially in the context of archives. As Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has argued: 'Paintings and sculpture may appropriately serve as cultural ambassadors in museums throughout the world, but archives always deserve restitution to the countries where they belong as the official record.'46
Archival internationalism, in contrast, de-emphasizes the importance of physical custody and ownership and recommends a greater emphasis on preservation and broad access. This also finds expression in statements from the international archival community. A 1999 statement of the Society of American Archivists on the destruction of archives in the former Yugoslavia, for example, stated: 'Although felt most deeply by those directly affected, the loss of archives anywhere in the world is an irreplaceable tragedy for all mankind.' And warned: 'Once destroyed, archives cannot be re-created, and the cultural patrimony of the world is permanently diminished.'47 The ICA's 2012 Universal Declaration on Archives declares: 'Open access to archives enriches our knowledge of human society.' A broader conception of 'joint heritage', one that might be read to mean 'universal heritage', would also reflect this.
Of course, the two concepts of archival nationalism and internationalism are not mutually exclusive or diametrically opposed. The issue is one of balance between them. This author would suggest that the international archival community should consider, for instance, whether its advocacy has been tilted too far in favour of archival nationalism. There is some evidence that a recalibration more towards archival internationalism could be a return to its roots. In a 1947 article entitled 'The Archivist's One World', then Archivist of the United States, Solon Buck, described nascent efforts, in which he was intimately involved, to create an international organisation for archives, efforts that ultimately resulted in the ICA. Buck's conception of an international perspective on archives was expansive. He described a holistic concept of the 'archival heritage of mankind' of which 'no one country can possess more than a small part' and he argued for broad access. Buck stressed: 'Scholarship that feeds upon the archival resources of a single country cannot be otherwise than one-sided and nationalistic' and 'the only antidotes are freedom of access to the originals in whatever country they may happen to be and the making and exchange of photographic facsimiles.' Buck also noted the corresponding importance of preservation, stating:
[T]hese measures in the interest of internationalism – and I might add enlightened nationalism – presuppose the preservation and efficient administration of the separate parts that compose the archival whole. The loss of an important body of records in any country is a loss to all countries – and it matters little in retrospect whether that loss be caused by an atomic bomb, unintelligent handling, or mere neglect.48
A greater emphasis towards internationalism in the work and advocacy of the international archival community could arguably have several benefits for the resolution of archival disputes.
First would be the potential for a simple change of tone in addressing these often-heated disputes by recognising a much broader pool of legitimate stakeholders in foreign records. This could expand an acknowledgement of a mutual interest as a softer starting point for negotiation and ideally would allow the parties to more easily move past the stalemate that comes with contested, inflexible positions on facts and law.
Second, less emphasis on sovereignty, inalienability and ownership may encourage more creativity in finding mutually agreeable solutions. The innovative lease agreement between France and South Korea, for example, illustrates the flexibility of bilateral agreements, an important characteristic for archives. When starting with a clean slate, such agreements can be carefully drafted and customised to provide mutual acknowledgment of the specific concerns of the states with the goal of allowing both states to claim victory and, where necessary, save face.
Third, a turn towards a more internationalist viewpoint would help contextualise problematic issues raised by the strict application of inalienability to displaced archives and records outside official state custody. Michelle Caswell, for example, questions the application of the concept of inalienability to records documenting the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which are in the custody of the non-governmental Documentation Centre of Cambodia. Caswell argues that if these archives were transferred to the National Archives of Cambodia, as a 2005 Cambodian law may require, the 'records could be destroyed by former Khmer Rouge officials who now hold office; at a minimum, access to the records would be embargoed'.49
Such concerns are consistent with Solon Buck's internationalist view, which was unmoored from the idea that international law or archival practice necessarily requires that archives belong in the custody of one state. In particular, Buck described a category of 'Records of International Concern and Importance' and used a rather extreme example of 'military and similar records of aggressor nations that have been defeated through the joint efforts of the United Nations' that 'although national in origin should not in the interests of world peace be left in the custody of the nation that created them' but instead 'preserved for such research and other use as can safely be made of them'.50
Finally, a pivot towards internationalism is not inconsistent with recent ICA initiatives focusing on access. The ICA's 2012 Principles of Access to Archives, for example, urges that archives be 'made available on equal and fair terms,' and that access to archives should be granted to victims of serious crimes under international law to find evidence of those violations 'even if those archives are closed to the general public'.51
Originals and Copies
A related strategy to further encourage resolution of archival disputes – which might be more controversial or even heretical – would be for the international archival community to critically reassess its views on the perceived significance of the distinction between originals and copies. Given the intense emphasis on the return – or retention – of originals in such disputes, it is reasonable to question whether originals are given more perceived value than their intrinsic value justifies.
The central importance of the distinction between originals and copies in archival disputes was highlighted in Leopold Auer's 1998 RAMP study. Auer noted: 'The responses to the questionnaire clearly indicate that claims for originals prevail. Therefore, microfilm must be regarded as a very secondary means for the solution of any disputed claim.' He added: 'The dominance of claims for originals partly explains itself by the high rate of restitution cases in which neither microfilm copies or joint heritage would make much sense.'52 Such importance placed on originals, by both sides in these debates, is arguably facilitated by, again, the emphasis on sovereignty, inalienability and ownership that is critiqued throughout this chapter.
Non-archivist observers are often surprised to learn that heated archival disputes continue unabated when copies of the archives are available. Such was the case, for example, with the debate between Russia and the United States over the Smolensk archive, which continued for decades despite the fact that the archives had 'long been available in their entirety for public purchase on microfilm'.53 To such observers, archival disputes often appear to be proxies for lingering debates over the historical events that gave rise to the displacement.
Of course, such lay opinions and non-technical views do not account for the obvious truth that the original documents are the original property to which states understandably attach special significance as a piece of their national heritage. Yet, even acknowledging that, there is a reasonable argument that the nature of archives, for which content is usually the most important element, diminishes the distinction between the original document and a modern reproduction in a way that is not true of other forms of cultural property.
To be clear, there are situations in which originals unquestionably can have the same significance as other forms of cultural property. The Korean royal archives, returned to South Korea from France, included elaborate paintings and illustrations that were as much art as archives. As a more limited example, an archivist who worked on captured German records from the Second World War prior to their return, lamented that information 'important to the scholar' was lost in the microfilm copies retained in the US National Archives. 'An outstanding example,' she noted, 'is color. It was generally the habit of many German officials of higher rank to stick generally to one color in their penciled notations. It is easy to identify them by their brilliant greens (Himmler), vermilions (Keitel), browns (Jodl), or purples (Thomas).'54 Yet there are many situations in which such special characteristics are lacking.
There are a variety of additional arguments useful in de-emphasising the distinction between copies and originals. Diplomatic treaties relied on to support possible international norms, for example, also include exchanges of copies. With limited exceptions, courts are also willing to accept authenticated copies into evidence to establish legal rights. And in the era of 'born digital' records, provided that copies capture relevant metadata of the records, the practical distinction between copies and originals approaches true insignificance.
Efforts to encourage the acceptance of copies should focus just as much, if not more, on the states with custody of the originals. As mentioned above, national laws that make state records inalienable can be obstacles to the goal of repatriation of originals and the retention of copies. Yet, reliance on such national laws as a defence should be tested. As Kecskeméti stated in 1977: '[T]ransfer of originals, when legally justified and carried out in accordance with archival principles, should not be considered an impoverishment of the national heritage' and invoked the 'duty of archivists' in accomplishing this.55 In order to permit the return of German records captured during the Second World War, for example, the then archivist of the United States determined that, in light of the availability of microfilm copies, the original German records no longer had 'sufficient administrative, legal, research, or other value' to warrant their continued retention, which satisfied US records laws.56
This is not to say that copies are a universal solution. Kecskeméti's 1977 warning that '[m]icrofilming is not a panacea' also applies to digital reproductions and 'virtual repatriations'.57 At the same time, greater willingness to retain or accept copies would unquestionably advance the resolutions of these disputes to the benefit of both parties and ultimately international researchers.
Reinvigorating the Role of Archivists
A final consideration for both advancing the practical resolution of archival disputes as well as avoiding such disputes going forward, is revisiting the role of the archivists. Developing relationships between archival institutions in states involved in archival disputes, for example, has had the effect of progressing resolutions. Michael Karabinos notes that archival cooperation between Indonesia and the Netherlands led to a broader cultural agreement that in turn 'ushered in the cooperation that eventually resulted in the return of the seized archives'.58
It is worth noting that in other situations, in contrast, professionals responsible for displaced archives have led the opposition to agreements to return them. In a particularly colourful episode, in negotiations over the Korean royal archives, it was the BnF staff that was strongly opposed to their return to South Korea. In fact, in 1993, then French President Francois Mitterand initially returned a single volume of the archives as a good-will gesture (and contemporaneous with France competing for a high-speed rail contract in South Korea) during a state visit to South Korea. This was over the vehement protest of BnF curators, who refused to hand over the manuscript that was housed in a locked box. Aides to the President were forced to break open the box minutes before the presentation ceremony.59
Moreover, when agreements for the return of archives are not forthcoming, government archivists and archival organisations should also revisit practical efforts to ameliorate the negative effects of archival displacement according to the maxim that the perfect should not be an enemy of the good. This could include facilitating access and exchange of copies, or even simply identifying relevant collections. A recurring issue is displaced archives being simply lost or forgotten. Part of the delay of the return of Indonesian archives from the Netherlands 'was that the seized archives were "mixed up with Dutch dossiers", and their whereabouts were not entirely known'.60 The Korean royal archives at the BnF were lost for decades because they were misclassified as Chinese manuscripts.61 Panamanian records seized by US forces during the 1989 invasion were forgotten in a US military warehouse for years until the military unit responsible received a bill for a decade worth of storage.62 Relevant to this, the ICA's 2012 Principles of Access to Archives states that institutions holding archives should 'make known the existence of the archives, including the existence of closed materials'.63
Moreover, national archives sometimes have a role in setting priorities for their government's programmatic declassification programmes, which could assist in accelerating broader access to collections of displaced foreign records that have been restricted. Further, archivists in states with custody of foreign records might also assist others in navigating national freedom of information laws, which are underutilised in seeking access to non-public displaced government collections.
Finally, given the intractable nature of many displaced archives disputes, additional resources and attention are needed in avoiding or preventing archival disputes. This begins with the central role of the ICA and national archivists in highlighting the importance of archives to ensure that their protection is not overlooked in military strategic plans and that their disposition is on the agenda of diplomatic negotiations in state succession scenarios.
An illustration of an archivist undertaking such a duty is seen in a 2003 letter from then archivist of the United States, John Carlin, to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the US invasion of Iraq began. Carlin urged the Department of Defense from the start to treat originals of seized Iraqi records as the property of the eventual 'new Iraqi Government' and advised that the National Archives would not treat the originals as records subject to US records laws. Carlin argued instead that '[s]canning and copying technology now allow American forces to obtain copies of virtually any type of record that will be necessary for military and intelligence purposes' and that these copies alone would be treated as the official US records.64
While these Iraqi records currently remain in US custody and while the letter clearly did not prevent controversy regarding their fate, Carlin's forward thinking will ultimately facilitate negotiations over their eventual return home. That archives of each nation are important to all nations comes with a corresponding duty for everyone to do their part to protect them.
Notes
1 Bibliotheque nationale de France, 'BnF's Korean manuscripts are lent to the National Museum of Korea (Seoul),' 11 May 2011.
2 See Cox, 2011, p. 409.
3 Ah-young, 2011.
4 Returned from Russia in Returned to Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues, Grimsted, Hoogewoud and Eric Ketelaar (eds.) 2007.
5 Eckert, 2012.
6 General Records Schedule, 'Seized German Records,' Aug. 1, 1953, US National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 242, Pomerenze Collection, AGAR-S No. 3144.
7 Karabinos, 2013, pp. 289–290.
8 Cox, 2011, p. 419.
9 Embassy of France in London, 'Francois Hollande pays state visit to Algeria,' 20 December 2012.
10 'The View of the Archival Community on the Settling of Disputed Claims' Position Paper Adopted by the Executive Committee of the International Council on Archives at its Meeting in Guangzhou, 10–13 April 1995 [hereinafter ICA Position Paper].
11 Bedjaoui, 1979, pp. 75, 100 (emphasis added).
12 Posner, 1942, p. 152.
13 ICA Position Paper.
14 The War Office, The Law of War on Land: Being Part III of the Manual of Military Law § 479 (London: HMS, 1958) (emphasis added).
15 Livingston, 2010, p. 81.
16 Quoted in Kecskeméti, 1977, p. 10.
17 ICA Position Paper.
18 UNESCO, Consultation Group to Prepare a Report on the Possibility of Transferring Documents from Archives Constituted within the Territory of Other Countries, Final Report (April 1976), CC.76/WS/9: § 5.2.
19 Society of American Archivists and Association of Canadian Archivists, 'SAA/ACA Joint Statement on Iraqi Records,' 22 April 2008.
20 Grimsted, 2010, p. 297.
21 Bedjaoui, 1979, p. 95.
22 Montgomery, 2010, pp. 161–165; Cox, 2010, pp. 1021–1022.
23 See Peterson, 2005, p. 270 (stating that 'archives are both cultural and administrative property and fit somewhat awkwardly into a purely cultural definition').
24 Ministry of Defence, Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict, § 11.8 (Oxford University Press, 2004).
25 Kecskeméti, 1977.
26 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of State Property, Archives and Debts, 8 April 1983.
27 Professional advice formulated in 1983 on the Vienna Convention on succession of States in respect of State Property, archives and debts, Part III, State archives (art. 19 to 31).
28 Bedjaoui, 1979, p. 75.
29 Radsan, 2007, p. 602.
30 Quintana, 2009.
31 Ciorciari and Franzblau, 2014, pp. 1–84.
32 Montgomery, 2010, p. 160.
33 Cox, 2011, pp. 414–416.
34 General Records Schedule, 'Seized German Records,' 1 August 1953, National Archives, Record Group 242, Pomerenze Collection, AGAR-S No. 3144.
35 Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Cary report on release of the colonial administration files, para. 18.
36 Cox, 2014, pp. 57–89.
37 Harry Gourevitch, Congressional Research Service, Memorandum, 'Seizure of Haitian Documents by the American Military,' to Representative John Conyers, Jr. 12 December 1995.
38 Kupermine, 2007, p. 145.
39 ICA Position Paper.
40 Agreement on Succession Issues, 29 June 2001, Annex D, art. 6.
41 Auer, 1998, p 24.
42 Merryman, 1986, pp. 831–853.
43 Merryman, p. 832.
44 Merryman, p. 832.
45 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 14 May 1954, Preamble.
46 Grimsted, 2001, pp. 493–494.
47 Society of American Archivists, 'Resolution on the Systematic Destruction of Archives in Kosovo and War-Caused Devastation of Archives throughout Yugoslavia,' 14 April 1999.
48 Buck, 1947, p. 17.
49 Caswell, 2013, p. 120.
50 Buck, 1947, p. 15.
51 International Council on Archives, Principles of Access to Archives (2012).
52 Auer, 1998, p. 24.
53 Grimsted, 1995, p. 4.
54 Perman, 1959, p. 437.
55 Kecskeméti, 1977, p. 6.
56 General Records Schedule, 'Seized German Records,' 1 August 1953, National Archives, Record Group 242, Pomerenze Collection, AGAR-S No. 3144.
57 Kecskeméti, 1977, p. 6.
58 Karabinos, 2013, p. 289.
59 Cox, 2011, pp. 413–414.
60 Karabinos, 2013, p. 290.
61 Cox, 2011, pp. 413–414.
62 Cox, 2014, p. 69.
63 International Council on Archives, 2012.
64 John Carlin, Archivist of the United States, Letter to Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, 17 April 2003, 1–2.
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Index
20 year rule
30 year rule , –
Abioye, Abiola
Abuja
Académie des sciences d'Outre-mer
access (to archives) ix, , , , , , –, , –, , , –, , –, , –, –, , –, , –, , –, , , –, –, –, , , –,
accessions ,
accountability (of government) , , , –; see also transparency
accumulations of records
Adams, Herbet Baxter
Aden ,
administrative continuity ,
advocacy
Adwar
aerial bombing , , , ,
affective capacities
Africa Studies Association
Africa , , –, , –, –, –, –, –, –
African Army
African Union ,
Afrikaans
Afrique Occidentale Française ; see also French West Africa
The Afterlife of Empire
Age of Enlightenment
Aix-en-Provence , ,
al-Sabah family
Algeria , , , –, , , , , ; dispute with France (see Franco-Algerian dispute); National Archives , –, , ,
Allies, the –, , , , –, , , ,
Almohad
Almoravid
alternative descriptions
America see United States of America
Amery, L. S.
Amiri Diwan
Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana sulla Somalia
Anbar province
Ancien Régime
Ancient China
Anderson, David
Anfal –
Angola
Anguilla
Annales School
Antananarivo
Antigua
Apartheid
Appadurai, Arjun
appraisal (of records) , , ,
ArcheoBiblioBase
Archi, Alfonso
archival claims –, , , , , , , –, –,
archival cooperation , , , ,
archival disputes , , , , , –, –
archival repositories viii, , –, , , , , , , , ,
archives: 'of management' , , ; 'of sovereignty' , , –, –
archiving the nation , ,
archiving the state , ,
Archiwum Akt Nowykh (AAN)
argief (archive or collection)
armed conflict viii, , , , , , ,
Arsip Nasional see Indonesia, National Archives
Arusha
Asia viii, ,
assassination –, ,
The Assassination of Lumumba –
Association of Canadian Archivists ,
Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Record Managers
Association of Commonwealth Universities
Assyrian sculptures
Athens –
Auer, Leopold ix, , , , , , , , ,
Auschwitz , , ; card files ; death books , ,
Austin, Texas viii
Australia , ,
Austria –, –, –, –, , ,
authority files
Axis powers
B'nai B'rith
Ba'ath Party , , –
Babylonia
Baden-Baden convention (1926)
Badger, Tony
Baghdad , –, , –,
Bahamas, The ,
Bailkin, Jordanna –,
Bandung
Banton, Mandy , , , , –,
Barbados
Barbuda
Barisan Banteng (Buffalo Brigade)
Barrera, Giuilia
Basque
Basra
Bastian, Jeanette
Bastien, Hervé ,
Basutoland , ,
Batavia
Bataween synagogue
The Battle of Algiers (1965)
Bautier, R.H. , ,
Bavaria
Bay of Algiers –
Bechuanaland ,
Bedjaoui, Mohamed , , –
Beijing ,
Belarus ,
Belgium , , –, –, , , , ,
Belgrade
Belize
Bella, Ahmed Ben
Berbice
Beria, Lavrentii –,
Berlin , , –, ,
Berry, Annie
bestanddelen (files)
Bibliotheque Nationale de France ,
bilateral agreements , –, ,
biography of records
Black Power Movement
Blaney, E. C. , ,
Blundell, Sir Michael –
Boateng, Lord Paul
Bodin, Jean
Bohemian crown archives
Bordeaux
born-digital records ,
Borobudur temple
Botswana , , , , –; National Archives
Boumendjel, Ahmed
boundary objects
Boyer, Pierre , , –
Brazzaville
Bremen
Bristol
Britain , , , , –, , , , –, , –, , –, , –, –, –, , –, –, , , , ; Ministry of Defence ; National Archives , –, –, –, –, , –,
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
British Empire and Commonwealth Museum
British Empire , , , , , ,
British Guiana , ,
British Indian Ocean Territory ,
British North Borneo Company
Brunei
Brusasca, Giuseppe
Brussels Convention
Brussels ,
Bubiyan
Buck, Solon Justus viii, –
Budapest
Bundesarchiv , , , , –
burning (of records) , ,
Burton, Antoinette
Burundi
Bush-Cheney administration ,
Bush, George H. ,
Butler, Kim
Cairo
Cambodia , , –; National Archives
Cameroon ,
Camp As Sayliya
Canada
Canonbury Masonic Centre
Cape Town
captured archives viii, , , , , –, , –, –, –, , , –, –, –, ,
Carlin, John ; see also Archivist of the United States
Cary Report , –, , –,
Casement, Roger
Caswell, Michelle , , –
catalogues , , –, –,
cataloguing ,
Catherine of Braganza
Catherine the Great
Central African Archives (CAA) –
Central African Office (CAO)
Central Archive of the Communist Party
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , ,
Centre for Overseas Archives (CAOM)
Centre for the Preservation of Historico-Documentary Collections (TsKhIDK) ,
Ceylon , , , , ,
Chagossians
Chamson, André ,
Charles II
Charles V
Charman, Derek
chemical weapons
Cheney, Richard ,
Cheysson, Claude
Chifamba, Sarudzayi
Chikhi, Abdelmadjid
China , , , , ,
Chinese manuscripts
citizenship , , –,
civil society ,
civil wars , ,
classification: classification schemes , ; classification of records and files , , –, , , , ; typologies of displaced archives , –, ; see also declassification
Clinton, Hilary
closure (of records) , , , –, , , , ; see also year rule; 30 year rule
co-creation ,
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) , ,
coalition , –, , , –,
code of ethics ix, ,
Cold War , ,
collection policies
collective memory , ,
colonial administration , , ,
colonial archives , –, ,
colonial government , , , ,
Colonial Office , –, –, , , , , ,
colonial period , , , –, ,
colonial rule , , , , , , ,
colonisation viii, , , , , , , –,
Comitato per la Documentazione Dell'Opera dell'Italia in Africa
Commission on Art Recovery
Commonwealth of Independent States
Commonwealth of Nations , , ,
Commonwealth Relations Office –
Communism , , , –,
Communist bloc ,
communities of objects
community archives
community registration photographs
community values
Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa
compensation , , , –,
Conference of the International Round Table on Archives (CITRA) ,
confidentiality , ,
Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC)
Congo , , , –
conservation ,
le contentieux see Franco-Algerian dispute
Cook, Michael
Copenhagen
copies (of records) , , , , –, , , , , , –, –, , , –, , , –, –, , –, , , –
copying (of records) , , , –,
copyright –, ,
Corsica
Council of Europe , ,
Count Palatine
counter-intelligence , –
Cox, Douglas ix, , ,
crimes against humanity ,
cultural agreement , ,
cultural assets , –,
cultural exchange , –
cultural heritage –, , , , , , –, –
cultural identity
cultural imperialism ,
cultural internationalism
cultural nationalism
cultural property , , –, –, , , , –, –, , , ,
cultural reparations
cultural value (of records)
culture of neglect
culture of secrecy –
Curaçao
custody viii, , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , , , , –, , , –
customary law (European) , –,
Cyprus , ,
Czech Republic
Czechoslovakia ,
d'Estaing, Valéry Giscard
Dakar ,
Danish Royal Archives
Danzig Senate
Danzig –
Dar es Salaam
databases , , ,
Daunou
death books see Auschwitz, death books
declaration of independence –,
declassification , , , ,
decolonisation viii, , , , , –, , –, –, –, , , , –, , , , , , , , ,
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) , ,
Deleuze, Gilles
Demerara
democracy ix, , , , –, , –, –
Denmark ,
deposit agreements
Derrida, Jacques
destruction of records –, , , , –, –, , , , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , ,
devolution (of archives) , ,
diaspora (of people) , , , , , , , ,
diaspora (of records) , –,
digital copies , , , –,
digital repatriation ,
digitisation , , , , , ,
diplomacy viii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, ,
diplomatics
Direzione Generale per Gli Archivi
Displaced Archives Working Group (of the ICA) , ,
disposition (of records) , , –,
Diwan of the Crown Prince
Diwan of the Prime Minister
Djogdja Documenten –, –
documentary heritage , ,
Dominica
Duff, Wendy
Duguid, Paul
Duhok
Dutch East India Company (VOC) –, , , ,
Dutch West India Company ,
East African Community
East and Central African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ECARBICA) , , ,
East Germany
East Timor
Eastern and Southern and African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA) , , –, ,
Eberly, Angelina viii
ecclesiastical archives
Eckert, Astrid ,
Ede, Jeffrey
Egypt –
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) –,
Eksander, Saad
El Watan
Elector of Mainz ,
Elkins, Caroline –, –
Embakasi Detention Camp ,
Emperor Ferdinand III
'end of empire' ,
England , , , ,
ephemera , ,
Eppard, Philip B.
Équateur
Equatorial Guinea ,
espionage , , ,
Essequibo
Estonia
ethics ix, , , , , , , ,
Ethiopia
ethnic violence , ,
Europe viii, , , , –, , –, , –, , –, , –, , , , –, , , , ,
European Parliament ,
European Union ,
Euskadi Ta Askatasuna
Evian Accords
evidence (records as) , , , –, , , , , , –, , , , , ,
exile ix, , , , , ,
expatriate (people) , ,
'expatriate archives' , , ,
fascism ,
FCO archives see 'migrated archives'
Federal Archives Centre
Federal Security Service
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland , , –
Ferdinand, Archduke Franz
Fiji
financial value (of records) , ,
finding aids ix, , , –,
First World War , , , ,
Fisher, D. J.
Flinn, Andrew
fonds (record groups) , , , , –, –, –, ,
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) , , , , –, –, , , , –, ,
Foreign Office , , , , , ; see also Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Fourth Republic
Fowles, Severin
France , , , –, –, , , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, , , , , , , –, , –; Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer ; Archives Nationales de France , ,
Franco-Algerian dispute , , –, , ,
Franco, Francisco
Frankfurt
freedom of access
Freedom of Information , , , , ,
French Association of Archivists
French empire
French Equatorial Africa
French Overseas Archives (ANOM) ,
French Revolution –
French West Africa , ; see also Afrique Occidentale Française
Front Demokrasi Rakjat
functional analysis
functional pertinence ,
G20 Summit
Galbraith, Peter –
Gallica digital library
Gambia ,
Garaba, Francis
Gates, Robert
Gaulle, General Charles de , ,
Gdánsk
generative spaces
genocide , –
German War Documents Project
Germany , , , , –, , , –, –, –, –, , , –, , , –, , –,
Gestapo ,
Ghana , , , , –
Gilbert and Ellice Islands
Gilliland-Swetland, Anne J. ; see also Gilliland, Anne J.
Gilliland, Anne J. , , , ; see also Gilliland-Swetland, Anne J.
glasnost
globalisation
Gold Coast –,
good governance
Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein –
Graz
Great Britain see Britain
Greece , –,
Grenada
Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy , , ,
groep (records group)
grote verzameling (large collection)
Grotius, Hugo
Guadeloupe
Guattari, Félix
Guinea-Bissau
Gulf War –, –,
Guyana ,
Habsburg Monarchy
Hague Conventions , –, , , , ,
Hague Peace Conferences
Hague, William ,
Haiti
Halabja
Halleck, Henry
Hamburg
Hampshire, Edward –
Hanslope Park ,
Harare ,
Haskell, Jessica
Hatra
Hatta, Mohamed
Havana
Hebrew manuscripts
Heeresarchiv ,
Heligoland
High Commission territories
Hilterman, Joost
Himmler, Heinrich
Hiribarren, Vincent , , , ,
historical value (of records) , , ,
Hobbes, Thomas
Hofkammerarchiv
Hollande, François
Holocaust , , –, –; see also Shoah
Holy Roman Empire –
Hong Kong ,
Hoover Institute at Stanford University
Horrisland, Helge
houer (carton)
House of Commons
House of Lords
Howe, Stephen
Hughes, Howard
human rights –, , ,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) –
Hungary , ,
Hussein, Saddam , –, –
identification documents ,
Ighilahriz, Louisette
Imperial Chamber Court
imperialism , , , , –,
inalienability , , , –, –
India , , , , , ,
India Office Library and Records ,
Indian Office
indices
Indochina ,
Indonesia , , –, , –, , , ; National Archives –, –
Institute for Defense Analysis
Institute of Commonwealth Studies
Institute of International Law
Instituto Portugûes de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento
integrity (of records) , , ,
intelligence , –, –, , , –, –, , , , , –, , –, , –, –, –, , ,
Interagency Council on Restitution
Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict
international archival community , , , –, , –
international boundaries ,
International Congress on Archives ,
international conventions , , , , , –, , , –, , , –, –, , –, , , , , –,
International Council on Archives (ICA), ix, –, , –, , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , –, , , –,
International Court of Justice
International Criminal Tribunal
International Law Commission of the United Nations , –, , ,
international law , , –, , , , –, , , , , –, , , –,
international legal norms , , –,
International Project on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) ,
inventories , –, , , ,
Ionian Islands –,
Iran-Iraq war
Iran , –,
Iraq , , –, –, –, , , ; National Library and Archives
Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) –
Iraq Survey Group
Iraqi Special Tribunal
Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH)
Ireland ,
Iron Curtain
Islamic art
Islamic State (ISIS) , –
Israel , , –
Israëlitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG)
Istanbul
Italo-Ethiopian Treaty
Italy , , –, , , –, –
Jagschitz, Gerhard ,
Jakarta ,
Jalink, Paul
Jamaica ,
James I
Japan
Java
Jeater, Diana
Jerusalem –
Jeune Afrique
Jewish: archives –, , , –; communities , –, , , ; organisations ,
Jewish Agency for Israel
Jodl, Alfred
Johannesburg
joint heritage , –, , , , , , –, ; see also shared heritage
Joseon Dynasty
Judea
jus gentium ; see also law of nations
Karabinos, Michael , , , , ,
Karner, Stefan ,
Kasai
Katanga
Kecskeméti, Charles ix, , , , , , , ,
Keeper of the Public Records (UK)
Keiler, Helmut
Keitel, Wilhelm
Kenya , , –, , –, , , –, , , , –, , ; National Archives ,
Kepolisian Negara
Ketelaar, Eric ,
Khmer Rouge , –
Khrushchev
Kiev
King Juan Carlos
King Leopold II ,
King of Prussia
Kiribati and Tuvalu
Kirkuk
Koblenz
Koran
Korea , , , , –
Korotaev, Vladimir
Kozlov, Vladimir ,
Kraków
Kremlin
Kriegsarchiv
Künsberg brigades
Kupermine, Jean-Claude
Kurdish Autonomous Regions
Kurdish Regional Government
Kurdish Socialist Party
Kurdistan –
Kuwait –,
Kuz'min, Evgenii
Kwaadgras, Evert
Kwantung
Kyiv ,
Laborde, Léon de
Ladino ,
Lake Victoria ,
Landsarchief ,
Laos
law of nations , ; see also jus gentium
laws of armed conflict ,
The Law of War on Land
Leader, Dan
League of Nations
legal status of displaced archives , , , , –
legislation , , –, , , , , , –, –, , –, , –,
Leisinger, A. , ,
Lenin Library
Leningrad ,
Léopoldville
Les Lieux de Mémoire
Lesotho , ,
Libération
Lieber, Francis
Liechtenstein , –
linked data ,
Lisbon
Lithuania
Livingston, Robert
Livingstone, David
loans , ,
London , –, –, , , ,
looting , –, , , ,
Lord Castlereagh
Lord Chancellor's Office , ,
Lord Chancellor's Security and Intelligence Instrument
Louis XIV
Lübeck
Lumumba, Patrice –
Lusaka
Luther, Martin
Luxembourg ,
macro appraisal
Madagascar , ,
Madiun
Makiya, Kanan –
Malawi , , , ; National Archives
Malaya –, ,
Malaysia
Maliki, Nouri al
Malta , ,
Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict
Maputo
Martinique
Masonic archives , –
materiality (of records) ,
Mau Mau , , , , ,
Mauritius ,
Mazikana, Peter ,
Mbabane
McKemmish, Sue –
Mediterranean ,
merchant shipping
Messina
metadata –, , , ,
MI5
microfilm , , , ,
microform
Middle Ages ,
'migrated archives' , , –, –, , –, , , , , , –, –, , , ,
Militärbefehlshaber Frankreich
military archives , , , ,
military campaigns , –, , , , , , ,
Milligan, Jennifer , ,
Minister of Belgian Congo
Ministero degli Affari Esteri (MAE) –
Ministry of Italian Africa
Minsk
missionary records
Mitterand, François
Mnjama, Nathan , , , , , –, , , , –
Molotov, Viacheslav
Morocco
Moscow , , , –, , –
Moser, Johann Jacob
Mosul ,
moveable property
Mozambique , ,
Mozzati, Marco
Mukhabarat –
Mukula, P. M.
Murambiwa, Ivan
Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
Musembi, M.
Muslim , ,
Naar, Devin
Nairobi –, , , –
Namibia ,
Napoleon , , –
Napoleonic Wars , , –,
National Archives of the United Kingdom see Britain, National Archives
National Archives of the United States see United States of America, National Archives and Records Administration
national communities ,
National Council of the Algerian Revolution
National Defense University
national heritage , , ,
national identity , , , ,
National Liberation Front (FLN) (of Algeria) , , ,
national narratives , ,
national security ,
National-Socialist see Nazism
nationalism , –, –, , , , –, –, –, –
Nazism , , , , –, , , –, , , ,
Nebuchadnezzar
neglect , ,
neo-colonialism (-ist) ,
neo-liberalism
Netherlands, The , , , –, , –, , –, –, , , , –, , , , –, , , ; Ministry of Defence , –; Ministry of Foreign Affairs ; National Archives –, –,
Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service (NEFIS) –
Netherlands Indies ; Attorney-General
networks , ,
Neuchâtel
Neven's Mission
New Hebrides
New South Wales
New York Times
New York –, , ,
Niger
Nigeria –, , , , –, ; National Archives –
Nimrud
Nineveh
Nixon, Richard
Nora, Pierre
Nördlingen
Noriega, Manuel
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)
North Borneo Company ,
North Borneo , ,
Northern Cameroon
Northern Rhodesia , ,
Norway
Novgorod
NSDAP Institute for Research on the Jewish Question (IEJ)
Nsibandze, Nomsa
nuclear weapons
Nuremberg trials , ,
Nyasaland , , , 924
Nzili, Paulo ,
Obiang, Teodoro
object biography
object ethnography
occupation (military) viii, , , –, , , –, –, , , , , –, –,
Oceania
'of administration' (archives) see archives, 'of management'
'of management' (archives) see archives, 'of management'
'of sovereignty' (archives) see archives, 'of sovereignty'
Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD)
Office of Human Rights and Transitional Justice
Office of National Intelligence
oil –, , ,
Old Admiralty Building
Oldenhage, Klaus
Onslow, Sue
openbaarheid
openness (of archives) , , , , , –, , , –,
Opération archives
Operation Ezra
Operation Legacy ,
Operation Nehemiah
opisi
oral history ,
original order
originals , , , , , , , , , –,
Oslo
Ottoman empire , ,
Oxford Colonial Records Project (OCRP)
Oxford University
Padua
Pakistan , ,
Palestine , , ,
Panama
Panwitz, Sebastian
Papon, Maurice
parallel descriptions
parallel provenance
Paramaribo
Paris , , , , , , , –, , , ,
participative archival network approach ,
patrimony , –, , , , , ,
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) –
peace treaties –, ,
Pease, Donald
Peking
Pentagon , , , –,
Pérotin, Yves , ,
personal papers , , , ,
personhood –
Philip of Hesse
photographic collections
pluralism –
Poland –, , , –
police , , , , , , ; records , , , ; see also secret police
policy , , –, –, , , , , , , ,
Pomian, Krzysztof
Portugal , , , , ; Arquivo Histórico Diplomático ; Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino
Posner, Ernst vii,
post-colonial contexts , , –, , , –, , , ,
post-war contexts , , , , , , , –, , –
postnationalism –, –, ,
Prague ,
Prasad, Shitla ,
preservation (of archives) , , , , , , , , , , –, –
Prince Metternich
Príncipe
Pringgodigdo Archive
privacy ,
private collections viii, , , , , –, , , , –, –, , , , ,
propaganda , , ,
provenance , , , , , , , –, , , –, –, , , , ,
Pskov
Public Record Office (PRO) see Britain, National Archives
publicité
Pugh, R. B.
Le Puloch
Punzalan, Ricardo
Putin, Vladimir , ,
Qatar , –,
Queen Beatrix
racial politics
Racibórz
Ramokate, Kago
Ratibor
rebellion , , , , ,
reclassification
reconciliation ,
The Reconstitution of the Memory of Poland
records: continuum theory , , ; creation , , , , , –, –, , , , , ,
Le RECOURS
Red Army , –
Regional Archives of Algiers
Regional Crimes Liaison Task Force
Reichsarchiv
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) , –,
Reinalter, Helmut
reorganisation of archival collections –
reparations , , –
repatriation ix, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
replevin ,
Republic of Indonesia see Indonesia, Republic of
respect des fonds
Ress, Imre
restitution, , , –, , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , ,
retroactive sovereignty
Returned from Russia , ,
Reunion
Reybrouck, David Van
rhizome
Rhodes House Library , , , , ; Manuscript Collection of Africana ; see also Oxford University
Rhodes University
Rhodesia , , , –, –
Rhodesian Army Archive , ,
Rhodesian Army Archive Project –,
Rhodesian Army Association Museum Trust (RAAMT)
Rieger, Morris ,
Rif War
Riga , ,
rights ix, , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , –,
Riveira, Miguel Primo de
Roman ,
Rome , ,
Roper, Michael
Rosarkhiv , , , ,
Rossica ,
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA) , , –
Rothschild Archive
Rothschild family ,
routing slips ,
Royal Commission on Public Records
Royal Navy
Ruanda-Unrundi
Rumsfeld, Donald
Russia , –, , , –, –, , –, , , , , ; Cultural Property Law 1998/2000 , , ; empire , ; parliament , , –; policy ,
Russian Duma see Russia, parliament
Russian Federation , , , –, –, –, –
Russian State Archive of Early Acts (RGADA)
Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI)
Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE) –
Russian State Library (RBG)
Rwanda
Saadi, Yaacef
Sabah
Sachsenhausen
St Croix
St Eustatius
St Lucia
St Petersberg
St Thomas
St Vincent
Salazar, Antónia de Oliveira
Salih, Barham
Salisbury
San Francisco
Santo Domingo
São Tomé
Sarawak
Saudi Arabia
Schellenberg, T. R.
Schlesiersee
Schmitt, Carl
Schryver, August E. de
scorched earth campaign
Second Empire
Second Treaty of Brömsebro
Second World War , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , –, , , –, , , ,
Secret Army Organisation (OAS)
secret police , , ; records ,
sectarianism , –
Seeley-Brown, John
Senegal
Sephardi , –
Serbia
Service Historique de la Défense
Seychelles
Shakry, Omnia E. –
Shanghai
Shaqlawah
shared heritage , , ; see also joint heritage
shared ownership
Shepard, Todd , , –, ,
Shiite –, ,
Shoah ; see also Holocaust
Sicily
Sierra Leone , ,
Silesia , –
Singapore ,
singular provenance ,
slave trade, abolition of
Sława
Slovakia
Smit, Jinna
Smith, Bonnie
Smolensk Communist Party Archives ,
Smolensk , ,
Society of American Archivists , , ,
Solomon Islands
Sonderarchiv
South Africa , , –,
South African Defence Force –,
South America
Southern Rhodesia , ,
sovereignty , –, –, –, , , , , , , , –, , , –, –, –
Soviet Military Administration (SVAG/SMAD) –,
Soviet spoliation , –, –, –, , –,
Soviet Union see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
Sowoolo, S.
Spain , , –,
Spanish Civil War
special collections –
spoils of war , ,
Sri Lanka ,
Stasi 'Rosenholz' files ,
State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)
state property , –,
Stein, Sara
Stepniak, Wladyslaw
stewardship ,
Stockholm ,
stolen records ,
Stoler, Ann ,
storage –, , , –, ,
The Struggle for the Files (Kampf um die Akten)
Suárez, Adolfo
succession of states viii, , , , , , , , , , –, ,
Suharto
Sukarno –
Sulaimaniyah ,
Sunni , , –
Surabaya –
Surinam ,
Swaziland , , ,
Sweden , , ; National Archives (Riksarkivet)
Syria ,
Talabani, Jalal
Tallinn City Archives
Talmud
Tanganyika –,
Tangier –,
Tanzania , , , ; National Archives ,
Tel Aviv University
Temesvar
territorial pertinence , ,
territorial provenance , , –
terrorism ,
Texas viii
Thessalonica –,
Thessaloniki
things-in-motion
Third Reich ,
Thirty Years War ,
thirty-year rule see 30 year rule
Tikrit
Tilly
toegang , –
Torah
torture , , , ,
transfer of sovereignty , ,
transnational networking
transparency (of government) , , , , –; see also accountability
Trawniki files
Treaty of Münster
Treaty of Paris
Treaty of Riga ,
Treaty of Saint-Germain
Treaty of Sveres
Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Westphalia
Trinidad
Tripoli Program
Trophies of War and Empire
trophy archives –, , , –, ,
trust metadata regime
trustworthiness
Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi arkhiv SSSR (TsGOA SSSR) –
Tsipras, Alexis
Tunis
Tunisia
Tuol Sleng Prison
Turkey , –,
Turks and Caicos,
twenty-year rule see 20 year rule
Twiss, Sir Travers
Uganda , , , ,
UK public records –, , , , ,
Ukraine , , , ,
UN Security Council , ,
UN see United Nations
UNESCO , , , –, , , , –, , , , , , –, , , ,
Unilateral Declaration of Independence
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) –, , , –, , –, , –
United Kingdom see Britain
United Nations (UN) , –, , , , , , , –, , ,
United Nations Conference on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts
United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization see UNESCO
United States of America , , –, , , , , , –, , , –, –, –, , , –, ; Army Foreign Military Studies Office ; Congress , ; Congressional Research Service ; Department of Defense ; Holocaust Museum ; House of Representatives ; National Archivist viii, , , (see also Carlin, John; Buck, Solon Justus); Justice Department ; National Archives and Records Administration , , , ; records laws , ; Senate , ; Senate Foreign Relations Committee , ; State Department , , ; Strategic Bombing Survey
Universal Declaration on Archives
universal heritage
universalism –
University of Algiers
University of Colorado-Boulder
University of Nairobi
University of Pavia
University of Texas viii
University of the West Indies
University of the West of England (UWE) –
University of Warsaw
Upravlenie reparatsii i postavok SVAG (SVAG Administration for Reparations and Deliveries) –
Van Laar, Evert ,
Vandevalle, Frederic
Vanuatu
Vatican ,
Vattel, Emmerich (Emer) de , ,
Venetian archives
Venice
Vichy State
Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives, and Debts , , , –, , , , , ,
Vienna , , ,
Vietnam –,
Vilnius
Vincennes
violence –, , , , ,
voice of the colonised
Vorontsov, Yuri
War Office
war viii, , , , , –, –, , , –, , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, , –, , , , –, –, ; crimes , –, , ,
Warba
Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets
Washington, DC , –, , ,
weapons of mass destruction , –,
Wei-Hai-Wei –, ,
Welensky, Roy ,
West Germany ,
West Indies Federation ,
Western Pacific –
Wheaton, Henry
Wikileaks
Wilhelm, Leopold
Wilkanów
Witte, Ludo de
Wölfelsdorf
work permits
World Organization of Jews from Iraq
World War I see First World War
World War II see Second World War
World War One see First World War
World War Two see Second World War
Wright, Marcia –
Yeltsin, Boris
Yogyakarta , , ,
Yugoslavia , , , , –, –, , –
Zakho
Zambia , , , , , ; National Archives ; see also Central African Archives
Zanzibar ,
Zheen Archive Centre
Zimbabwe Rhodesia
Zimbabwe , –, , , –; National Archives , ,
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La Figure allongée, en trois morceaux, 1 est une sculpture de Henry Moore.
La sculpture en bronze est inaugurée en 1962 dans l'atrium de la tour CIBC à Montréal par le maire Jean Drapeau. Elle était alors la première sculpture monumentale de Moore au Canada et portait le nom de Figure couchée en trois parties, 1. Coulée en sept exemplaires, l'œuvre est typique des figures allongées de Moore, sujet récurrent lui permettant d'explorer la relation entre abstraction et figuration.
La sculpture est donnée par la CIBC au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal en 2017. Elle est installée dans le jardin de sculptures.
Source
Œuvre conservée au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal
Sculpture en bronze
Henry Moore
Sculpture du XXe siècle
Sculpture monumentale
Centre-ville de Montréal
Sculpture à Montréal | {
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Les URL de fichiers renvoient le fichier en question
Les URL de dossiers sont traitées et formaté par Apache via le .htacces
Toutes les autres URL executent un .php associé
Les URL sont découpées en niveaux par les "/" puis confiées au controleur correspondant au premier niveau.
Exemple : "monsite.com/User/view/toto" sera confiée au controller User.php et sa fonction "get_view" sera appelée
Les controllers doivent se trouver dans le dossier /src/
Si un controller n'est pas trouvé, le controlleur "Page" est invoqué a la place
Si la fonction demandée n'existe pas, la fonction "get_default" est invoquée a la place
Exemple : "monsite.com/" sera confié a la fonction "get_default" du controleur "Page"
Exemple : "monsite.com/test" sera confié a la fonction "get_default" du controleur "test"
Exemple : "monsite.com/test/ca" sera confié a la fonction "get_ca" du controleur "test"
Le controller "Page" génére des pages listant sous forme hierarchique, les fichiers présent dans le dossier /web/public/page
Le contenu de ces page est le fichier passé dans l'URL ou a default, la page Accueil.html
Les fichiers cachés (commencant par un ".") ne sont pas listé mais restent accessible par URL
Il est possible de créer des lien symbolique pour faire lister des fichiers externe au dossier /page/
Le controller "v1" est en charge des interaction avec la bases de donnée.
Un descriptif des fonctions proposées par v1 est disponible a l'adresse "/v1"
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Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series
BLACK EYES AND THE DAILY GRIND
THE DICTATOR
PRISON OF A BILLION YEARS
THE GRAVEYARD OF SPACE
SUMMER SNOW STORM
MY SHIPMATE—COLUMBUS
EARTHSMITH
VOYAGE TO ETERNITY
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT
THE ONE AND THE MANY
QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE
A PLACE IN THE SUN
THINK YOURSELF TO DEATH
WORLD BEYOND PLUTO
COPYRIGHT INFO
The Eighth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack: Milton Lesser is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cover art copyright © Innovari / Fotolia.
* * * *
"Black Eyes and the Daily Grind" originally appeared in If Worlds of Science Fiction, March 1952.
"The Dictator" originally appeared in Imagination, January 1955.
"Prison of a Billion Years" originally appeared in Imagination, April 1956.
"The Graveyard of Space" originally appeared in Imagination, April 1956.
"Summer Snow Storm"originally appeared in Amazing Stories, October 1956.
"My Shipmate—Columbus" originally appeared in Amazing Stories, October 1956.
"Earthsmith" originally appeared in Imagination, January 1953.
"Voyage To Eternity" originally appeared in Imagination, July 1953.
"Home Is Where You Left It" originally appeared in Amazing Stories, February 1957.
"The One and the Many" originally appeared in If Worlds of Science Fiction, July 1952.
Quest of the Golden Ape, published under the pseudonyms "Ivar Jorgensen" and "Adam Chase" (Ivar Jorgensen is either Paul W. Fairman or Randall Garrett), originally appeared in Amazing Stories as a 3-part serial, January, February, March 1957.
"A Place in the Sun" originally appeared in Amazing Stories, October 1956.
"Think Yourself to Death" originally appeared in Amazing Stories, March 1957.
"World Beyond Pluto" originally appeared in Amazing Stories, November 1958.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Milton Lesser (1928-2008) was born in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was an American author of science fiction, mystery novels, and fictional autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is best known for his detective character Chester Drum, whom he created in the 1955 novel The Second Longest Night. Lesser also wrote under the pseudonyms Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, C.H. Thames, Jason Ridgway and Ellery Queen.
Lesser attended William and Mary College, earning his degree in philosophy, marrying Leigh Lang shortly after graduating. The couple divorced in 1962. He was drafted into the U. S. Army during the Korean War.
He was awarded the French Prix Gutenberg du Livre in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, and in 1997 he was awarded the "Life Achievement Award" by the Private Eye Writers of America. He also served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America. He lived with his second wife Ann in Williamsburg, Virginia.
He legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe, the pseudonym he had used on myseries.
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
ABOUT THE MEGAPACKS
Over the last few years, our "Megapack" series of ebook anthologies has grown to be among our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, "Who's the editor?"
The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside's authors...who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?
Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We'd love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).
Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.
TYPOS
Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it's been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.
If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We'll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.
The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series
MYSTERY
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The Roy J. Snell Mystery MEGAPACK™
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The Singer Batts Mystery MEGAPACK™: The Complete Series, by Thomas B. Dewey
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GENERAL INTEREST
The Adventure MEGAPACK™
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The Classic American Short Stories MEGAPACK™, Vol. 1.
The Classic Humor MEGAPACK™
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THE GOLDEN AGE OF PULP FICTION
1. George Allan England
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION
1. Winston K. Marks
2. Mark Clifton
3. Poul Anderson
4. Clifford D. Simak
5. Lester del Rey (vol. 1)
6. Charles L. Fontenay
7. H.B. Fyfe (vol. 1)
8. Milton Lesser (Stephen Marlowe)
9. Dave Dryfoos
10. Carl Jacobi
11. F.L. Wallace
12. David H. Keller, M.D.
13. Lester del Rey (vol. 2)
14. Charles De Vet
15. H.B. Fyfe (vol. 2)
16. William C. Gault
17. Alan E. Nourse
18. Jerome Bixby
19. Charles De Vet (Vo. 2)
20. Evelyn E. Smith
21. Edward Wellen
22. Robert Moore Williams
THE GOLDEN AGE OF WEIRD FICTION
1. Henry S. Whitehead
2. George T. Wetzel
3. Emil Petaja
4. Nictzin Dyalhis
5. David H. Keller
6. Clark Ashton Smith
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
The First Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Third Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Sixth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Eighth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Ninth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The 10th Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The A. Merritt MEGAPACK™*
The A.R. Morlan MEGAPACK™
The Andre Norton MEGAPACK™
The C.J. Henderson MEGAPACK™
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The Mad Scientist MEGAPACK™
The Martian MEGAPACK™
The Milton A. Rothman Science Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Miss Pickerell MEGAPACK™
The Murray Leinster MEGAPACK™***
The Second Murray Leinster MEGAPACK™***
The Philip K. Dick MEGAPACK™
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The Plague, Pestilence, & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™
The Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Randall Garrett MEGAPACK™
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The Science-Fantasy MEGAPACK™
The Space Opera MEGAPACK™
The Space Patrol MEGAPACK™, by Eando Binder
The Second Space Patrol MEGAPACK™, by Eando Binder
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The Arthur Machen MEGAPACK™**
The Monster MEGAPACK™
The Mummy MEGAPACK™
The Occult Detective MEGAPACK™
The Penny Dreadfuls MEGAPACK™
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The Uncanny Stories MEGAPACK™**
The Vampire MEGAPACK™
The Victorian Ghost Story MEGAPACK™
The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™
The Werewolf MEGAPACK™
The William Hope Hodgson MEGAPACK™
WESTERN
The Andy Adams Western MEGAPACK™
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YOUNG ADULT
The Bobbsey Twins MEGAPACK™
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SINGLE-AUTHOR
The A. Merritt MEGAPACK™*
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The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK™
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The Arthur Conan Doyle MEGAPACK™: Beyond Sherlock Holmes
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* Not available in the United States
** Not available in the European Union
***Out of print.
FREE PROMO MINIPACKS™
Each one is only available from our web site for a single day—on Free Ebook Tuesday! Like us on Facebook to see new title announcements.
The John Gregory Betancourt MINIPACK™
The Richard Deming Crime MINIPACK™
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The Lt. Jon Jarl of the Space Patrol MINIPACK™, by Eando Binder
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The Thubway Tham Thanksgiving MINIPACK™
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called "The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK™")
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
BLACK EYES AND THE DAILY GRIND
He liked the flat cracking sound of the gun. He liked the way it slapped back against his shoulder when he fired. Somehow it did not seem a part of the dank, steaming Venusian jungle. Probably, he realized with a smile, it was the only old-fashioned recoil rifle on the entire planet. As if anyone else would want to use one of those old bone-cracking relics today! But they all failed to realize it made sport much more interesting.
"I haven't seen anything for a while," his wife said. She had a young, pretty face and a strong young body. If you have money these days, you could really keep a thirty-five-year-old woman looking trim.
Not on Venus, of course. Venus was an outpost, a frontier, a hot, wet, evil-smelling place that beckoned only the big-game hunter. He said, "That's true. Yesterday we could bag them one after the other, as fast as I could fire this contraption. Today, if there's anything bigger than a mouse, it's hiding in a hole somewhere. You know what I think, Lindy?"
"What?"
"I think there's a reason for it. A lot of the early Venusian hunters said there were days like this. An area filled with big lizards and cats and everything else the day before suddenly seems to clear out, for no reason. It doesn't make sense."
"Why not? Why couldn't they all just decide to make tracks for someplace else on the same day?"
He slapped at an insect that was buzzing around his right ear, then mopped his sweating brow with a handkerchief. His name was Judd Whitney, and people said he had a lot of money. Now he laughed, patting his wife's trim shoulder under the white tunic. "No, Lindy. It just doesn't work that way. Not on Earth and not on Venus, either. You think there's a pied-piper or something which calls all the animals away?"
"Maybe. I don't know much about those things."
"No. I don't think they went anyplace. They're just quiet. They didn't come out of their holes or hovels or down from the trees. But why?"
"Well, let's forget it. Let's go back to camp. We can try again tomor—look! Look, there's something!"
Judd followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Half-hidden by the creepers and vines clinging to an old tree-stump, something was watching them. It wasn't very big and it seemed in no hurry to get away.
"What is it?" Lindy wanted to know.
"Don't know. Never saw anything like it before. Venus is still an unknown frontier; the books only name a couple dozen of the biggest animals. But hell, Lindy, that's not game. I don't think it weighs five pounds."
"It's cute, and it has a lovely skin."
Judd couldn't argue with that. Squatting on its haunches, the creature was about twenty inches tall. It had a pointed snout and two thin, long ears. Its eyes were very big and very round and quite black. They looked something like the eyes of an Earthian tarsier, but the tarsier were bloody little beasts. The skin was short and stiff and was a kind of silvery white. Under the sheen, however, it seemed to glow. A diamond is colorless, Judd thought, but when you see it under light a whole rainbow of colors sparkle deep within it. This creature's skin was like that, Judd decided.
"If we could get enough of them," Lindy was saying, "I'd have the most unusual coat! Do you think we could find enough, Judd?"
"I doubt it. Never saw anything like it before, never heard of anything like it. You'd need fifty of 'em, anyway. Let's forget about it—too small to shoot, anyway."
"No, Judd. I want it."
"Well, I'm not going to stalk a five-pound—hey, wait a minute! I taught you how to use this rifle, so why don't you bag it?"
Lindy grinned. "That's a fine idea. I was a little scared of some of those big lizards and cats and everything, but now I'm going to take you up on it. Here, give me your gun."
Judd removed the leather thong from his shoulder and handed the weapon to her. She looked at it a little uncertainly, then took the clip of shells which Judd offered and slammed it into the chamber. The little creature sat unmoving.
"Isn't it peculiar that it doesn't run away, Judd?"
"Sure is. Nothing formidable about that animal, so unless it has a hidden poison somewhere, just about anything in this swamp could do it in. To survive it would have to be fast as hell and it would have to keep running all the time. Beats me, Lindy."
"Well, I'm going to get myself one pelt toward that coat, anyway. Watch, Judd: is this the way?" She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and squinted down the sights toward the shining creature.
"Yeah, that's the way. Only relax. Relax. Shoulder's so tense you're liable to dislocate it with the kick. There—that's better."
Now Lindy's finger was wrapped around the trigger and she remembered Judd had told her to squeeze it, not to pull it. If you pulled the trigger you jerked the rifle and spoiled your aim. You had to squeeze it slowly....
The animal seemed politely interested.
Suddenly, a delicious languor stole over Lindy. It possessed her all at once and she had no idea where it came from. Her legs had been stiff and tired from the all-morning trek through the swamp, but now they felt fine. Her whole body was suffused in a warm, satisfied glow of well-being. And laziness. It was an utterly new sensation and she could even feel it tingling at the roots of her hair. She sighed and lowered the rifle.
"I don't want to shoot it," she said.
"You just told me you did."
"I know, but I changed my mind. What's the matter, can't I change my mind?"
"Of course you can change your mind. But I thought you wanted a coat of those things."
"Yes, I suppose I do. But I don't want to shoot it, that's all."
Judd snorted. "I think you have a streak of softness someplace in that pretty head of yours!"
"Maybe. I don't know. But I'd still like the pelt. Funny, isn't it?"
"Okay, okay! But don't ask to use the gun again." Judd snatched it from her hands. "If you don't want to shoot it, then I will. Maybe we can make you a pair of gloves or something from the pelt."
And Judd pointed his ancient rifle at the little animal preparing to snap off a quick shot. It would be a cinch at this distance. Even Lindy wouldn't have missed, if she hadn't changed her mind.
Judd yawned. He'd failed to realize he was so tired. Not an aching kind of tiredness, but the kind that makes you feel good all over. He yawned again and lowered the rifle. "Changed my mind," he said. "I don't want to shoot it, either. What say we head back for camp?"
Lindy gripped his hand impulsively. "All right, Judd—but I had a brainstorm! I want it for a pet!"
"A pet?"
"Yes. I think it would be the cutest thing. Everyone would look and wonder and I'll adore it!"
"We don't know anything about it. Maybe Earth would be too cold, or too dry, or maybe we don't have anything it can eat. There are liable to be a hundred different strains of bacteria that can kill it."
"I said I want it for a pet. See? Look at it! We can call it Black Eyes."
"Black Eyes—" Judd groaned.
"Yes, Black Eyes. If you don't do this one thing for me, Judd—"
"Okay—okay. But I'm not going to do anything. You want it, you take it."
Lindy frowned, looked at him crossly, then sloshed across the swamp toward Black Eyes. The creature waited on its stump until she came quite close, and then, with a playful little bound, it hopped onto her shoulder, still squatting on its haunches. Lindy squealed excitedly and began to stroke its silvery fur.
* * * *
A month later, they returned to Earth. Judd and Lindy and Black Eyes. The hunting trip had been a success—Judd's trophies were on their way home on a slow freighter, and he'd have some fine heads and skins for his study-room. Even Black Eyes had been no trouble at all. It ate scraps from their table, forever sitting on its haunches and staring at them with its big black eyes. Judd thought it would make one helluva lousy pet, but he didn't tell Lindy. Trouble was, it never did anything. It merely sat still, or occasionally it would bounce down to the floor and mince along on its hind-legs for a scrap of food. It never uttered a sound. It did not frolic and it did not gambol. Most of the time it could have been carved from stone. But Lindy was happy and Judd said nothing.
They had a little trouble with the customs officials. This because nothing unknown could be brought to Earth without a thorough examination.
At the customs office, a bespectacled official stared at Black Eyes, scratching his head. "Never seen one like that before."
"Neither have I," Judd admitted.
"Well, I'll look in the book." The man did, but there are no thorough tomes on Venusian fauna. "Not here."
"I could have told you."
"Well, we'll have to quarantine it and study it. That means you and your wife go into quarantine, too. It could have something that's catching."
"Absurd!" Lindy cried.
"Sorry, lady. I only work here."
"You and your bright ideas," Judd told his wife acidly. "We may be quarantined a month until they satisfy themselves about Black Eyes."
The customs official shrugged his bony shoulders, and Judd removed a twenty-credit note from his pocket and handed it to the man. "Will this change your mind?"
"I should say not! You can't bribe me, Mr. Whitney! You can't—" The man yawned, stretched languidly, smiled. "No, sir, you can keep your money, Mr. Whitney. Guess we don't have to examine your pet after all. Mighty cute little feller. Well, have fun with it. Come on, move along now." And, as they were departing with Black Eyes, still not believing their ears: "Darn this weather! Makes a man so lazy...."
It was after the affair at the customs office, that Black Eyes uttered its first sound. City life hasn't changed much in the last fifty years. Jet-cars still streak around the circumferential highways, their whistles blaring. Factories still belch smoke and steam, although the new atomic power plants have lessened that to a certain extent. Crowds still throng the streets, noisy, hurrying, ill-mannered. It's one of those things that can't be helped. A city has to live, and it has to make noise.
But it seemed to frighten Lindy's new pet. It stared through the jet-car window on the way from the spaceport to the Whitneys' suburban home, its black eyes welling with tears.
"Look!" Judd exclaimed. "Black Eyes can cry!"
"A crying pet, Judd. I knew there would be something unusual about Black Eyes, I just knew it!"
The tears in the big black eyes overflowed and tumbled out, rolling down Black Eyes' silvery cheeks. And then Black Eyes whimpered. It was only a brief whimper, but both Judd and Lindy heard it, and even the driver turned around for a moment and stared at the animal.
The driver stopped the jet. He yawned and rested his head comfortably on the cushioned seat. He went quietly to sleep.
* * * *
A man named Merrywinkle owned the Merrywinkle Shipping Service. That, in itself, was not unusual. But at precisely the moment that Black Eyes unleashed its mild whimper, Mr. Merrywinkle—uptown and five miles away—called an emergency conference of the board of directors and declared:
"Gentlemen, we have all been working too hard, and I, for one, am going to take a vacation. I don't know when I'll be back, but it won't be before six months."
"But C.M.," someone protested. "There's the Parker deal and the Gilette contract and a dozen other things. You're needed!"
Mr. Merrywinkle shook his bald head. "What's more, you're all taking vacations, with pay. Six months, each of you. We're closing down Merrywinkle Shipping for half a year. Give the competition a break, eh?"
"But C.M.! We're about ready to squeeze out Chambers Parcel Co.! They'll get back on their feet in six months."
"Never mind. Notify all departments of the shut-down, effective immediately. Vacations for all."
* * * *
"Who shut off the assembly belt?" the foreman asked mildly. He was not a mild man and he usually stormed and ranted at the slightest provocation. This was at Clewson Jetcraft, and you couldn't produce a single jet-plane without the assembly belt, naturally.
A plump little man said, "I did."
"But why?" the foreman asked him, smiling blandly.
"I don't know. I just did."
The foreman was still smiling. "I don't blame you."
Two days later, Clewson Jetcraft had to lay off all its help. They put ads in all the papers seeking new personnel but no one showed up. Clewson was forced to shut down.
* * * *
The crack Boston to New York pneumo-tube commuter's special pulled to a bone-jarring stop immediately outside the New York station. Some angry commuters pried open the conductor's cab, and found the man snoozing quite contentedly. They awakened him, but he refused to drive the train any further. All the commuters had to leave the pneumo-train and edge their way along three miles of catwalk to the station. No one was very happy about it, but the feeling of well-being which came over them all nipped any possible protest in the bud.
* * * *
Black Eyes whimpered again when Judd and Lindy reached home but after that it was quiet. It just sat on its haunches near the window and stared out at the city.
The quiet city.
Nothing moved in the streets. Nothing stirred. People remained at home watching local video or the new space-video from Mars. At first it was a good joke, and the newspapers could have had a field day with it, had the newspapers remained in circulation. After four days, however, they suspended publication. On the fifth day, there was a shortage of food in the city, great stores of it spoiling in the warehouses. Heat and light failed after a week, and the fire department ignored all alarms a day later.
But everything did not stop. School teachers still taught their classes; clerks still sold whatever goods were left on local shelves. Librarians were still at their desks.
Conservatives said it was a liberal plot to undermine capital and demand higher wages; liberals said big business could afford the temporary layoff and wanted to squeeze out the small businessman and labor unions.
Scientists pondered and city officials made speeches over video.
"Something," one of them observed, "has hit our city. Work that requires anything above a modicum of sound has become impossible; in regards to such work people have become lazy. No one can offer any valid suggestions concerning the malady. It merely exists. However, if a stop is not put to it—and soon—our fair city will disintegrate. Something is making us lazy, and that laziness can spell doom, being a compulsive lack of desire to create any noise or disturbance. If anyone believes he has the solution, he should contact the Department of Science at once. If you can't use the video-phone, come in person. But come! Every hour which passes adds to the city's woes."
Nothing but scatter-brained ideas for a week, none of them worth consideration. Then the bespectacled customs official who had bypassed quarantine for Black Eyes, got in touch with the authorities. He had always been a conscientious man—except for that one lapse. Maybe the queer little beast had nothing to do with this crisis. But then again, the customs official had never before—or since—had that strange feeling of lassitude. Could there be some connection?
A staff of experts on extra-terrestrial fauna was dispatched to the Whitney residence, although, indeed, the chairman of the Department of Science secretly considered the whole idea ridiculous.
The staff of experts introduced themselves. Then, ignoring the protests of Lindy, went to work on Black Eyes. At first Judd thought the animal would object, but apparently it did not. While conditions all about them in the city worsened, the experts spent three days studying Black Eyes.
They found nothing out of the ordinary.
Black Eyes merely stared back at them, and but for an accident, they would have departed without a lead. On the third day, a huge mongrel dog which belonged to the Whitneys' next-door neighbors somehow slipped its leash. It was a fierce and ugly animal, and it was known to attack anything smaller than itself. It jumped the fence and landed in Judd Whitney's yard. A few loping bounds took it through an open window, ground level. Inside, it spied Black Eyes and made for the creature at once, howling furiously.
Black Eyes didn't budge.
And the mongrel changed its mind! The slavering tongue withdrew inside the chops, the howling stopped. The mongrel lay down on the floor and whined. Presently it lost all interest, got to its feet, and left as it had come.
Other animals were brought to the Whitney home. Cats. Dogs. A lion from the city zoo, starved for two days and brought in a special mobile cage by its keeper. Black Eyes was thrust into the cage and the lion gave forth with a hideous yowling. Soon it stopped, rolled over, and slept.
* * * *
The scientists correlated their reports, returned with them to the Whitney house. The leader, whose name was Jamison, said: "As closely as we can tell, Black Eyes is the culprit."
"What?" Lindy demanded.
"Yes, Mrs. Whitney. Your pet, Black Eyes."
"Oh, I don't believe it!"
But Judd said, "Go ahead, Dr. Jamison. I'm listening."
"Well, how does an animal—any animal—protect itself?"
"Why, in any number of ways. If it has claws or a strong jaw and long teeth, it can fight. If it is fleet of foot, it can run. If it is big and has a tough hide, most other animals can't hurt it anyway. Umm-mm, doesn't that about cover it?"
"You left out protective coloration, defensive odors, and things like that. Actually, those are most important from our point of view, for Black Eyes' ability is a further ramification of that sort of thing. Your pet is not fast. It isn't strong. It can't change color and it has no offensive odor to chase off predatory enemies. It has no armor. In short, can you think of a more helpless creature to put down in those Venusian swamps?"
After Judd had shaken his head, Dr. Jamison continued: "Very well, Black Eyes should not be able to survive on Venus—and yet, obviously the creature did. We can assume there are more of the breed, too. Anyway, Black Eyes survives. And I'll tell you why.
"Black Eyes has a very uncommon ability to sense danger when it approaches. And sensing danger, Black Eyes can thwart it. Your creature sends out certain emanations—I won't pretend to know what they are—which stamp aggression out of any predatory creatures. Neither of you could fire upon it—right?"
"Umm-mm, that's true," Judd said.
Lindy nodded.
"Well, that's one half of it. There's so much about life we don't understand. Black Eyes uses energy of an unknown intensity, and the result maintains Black Eyes' life. Now, although that is the case, your animal did not live a comfortable life in the Venusian swamp. Because no animal would attack it, it could not be harmed. Still, from what you tell me about that swamp...
"Anyhow, Black Eyes was glad to come away with you, and everything went well until you landed in New York. The noises, the clattering, the continual bustle of a great city—all this frightened the creature. It was being attacked—or, at least that's what it must have figured. Result: it struck back the only way it knew how. Have you ever heard about sub-sonic sound-waves, Mr. Whitney, waves of sound so low that our ears cannot pick them up—waves of sound which can nevertheless stir our emotions? Such things exist, and, as a working hypothesis, I would say Black Eyes' strange powers rest along those lines. The whole city is idle because Black Eyes is afraid!"
In his exploration of Mars, of Venus, of the Jovian moons, Judd Whitney had seen enough of extra-terrestrial life to know that virtually anything was possible, and Black Eyes would be no exception to that rule.
"What do you propose to do?" Judd demanded.
"Do? Why, we'll have to kill your creature, naturally. You can set a value on it and we will meet it, but Black Eyes must die."
"No!" Lindy cried. "You can't be sure, you're only guessing, and it isn't fair!"
"My dear woman, don't you realize this is a serious situation? The city's people will starve in time. No one can even bring food in because the trucks make too much noise! As an alternative, we could evacuate, but is your pet more valuable than the life of a great city?"
"N-no...."
"Then, please! Listen to reason!"
"Kill it," Judd said. "Go ahead."
Dr. Jamison withdrew from his pocket a small blasting pistol used by the Department of Domestic Animals for elimination of injured creatures. He advanced on Black Eyes, who sat on its haunches in the center of the room, surveying the scientist.
Dr. Jamison put his blaster away. "I can't," he said. "I don't want to."
Judd smiled. "I know it. No one—no thing—can kill Black Eyes. You said so yourself. It was a waste of time to try it. In that case—"
"In that case," Dr. Jamison finished for him, "we're helpless. There isn't a man—or an animal—on Earth that will destroy this thing. Wait a minute—does it sleep, Mr. Whitney?"
"I don't think so. At least, I never saw it sleep. And your team of scientists, did they report anything?"
"No. As far as they could see, the creature never slept. We can't catch it unawares."
"Could you anesthetize it?"
"How? It can sense danger, and long before you could do that, it would stop you. It's only made one mistake, Mr. Whitney: it believes the noises of the city represent a danger. And that's only a negative mistake. Noise won't hurt Black Eyes, of course. It simply makes the animal unnecessarily cautious. But we cannot anesthetize it any more than we can kill it."
"I could take it back to Venus."
"Could you? Could you? I hadn't thought of that."
Judd shook his head. "I can't."
"What do you mean you can't?"
"It won't let me. Somehow it can sense our thoughts when we think something it doesn't want. I can't take it to Venus! No man could, because it doesn't want to go."
"My dear Mr. Whitney—do you mean to say you believe it can think?"
"Uh-uh. Didn't say that. It can sense our thoughts, and that's something else again."
Dr. Jamison threw his hands up over his head in a dramatic gesture. "It's hopeless," he said.
* * * *
Things grew worse. New York crawled along to a standstill. People began to move from the city. In trickles, at first, but the trickles became torrents, as New York's ten million people began to depart for saner places. It might take months—it might even take years, but the exodus had begun. Nothing could stop it. Because of a harmless little beast with the eyes of a tarsier, the life of a great city was coming to an end.
Word spread. Scientists all over the world studied reports on Black Eyes. No one had any ideas. Everyone was stumped. Black Eyes had no particular desire to go outside. Black Eyes merely remained in the Whitney house, contemplating nothing in particular, and stopping everything.
Dr. Jamison, however, was a persistent man. Judd got a letter from him one day, and the following afternoon he kept his appointment with the scientist.
"It's good to get out," Judd said, after a three hour walk to the Department of Science Building. "I can go crazy just staring at that thing."
"I have it, Whitney."
"You have what? Not the way to destroy Black Eyes? I don't believe it!"
"It's true. Consider. Everyone in the world does not yet know of your pet, correct?"
"I suppose there are a few people who don't—"
"There are many. Among them, are the crew of a jet-bomber which has been on maneuvers in Egypt. We have arranged everything."
"Yes? How?"
"At noon tomorrow, the bomber will appear over your home with one of the ancient, high-explosive missiles. Your neighbors will be removed from the vicinity, and, precisely at twelve-o-three in the afternoon, the bomb will be dropped. Your home will be destroyed. Black Eyes will be destroyed with it."
Judd looked uncomfortable. "I dunno," he said. "Sounds too easy."
"Too easy? I doubt if the animal will ever sense what is going on—not when the crew of the bomber doesn't know, either. They'll consider it a mighty peculiar order, to destroy one harmless, rather large and rather elaborate suburban home. But they'll do it. See you tomorrow, Whitney, after this mess is behind us."
"Yeah," Judd said. "Yeah." But somehow, the scientist had failed to instill any of his confidence in Judd.
* * * *
With Lindy, he left home at eleven the following morning, after making a thorough list of all their properties which the City had promised to duplicate. Judd did not look at Black Eyes as he left, and the animal remained where it was, seated on its haunches under the dining room table, nibbling crumbs. Judd could almost feel the big round eyes boring a pair of twin holes in his back, and he dared not turn around to face them....
They were a mile away at eleven forty-five, making their way through the nearly deserted streets. Judd stopped walking. He looked at Lindy. Lindy looked at him.
"They're going to destroy it," he said.
"I know."
"Do you want them to?"
"I—I—"
Judd knew that something had to be done with Black Eyes. He didn't like the little beast, and, anyway, that had nothing to do with it. Black Eyes was a menace. And yet, something whispered in Judd's ear, Don't let them, don't let them... It wasn't Judd and it wasn't Judd's subconscious. It was Black Eyes, and he knew it. But he couldn't do a thing about it—
"I'm going to stay right here and let them bomb the place," he said aloud. But as he spoke, he was running back the way he had come.
Fifteen minutes.
He sprinted part of the time, then rested, then sprinted again. He was somewhat on the beefy side and he could not run fast, but he made it. Just.
He heard the jet streaking through the sky overhead, looked up once and saw it circling. Two blocks from his house he was met by a policeman. The entire area had been roped off, and the officer shook his head when Judd tried to get through.
"But I live there!"
"Can't help it, Mister. Orders is orders."
Judd hit him. Judd didn't want to, but nevertheless, he grunted with satisfaction when he felt the blow to be a good one, catching the stocky officer on the point of his chin and tumbling him over backwards. Then Judd was ducking under the rope and running.
He reached his house, plummeted in through the front door. He found Black Eyes under the kitchen table, squatting on its haunches. He scooped the animal up, ran outside. Then he was running again, and before he reached the barrier, something rocked him. A loud series of explosions ripped through his brain, and instinctively—Black Eyes' instincts, not his—he folded his arms over the animal, protecting it. Something shuddered and began to fall behind him, and debris scattered in all directions. Something struck Judd's head and he felt the ground slapping up crazily at his face—
He was as good as new a few days later.
And so was Black Eyes.
"I have it," Judd said to his nurse.
"You have what, sir?"
"It's so simple, so ridiculously simple, maybe that's why no one ever thought of it. Get me Dr. Jamison!"
Jamison came a few moments later, breathless. "Well?"
"I have the solution."
"You...do?" Not much hope in the answer. Dr. Jamison was a tired, defeated man.
"Sure. Black Eyes doesn't like the city. Fine. Take him out. I can't take him to Venus. He doesn't like Venus and he won't go. No one can take him anyplace he doesn't want to go, just as no one can hurt him in any way. But he doesn't like the city. It's too noisy. All right: have someone take him far from the city, far far away—where there's no noise at all. Someplace out in the sticks where it won't matter much if Black Eyes puts a stop to any disturbing noises."
"Who will take him? You, Mr. Whitney?"
Judd shook his head. "That's your job, not mine. I've given you the answer. Now use it."
Lindy had arrived, and Lindy said: "Judd, you're right. That is the answer. And you're wonderful—"
No one volunteered to spend his life in exile with Black Eyes, but then Dr. Jamison pointed out that while no one knew the creature's life-span, it certainly couldn't be expected to match man's. Just a few years and the beast would die, and...Dr. Jamison's arguments were so logical that he convinced himself. He took Black Eyes with him into the Canadian Northwoods, and there they live.
* * * *
Judd was right—almost.
This was the obvious answer which escaped everyone.
But scientists continued their examinations of Black Eyes, and they discovered something. Black Eyes' fears had not been for herself alone. She is going to have babies. The estimate is for thirty-five little tarsier-eyed creatures. No doctor in the world will be able to do anything but deliver the litter.
THE DICTATOR
Just looking at Ellaby, you could tell he was going places. He was five feet nine inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He had an I. Q. of ninety-eight point five-seven, less than four hundredths off the mode. His hair was mousey and worn slightly long for a man, slightly short for a woman. Back in High Falls, where he was born, he was physically weaker than sixty percent of the men but stronger than sixty percent of the women.
He had been in training since his twentieth birthday to assassinate the Dictator. Ellaby was now thirty years old.
Dorcas Sinclair met Ellaby at the pneumo-station. She was too big and strapping for a woman, but otherwise not unattractive with her lusterless hair, slightly thick-featured face, small sagging bosom and heavy-calved legs.
"I'll take your bags," she told Ellaby, and led him from the station. She walked quickly, but not too quickly. You always had to find the happy medium, thought Ellaby. For Ellaby, finding the happy medium had always come easy. Ten years ago, when Ellaby had been graduated from the High Falls secondary school, the four words MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED had been printed under his picture in the yearbook. It was expected by everyone: young Ellaby had learned his three R's—rules, rights, responsibilities—satisfactorily. Ellaby had neither excelled nor failed: he was by nature a first class citizen.
Running to keep up with the too big, too long-legged Dorcas Sinclair who was carrying one of his suitcases in each hand, Ellaby was led from the pneumo-station. The splendid, unimaginative geometric precision of the Capitol stretched out before him in the dazzling summer sunlight, the view serving as a leaven for Ellaby's usually phlegmatic disposition. He could feel his spirits rise, his heart thump more rapidly, speeding the sudden flow of adrenalin through his body.
This was the city. It was here where the fruits of whatever had gone wrong in Ellaby's upbringing or whatever had gone wrong in the linear arrangement of his genes would ripen. It was here where Ellaby, modal Ellaby would pass his tests for top-secret work; unsuspected, average Ellaby, would write his name in flaming letters across the pages of history. It was here where Ellaby would kill the Dictator.
And after that—what? Chaos? A new order based not on modality but something else? Ellaby wasn't sure. No one in the organization knew for sure. The concept was staggering to Ellaby. It was the system—or nothing. Well, let the others worry about it. They did the planning. Ellaby was only the executioner.
* * * *
The house was like all the others on the block, all the others in the Capitol, a grimly solid structure of lets-pretend brick fronting on a street which faded into distant haze, straight as a ruled line, to north and south, crossing the east-west avenues at precise right angles every five hundred feet. The grid pattern city, Ellaby remembered from his rights course in school, (every man has the right to a room and bath in any city as long as he is employed) made the best use of available space for houses. The strip city is unnecessary in time of peace—was there ever, had there ever been any other time? the radial city is preferred for rapid transportation, being the accepted pattern in the great economic hubs and ports like Greater New York and Hampton Roads.
"You will have to live here with me" Dorcas Sinclair told Ellaby, "until you pass your tests for employment. I don't have to tell you how much depends on the outcome of those tests, Ellaby."
"But I can't fail them. I thought you knew my record."
With an unnerving unmodal violence, Dorcas Sinclair's strong fingers dug into the flabby muscle of Ellaby's upper arm. "Well, you had better not," she said, her large teeth hardly parting to let the sounds out.
Ellaby was suddenly alarmed. He had had very little truck with people of this sort. They were as unpredictable as the weather in High Falls which having a population under twenty-five thousand, had never qualified for weather control. Unlike modal man, they had never been exhaustively studied. Their likes and dislikes were not catered to, but their passions couldn't be predicted, either.
"Ease up, Dorcas," a deep voice said from the doorway leading to the kitchen.
Ellaby stared in that direction gratefully. It was indecent for a woman, for anyone, to expose her emotions that way. Ellaby was almost inclined to thank the stranger.
"Stranger, nothing!" Ellaby blurted aloud. Ellaby's face reddened and he apologized. "I didn't mean to raise my voice," he explained. "You surprised me."
"I guess you didn't expect to find me here, at that. You haven't changed much, Ellaby."
Automatically, Ellaby mumbled his thanks for the compliment. Sam Mulden, though, had changed. He'd always been a radical. He wore his hair cropped too short. He was tall and thin, his elbows and knees exposed by the tunic he wore like knots on gnarled, living wood. Mulden looked older. He hadn't bothered to dye his graying hair, or to smooth the premature wrinkles on his long-nosed, thin-lipped face. He was smiling sardonically at Ellaby now, as if he could read Ellaby's mind. "I might have known it would be you," he said. "As soon as they said the assassin was coming from High Falls, I should have guessed."
"Why?" asked Ellaby. It was a question which had nudged for ten years at his docile patience. When people go out of their way to train you, though, to spend ten years teaching you every inch of Capitol territory without once taking you there, to make you proficient with various deadly weapons although your reflexes are splendidly modal, to teach you meaningless phrases like democratic inequality (?) and individuality (?) and the right to live a self-directed (?) life, to make your own decisions (?), when people act, in short, like a very thorough government school, even if their motives seem strangely misdirected, you don't question them.
"For two reasons," Mulden said. "You can understand the first, Ellaby. If the second one bothers you, forget it. In the first place, you're so perfectly modal, the government would never suspect you. In the second place, you're so well adjusted you're bound to follow our instructions."
"Or any instructions," Dorcas Sinclair said. "That's what I'm afraid of, Mulden."
* * * *
Ellaby still couldn't get over it. He never expected to find poor, unfortunate Sam Mulden in such a high position in the organization or anywhere. He remembered Mulden clearly from their school days together. Mulden was a character, a real character. Physically, he was barely acceptable: more than eighty percent of the men and some sixty-five percent of the women were able to knock Mulden down in the High Falls gymnasium classes. But mentally Mulden was a misfit. His I. Q. was in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty. His gangling, ineffectual physique wasn't too far below the mode, but mentally he soared intolerably above it.
Now Mulden told Dorcas Sinclair, "Don't worry about that. We've had ten years to work on him. They can't undo it in a few days. Ellaby, you are quite sure you know what you must do?"
"Oh, yes. Tomorrow morning I will take my security tests. According to the record of my previous physical and mental testing, I should make top secret classification. I will work here in the capitol. I will find the Dictator and kill him. The only thing that bothers me is I don't know who to look for. What does the Dictator look like?"
"Didn't they explain all of that to you in High Falls?" the woman asked irritably, without even making an effort to poker her face.
"Ease off," Mulden told her for the second time. "He's confused. Listen to me, Ellaby. Don't you remember? The Dictator never makes public appearances."
"Yes. Yes, now I remember. No one knows what the Dictator looks like. He keeps to himself. He issues orders which are instantly obeyed, helping to maintain universal modality in the country. It almost seems a shame I'll have to kill him."
"So we've pavloved him for ten years, have we?" Dorcas Sinclair raged. Ellaby turned away in embarrassment. "Damn you, Mulden, he still questions it!"
"He's supposed to," Mulden explained quietly. "If he accepted what we told him, he'd go around talking about it naively. This way, he understands the necessity for secrecy."
"He doesn't understand—"
"Well, then he realizes it. Let him get some sleep, will you? Tomorrow's going to be a good day for us, a big day for him. Good night, Ellaby. If you want anything, Sinclair will get it for you."
Ellaby assured them he would want nothing except a simple meal of whatever most people in the Capitol ate on Wednesdays. It turned out to be pork chops, which Ellaby neither particularly liked nor disliked. He chewed his food with the proper lack of enthusiasm and retired early.
* * * *
The next morning, Ellaby took his I. Q. test at the Capitol personnel bureau. He was slightly above average in space perception but slightly below average in comparisons. He hoped his anxiety didn't show on his face. If anyone asked him why he had come to the Capitol he was ready to blurt out the reason and have done with it. He wondered what Sam Mulden would have thought if he knew. The Sinclair woman would have been furious.
No one asked Ellaby. You came to the Capitol because you wanted to work there. According to the mode, a man desired to change his location every 3.7 years. Ellaby had been 6.3 years tardy, but High Falls was an ideally modal community in which people tended to linger.
"I. Q., point seven under the mode," the personnel clerk told Ellaby. The slight variation—due to his anxiety—was not enough to matter, Ellaby realized with a faint sense of triumph. "Proceed to physical testing," the girl told Ellaby.
Obediently, Ellaby followed the green arrow to the gymnasium. He was given a locker, a towel, a pair of athletic shorts and a first-aid kit. He stripped off his clothing, placing the tunic, underwear and sandals in the locker, then climbed into his athletic shorts and fell into line with the other men and women carrying their towels and first-aid kits into the gymnasium.
The ten-over-mode male wrestling tester pinned Ellaby in less than two minutes, a fact which was duly noted on his employment blank. He was given fifteen minutes of rest, then squared off on the mat with a skinny, five-under-mode male. Ellaby bested him in four minutes flat, took another fifteen minute break, mopping the sweat from his body with an already sodden towel, then defeated the ten-under-mode female wrestler in two minutes and some seconds. It developed into a knock down, drag out fight with the two-over-mode female, who finally forced Ellaby's shoulders to the mat for the necessary five seconds after half an hour.
Ellaby showered, ate a hot Thursday lunch and took his employment blank to the emotion lab. His electroencephalogram revealed nine alpha cycles to the second, but too much theta.
"Are you nervous?" the technician asked Ellaby. "You're thetaing all over the place."
"I guess so. Yes, I'm nervous."
"Then let's try it again."
They did, the technician rubbing the greasy electrode salve on Ellaby's forehead before the electrodes were fastened there for the second time. The result was the same. "More than modal theta," said the technician, writing something in code on his employment blank. "See the personnel advisor, please."
For Ellaby, it came as a distinct shock. His heart pounded against his temples, in his ears. He was emotionally unstable. Had the ten years been for nothing?
* * * *
"Sit down, Ellaby," the personnel advisor said. He was a man of middle age, irritatingly careless about his appearance. He had dyed his graying hair, of course, but if you looked close you could see gray at the roots. He wore a green Thursday tunic which was poorly starched. Having had a full week to get it ready, that was naturally inexcusable.
"You have a splendid record, Ellaby," the sloppy personnel clerk said. "Mentally, within tenths of the mode. Physically, even closer. Unfortunately your emotional—"
"That never happened to me before, not in High Falls, it didn't," Ellaby interrupted.
"This is not High Falls. Every community, you must realize, has its own security testing center. And the capitol requires the tightest security of all."
"I know but I was nervous. You're going to tell me my theta was too high, aren't you?"
"That's correct. You needn't feel so bad about it. You're going to be cleared for secret work. You're damn close to modal, Ellaby. You're a good security risk. Incidentally, just why were you nervous?"
"Because I wanted top secret clearance. Because I wanted to work close to the Dictator. You see—" Abruptly, Ellaby stopped talking, clasping a hand over his mouth in sudden confusion. He wasn't supposed to talk about this. Lying, of course, was as far from Ellaby's nature as it was from anyone else's, assuming he were reasonably close to the mode. But Ellaby hadn't been asked for all that information directly. "What kind of job will I get?" he asked, trying desperately to change the subject.
It was too late. The personnel clerk asked, "Just why did you want to work close to the Dictator?"
Ellaby felt a single drop of sweat fall from his armpit under the loose tunic and roll, itching, down the side of his body. He wanted with all his soul to be back in High Falls. Anyplace but here.
"Why, Ellaby?"
"I can't answer that question. A man isn't forced to answer a question unless he wants to."
"Certainly not," said the personnel advisor, staring blandly at Ellaby. "This is a democratic country."
"Then—"
"But you've never known a man to refuse answering a question asked of him officially, have you?"
"I'm not sure I understand, sir."
"You don't have to be so obsequious, Ellaby. I'm less modal than you are, but I make the best of my divergencies. What I meant was this: did you ever hear of a criminal not confessing to his crime?"
"Well, no."
"I'll ask you the question again, Ellaby. Why did you want to work near the Dictator?"
The man leaned close, peered at Ellaby. The room was small, almost a cubicle, the bare walls seeming to close in on all four sides. Ellaby stifled a wild impulse to scream and run out of there, run any place as long as he could leave the room and the personnel advisor behind him. "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question," he said finally.
"Tell me, Ellaby, did you ever hear your own voice?"
What a strange question. "Why, certainly. All the time, when I speak."
"No, I mean your voice reproduced artificially. Your radio voice?"
"No, I never heard it."
"Well, you're about to."
While the personnel advisor busied himself setting up the radio equipment, Ellaby had a few seconds in which to think. He could still make a clean breast of the whole thing. They had chosen him—Mulden, the Sinclair woman and the others in High Falls—for his modality. Very well, he could use that modality to get out from under. He didn't understand. He didn't know what they were leading him to, slowly, over a period of ten years. He didn't want to assassinate the Dictator. What in the world would he want to do that for? He would gladly name all the names he knew if the personnel advisor would only let him forget the whole mad experience and return to High Falls. He could attend Adjustment Academy if they thought he needed it. Anything. Anything....
"Please slip these earphones over your head, over your ears. There. Is the microphone close enough to your lips? I think so."
* * * *
A metal band running over the top of Ellaby's cranium held the earphones in place. Another metal band curved around the side of his cheek and chin, leading to a small microphone before his lips.
"Place your hands on the arms of your chair, please."
Ellaby did as he was told. Click! Click! A pair of manacles sprang up from the chair arms trapping Ellaby's wrists. Ellaby looked at the personnel tester in unpokered alarm. "What did you do that for?" he asked timidly.
"So you won't remove the earphones. Now, are we ready?" The personnel advisor pressed a button on his desk. Ellaby thought he heard a faint hum of power in the microphone. "I will ask you once more, Ellaby. Why did you want to work near the Dictator?"
Ellaby shrugged. He was going to say, "I'm sorry, but I don't have to answer that question." He said, and heard through the earphones: "I'm sorry (I'm) but I (sorry don't have (but) to ans (I) wer that (don't) question) (have to answer that question)."
"Again, please. I didn't hear you," the personnel tester said.
It was his own voice Ellaby had heard through the earphones. Playback, with a fraction of a second lapse. Oddly, it un-nerved him. The reproduced voice had no right lagging. He shouted, "I'm sorry (I'm) but I (sorry) don't have (but) to ans (I) wer that (don't question!) (have to) Shut up! (answer) SHUT UP! (that) PLEASE.... (question). PLEASE! (please)."
"Once more, if you don't mind."
Ellaby's head was whirling. He blinked sweat from his eyes. "I—please! (I—please!)"
"The law requires that you make some answer, even if answer is a refusal."
Criminals confessed, Ellaby thought wildly. Is this why criminals confessed? Did the sound of their own voices drive them mad? It seemed such a simple device, and yet...and yet...but he could fool it. He couldn't rush the words out in a quick torrent and: "I don't have to (I don't answer that ques) (have to) tion (answer that question.)" Ellaby—and Ellaby's echo. "Well, I (well) don't (I don't)!" Ellaby blinked more sweat from his eyes. "Mumble (mumble). Sob. (Sob)."
"Relax, Ellaby. You seem upset. Will you read this, please?" the personnel advisor held a card in front of Ellaby's face.
The words swam, blurred together, fused, were readable and then were not. Ellaby read aloud: "A code (a) of eth (code) ics for (eth) mankind (ethics for mankind)." It was, he realized, the preamble to the constitution. "In the (in) nineteenth (the) centur (nine) y the (nine) common (teenth)"—faster, faster!—"(century the common) c-common man was defended (common man) by enlightened liberalism (man was). In the t-twentieth century (in the t-twen) common man was championed by (tieth century) enlightened liberalism (the common man was). In the twenty-first century (championed by enlightened) the common man assumed his proper place (liberalism) at the top of society but (in the twenty-first cen) will protect the rights of the (tury the common man) enlightened liberals or any other minority, (assumed his proper) encouraging them to become (place at the top of) as common as possible (society but will protect the rights of the enlightened liberals or any other minority, encouraging them to become as common as possible).
"Oh God (Oh)," shouted Ellaby. "Shut (God) it (shut) off (it) make (off) it (make) stop (it) God (stop—God)!"
"Will you agree to answer my question?"
"Anything (anything)! ANYTHING (anything)." Now the playback was a faint whisper. Ellaby found himself hysterically fascinated by it, trying to guess the time-lapse, which varied, trying to guess the volume, which varied. Ellaby's head slumped forward on his chest. The unfamiliar wetness at the corners of his mouth was drool. Ellaby didn't quite know it, of course, but he had given himself a very mild and very temporary nervous breakdown.
Two hours later he was asked one question. He answered: "I want to be near the Dictator so I can kill him."
* * * *
"Later, Dorcas Sinclair asked: "What else happened at testing, Ellaby?"
"Take your time," Mulden cautioned. "He looks nervous."
"I know it. I want to find out why."
"After my EEG," said Ellaby softly, "they told me I had too much theta."
"Damn you!" Dorcas Sinclair swore. "Then you weren't cleared for top secret?"
"No, I wasn't. Not at first. Then a strange thing happened. They said I was cleared only for secret and asked me why I wanted to be cleared for top secret."
"You fool!" the woman cried.
"I told them it was because I wanted to work near the Dictator. I didn't mean to tell them, but—"
The woman shook her head in despair. "Don't bother finishing," she said. "You can clear out of here, Ellaby. You're through. Ten years. Ten years wasted."
"If you wish," Ellaby said mildly. "But you're missing the most interesting part. They asked me why I wanted to be near the Dictator."
Dorcas Sinclair sucked in her breath sharply. Even Mulden seemed anxious. "You didn't tell them?" the woman asked in a frantic whisper.
"I'm afraid I did."
"We'll have to flee the city," the woman told Mulden, ignoring Ellaby now. "If he told them that, he probably named names. I have friends in Hampton Roads—"
"Let him finish," Mulden said. Mulden was looking strangely at Ellaby.
"They didn't ask me to name anyone in the conspiracy," Ellaby said. "Unless they could poker very well, they seemed perfectly calm. They said they would make an exception in my case. They would clear me for top secret work. I start tomorrow."
"What's your job?" Mulden asked eagerly.
"Well, this is the strangest part. I'm to be the Dictator's confidential assistant."
"Of course!" Mulden cried. "It makes sense. Don't you see, Sinclair? We're not the only ones. There are others, inside the government, who think it's time for a coup. With their help, Ellaby won't fail us."
Dorcas Sinclair wasn't convinced. "Doesn't it seem peculiar to you that, purely by co-incidence, Ellaby happened to meet these people?"
But Mulden shrugged. "You know the old saw about the gift horse," he said. "Ellaby will go ahead with the plan. Tomorrow, if all goes well, we'll have a full-scale revolution on our hands. Don't you understand, Sinclair? The Dictator—a figurehead. There are plenty of people around like us, who don't want to do things just because everyone else does them, who don't want to be stamped by the mold of conformity, who don't want...but I don't have to go on. The Dictator is a figurehead, a symbol of power. Destroy him and the whole conforming system comes tumbling down in chaos. You'll see tomorrow."
It was all beyond Ellaby, who was still weary from the playback ordeals. He took the small, palm-sized blaster from Mulden and slipped it into his tunic. Tomorrow he would assassinate the Dictator and suffer the consequences. He almost had in mind to rebel. The people at testing had been very nice—except for those earphones. But the Sinclair woman and Mulden might be able to do as bad—or worse. He'd go through with it.
Under the circumstances, he slept surprisingly well.
* * * *
Mulden's passionate parting words still ringing in his ears, Ellaby entered the capitol building. "Someday you and your kind will understand, Ellaby," Mulden had said. "Someday you'll know what banal really means, and vulgar. Someday—I promise you, someday—the true social perspective will be re-established. It should not be the role in life of the common man, the mass, the mob, to make the uncommon man as common as possible, but quite the other way around. The other way, Ellaby! Common folk should be given the opportunity to become as uncommon as possible. Otherwise, Ellaby, we've reached a dead end.
"Kill him and I promise you this: the whole warped system will come tumbling. A man shouldn't be forced to conform, Ellaby. Mankind's greatness stems from lack of conformity. For his own purposes, the Dictator bows to the will of the mob. But he's surrounded himself, with mediocrity. Without him, what can they do? Without him they'll go down in weeks, Ellaby. In days!"
The guard, a tall blonde woman who looked like a twenty-over-mode to Ellaby, led him down a long, well-lit corridor. No one had searched him. It would have taken the guard a moment to reach within his tunic, find the blaster and drag him off to the Academy. Other people, nameless people on nameless errands, walked by in the corridor without paying Ellaby any attention.
Was Mulden right? Were there people here, within the building, waiting to help Ellaby?
Ellaby licked his dry lips and kept walking, finding it difficult to keep his legs from trembling. It was as if a nimbus of terror dogged his footsteps, ready to envelope him momentarily. The guard seemed completely unconcerned. She was humming the melody of the latest song-hit, a wonderfully liltingly banal tune which had been on everyone's lips back in High Falls.
The blonde guard paused before a door in the long corridor. "Here we are," she said.
Ellaby opened his mouth to speak, but gulped in air instead. He felt a weak fluttering in his chest. He had never been so afraid in all his life.
The guard, who was a head taller than Ellaby, glanced down at him. "You don't have to be so nervous," she said in a perfectly normal voice. "Everything's going to be all right."
"You see, it's a new job and all—"
"Oh, here! Let's see that blaster."
Ellaby's heart plunged. He wanted to bolt, to run. She knew. She knew....
He stood there, too weak to move, while the guard reached inside his tunic, found the blaster taped to his chest, wrenched it loose. She took it out, held it up, flipping open the chamber and examined the inside. "All right," she said. "I only wanted to make sure it was loaded."
And she took out a key and opened the door. "He's inside," she said, and strolled on down the hall.
* * * *
Ellaby clutched the doorframe for support. He was breathing raggedly now, as if he'd run all the great length of the corridor, sprinting with monsters behind him. He rubbed the shoulder of his tunic against his damp brow and entered the room.
A man Ellaby's own size was sitting there, viewing a 3D. When he heard Ellaby at the door he got up. He looked very unhappy as Ellaby pointed the blaster at him. He said, "So soon?"
"They said you would try wiles, trickery, deceit," Ellaby recited. "You won't fool me."
"You think I'm the Dictator? You're going to kill me? That's very funny. I know, you see. I know."
"Stand back!" Ellaby screamed.
"I assure you, I am not the Dictator any more than you will be—"
The Dictator's face dissolved in a red, jelly-like smear as Ellaby pulled this trigger of his blaster.
He spent the next ten minutes being very ill.
Afterwards, they were very efficient. They carted the body away and told Ellaby all he had to do was ring for food or drink or anything he wanted. Occasionally, he would sign some papers. Occasionally—masked—he might be asked to review a parade.
And all at once, sitting alone in the room with its pleasant view, it came to Ellaby. He passed no judgment, but he understood—and he was afraid.
The masses ruled, thought Ellaby, hardly knowing what the phrase meant. The system was self-perpetuating, and revolution couldn't change it. The common man—men like Ellaby—had come into his own, for once and for all time.
The man Ellaby had slain was no Dictator. He had tried to tell Ellaby that before he perished. Now Ellaby had taken his place. Ellaby was no Dictator, either.
But he would do until the next one came along.
PRISON OF A BILLION YEARS
Published under the pseudonym "C.H. Thames"
Adam Slade crushed the guard's skull with a two foot length of iron pipe. No one ever knew where Slade got the iron pipe, but it did not seem so important.
The guard was dead. That was important.
And Slade was on the loose. With a hostage.
That was even more important.
The hostage's name was Marcia Lawrence. She was twenty-two years old and pretty and scared half out of her wits. She was, before she became a hostage, a reporter for Interplanetary Video. She had been granted the final pre-execution interview with Adam Slade and she had looked forward to it a long time but it had not worked out as planned.
It had not worked out as planned because Slade, only hours from the execution chamber with absolutely nothing to lose, had splattered the guard's brains around the inside of his cell and marched outside with a frightened Marcia Lawrence.
Outside. Outside the cell block while other condemned prisoners roared and shouted and banged tin cups on bars and metal walls and judas-hole-grills. Outside the prison compound and across the dome-enclosed city which served the prison.
Then outside the dome.
Outside the dome there was rock. Rock only, twisted and convoluted and thrusting and gigantic like monoliths of a race of giants. Rock alone under the awesome gray sky. Steaming rock, for some of the terrestrial waters were still trapped at great depths. And the sea far off, booming against rocky headlands, hissing tidally and slowly, in an age-long process, pulverizing the rock. The sea far off, a clean sea, not sea-smelling sea, a sea whose waters must evaporate countless times and be borne up over the naked rocks in vapor and clouds and come down in pelting, endless rain and rush across the rock, frothing and steaming—a sea which must do this countless times in the eons to come, and would do it, to bring salinity to its own waters.
"It kind of scares the hell out of you, doesn't it?" Adam Slade said. He was a big man with a thick neck and heavy, sleepy-looking eyes and a blue beard-shadow on his stubborn jaw. He said those words as he climbed out of the prison tank with Marcia Lawrence. The tank's metal was still warm from over-heated travel.
"I didn't think anything would scare you," Marcia Lawrence said. She had conquered her initial terror in the five hours of clanking tank flight from the prison. They had come a great many miles from the prison dome, paralleling the edge of the saltless sea and then finally, when their fuel was almost gone, clanking and rattling down toward the sea. She was a newspaperwoman, that above all now. She must not be afraid. She had a story here. A story.
"Get moving," Adam Slade said. "I got nothing against you, lady," he told her for the tenth time. "But you try anything, you're dead. You get that? I got nothing to lose. One time is all they can kill me. But first they got to find me, but they won't be able to take me as long as you're here. Just stay meek and you'll stay alive."
"How long do you think you can hold out?" Marcia Lawrence asked practically. They had begun to walk away from the now useless tank. Adam Slade was carrying the dead guard's M-gun in the crook of his bent left arm and walking with long, easy, ground-consuming strides. Marcia almost had to run to keep up with him as they went down a stretch of slightly sloping black rock toward the steaming, hissing, pounding, roaring, exploding surf.
Slade smiled. "Plenty of water," he said.
"But no food, Mr. Slade. There is absolutely no food on earth now and no possible way of getting food unless you want to stick around for a few million years."
"You think I came out here without a plan?" Slade asked with some hostility.
"I don't know. You were desperate."
"As long as you're with me I figure they might follow, but they won't rush me. They might even send over a 'copter, but it won't try anything. Not with you here. Desperate? I'm not desperate, and don't you forget it. Desperate you don't think straight. Once is all they can execute me. I stayed behind, they'd of done it. If they catch me, they'll do it. What's the difference?"
"You said you had a plan."
* * * *
They reached the edge of a thrusting headland, an enormous beak-shaped cliff of beetling black rock which leaned out over the young, still saltless ocean. Slade paced back and forth quickly, with a powerful leonine grace, until he found a fault in the rock. The fault tumbled jaggedly, steeply down almost to the edge of the sea.
"Down there," Slade said. "We'll follow the sea coast back to the prison."
"Back?" Marcia said in disbelief.
"Hell yes, back. You said it yourself. There's no food out here. Since there ain't no life, of course there's no food. Oh, it's a great place for a prison, all right. Whoever thought of it ought to win a prize. A prison—a billion years in the past. What's the word?"
"Archaeozoic," she supplied.
"Yeah, archaeozoic. An archaeozoic prison. You can escape to your heart's content, but what the hell's the difference. There's no life back here, not yet. The Earth's just a baby. So you escape—and you starve to death. It makes every maximum security jail before this one look like a kid's piggy bank."
"There hasn't ever been an escape," Marcia said hopefully as they made their way down to the sea, she in front and Slade behind her with the M-gun.
"There ain't never been a hostage before."
"No-o."
"There's a hostage now."
Marcia Lawrence took a deep breath and asked suddenly, "Are you going to kill me?"
"Hell, I don't know. I got no reason to—unless you make me. We're going back there. We're double-tracking along the beach, get me? Back to the prison dome."
"But—"
"Adam Slade won't starve to death out here. We'll double back to the dome—and the time machine."
"Oh," she said. They began to walk along the edge of the sea, its waters sullen gray, mirroring the sky. Here on this dawn earth the sky has as yet never been blue, for the primordial waters were still falling, falling. It rained almost all the time and the air was thick with moisture and every night when the sun—as yet unseen by the dawn earth except as an invisible source of light—went down and darkness came, the mists rolled in from the sea. In the morning whether rains had fallen or not the ground was soaked and tiny freshets rushed down to the sea, returning to it.
"Look out!" he cried suddenly, and shoved her against the base of the cliff which overlooked the water. The cliff top thrust out over them, umbrella-wise. The base of the cliff was thus a concavity and they pressed themselves against it now, in shadow. The waters of the infant sea were a hundred yards away, surging and booming against the rock.
She heard it soon after he did. A helicopter. She wanted to scream. She wondered if they would hear her scream. But she looked at Adam Slade's face and did nothing. Soon the helicopter came, buzzing low over them, searching. It circled a great many times because the abandoned tank was there. It circled and came down on the beach and two uniformed figures got out. Now she really wanted to scream. One sound. One sound and they would hear her. One quick filling of the lungs and—
Adam Slade hit her suddenly and savagely and the black loomed up at her but she did not remember striking it.
When she awoke, the helicopter was gone.
"Sorry I had to poke you one," Slade said. He did not seem sorry at all. He said it automatically and then added: "You ready to walk?"
She nodded. She got up and staggered a few steps before her legs steadied under her. Then with Slade she walked down along the rocky beach. This, she thought, was a story. It was the only big story she had ever had and probably she would not live to write it. As a woman, she was almost hysterical with fear, but as a videocaster she was angry. The story was hers—if she lived to tell it.
Then she had to live.
Time prison. Sure, she thought. Utterly escape proof—unless someone like Slade could take a hostage, double back to the prison dome, the hermetically sealed dome and somehow trick or overpower the guards who watched the time traveling machine outside the prison dome.
Outside. Naturally, it would be outside. That way the prisoners couldn't get at it.
Unless, like Slade, they too were outside.
Outside, where life had not yet been born. Outside, the infant earth. Let a man escape. What did his escape matter? He would live exactly as long as it took a man, reasonably healthy, to starve to death.
Unless he had a hostage and a plan....
* * * *
She became aware of rain when they left the cliff overhang. There was almost no wind and the rain came down slowly at first, huge slow drops which splattered on the black rock.
"If it gets any harder," Slade said, "we'll have to duck under the cliff for protection. You don't know what a rain can be like back here. I seen them through the dome."
But they couldn't go under the cliff for protection, not if they wanted to keep going. For the cliff dropped suddenly in a wild jumble of rocks and then there was nothing but the sloping black beach, sloping down to the sea.
Then, all at once, someone opened the sluicegates and the rain bombarded them. It slapped and bounced off the rock like pistol shots. It struck them like hammers. They staggered under its weight.
"We'll have to go back to the cliffs!" Marcia cried. She yelled it again at the top of her voice because she realized Slade would not hear her otherwise as the rain cracked and exploded and splattered and crashed. There were no droplets of water. For each one had size and shape and weight, swift-falling, hammering weight as it came down. Each one, Marcia thought wildly, struggling to keep her feet, was the size of your clenched fist there in the gray dawn of Earth.
"The cliffs!" she cried again.
But Adam Slade shook his head, grabbed her arm above the wrist and pulled her after him. He pointed ahead, in the direction they had been going. He said nothing. There was no need to talk. They were going forward and if it killed them probably Adam Slade did not care much.
He wanted that prison time machine for his escape and he was either going to get it or die in the attempt.
They went on slowly. First one would fall and then the other and when it was Slade who had fallen, she would wait patiently, hopefully. If he ever released his hold on the M-gun—
But if it were Marcia who fell, Slade would yank her to her feet savagely, yelling words which she had heard at first but which after a while, after an eternity of the storm, seemed to merge with the sound of the rain and the far booming of thunder out over the water and then, as if by magic, she was walking again and stumbling along with Slade, drenched and beaten and half-drowned.
She hardly remembered when night came, but presently she was aware of the darkness and the mist over the sea and over the rock and now engulfing them with its white ectoplasmic tendrils. In the mist she knew she could escape Slade, and yet she did not. Without Slade now, now in the middle of nowhere there by the sea on the shores of the young Earth, she would die in the storm. With Slade—at least for now—was life. And she went on.
The thunder followed them—and came closer.
By the middle of the night it sounded like artillery at a distance of half a mile, like a barrage of big atomic shells just out of sight behind a black ridgeline which wasn't there. And through the deeper rain-wet darkness of early morning, through the mist, tearing the mist to tatters, shredding it, came the spears and forks and lances of lightning. It was, Marcia thought, a nightmare of a storm. And she must remember it, for it would make a story, a real story, if ever she lived to tell it.
By morning, the air smelled of ozone. It reeked of ozone and around them as the gray light seeped out of the wet sky and the rain suddenly slackened as if the weak daylight dispelled it, the black rocks were blasted and broken where lightning had struck.
In the dawn's first light another helicopter came.
"Get down!" Slade shouted, and they dropped among the blasted black rocks, hiding there, not moving. The helicopter came on through the slackening rain, buzzing a few hundred feet over them but not circling. It was heading for the abandoned tank, Marcia thought. It wasn't looking for them here—
But suddenly the rain came down in all its savage force again, blinding bounding off the rocks, pounding relentlessly.
Overhead, the helicopter seemed to pause like a bird stricken in flight. The rotors whirled a silver shield against the rain, the great drops splattering off the shield.
And the helicopter came down under the weight of the rain.
* * * *
It landed a hundred and fifty yards from them down the beach and Marcia watched breathlessly while three men got out and looked at each other and at the rain. The dawn light was still only a dim gray and Marcia could not see the men clearly, but abruptly a jagged spear of lightning blasted rock midway between where they were hiding and the helicopter and in the after-glare through the wet and almost crackling air, the men were very clear. And clearer still when other lightning came down around them, ringing them in, it seemed, like a tent. There was now so much lightning it looked more like an aurora than an electric storm.
The dawn earth, before life, spending itself in fury....
All at once Marcia was running down toward the edge of the water, where the helicopter was. She ran screaming and shouting but the thunder swallowed her puny voice. At every moment she expected Adam Slade to kill her, to merely stand up with the M-gun and shoot her, but he did not and perhaps her unconscious mind in the instant she had fled had instinctively known he would not. For if Adam Slade killed her, he had no hostage. If he killed her and they found him, he would have absolutely no chance.
She turned and looked behind her. There was Slade, silhouetted against the lightning, running, covering the ground in huge strides, gaining on her. She did not look back again. The whole world was lightning and thunder and her legs striking earth under her, up and down, up and down, pounding, running, fleeing, and the rain, Slade's ally, beating her, buffeting her, exploding against her.
She stumbled and fell but she was up and running again in a moment. Now Slade was very close. But the helicopter was close too. She did not think the men there had seen them yet. She waved her arms and screamed although she knew the screams would not be heard—and then Slade was on her.
They went down together and she knew she was frail and helpless before his great strength. He grabbed her, his hands, angry hands on her throat—
And lightning struck.
It bounded and bounced off rock a dozen feet from them. It shook the earth and blasted the rock and pieces like shrapnel cluttered all around them and struck them too and Marcia felt hot blood on her arm and it was her own blood.
But Slade had been momentarily stunned and she was running again. Away from him.
But away from the helicopter too. At first she did not realize that but when she did realize it, it was too late. If she doubled back now, she would rush into Slade's arms.
She ran—into the sea.
It was suddenly, unexpectedly calm. It merely eddied around her ankles, as if waiting for something. The storm seemed to be waiting too, lightning holding back, the thunder stilled, even the rain hanging there in the black heavy sky, waiting....
Slade came after her, stalking through the surf.
A single bolt of lightning lanced down at them and a great engulfing roar lifted Marcia, carried her, stunned her, and then the rain pelted down again and the sea was an angry sea and the air was supercharged with ozone and another smell. Like seared flesh.
Like seared flesh.
She saw Adam Slade then. Slade was down in a foot of water, face down. He was not moving and the water lapped around him, over him. She went to him, walking slowly.
The men from the helicopter were there too. They had seen in that final flash of lightning.
"Are you all right, miss?" one of them shouted.
"Yes. Slade?"
They turned him over. They looked at him. "Dead," one of them said.
"Dead," she echoed. She would have collapsed, but they caught her.
* * * *
Then the rain really came down, not as it had come before, which was hard enough. It came in huge globes of water and each globe was as big as your head and if it hit it could stun you.
"Slade?" someone cried as the globes exploded violently in the surf around them.
"He's dead. He'll keep."
And they went back to the helicopter with Marcia, to await the end of the storm there.
When it was over, when the sky was not black but merely the color of lead, they returned down the beach for Slade's body.
But Slade wasn't there.
"But he was dead!" Marcia said incredulously.
One of the men smiled. "He didn't go anyplace under his own power. He was dead, all right. The storm took his body out to sea, is all."
They stood there for a moment, gazing out across the black troubled water of the infant ocean on the infant earth. A billion years ago....
Slade was out there. Slade, dead. Out there with the tides and the waters and the frequent electric storms—
"Out there with a million bacteriological parasites on his dead body and in his dead body, which he brought with him," Marcia said, dreamily.
"What are you talking about, miss?"
Out there in the electric dawn of earth, with the bacteria which lived in his body as they lived in all other bodies. Out there with them, dead.
Food for them.
Food and water and air heavy with ozone and the electric storms.
Marcia laughed hysterically. It was a story she wanted to write.
But she wouldn't write it.
Slade was a killer, condemned to die. But Slade, dead out there with his bacteria, Slade evil to man and human society but not necessarily evil in the implacable ways of nature or perhaps grimly, terribly evil—Slade out there, dead on the bosom of the primordial waters, Slade back in time a billion years before life had been born on Earth....
She laughed hysterically as they led her away from the water. They slapped her face, gently at first, then harder. "I'll be all right," she managed to say.
She would be all right. She could live to forget it.
But Slade out there.
Slade.
Slade fathering all life on earth there in the sea with his dead body. Slade who had sinned and was taken back here to die for his sins so that life could be born.
Slade, whose first name was Adam.
THE GRAVEYARD OF SPACE
He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to share it?"
"No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes.
Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like when she had worked by his side at the mine. It had not been much of a mine. It had been a bust, a first class sure as hell bust, like everything else in their life together. And it had aged her. Had it only been three years? he thought. Three years on asteroid 4712, a speck of cosmic dust drifting on its orbit in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Uranium potential, high—the government had said. So they had leased the asteroid and prospected it and although they had not finished the job, they were finished. They were going home and now there were lines on Diane's face although she was hardly past twenty-four. And there was a bitterness, a bleakness, in her eyes.
The asteroid had ruined them, had taken something from them and given nothing in return. They were going home and, Ralph Meeker thought, they had left more than their second-hand mining equipment on asteroid 4712. They had left the happy early days of their marriage as a ghost for whomever tried his luck next on 4712. They had never mentioned the word divorce; Diane had merely said she would spend some time with her sister in Marsport instead of going on to Earth....
"We'd be swinging around to sunward on 4712," Ralph mused.
"Please. That's over. I don't want to talk about the mine."
"Won't it ever bother you that we never finished?"
"We finished," Diane said.
He smoked the cigarette halfway and offered it to her. She shook her head and he put the butt out delicately, to save it.
Then a radar bell clanged.
"What is it?" Ralph asked, immediately alert, studying the viewport. You had to be alert on an old tub like the Gormann '87. A hundred tonner, it had put in thirty years and a billion and some miles for several owners. Its warning devices and its reflexes—it was funny, Ralph thought, how you ascribed something human like reflexes to a hundred tons of battered metal—were unpredictable.
"I don't see anything," Diane said.
He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was next to impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen—and completely impossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you false information. You could shut it off and pray—but the odds would still be a hundred to one against you.
"There!" Diane cried. "On the left! The left, Ralph—"
He saw it too. At first it looked like a jumble of rocks, of dust as the asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms which pursued their erratic, dangerous orbits through the asteroid belt.
But it was not dust.
"Will you look at that," Diane said.
The jumble of rocks—which they were ready to classify as dust—swam up toward them. Ralph waited, expecting the automatic pilot to answer the radar warning and swing them safely around the obstacle. So Ralph watched and saw the dark jumble of rocks—silvery on one side where the distant sunlight hit it—apparently spread out as they approached it. Spread out and assume tiny shapes, shapes in miniature.
"Spaceships," Diane said. "Spaceships, Ralph. Hundreds of them."
They gleamed like silver motes in the sun or were black as the space around them. They tumbled slowly, in incredible slow motion, end over end and around and around each other, as if they had been suspended in a slowly boiling liquid instead of the dark emptiness of space.
"That's the sargasso," Ralph said.
"But—"
"But we're off course. I know it. The radar was probably able to miss things in our way, but failed to compensate afterwards and bring us back to course. Now—"
Suddenly Ralph dived for the controls. The throbbing rockets of the Gormann '87 had not responded to the radar warning. They were rocketing on toward the sargasso, rapidly, dangerously.
"Hold on to something!" Ralph hollered, and punched full power in the left rockets and breaking power in the right forward rockets simultaneously, attempting to stand the Gormann '87 on its head and fight off the deadly gravitational attraction of the sargasso.
The Gormann '87 shuddered like something alive and Ralph felt himself thrust to the left and forward violently. His head struck the radar screen and, as if mocking him the radar bell clanged its warning. He thought he heard Diane scream. Then he was trying to stand, but the gravity of sudden acceleration gripped him with a giant hand and he slumped back slowly, aware of a wetness seeping from his nose, his ears—
All of space opened and swallowed him and he went down, trying to reach for Diane's hand. But she withdrew it and then the blackness, like some obscene mouth as large as the distance from here to Alpha Centauri, swallowed him.
* * * *
"Are you all right, Diane?" he asked.
He was on his knees. His head ached and one of his legs felt painfully stiff, but he had crawled over to where Diane was down, flat on her back, behind the pilot chair. He found the water tank unsprung and brought her some and in a few moments she blinked her eyes and looked at him.
"Cold," she said.
He had not noticed it, but he was still numb and only half conscious, half of his faculties working. It was cold. He felt that now. And he was giddy and growing rapidly more so—as if they did not have sufficient oxygen to breathe.
Then he heard it. A slow steady hissing, probably the sound feared most by spacemen. Air escaping.
Diane looked at him. "For God's sake, Ralph," she cried. "Find it."
He found it and patched it—and was numb with the cold and barely conscious when he had finished. Diane came to him and squeezed his hand and that was the first time they had touched since they had left the asteroid. Then they rested for a few moments and drank some of the achingly cold water from the tank and got up and went to the viewport. They had known it, but confirmation was necessary. They looked outside.
They were within the sargasso.
The battered derelict ships rolled and tumbled and spun out there, slowly, unhurried, in a mutual gravitational field which their own Gormann '87 had disturbed. It was a sargasso like the legendary Sargasso Seas of Earth's early sailing days, becalmed seas, seas without wind, with choking Sargasso weed, seas that snared and entrapped....
"Can we get out?" Diane asked.
He shrugged. "That depends. How strong the pull of gravity is. Whether the Gormann's rocket drive is still working. If we can repair the radar. We'd never get out without the radar."
"I'll get something to eat," she said practically. "You see about the radar."
Diane went aft while he remained there in the tiny control cabin. By the time she brought the heated cans back with her, he knew it was hopeless. Diane was not the sort of woman you had to humor about a thing like that. She offered him a can of pork and beans and looked at his face, and when he nodded she said:
"It's no use?"
"We couldn't fix it. The scopes just wore out, Diane. Hell, if they haven't been replaced since this tub rolled off the assembly line, they're thirty years old. She's an '87."
"Is there anything we can do?"
He shrugged. "We're going to try. We'll check the air and water and see what we have. Then we start looking."
"Start looking? I don't understand."
"For a series eighty Gormann cruiser."
Diane's eyes widened. "You mean—out there?"
"I mean out there. If we find a series eighty cruiser—and we might—and if I'm able to transfer the radarscopes after we find out they're in good shape, then we have a chance."
Diane nodded slowly. "If there are any other minor repairs to make, I could be making them while you look for a series eighty Gormann."
But Ralph shook his head. "We'll probably have only a few hours of air to spare, Diane. If we both look, we'll cover more ground. I hate to ask you, because it won't be pretty out there. But it might be our only chance."
"I'll go, of course. Ralph?"
"Yes?"
"What is this sargasso, anyway?"
* * * *
He shrugged as he read the meters on the compressed air tanks. Four tanks full, with ten hours of air, for two, in each. One tank half full. Five hours. Five plus forty. Forty-five hours of air.
They would need a minimum of thirty-five hours to reach Mars.
"No one knows for sure about the sargasso," he said, wanting to talk, wanting to dispel his own fear so he would not communicate it to her as he took the spacesuits down from their rack and began to climb into one. "They don't think it's anything but the ships, though. It started with a few ships. Then more. And more. Trapped by mutual gravity. It got bigger and bigger and I think there are almost a thousand derelicts here now. There's talk of blasting them clear, of salvaging them for metals and so on. But so far the planetary governments haven't co-operated."
"But how did the first ships get here?"
"It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. One theory is ships only, and maybe a couple of hunks of meteoric debris in the beginning. Another theory says there may be a particularly heavy small asteroid in this maze of wrecks somewhere—you know, superheavy stuff with the atoms stripped of their electrons and the nuclei squeezed together, weighing in the neighborhood of a couple of tons per square inch. That could account for the beginning, but once the thing got started, the wrecked ships account for more wrecked ships and pretty soon you have—a sargasso."
Diane nodded and said, "You can put my helmet on now."
"All right. Don't forget to check the radio with me before we go out. If the radio doesn't work, then you stay here. Because I want us in constant radio contact if we're both out there. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir, captain," she said, and grinned. It was her old grin. He had not seen her grin like that for a long time. He had almost forgotten what that grin was like. It made her face seem younger and prettier, as he had remembered it from what seemed so long ago but was only three years. It was a wonderful grin and he watched it in the split-second which remained before he swung the heavy helmet up and in place over her shoulders.
Then he put on his own helmet awkwardly and fingered the outside radio controls. "Hear me?" he said.
"I can hear you." Her voice was metallic but very clear through the suit radios.
"Then listen. There shouldn't be any danger of getting lost. I'll leave a light on inside the ship and we'll see it through the ports. It will be the only light, so whatever you do, don't go out of range. As long as you can always see it, you'll be O.K. Understand?"
"Right," she said as they both climbed into the Gormann '87's airlock and waited for the pressure to leave it and the outer door to swing out into space. "Ralph? I'm a little scared, Ralph."
"That's all right," he said. "So am I."
"What did you mean, it won't be pretty out there?"
"Because we'll have to look not just for series eighty Gormanns but for any ships that look as old as ours. There ought to be plenty of them and any one of them could have had a Gormann radarscope, although it's unlikely. Have to look, though."
"But what—won't be pretty?"
"We'll have to enter those ships. You won't like what's inside."
"Say, how will we get in? We don't have blasters or weapons of any kind."
"Your suit rockets," Ralph said. "You swing around and blast with your suit rockets. A porthole should be better than an airlock if it's big enough to climb through. You won't have any trouble."
"But you still haven't told me what—"
"Inside the ships. People. They'll all be dead. If they didn't lose their air so far, they'll lose it when we go in. Either way, of course, they'll be dead. They've all been dead for years, with no food. But without air—"
"What are you stopping for?" Diane said. "Please go on."
"A body, without air. Fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch on the inside, and zero on the outside. It isn't pretty. It bloats."
"My God, Ralph."
"I'm sorry, kid. Maybe you want to stay back here and I'll look."
"You said we only have ten hours. I want to help you."
All at once, the airlock swung out. Space yawned at them, black enormous, the silent ships, the dead sargasso ships, floating slowly by, eternally, unhurried....
"Better make it eight hours," Ralph said over the suit radio. "We'd better keep a couple of hours leeway in case I figured wrong. Eight hours and remember, don't get out of sight of the ship's lights and don't break radio contact under any circumstances. These suit radios work like miniature radar sets, too. If anything goes wrong, we'll be able to track each other. It's directional beam radio."
"But what can go wrong?"
"I don't know," Ralph admitted. "Nothing probably." He turned on his suit rockets and felt the sudden surge of power drive him clear of the ship. He watched Diane rocketing away from him to the right. He waved his hand in the bulky spacesuit. "Good luck," he called. "I love you, Diane."
"Ralph," she said. Her voice caught. He heard it catch over the suit radio. "Ralph, we agreed never to—oh, forget it. Good luck, Ralph. Good luck, oh good luck. And I—"
"You what."
"Nothing, Ralph. Good luck."
"Good luck," he said, and headed for the first jumble of space wrecks.
* * * *
It would probably have taken them a month to explore all the derelicts which were old enough to have Gormann series eighty radarscopes. Theoretically, Ralph realized, even a newer ship could have one. But it wasn't likely, because if someone could afford a newer ship then he could afford a better radarscope. But that, he told himself, was only half the story. The other half was this: with a better radarscope a ship might not have floundered into the sargasso at all....
So it was hardly possible to pass up any ship if their life depended on it—and the going was slow.
Too slow.
He had entered some dozen ships in the first four hours turning, using his shoulder rockets to blast a port hole out and climb in through there. He had not liked what he saw, but there was no preventing it. Without a light it wasn't so bad, but you needed a light to examine the radarscope....
They were dead. They had been dead for years but of course there would be no decomposition in the airless void of space and very little even if air had remained until he blasted his way in, for the air was sterile canned spaceship air. They were dead, and they were bloated. All impossibly fat men, with white faces like melons and gross bodies like Tweedle Dee's and limbs like fat sausages.
By the fifth ship he was sick to his stomach, but by the tenth he had achieved the necessary detachment to continue his task. Once—it was the eighth ship—he found a Gormann series eighty radarscope, and his heart pounded when he saw it. But the scope was hopelessly damaged, as bad as their own. Aside from that one, he did not encounter any, damaged or in good shape, which they might convert to their own use.
Four hours, he thought. Four hours and twelve ships. Diane reported every few moments by intercom. In her first four hours she had visited eight ships. Her voice sounded funny. She was fighting it every step of the way he thought. It must have been hell to her, breaking into those wrecks with their dead men with faces like white, bloated melons—
In the thirteenth ship he found a skeleton.
He did not report it to Diane over the intercom. The skeleton made no sense at all. The flesh could not possibly have decomposed. Curious, he clomped closer on his magnetic boots. Even if the flesh had decomposed, the clothing would have remained. But it was a skeleton picked completely clean, with no clothing, not even boots—
As if the man had stripped of his clothing first.
He found out why a moment later, and it left him feeling more than a little sick. There were other corpses aboard the ship, a battered Thompson '81 in worse shape than their own Gormann. Bodies, not skeletons. But when they had entered the sargasso they had apparently struck another ship. One whole side of the Thompson was smashed in and Ralph could see the repair patches on the wall. Near them and thoroughly destroyed, were the Thompson's spacesuits.
The galley lockers were empty when Ralph found them. All the food gone—how many years ago? And one of the crew, dying before the others.
Cannibalism.
Shuddering, Ralph rocketed outside into the clear darkness of space. That was a paradox, he thought. It was clear, all right, but it was dark. You could see a great way. You could see a million million miles but it was darker than anything on Earth. It was almost an extra-dimensional effect. It made the third dimension on earth, the dimension of depth, seem hopelessly flat.
"Ralph!"
"Go ahead, kid," he said. It was their first radio contact in almost half an hour.
"Oh, Ralph. It's a Gormann. An eighty-five. I think. Right in front of me. Ralph, if its scopes are good—oh, Ralph."
"I'm coming," he said. "Go ahead inside. I'll pick up your beam and be along." He could feel his heart thumping wildly. Five hours now. They did not have much time. This ship—this Gormann eighty-five which Diane had found—might be their last chance. Because it would certainly take him all of three hours to transfer the radarscope, using the rockets from one of their spacesuits, to their own ship.
He rocketed along now, following her directional beam, and listened as she said: "I'm cutting through the porthole now, Ralph. I—"
Her voice stopped suddenly. It did not drift off gradually. It merely ceased, without warning, without reason. "Diane!" he called. "Diane, can you hear me?"
* * * *
He tracked the beam in desperate silence. Wrecks flashed by, tumbling slowly in their web of mutual gravitation. Some were molten silver if the wan sunlight caught them. Some were black, but every rivet, every seam was distinct. The impossible clarity of blackest space....
"Ralph?" Her voice came suddenly.
"Yes, Diane. Yes. What is it?"
"What a curious thing. I stopped blasting at the port hole. I'm not going in that way. The airlock, Ralph."
"What about the airlock?"
"It opened up on me. It swung out into space, all of a sudden. I'm going in, Ralph."
Fear, unexpected, inexplicable, gripped him. "Don't," he said. "Wait for me."
"That's silly, Ralph. We barely have time. I'm going in now, Ralph. There. I'm closing the outer door. I wonder if the pressure will build up for me. If it doesn't, I'll blast the outer door with my rockets and get out of here.... Ralph! The light's blinking. The pressures building. The inner door is beginning to open, Ralph. I'm going inside now."
He was still tracking the beam. He thought he was close now, a hundred miles perhaps. A hundred miles by suit rocket was merely a few seconds but somehow the fear was still with him. It was that skeleton, he thought. That skeleton had unnerved him.
"Ralph. It's here, Ralph. A radarscope just like ours. Oh, Ralph, it's in perfect shape."
"I'm coming," he said. A big old Bartson Cruiser tumbled by end over end, a thousand tonner, the largest ship he had seen in here so far. At some of the portholes as he flashed by he could see faces, dead faces staring into space forever.
Then Diane's voice suddenly: "Is that you, Ralph?"
"I'm still about fifty miles out," he said automatically, and then cold fear, real fear, gripped him. Is that you, Ralph?
"Ralph, is that—oh, Ralph. Ralph—" she screamed, and was silent.
"Diane! Diane, answer me."
Silence. She had seen someone—something. Alive? It hardly seemed possible. He tried to notch his rocket controls further toward full power, but they were straining already—
The dead ships flashed by, scores of them, hundreds, with dead men and dead dreams inside, waiting through eternity, in no hurry to give up their corpses and corpses of dreams.
He heard Diane again then, a single agonized scream. Then there was silence, absolute silence.
Time seemed frozen, frozen like the faces of the dead men inside the ships, suspended, unmoving, not dropping into the well of the past. The ships crawled by now, crawled. And from a long way off he saw the Gormann eighty-five. He knew it was the right ship because the outer airlock door had swung open again. It hung there in space, the lock gaping—
But it was a long way off.
He hardly seemed to be approaching it at all. Every few seconds he called Diane's name, but there was no answer. No answer. Time crawled with the fear icy now, as cold as death, in the pit of his stomach, with the fear making his heart pound rapidly, with the fear making it impossible for him to think. Fear—for Diane. I love you, Di, he thought. I love you. I never stopped loving you. We were wrong. We were crazy wrong. It was like a sargasso, inside of us, an emptiness which needed filling—but we were wrong. Diane—
* * * *
He reached the Gormann and plunged inside the airlock, swinging the outer door shut behind him. He waited. Would the pressure build up again, as it had built up for Diane? He did not know. He could only wait—
A red light blinked over his head, on and off, on and off as pressure was built. Then it stopped.
Fifteen pounds of pressure in the airlock, which meant that the inner door should open. He ran forward, rammed his shoulder against it, tumbled through. He entered a narrow companionway and clomped awkwardly toward the front of the ship, where the radarscope would be located.
He passed a skeleton in the companionway, like the one he had seen in another ship. For the same reason, he thought. He had time to think that. And then he saw them.
Diane. On the floor, her spacesuit off her now, a great bruise, blue-ugly bruise across her temple. Unconscious.
And the thing which hovered over her.
At first he did not know what it was, but he leaped at it. It turned, snarling. There was air in the ship and he wondered about that. He did not have time to wonder. The thing was like some monstrous, misshapen creature, a man—yes, but a man to give you nightmares. Bent and misshapen, gnarled, twisted like the roots of an ancient tree, with a wild growth of beard, white beard, heavy across the chest, with bent limbs powerfully muscled and a gaunt face, like a death's head. And the eyes—the eyes were wild, staring vacantly, almost glazed as in death. The eyes stared at him and through him and then he closed with this thing which had felled Diane.
It had incredible strength. The strength of the insane. It drove Ralph back across the cabin and Ralph, encumbered by his spacesuit, could only fight awkwardly. It drove him back and it found something on the floor, the metal leg of what once had been a chair, and slammed it down across the faceplate of Ralph's spacesuit.
Ralph staggered, fell to his knees. He had absorbed the blow on the crown of his skull through the helmet of the suit, and it dazed him. The thing struck again, and Ralph felt himself falling....
Somehow, he climbed to his feet again. The thing was back over Diane's still form again, looking at her, its eyes staring and vacant. Spittle drooled from the lips—
Then Ralph was wrestling with it again. The thing was almost protean. It all but seemed to change its shape and writhe from Ralph's grasp as they struggled across the cabin, but this time there was no weapon for it to grab and use with stunning force.
Half-crazed himself now, Ralph got his fingers gauntleted in rubberized metal, about the sinewy throat under the tattered beard. His fingers closed there and the wild eyes went big and he held it that way a long time, then finally thrust it away from him.
The thing fell but sprang to its feet. It looked at Ralph and the mouth opened and closed, but he heard no sound. The teeth were yellow and black, broken, like fangs.
Then the thing turned and ran.
Ralph followed it as far as the airlock. The inner door was slammed between them. A light blinked over the door.
Ralph ran to a port hole and watched.
The thing which once had been a man floated out into space, turning, spinning slowly. The gnarled twisted body expanded outward, became fat and swollen, balloon-like. It came quite close to the porthole, thudding against the ship's hull, the face—dead now—like a melon.
Then, after he was sick for a moment there beside the airlock, he went back for Diane.
* * * *
They were back aboard the Gormann '87 now, their own ship. Ralph had revived Diane and brought her back—along with the other Gormann's radarscope—to their battered tub. The bruise on her temple was badly discolored and she was still weak, but she would be all right.
"But what was it?" Diane asked. She had hardly seen her attacker.
"A man," Ralph said. "God knows how long that ship was in here. Years, maybe. Years, alone in space, here in the sargasso, with dead men and dead ships for company. He used up all the food. His shipmates died. Maybe he killed them. He needed more food—"
"Oh, no. You don't mean—"
Ralph nodded. "He became a cannibal. Maybe he had a spacesuit and raided some of the other ships too. It doesn't matter. He's dead now."
"He must have been insane like that for years, waiting here, never seeing another living thing...."
"Don't talk about it," Ralph said, then smiled. "Ship's ready to go, Diane."
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her. "Mars?"
She didn't say anything.
"I learned something in there," Ralph said. "We were like that poor insane creature in a way. We were too wrapped up in the asteroid and the mine. We forgot to live from day to day, to scrape up a few bucks every now and then maybe and take in a show on Ceres or have a weekend on Vesta. What the hell, Di, everybody needs it."
"Yes," she said.
"Di?"
"Yes, Ralph?"
"I—I want to give it another try, if you do."
"The mine?"
"The mine eventually. The mine isn't important. Us, I mean." He paused, his hands still over the controls. "Will it be Mars?"
"No," she said, and sat up and kissed him. "A weekend on Vesta sounds very nice. Very, very nice, darling."
Ralph smiled and punched the controls. Minutes later they had left the sargasso—both sargassos—behind them.
SUMMER SNOW STORM
Published under the pseudonym "Adam Chase"
It was, as the expression goes, raining cats and dogs. Since the Weather Bureau had predicted fair and warmer, the Weather Bureau was not particularly happy about the meteorological state of affairs. No one, however was shocked.
Until it started to snow.
This was on the twenty-fifth of July in the U.S.A....
Half an hour before the fantastic meteorological turn of events, Bureau Chief Botts dangled the forecast sheet before Johnny Sloman's bloodshot eyes and barked, "It's all over the country by now, you dunderhead!" Then, as an afterthought: "Did you write this?"
"Yes," said Sloman miserably.
Slowly, Botts said, "Temperature, eighty degrees. Precipitation expected: snow. Snow, Sloman. Well, that's what it says."
"It was a mistake, Chief. Just—heh-heh—a mistake."
"The prediction should have been for fair and warmer!" Botts screamed.
"But it's raining," Sloman pointed out.
"We make mistakes," said Botts in a suddenly velvety voice. Then, as if that had been a mistake, bellowed: "But not this kind of mistake, Sloman! Snow in July! We have a reputation to maintain! If not for accuracy, at least for credulity."
"Yes, sir," said Johnny Sloman. One of the troubles was, he had a hangover. Although, actually, that was a consequence of the real trouble. The real trouble was his fiancee. Make that his ex-fiancee. Because last night Jo-Anne had left him. "You—you're just going no place at all, Johnny Sloman," she had said. "You're on a treadmill and—not even running very fast." She had given him back the quarter-carat ring tearfully, but Johnny hadn't argued. Jo-Anne had a stubborn streak and he knew when Jo-Anne's mind was made up. So Johnny had gone and gotten drunk for the first time since the night after college graduation, not too many years ago, and the result was a nationally-distributed forecast of snow.
Chief Botts' first flush of anger had now been replaced by self-pity. His red, loose-jowled face was sagging and his eyes became watery as he said, "At least you could have double-checked it. As a member of this Bureau you only have to fill out the forecast once every ten days. Is that so hard? Is there any reason why you should predict snow for July 25th?" His voice became silky soft as he added, "You realize, of course, Sloman, that if this was anything but a civil service job you'd be out on your ear for a stunt like this! Well, there are other ways. I can pass over you for promotion. I intend to pass over you until the crack of doom. You'll be a GS-5 the rest of your working life. Are you satisfied, Sloman? Snow in July..." Chief Botts' voice trailed off, the Chief following it.
Johnny sat with his head in his hands until Harry Bettis, the GS-5 weatherman who shared his small office with him, came in. Naturally, hangover or no, Johnny had reported for work first. Johnny was always first in the office, but it didn't seem to do any good. Now, Harry Bettis could come in an hour late and read the funnies half the day and flirt with the secretarial staff the other half and still be Chief Botts' odds-on favorite for the promotion that was opening next month. Harry Bettis was like that.
He came in and gave Johnny the full treatment. First the slow spreading smile. Then the chuckle. Then the loud, roaring belly-laugh. "Gals outside told me!" he shouted, loud enough so the girls outside would know he knew they had told him. "Snow! Snow in July! Sloman, you kill me! You really do!"
"Do you have to shout?" Johnny said.
"Do I? We all ought to shout this. To the rooftops! Sloman, my foot. You have a new name, sonny. Snowman! Johnny Snowman."
Johnny groaned. Instinctively, he knew the name would stick.
"Hear you had a little trouble with the gal-friend this past p.m.," Harry Bettis clucked in a voice which managed to be both derisive and sympathetic.
"How did you find out?" Johnny asked, but knew the answer at once. Jo-Anne was a roommate of one of the Bureau Secretaries. It was how Johnny had met her.
"You know how I found out, Snowman. Well, that's tough luck, kiddo. But tell me, does that mean the field is wide open? I always thought your gal-friend—your ex-gal-friend—had the cutest pair of—"
"I have nothing to do with whether the field is open or not open, I'm afraid."
"Well, don't be. Afraid, I mean," Harry Bettis advised jovially. "If the gal could make you pull a boner like that, you're better off without her. But I forgot to ask Maxine: can I have little Jo-Anne's phone number? Huh, boy?"
Before Johnny could answer, the three-girl staff of secretaries entered the small office. Entered—and stared.
"That's all right, girls," Harry Bettis said. "You didn't have to follow me in here. I'd have been right out."
But they weren't staring at Harry Bettis. They were staring at Johnny. Their mouths had flapped open, their eyes were big and round. Johnny didn't, but Harry Bettis knew that look on a girl's face. Without any trouble at all, Johnny could have made any of those girls, right there, right then, without even trying.
They gawked and gawked. One of them pointed at the window. The others tried to, but their hands were trembling.
The one who was pointing squawked: "Look!"
The second one said, "Out the window!"
The third one said, "Will you!"
Outside the window on the twenty-fifth of July it was snowing.
* * * *
It was an hour later. Telephones were ringing. Long-distance calls from all over the country now that the ticker had gone out with the incredible fact that it was snowing in the Northeast in July. Most of the calls, though, were from Washington. Chief Botts disconnected the PBX and walked in a dazed, staggering fashion to Johnny, smiling weakly and saying:
"Sloman, I misjudged you. Genius, right here, right now, in this office, and we never knew it. Sloman, I have to admit I was wrong about you. But how did you know? How did you ever know?"
"Hell's bells," Harry Bettis said before Johnny could say it was all a mistake. "That's easy, Chief. Anyone knows that all rain starts out as snow. It's got to. You see, the droplets of moisture in the cold upper regions of a cloud condense around dust particles because the air up there is too cold to hold them as vapor. Since it's below freezing, snow is formed—snow which warms up as it passes through hotter air en route to the ground, and—"
"That will be quite enough, Bettis," Chief Botts said. "I am a weatherman too, you know. You don't have to tell me the most elementary of—"
"In this case, Chief," Bettis persisted, "the biggest inversion layer you ever saw kept the surface air down and brought the cold upper air very close to the surface. Result: the snowflakes didn't have a chance to melt, not even to freezing rain. Result: snow!"
"The chances of that happening," said Chief Botts coldly, "are about one in a billion. Aren't they, Sloman, dear fellow?"
"One in two billion," Johnny said.
"He is modest," Chief Botts told the staff. "He seems so unconcerned."
Just then Maxine came into the little office. The look of awe on her face had been replaced by one of sheer amazement. "Well, I checked it, Chief," she said. "Wait until I tell Jo-Anne!"
"Won't you please tell us first?" Chief Botts asked.
"Yes, sir," said Maxine, and read from the memo pad in her hand. "Since coming to work for the Bureau, Johnny Sloman has once every ten days made our official forecast. I have checked back on his forecast, Chief, as you directed. Johnny has made fifty-five forecasts. While only one of them—startlingly—has called for snow in July—every single one of them has been right."
There was a shocked silence. "But—but the Weather Bureau average is only eighty-eight percent!" Harry Bettis gasped.
"You mean," Chief Botts corrected him, "eighty-eight percent is the figure we try to foist on the unsuspecting public. Actually, the Weather Bureau averages a bare seventy-five percent, and you know it."
"But Sloman's got a hundred percent accuracy—up to and including snow in July," Harry Bettis said in a shocked voice.
"It was only an accident," Johnny said in a mild voice. "I didn't mean to write snow."
"Accident, smaccident," said Harry Bettis. "It was no accident with a record like that. You have the uncanny ability to forecast weather with complete accuracy, Johnny-boy. You realize what that means, old pal?"
"I'd better call Washington and tell them," Chief Botts said, but Harry Bettis held his arm while Johnny mused:
"I guess I realize what it means, Harry. That is, if you're right. No more getting wet on picnics. Because I'd know. I'd know, Harry. No more going to ball games and having them rained out on you. No more being caught by a thunderstorm at the beach..."
"Johnny!" Harry Bettis said. "Think, pal. Think!"
"I'm calling Washington," Chief Botts said. "This is too much for me."
But Harry Bettis was still holding his arm. "Now, just a minute, bucko," he said. "You're not calling anyone—not without his manager's permission."
"Whose manager's permission?"
"Why, Mr. Sloman's manager's permission, of course. In a word, me."
"This is preposterous!" Chief Botts cried.
"Is it?" Bettis asked. "Listen, Johnny, don't let anyone sell you a bill of goods—like the Civil Service Commission giving you a GS-8 rating and sending you to Washington. Because stick with me, kid, and there'll be great things in store for you, you'll see."
"Such," said Maxine dubiously, "as what?"
"Are you on our side?" Harry Bettis asked her suspiciously.
"I'm on Jo-Anne's side. If old Johnny here has something she ought to have, I want to know it."
* * * *
"You mean, if she ought to change her mind and marry him? I'll admit it even if I think Jo-Anne's a real cute trick: she'd be nuts if she didn't." Women, Harry Bettis did not add, never came between Harry Bettis and ten percent of a gold mine. But that's what he was thinking. He went on: "Just think of it, Johnny. Drought in the Midwest. They call Sloman. Sloman predicts rain. It rains. Have any idea what they'd pay for a stunt like that? Or swollen rivers in New England, or California. Looks like another big flood is on the way, but they call Sloman. Looks like rain, kiddo? That don't matter. Predict a dry spell and it won't rain. Do you know," Harry Bettis said in a devout whisper, "what a stunt like that would be worth? Millions."
"Yeah, wise guy," said Maxine. "So what's in it for you?"
Harry Bettis did not look at Maxine when he answered. He looked at Johnny and said, "I'll be frank, kiddo. You have the talent, but you don't have the salesmanship to promote it. Do you want a mediocre job while the weather boys exploit you for the rest of your life or—do you want greatness, riches, and Jo-Anne?"
"Jo-Anne," Johnny said.
Harry Bettis nodded. "My price is twenty-five percent."
"Of Jo-Anne?" Maxine asked suspiciously.
"Of everything Johnny makes as the world's first real Weather Man. Not a forecaster—a commander. Because when my client forecasts the weather, it happens. Brothers and sisters, it happens." He turned abruptly to Johnny, said, "You have any money saved up?"
"A few hundred dollars, but—"
"An ad in the papers. Alongside the article telling how it snowed on July twenty-fifth. Saying that your services are for hire. We're a shoo-in, kid!"
"Well, if you say so," Johnny said doubtfully.
"So don't call D.C.," Bettis told Chief Botts.
"But Sloman's an employee of this Bureau."
"Was, you mean."
"What did you say?"
"Was an employee. He ain't an employee now. He's quitting—with his manager," said Harry Bettis, and walked out of the office, steering a dazed Johnny Sloman with him.
"Wait until I call Jo-Anne," Maxine said.
During the next six months, Johnny Sloman—known to the world as The Weather Man—made fifty million dollars. Since it had taken a whole lifetime for him to develop his remarkable talent, his lawyers were trying to have capital gains declared on the earnings rather than straight income tax. The odds seemed to be in their favor.
How had Johnny made his fifty million dollars? By predicting the weather. He predicted:
A flood in the Texas panhandle—in time to save the dry lands from going entirely arid.
An end of the snowstorms in northern Canada—which had trapped the five hundred residents of a small uranium-mining town without food or adequate drinking water.
The break-up of Hurricane Anita—which had threatened to be the most destructive ever to strike the Carolina Coast.
No frost for Florida that winter—a prediction still to be ascertained, but a foregone conclusion.
Every prediction had come true. In time, the world began to realize that his predictions were not predictions at all: they were sure things. That is, they predicted nothing—they made things happen. Johnny was in demand everywhere and naturally could not fill all engagements. Harry Bettis hired a whole squad of corresponding secretaries, whose job it was to turn down, with regret, some ninety percent of the jobs requested. Johnny, in fact, was in such demand, that his engagement to Jo-Anne—which, of course, had been reinstated at her insistence—remained only an engagement. The nuptials were put off, and put off again.
This suited Harry Bettis, who saw to it that Johnny kept putting off the marriage. Because, ultimately, Jo-Anne would reach the end of her proverbial tether and decide that Harry's twenty-five percent, if it could be shared as a wife, was better than Johnny's seventy-five percent, if it could not.
Jo-Anne, though, was not that kind of girl. Harry Bettis, knowing no other kind of girl, never understood that.
The scientists, meanwhile, had a field day with Johnny. His strange talent obeyed no natural law, they said, and at first attributed it to random chance. Soon, though, this became patently impossible. And so a new natural law was sought. All types of hair-brained theories were proposed, none of them accepted, until an osteopathic physician in Duluth, Minn., hit upon the theory that staggered the world with its simplicity and, eventually, was accepted as that which explained the strange phenomenon of Johnny Sloman.
The osteopath, many of whose patients suffered from rheumatism which was aggravated by the bitter Minnesota winters, suggested that Johnny Sloman was a case of rheumatism in reverse. The weather, he pointed out, had an adverse effect upon the symptoms of his patients. Conversely, why couldn't some human being—a Johnny Sloman, for example—affect the weather in precisely the same way that the weather invariably affected his rheumatic patients?
It was clear, simple, lucid. It was the only theory which could not be disproven by the weight of scientific knowledge. It thus became the accepted theory.
* * * *
"The Under-Secretary of Defense to see you," Maxine said one day during the winter following Johnny's July snowfall.
"Don't see him," Harry Bettis said. "You don't want to see him."
"But why not?" Johnny asked.
"Because they'll make you a dollar-a-year man and we're not in this to make any stinking dollar a year," Harry Bettis said.
"Well, I think I ought to see him, anyway. At least see him." He turned to Jo-Anne, who was sitting at the next desk, writing up some reports. "What do you think, Jo?"
"If the country needs you, Johnny," she said, "it's your duty to help."
Johnny told Maxine, "Show the Under-Secretary in, please."
He was a small man with a big brief case. He spoke slowly, earnestly, backing up his statements with reams of paper from the brief case. The Defense Department had not contacted Johnny right away, he said, because they wanted to compile all the facts. They had all the facts now.
Johnny Sloman could be the biggest single factor for peace the world had ever known.
Item. In the event of aggression, he could so bog down the aggressor's supply lines and troop movements with continuous rains and snowstorms that it would be all but impossible for the aggressor to maintain hostilities.
Item. In the event that such tactical weather-war failed, he could cause a drought in the aggressor's food-producing regions, forcing the aggressor to surrender or face starvation.
Item. He could always, conversely, see to it that the defensive force's supply lines were never hampered by the weather and that the precipitation over the defensive country's breadbasket was ideal.
Item. He could render aggressor communication difficult with heavy fog and/or icy roads.
Item. He could cover defensive troop movements with low, dense clouds.
In short, concluded the Under-Secretary, Johnny Sloman could be a one-man world police-force practically guaranteeing peace. He stopped talking. He looked at Johnny. His eyes said, the call of duty is clear.
Harry Bettis said, "Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Secretary. Naturally, we'll think about what you said."
"Think about it!" gasped the Under-Secretary. "Think about it!"
"My client is a busy man—the busiest man in his field," Harry Bettis said.
The Under-Secretary smiled bleakly. "The only man in his field, you mean. That's why we need him."
"We'll send you a report in a few weeks," Harry said indifferently, "after we've had an opportunity to study the situation."
"But, Harry—" Johnny began.
"Johnny," Harry said. He did not have to finish the statement. It had happened before—"Johnny, I've made you a tremendous success. I'm your manager, aren't I? Let's leave it that way."
"If Johnny thinks he ought to help—" Jo-Anne said.
"Now, Jo-Anne," Harry Bettis scolded, and led the Under-Secretary to the door.
* * * *
Three days later, the assistant chief of the F.B.I. came to see them. "We regret this, Sloman," he said.
"You regret what?" Harry Bettis asked.
"Defense allowed a report on its findings out. That was unwise. We'll have to give you around-the-clock protection, Sloman."
"Protection from what?" Johnny wanted to know.
"Enemy agents. The enemy is desperate. At all costs, according to their intelligence reports, they're out to get you."
"Get him?" said Harry Bettis. "You mean, kill him?"
"I mean, get him. Get him on their side. Because everything Johnny could do for the forces of peace and democracy, he could be made to do for the forces of aggression. You see?"
"Yes," said Johnny.
"No," said Harry Bettis. "This sounds like a government trick—to make Johnny go to work. To make him think it's his patriotic duty—"
"Well," said Jo-Anne sharply, "isn't it?"
Harry Bettis smiled. "When he gets as big as Universal Motors, he can become patriotic."
"Mr. Sloman," the assistant F.B.I. chief said, "they will either try to kidnap you outright, or work on you through someone you love. Therefore, our bodyguards—"
"Well, let them keep their distance, that's all," Bettis said. "Bad for business. Nobody wants enemy agents hanging around."
"That's your final decision?" the F.B.I. man asked.
"Well—" began Johnny.
"Yes, it's our final decision," said Harry Bettis, showing the F.B.I. man to the door.
"I don't think you should have done that," Johnny said after he had gone.
"You just make the weather, Johnny-boy. I'll take care of business."
"Well—" said Johnny.
"Johnny!" cried Jo-Anne. "Oh, Johnny! Why don't you act like a man?" And she ran from the room, slamming the door.
After that, Johnny didn't see her again.
She was gone.
Really gone, for certain, not simply walking off in a huff.
Two weeks later, Johnny got the letter—unofficial—from the Enemy.
* * * *
The F.B.I. was sympathetic, but the Chief said, "You can understand, Mr. Sloman, how our hands are tied. It is not an official letter. We can't prove anything. We don't doubt it for a minute, of course. The cold war enemy has kidnapped your fiancee and taken her to their motherland. But—we can't prove it. Not being able to prove it, we can't do a thing about it. You're aware, of course, of how readily the rest of the world condemns our actions. Not that they wouldn't be on our side if we could prove that this kidnap letter was the real thing, but you realize we won't be able to prove it at all."
"Oh," said Johnny. He went home. He saw Harry Bettis, who said he was shocked. The note read:
Mr. Johnny Sloman:
We have Miss Jo-Anne Davis here in the motherland. The only way she can live a normal life here is if you join her and work for us. We believe you know what the other kind of life is like here.
Bettis said, "It stumps the hell out of me, Johnny."
"I'm just waking up," said Johnny slowly. "In a way, it's your fault."
"Now, don't be a jackass, Johnny."
Jackass or no, Johnny hit him. His knuckles went crunch and Harry Bettis' nose went crunch and Bettis fell down. He lay there, his nose not looking so good.
Now, when it was apparently too late, Johnny knew what his course of action should have been. Get rid of the money-grubbing Bettis. Go to work for the government unselfishly. Insure world peace.
Too late...too late...
Because unless he could somehow save Jo-Anne, he would never predict the weather again—for anyone.
* * * *
"But what you ask is impossible!" the Secretary of Defense said a few days later.
"If I come back, if I'm successful," Johnny said quietly, "I'm your man, for as long as you want me, without pay."
"You mean that?" the Secretary asked slowly.
"I mean it."
The Secretary nodded grimly, touched a button on his desk. "Get me Air Force Chief of Staff Burns," he said, and, a moment later: "Bernie? Chuck here. We need a plane. A jet-transport to go you-know-where. Cargo? One man, in a parachute. Can you manage it? Immediately, if not sooner. Good boy, Bernie. No...no, I'm sorry, I can't tell you a thing about it." The Secretary cut the connection, turned to Johnny:
"You leave this afternoon, Sloman. You realize, of course, there isn't a thing we can do to get you out. Not a thing."
"Yes," said Johnny.
"You're a very brave man, or very much in love."
Hours later, the jet transport took off with Johnny in it.
He came down near what had been the border of the motherland and Poland. He began to walk. A farmer and his son spotted the parachute, came after him. The son was a Red Army man on leave. The son had a gun. He fired prematurely, and Johnny ran. It was hopeless, he decided. He would never make it. He would never even reach the capital alive, where they were holding Jo-Anne.
He ran.
He wished for rain. A blinding rainstorm. The clouds scudded in. The rain fell in buckets. The farmer and his son soon lost sight of Johnny.
Just to make sure, Johnny ran and let it go on raining.
* * * *
"Floods in their motherland," the Secretary of Defense told the President. "Naturally, their news broadcasts are trying to keep the reports to a minimum, but these are the biggest floods we've ever heard of over there."
"Our man is there?" the President asked.
"He was dropped by parachute, sir!"
* * * *
It was snowing when Johnny reached the capital. He had been parachuted into the enemy's motherland, naturally, because propinquity alone assured the success of his strange talent.
He was tired. His feet ached. He'd been the only one heading for the capital. Hundreds of thousands had been fleeing from the floods...
"There he is!" a voice cried in the enemy language. He didn't understand the language, but he understood the tone. His picture had been flashed across the length and breadth of the motherland. He had been spotted.
He ran. Down an alley, across a muddy yard, floundering to his knees, then his thighs, in thick mud. They came floundering in pursuit. They fired a warning volley of shots. He stumbled and fell face down in the black, stinking mud.
They took him...
* * * *
Dark room. One light, on his face. A voice: "We can kill you."
"Kill me," he said. "My last wish will be for rain. Rain, forever."
"We can torture you."
"And I will say, before you start, let it rain and go on raining. Let me be powerless to prevent it. Rain!"
"We can kill the girl."
"Your country will float away."
A fist came at him out of the darkness. Hit him. It was tentative torture. He sobbed and thought: rain, harder. Rain, rain, rain...
Water seeped into the dungeon. This had never happened before. The fist went away.
Outside it rained and rained.
* * * *
"What does he want, comrade?"
"We don't know, comrade."
"Give it to him—whatever it is. He has disrupted our entire economy. We face economic disaster unless he—and his rain—leave us in peace."
"Perhaps that is what he wants. Peace."
"You fool! We are supposed to want peace. Shut up!"
"Yes, sir. Comrade."
"Better ask the party secretary."
"Yes, comrade."
The party secretary was asked. The party secretary sighed and nodded.
Johnny saw the light of day. And Jo-Anne.
* * * *
A month later, the Secretary of Defense told him. "Thanks to you, they agreed to a German settlement, stopped sending arms to their Red ally in Asia, withdrew their promise of aid to the Arab fanatics, and have freed all foreigners held in their motherland illegally."
Johnny listened, smiling at Jo-Anne. They had been married two weeks. Naturally, the enemy had been only too glad to see them leave.
"Just stay available, Sloman," the President beamed from alongside the Secretary of Defense. "As long as they know we can always send you over there again, they'll never try anything. Right?"
"Yes, sir," said Johnny.
They called him the Weather Man. They went on calling him the Weather Man, although he retired more or less—except during cases of dire emergency.
The world called him that, the Weather Man. And, because he had retired to enjoy life with his new wife, they began to suspect, as could be expected, that he had been a fraud.
But the enemy did not think so. Ever again.
And that was enough for Johnny....
MY SHIPMATE—COLUMBUS
Published under the pseudonym "Stephen Wilder"
The laughter brought spots of color to his cheeks. He stood there for a while, taking it, and then decided he had had enough and would sit down. A whisper of amusement still stirred the room as he returned to his seat and the professor said,
"But just a moment, Mr. Jones. Won't you tell the class what makes you think Columbus was not the 'bold skipper' the history books say he was. After all, Mr. Jones, this is a history class. If you know more or better history than the history books do, isn't it your duty to tell us?"
"I didn't say he wasn't," Danny Jones said desperately as the laughter started again. Some profs were like that, he thought. Picking on one student and making the rest of the class laugh and think what a great guy the prof was and what a prize dodo the hapless student was. "I said," Danny went on doggedly, "Columbus might not have been—maybe wasn't—the bold skipper the history books claim he was. I can't prove it. No one can. I haven't a time machine."
Again it was the wrong thing to say. The professor wagged a finger in front of his face and gave Danny a sly look. "Don't you," he said, "don't you indeed? I was beginning to think you had been willed H. G. Wells' famous literary invention, young man." That one had the class all but rolling in the aisles.
Danny said desperately, "No! No, I mean, they don't even know for sure if Columbus was born in Genoa. They just think he was. So they also could be wrong about—"
Abruptly the professor's face went serious. "My dear Mr. Jones," he said slowly, acidly, "don't you think we've had enough of fantasy? Don't you think we ought to return to history?"
Danny sat down and for a moment shut his eyes but remained conscious of everyone looking at him, staring at him, evaluating. It wasn't so easy, he decided, being a sophomore transfer student from a big city college, where almost everything went and there was a certain amount of anonymity in the very size of the classes, to a small town college where every face, after a week or so, was familiar. Danny wished he had kept his big yap shut about Columbus, but it was too late now. They'd be ribbing him for weeks....
On his way back to the dorm after classes he was hailed by a student who lived down the hall from him, a fellow named Groves, who said, "How's the boy, Danny. Next thing you'll tell us is that Cortez was really a sexy Spanish broad with a thirty-eight bust who conquered Montezuma and his Indians with sex appeal. Get it, boy. I said—"
"Aw, lay off," Danny grumbled.
The other boy laughed, then shrugged, then said, "Oh yeah, forgot to tell you. There's a telegram waiting for you in the dorm. House-mother's got it. Well, see you, Vasco da Gama."
Danny trudged on to the Georgian-style dormitory and went inside, through the lobby and behind the stairs to the house-mother's office at the rear of the building. She was a kindly-looking old woman with a halo of white hair and a smile which made her a good copy of everyone's grandmother. But now her face was set in unexpectedly grim lines. "Telegram for you, Danny," she said slowly. "They read it over the telephone first, then delivered it." She held out a yellow envelope. "I'm afraid it's some bad news, Danny." She seemed somehow reluctant to part with the little yellow envelope.
"What is it?" Danny said.
"You'd better read it yourself. Here, sit down."
Danny nodded, took the envelope, sat down and opened it. He read:
MR. DANNY JONES, WHITNEY COLLEGE, WHITNEY, VIRGINIA. REGRET TO INFORM YOU UNCLE AVERILL PASSED AWAY LAST NIGHT PEACEFULLY IN HIS SLEEP LEAVING UNSPECIFIED PROPERTY TO YOU.
It was signed with a name Danny did not recognize.
"I'm terribly sorry," the house-mother said, placing her hand on Danny's shoulder.
"Oh, that's all right, Mrs. Grange. It's all right. You see, Uncle Averill wasn't a young man. He must have been in his eighties."
"Were you very close to him, Danny?"
"No, not for a long time. When I was a kid—"
Mrs. Grange smiled.
"Well, when I was eight or nine, I used to see him all the time. We stayed at his place on the coast near St. Augustine, Florida, for a year. I—I feel sorry about Uncle Averill, Mrs. Grange, but I feel better about something that happened in class today. I—I think Uncle Averill would have approved of how I acted."
"Want to talk about it?"
"Well, it's just he always said never to take any so-called fact for granted, especially in history. I can almost remember his voice now, the way he used to say, 'if ever there's an argument in history, sonny, all you ever get is the propaganda report of the side which won.' You know, Mrs. Grange, I think he was right. Of course, a lot of folks thought old Uncle Averill was a little queer. Touched in the head is what they said."
"They oughtn't to say such things."
"Always tinkering around in his basement. Funny, nobody ever knew on what. He wouldn't let anybody near the place. He had a time lock and everything. What nobody could figure out is if he was trying so hard to guard something that was in the basement, why did he sometimes disappear for weeks on end without even telling anybody where he went. And I remember," Danny went on musing, "every time he came back he went into that harangue about history, as if somehow he had confirmed his suspicions. He was a funny old guy but I liked him."
"You remembering him so vividly after all these years will be the best epitaph your uncle could have, Danny. But what are you going to do? About what he left you, I mean."
"Uncle Averill always liked promptness. If he left something for me, he'd want me to pick it up immediately. I guess I ought to go down there to St. Augustine as fast as I can."
"But your classes—"
"I'll have to take an emergency leave of absence."
"Under the circumstances, I'm sure the college will approve. Do you think your uncle left you anything—well—important?"
"Important?" Danny repeated the word. "No, I don't think so. Not by the world's standards. But it must have been important to Uncle Averill. He was a—you know, an image-breaker—"
"An iconoclast," supplied Mrs. Grange.
"Yes'm, an iconoclast. But I liked him."
Mrs. Grange nodded. "You'd better get over and see the Dean."
An hour later, Danny was at the bus depot, waiting for the Greyhound that would take him over to Richmond, where he would meet a train for the south and Florida.
* * * *
It was a rambling white stucco house with a red tile roof and a pleasant grove of palm trees in front and flame-red hibiscus climbing the stucco. The lawyer, whose name was Tartalion, met him at the door.
"I'll get right down to business, Mr. Jones," Tartalion said after they had entered the house. "Your uncle wanted it that way."
"Wait a minute," Danny said, "don't tell me they already had the funeral?"
"Your uncle didn't believe in funerals. His will stipulated cremation."
"But, it was so—"
"Sudden? I know, the will wasn't officially probated. But your uncle had a judge for a friend, and under the circumstances, his wishes were granted. Now, then, you know why you're here?"
"You mean, what he left me? I thought I'd at least get to see his—"
"His body? Not your uncle, not old Averill Jones. You ought to know better. Sonny," the lawyer asked abruptly, "how well did you know the old man?"
The sonny rankled. After all, Danny thought, I'm nineteen. I like beer and girls and I'm no sonny anymore. He sighed and thought of his history class, then thought of Uncle Averill's opinion of history, and felt better. He explained the relationship to Mr. Tartalion and waited for the lawyer to speak.
"Well, it beats me," Tartalion admitted. "Why he left it to a nephew he hasn't seen in ten or eleven years, I mean. Don't just look at me like that. You know that contraption he had in the basement, don't you? How he wouldn't let a soul near it, ever? Then tell me something, Danny. Why did he leave it to you?"
"You're joking!" Danny cried.
"I was your uncle's lawyer. I wouldn't joke about it. He said it was the only thing he had worth willing. He said he willed it to you. Want me to read you the clause?"
Danny nodded. He felt strangely flattered, because the contraption in Averill Jones' basement—a contraption which no one but Averill Jones had ever seen—had been the dearest thing in the old bachelor's life. Actually, he was not Danny's uncle, but his grand-uncle. He had lived alone in St. Augustine and had liked living alone. The only relative he had tolerated was Danny, when Danny was a small boy. Then, as Danny approached his ninth birthday, the old man had said, "They're teaching you too much at school, son. Too many wrong things, too many highfalutin' notions, too much just plain old hogwash. Why don't you kind of make yourself scarce for a few years?" It had been blunt and to the point. It had made Danny cry. He hadn't thought of what had happened that last day he'd seen his grand-uncle for years, but he thought of it now.
* * * *
"But why can't I come back and see you?" he had asked tearfully.
"On account of the machine, son."
"But why, uncle?"
"Hey, come on now and stop your blubbering all over me. If you can't you can't."
"You have to tell me why!"
"Stubborn little critter. Well, I like that. All right, I'll tell you why. Because the machine has a funny kind of fuel, that's why. It doesn't run on gasoline, Danny, or anything like that."
"What does it do, uncle?"
But the old man had shaken his head. "Maybe someday after I'm gone you'll find out. If anyone finds out, it will be you, and that's a promise."
"You still didn't tell me why I have to go away."
"Because—well, don't go telling this to your folks, son, or they'll think old Uncle Averill has a screw loose somewheres—because that machine I have downstairs runs on faith. On faith, you understand? Oh, not the kind of faith they think is important and do a lot of talking and sermoning about, but a different kind of faith. Personal faith, you might say. Faith in a dream or a belief, no matter what people think. And—you know what ruins that faith?"
"No," Danny had said, his eyes very big.
"Knowledge!" cried his uncle. "Too much so-called knowledge which isn't knowledge at all, but hearsay. That's what they're teaching you. In school, other places, every day of your life. I'll tell you when you can come back, Danny: when you're ready to throw most of it overboard. All right?"
He had had to say all right. It was the last time he had ever seen his uncle, but those weren't the last words Averill Jones had spoken to him, for the old man had added as he got up to go: "Don't forget, son. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. History is propaganda—from a winner's point of view. If a side lost the war and got stamped on, you never see the war from its point of view. If an idea got out of favor and stamped on, the idea is ridiculed. Don't forget it, son. If you believe something, if you know it's right, have faith in it and don't give a mind what people say. Promise?"
Danny, his eyes stinging with tears because somehow he could sense he would never see Uncle Averill again, had said that he promised.
"...to my nephew, Danny Jones," the lawyer was reading. "So, you see, you'll have to go right down there and look the thing over. Naturally, I'll have to leave the house while you do so and I won't be able to return until you tell me I can—"
"But why?"
"Weren't you listening?"
"I guess I was thinking about my uncle."
"Well, the clause says you're to examine the machine alone, with no one else in the house. It's perfectly legal. If that's what your uncle wanted, that's what he'll get. Are you all set?"
Danny nodded and Tartalion shook his hand solemnly, then left the room. Danny heard the lawyer's footsteps receding, heard the front door open and close, heard a car engine start. Then, slowly, he walked through the living room of his dead uncle's house and across the long, narrow kitchen and to the basement stairs. His hands were very dry and he felt his heart thudding. He was nervous, which surprised him.
* * * *
But why? he thought, why should it surprise me? All my life, Uncle Averill's basement has been a mystery. Let's face it, Danny-boy, you haven't exactly had an adventurous life. Maybe Uncle Averill was the biggest adventure in it, with his secret machine and strange disappearances. And maybe Uncle Averill did a good selling job when you were small, because that machine means mystery to you. It's probably not much more than a better mousetrap, but you want to believe it is, don't you? And you're nervous because the way Uncle Averill kept you and anyone else away from his basement when you were a kid makes it a kind of frightening place, even now.
He opened the basement door with a key which the lawyer had given him. Beyond the door were five steps and another door—this one of metal. It had had a time lock in the old days, Danny remembered, but the lock was gone now. The metal door swung ponderously, like the door to a bank vault, and then Danny was on the other side. It was dark down there, but faint light seeped in through small high windows and in a few moments Danny's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom.
The basement was empty except for what looked like a big old steamer trunk in the center of the dusty cement floor.
Danny was disappointed. He had childhood visions of an intricate maze of machinery cluttering up every available square foot of basement space, but now he knew that whatever it was which had taken up so much of Uncle Averill's time could fit in the odd-looking steamer trunk in the center of the floor and thus wasn't too much bigger than a good-size TV set. He walked slowly to the trunk and stood for a few moments over the lid. It was an ancient-looking steamer: Uncle Averill must have owned it since his own youth. Still, just a plain trunk.
Danny was in no hurry to open the lid, which did not seem to be locked. For a few moments, at least, he could shield himself from further disappointment—because now he had a hunch that Uncle Averill's machine was going to be a first-class dud. Maybe, he thought gloomily, Uncle Averill had simply not liked to be with people and had used the ruse of a bank-vault door and an empty steamer trunk to achieve privacy whenever he felt the need for it.
Remembering the history class, Danny decided that—after all—sometimes that wasn't a bad idea. Finally, he called himself a fool for waiting and threw up the trunk-lid.
A small case was all he saw inside, although the interior of the trunk was larger than he had expected. A man could probably curl up in there quite comfortably. But the case—the case looked exactly like it ought to house a tape-recorder.
Danny reached in and hauled out the case. It was heavy, about as heavy as a tape-recorder ought to be. Danny placed it down on the floor and opened it.
What he saw was a battery-powered tape-recorder. His disappointment increased: Uncle Averill had left a message for him, that was all. Dutifully, however, he set the spools and snapped on the switch.
A voice from yesterday—Uncle Averill's voice—spoke to him.
* * * *
"Hallo, Danny," it said. "The way the years roll by, I forget exactly how old you are, boy. Seventeen? Eighteen? Twenty? Well, it doesn't matter—if you still believe. If you have faith. Faith in what? Maybe now you're old enough to know. I mean faith in—not having faith. That is, faith in not taking faithfully all the silly items of knowledge they try to cram down your throat in school. See what I mean? Remember what I always said about history, Danny: you get propaganda, is all, from the winning side. If you got faith enough in yourself, Danny, faith enough not to believe everything the history books tell you, that's the kind of faith I mean. Because such a faith gave me the most interesting life a man ever lived, make no mistake about that.
"I'm dead, Danny. Yep, old Uncle Averill is dead. Because this tape-recorder won't be left you in my will until I am dead. But, no regrets, boy. I had a great life. How great—nobody knows. Only you, you're about to find out. Do you believe? Do you believe the way I have in mind? Make no mistake about it now, son. If you don't believe, you might as well burn these spools and go home."
Danny considered. He remembered what had happened in his history class. Wasn't that the sort of faith Uncle Averill had in mind? Faith not to believe in historical fairy tales? Faith to doubt when one ought to doubt? Faith to be skeptical....
"Good," said the voice from the past. "Then you're still here. Look in front of you, Danny-boy. The trunk. The old steamer. Know what it is?"
"No," Danny said, then clamped a hand over his mouth. For a moment he had actually believed he was talking to the dead man.
"It's a time machine," said his Uncle's voice.
There was a silence. The tape went on winding. For a moment, Danny thought that was all. Then the voice continued: "No, your old grand-uncle isn't nuts, Danny. It's a time machine. I know it's a time machine because I used it all my life. You expected some kind of complicated gadget down here, I know. I made everybody think it was a gadget. Going down to your basement and tinkering with a gadget is fine in our culture. Hell's fire, boy, it's approved behavior. But locking a bank-vault door behind you and curling up in a steamer trunk, that isn't approved. Now, is it?
"I'll tell you about this here time machine, sonny. It isn't a machine at all, in the strict sense of the word. You can see that. It's just—well, an empty box. But it works, and what else ought a fellow to care about.
"Funny how I got it. I was eighteen or twenty, maybe. And my Grand-uncle Daniel gave it to me. Daniel, get me. Daniel to Averill to Daniel. So when you have a grand-nephew, see that his name's Averill, understand? Keep it going, Danny. Because this trunk is old. A lot older than you think.
"And you can travel through time in it. Don't look at me like that, I know what you're thinking. There isn't any such thing as time travel. In the strict sense of the word, it's impossible. You can't resurrect the past or peek into the unborn future. Well, I don't know about the future, but I do know about the past. But you got to have faith, you got to be a kid at heart, Danny. You got to have this dream, see?
"Because you don't travel anywhere. But your mind does, and it's like you wake up in somebody else's body, drawn to him like a magnet, somebody else—somewhen else. Your body stays right here, you see. In the trunk. In what they called suspended animation. But you—the real you, the you that knows how to dream and to believe—you go back.
"Don't make the mistake I made at first. It's no dream in the usual sense of the word. It's real, Danny. You're somebody else back there, all right, but if he gets hurt, you get hurt. If he dies—taps for Danny Jones! You get me?"
* * * *
The dead man's voice chuckled. "But don't think this means automatically you'll be able to travel through time. Because you got to have the proper attitude. You've got to believe in yourself, and not in all the historical fictions they give you. Now do you understand? If you're skeptical enough and if at the same time you like to dream enough—that's all it takes. Want to try it?"
Suddenly the voice was gone. That was all there was and at first Danny could not believe it. A sense of bitter disappointment enveloped him—not because Uncle Averill had left him nothing but an old steamer trunk but because Uncle Averill had been, to say the least, off his rocker.
The fabulous machine in the basement was—nothing.
Just a steamer trunk and an incredible story about time-traveling.
Danny sighed and began to walk back toward the cellar stairs. He paused. He turned around uncertainly and looked at the trunk. After all, he had promised; at least he'd promised himself that he'd carry out his peculiar uncle's wishes. Besides, he'd come all the way down here from Whitney College and he ought to at least try the machine.
But there wasn't any machine.
Try the trunk then? There was nothing to try except curling up in it and maybe closing the lid. Uncle Averill was a practical joker, too. It might be just like Uncle Averill to have the lid snap shut and lock automatically so Danny would have to pound his knuckles black and blue until the lawyer heard and came for him.
You see, sonny? would be Uncle Averill's point. You believed me, and you should have known better.
Danny cursed himself and returned to the trunk. He gazed down at the yawning interior for a few seconds, then put first one foot, then the other over the side. He sat down and stared at a peeling blue-paper liner. He rolled over and curled up. The bottom of the trunk was a good fit. He reached up and found a rope dangling down toward him. He pulled the lid down, smiling at his own credulity, and was engulfed in total darkness.
But it would be wonderful, he found himself thinking. It would be the most wonderful thing in the world, to be able to travel through time and see for yourself what really had happened in all the world's colorful ages and to take part in the wildest, proudest adventures of mankind.
He thought, I want to believe. It would be so wonderful to believe.
He also thought about his history class. He did not know it, but his history class was very important. It was crucial. Everything depended on his history class. Because he doubted. He did not want to take Columbus' bravery and intelligence for granted. There were no surviving documents, so why should he?
Maybe Columbus was a third-rater!
Maybe—at least you didn't have to worship him as a hero just because he happened to discover...
Now, what did he discover?
In absolute darkness and a ringing in the ears and far away a dim glowing light and larger and brighter and the whirling whirling spinning flashing I don't believe but strangely somehow I have faith, faith in myself, buzzing, humming, glowing...
The world exploded.
There was a great deal of laughter in the tavern.
At first he thought the laughter was directed at him. Giddily, he raised his head. He saw raw wood rafters, a leaded glass window, a stained and greasy wall, heavy wood-plank tables with heavy chairs and a barbarous-looking crew drinking from heavy clay mugs. One of the mugs was in front of him and he raised it to his lips without thinking.
It was ale, the strongest ale he had ever tasted. He got it down somehow without gagging. The laughter came again, rolling over him like a wave. A serving girl scurried by, skirts flashing, a rough tray of clay mugs balanced expertly on one hand. A man with a sword dangling at his side staggered to his feet drunkenly and clawed at the girl, but she shoved him back into his seat and kept walking.
The third wave of laughter rolled and then there was a brief silence.
"Drink too much, Martin Pinzon?" Danny's companion at the long board-table asked. He was an evil-looking old man with a patch over one eye and a small white spade-shaped beard and unshaven cheeks.
"Not me," Danny said, amazed because the language was unfamiliar to him yet he could both understand and speak it. "What's so funny?" he asked. "Why's everyone laughing?"
The old man's hand slapped his back and the mouth parted to show ugly blackened teeth and the old man laughed so hard spittle spotted his beard. "As if you didn't know," he managed to say. "As if you didn't know, Martin Pinzon. It's that weak-minded sailor again, the one who claims to have a charter for three caravels from the Queen herself. Drunk as Bacchus and there's his pretty little daughter trying to get him to come home again. I tell you, Martin Pinzon, if he isn't..."
* * * *
But now Danny wasn't listening. He looked around the tavern until he saw the butt of all the laughter. Slowly, drawn irresistibly, Martin Pinzon—or Danny Jones—got up and walked over there.
The man was drunk as Bacchus, all right. He was a man perhaps somewhat taller than average. He had a large head with an arrogant beak of a nose dominating the face, but the mouth was weak and irresolute. He stared drunkenly at a beautiful girl who could not have been more than seventeen.
The girl was saying, "Please, papa. Come back to the hotel with me. Papa, don't you realize you're sailing tomorrow?"
"Gowananlemebe," the man mumbled.
"Papa. Please. The Queen's charter—"
"I was drunk when I took it and drunk when I examined those three stinking caravels and—" he leaned forward as if to speak in deepest confidence, but his drunken voice was still very loud—"and drunk when I said the world was round. I—"
"You hear that?" someone cried. "Old Chris was drunk when he said the world was round!"
"He must a' been!" someone else shouted. Everyone laughed.
"Come on, papa," the girl pleaded. She wore a shawl over her dress and another shawl on her head. Her blonde hair barely peeked out, and she was beautiful. She tried to drag her father to his feet by one arm, but he was too heavy for her.
She looked around the room defiantly as the laughter surged again. "Brave men!" she mocked. "A bunch of stay-at-homes. Won't somebody help me? Papa sails tomorrow."
"Papa sails tomorrow," said someone, miming her desperate tones. "Didn't you know that papa sails tomorrow?"
"Not sailing anyplace at all," the father mumbled. "World isn't round. Drunk. Think I want to fall over the edge? Think I—"
"Oh, papa," moaned the girl. "Won't someone help me to—" And she tugged again at the man's arm—"to get him to bed."
A big man nearby boomed, "I'll help you t'bed, me lass, but it won't be with your old father. Eh, mates?" he cried, and the tavern echoed with laughter. The big man got up and went over to the girl. "Now, listen, lass," he said, taking hold of her arm. "Why don't you forget this drunken slob of a father and—"
Crack! Her hand blurred at his cheek, struck it like a pistol shot. The big man blinked his eyes and grinned. "So you have spirit, do you? Well, it's more than I can say for that father of yours, too yellow and too drunk to carry out the Queen of Castile's bid—"
The hand flashed out again but this time the big man caught it in one of his own and twisted sideways against the girl, forcing her back against the table's edge. "I like my girls to struggle," he said, and the girl's face went white as she suddenly let herself go limp in his arms.
The man grinned. "Oh I like 'em limp, me lass. When they're pretty as a rose, like you, who's to care?"
"Papa!" the girl screamed. The big man's face hovered over hers, blotting out the oil-lamp lights, the thick lips all but slavering....
* * * *
"Just a minute, man!" Danny cried, striding boldly to them. Hardly pausing in his efforts to kiss the again struggling girl, the big man swatted back with one enormous arm and sent Danny reeling. Whoever he was, he was a popular figure. The laughter was still louder now. Everyone was having a great time, at Danny's expense now.
Danny crashed into a chair, upending it. A bowl of soup came crashing down, the heavy bowl splintering, the hot contents scalding him. He stood up and heard the girl scream. Instinctively, he grasped two legs of the heavy chair and hefted it. Then he sprinted back across the room.
"Behind you, Pietro!" a voice cried, and at the last moment the big man whirled and faced Danny, then lunged to one side, taking the girl with him.
Danny couldn't check his arms, which had carried the heavy chair overhead. It came down with a crash against the edge of the big plank table. The chair shattered in Danny's arms. One leg flew up and struck the big man in the face, though, bringing blood just below the cheek bone. He bellowed in surprise and pain and came lumbering toward Danny.
Danny was aware of the girl cowering to one side, aware that another of the chair's legs was still grasped in his right hand. He was but a boy, he found himself thinking quickly, desperate. If the giant grabbed him, grabbed him just once, the fight would be over. The man was twice his size, twice his weight. Yet he had to do something to help the girl....
The giant came at him. The big arms lifted over the heavy, brutal face.... And Danny drove under them with the chair-leg, jabbing the tip of it against the man's enormous middle. Pietro—for such was the man's name—sagged a few inches, the breath rushing, heavy with garlic, from his mouth. But still, he got his great hands about Danny's throat and began to squeeze.
Danny saw the wood rafters, the window, a bargirl standing, mouth open, watching them, the drunken man and his daughter, then a blurry, watery confusion as his eyes went dim. He was conscious of swinging the club, of striking something, of extending the club out as far as it would go and then slamming it back toward himself, striking something which he hoped was Pietro's head. He felt his mouth going slack and wondered if his tongue were hanging out. Exerting all his strength he struck numbly, mechanically, desperately with the chair-leg.
And slowly, the constriction left his throat. Something struck against his middle, almost knocking him down. Something pushed against his legs, backing him against the table. He looked down. His eyes were watery, his throat burning. The giant Pietro lay, breathing stertorously, at his feet.
A small hand grabbed his. "Father will come now," a voice said. "I don't—don't even know who you are, but I want to thank you. I thank you for myself and the Queen, and God, senor. You better come quickly, with us. Does it hurt much?"
Danny tried to talk. His voice rasped in his throat. The girl squeezed his hand and together with her and the drunken man who was her father, he left the tavern. The giant Pietro was just getting up and shaking his fist at them slowly....
* * * *
It was a small top-floor room in an old waterfront building in the Spanish port of Palos. Or, Danny corrected himself, the Castillian port of Palos. Because, in this year of our Lord 1492, Spain had barely become a unified country.
"Are you feeling better, Martin Pinzon?" the beautiful girl asked him.
He had given the name he had heard, Martin Pinzon, as his own. The room was very hot. The August night outside was hot too and sultry and starless. The girl's father was resting now, breathing unevenly. The girl's name was Nina. One of the small caravels in her father's three-ship fleet was named after her. Her full name was Nina Columbus.
Nina brought another wet cloth and covered Danny's swollen throat with it. "Does it hurt much?" she said, and, for the tenth time, "we have no money to thank you with, senor."
"Any man would have—"
"But you were the only one. The only—never mind. Martin, listen. I have no right to trouble you, but...it's father. Tomorrow is the second day of August, you see, and it is all over Palos that tomorrow he sails with the Queen's charter...."
"Then if you're worrying about that big man, Pietro, you can forget it. If you're sailing, I mean."
"That's just it," Nina said desperately. "Father doesn't want to sail. Martin, tell me, do you believe the world is round?"
Danny nodded very soberly. "Yes, Nina," he told her softly. "The world is round. I believe it."
"My father doesn't! Funny, isn't it, Martin?" she said in a voice which told him she did not think it was funny at all. "All Spain—and Genoa too—think that tomorrow morning my father, Christopher Columbus, will journey to the unexplored west confident that he will arrive, after a long voyage, in the East—when really my father, this same Christopher Columbus, lies here in a drunken stupor because he lacks the courage to face his convictions and...oh, Martin!" Her voice broke, her pretty face crumpled. She sobbed into her hands. Gently, Danny stroked her back.
* * * *
"There now, take it easy," he said. "Your father will sail. I know he'll sail. Do you believe the world to be round, little Nina?"
"Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes!"
"He will sail. He will prove it and be famous. I know he will."
"Oh, Martin. You sound so sure of yourself. I wish I could..."
"Nina, listen. Your father will sail."
"You'll help us you mean?"
"Yes. All right, I'll help you. Now, get some sleep if you want to wake up and say goodbye to him in the morning. Because I'll be getting him up before the sun to—"
"Are you a sailing man too? Are you going with him?"
"Well..."
"Wait! Martin, I remember you now. Martin Pinzon. At the meeting of the organization to prove the Earth's round shape. You! You were there. And once, once when he was not drunk, father said that a Don Pinzon would command one of our three ships, the Nina it was, the caravel which bears my name. Are you this Don Pinzon?"
Slowly, Danny nodded. He remembered his history now. The Nina had been commanded by one Don Pinzon, Don Martin Pinzon! And he was now this Martin Pinzon, he, Danny Jones. Which meant he was going with Columbus to discover a new world! A nineteen-year-old American youth going to witness the single most important event in American history....
"Yes," Danny said slowly, "I am Don Pinzon."
"But—but you're so young!"
Danny shrugged. "I have seen more of the world than you would believe, Nina."
"The Western Sea? You have been out on the Western Sea, as far as the Canary Islands, perhaps?" she asked in an awed voice.
"I know the Western Sea," he said. "Trust me."
She came very close. She looked long in his eyes. "I trust you, Martin. Oh yes, I trust you. Listen, Martin. I'm going. I'm going with you. I have to go with you."
"But a girl—"
"He is my father. I love him, Martin. He needs me. Martin, don't try to stop me. I want you to help me aboard, to see that he...oh, Martin, you'll have so much to do. Because the rest of our crew—some of them being hired even now by the three caravel pursers—will be a crew of cut-throats and ne'er-do-wells embarking into the unknown because they have utterly nothing to lose. Father needs you because the others won't care."
"The three caravels will sail west," Danny told her. "Believe me, they'll sail west. Now, get some sleep."
Her face was still very close. Her eyes filled with tears, but they were not tears of sadness. She took his cheeks in her hands and kissed him softly on the lips. She smiled at him, her own lips trembling.
"Martin," she said.
His arms moved. They went around her, drew the softness of her close. She murmured something, but he did not hear it. His lips found hers a second time, fiercely. His hands her shoulder, her throat, her...
"Flat," Columbus mumbled. "Flat. Abs'lutely flat. The Earth is—flat as a pancake...."
"Oh, Martin!" Nina cried.
* * * *
It was raining in the morning. A hard, driving rain, pelting down on the seaport of Palos. The three caravels floated side by side in the little harbor and a large, derisive crowd had gathered. The crowd erupted into noisy laughter when Columbus and his little party appeared on foot.
"I need a drink," Columbus whispered. "I can't go through with it."
"Father," Nina said. "We're with you. I'm here. Martin is here."
"I can't go—"
"You've got to go through with it! For yourself and for the world. Now, stand straight, father. They're looking at you. They're all looking at you."
Columbus, thought Danny. The intrepid voyager who had discovered a new world! He smiled grimly. Columbus, the history books should have said, the drunken sot who didn't even have the courage to face his own convictions.
They walked ahead through the ridiculing crowd. Danny's throat was still sore. He was not frightened, though. He possibly was the only man in the crew who was not frightened. The others didn't care what their destination was, true: but they wanted to reach it alive. Danny knew the journey would end in success. The end of the journey meant nothing to him. It was written in history. It was...
Unless, he suddenly found himself thinking, I came back here to write it. He grinned at his own bravado. What would they have said in freshman psych—that was practically paranoid thinking. As if Danny Jones, Whitney College, Virginia, U.S.A., could have anything to do with the success or failure of Columbus' journey.
They reached the small skiff that would take them out to the tiny fleet of caravels. The crowd hooted and jeered.
"...going to drop off the edge of the world, Columbus."
"If the monsters don't get you first."
"Or the storms and whirlpools."
Columbus gripped Nina's hand. Martin-Danny took his other arm firmly and steered him toward the prow of the skiff. "Easy now, skipper," Danny said.
"I can't—"
"There's wine on the Santa Maria," Danny whispered. "Much wine—to make you forget. Come on!"
"And I'm going, father," Nina said. "Whether you go or not."
"You!" Columbus gasped. "A girl. You, going—"
"With Martin Pinzon. If—if my own father can't look after me, then Martin can."
"But you—" Danny began.
"Be quiet, please," she whispered as Columbus climbed stiffly into the skiff. "It may be the only way, Martin. He—he loves me. I guess I'm the only thing he cares about. If he knows I'm going."
"To the Santa Maria!" Columbus told the rowers as Danny and Nina got into the skiff.
"To the New World!" cried Danny melodramatically.
"What did you say?" Nina asked him.
His face colored. "I mean, to the Indies! To the Indies!"
The skiff bobbed out across the harbor toward the three waiting caravels. Departure time had arrived.
Two hours later, they were underway.
* * * *
The sea was calm as glass, green as emerald. The three caravels, after a journey of several days, had reached the Canary Islands where additional provisions and fresh water were to be had.
"This," said Columbus, waving his arms to take in the chain of islands. "This is as far as a mere man has a right to go. There is nothing further, can't you see? Can't you?"
He was sober. Danny had come over in a skiff from the Nina to see that he remained sober at least for the loading and the departure. It was as if he, Danny, was going to preserve Columbus' name for history—single-handed if necessary.
"We will not go on," Columbus said. "We're going back. The only way to the Indies is around the Cape of Storms, around Africa. I tell you—"
"That's enough, father," Nina said. "We..."
"I'm in command here," Columbus told them. It surprised Danny. Usually, the drunken sailor was not so self-assertive. Then it occurred to Danny that it wasn't merely self-assertiveness: it was fear.
Danny called over the mate, a one-legged man named Juan, who walked with a jaunty stride despite his peg leg. "You take orders from Columbus?" Danny said. "Would you take orders from me?"
Juan shook his head, smiling. "You command aboard the Nina only, Martin Pinzon. I heard what the Captain said. If he wants to go back and give up this fool scheme, it's all right with me. And you know the rest of the crew will say the same."
Nina looked at Danny hopelessly. She said, "Then, then it's no use?"
Danny whispered fiercely, "Your father loves you very much?"
"Yes, but—"
"And doesn't want to see anything happen to you?"
"But—"
"And believes the world is flat and if you sail far enough west you'll fall off?"
"But I—"
"Then you're coming with me aboard the Nina!"
Columbus gasped, "What did you say?"
"She's coming with me, on the Nina. If you don't want to find the western route to the Indies, we will. Right, Nina?" he said, taking her hand and moving to where the rope-ladder dangled over the side of the Santa Maria to the skiff below.
"Don't take her from this deck," Columbus ordered.
Danny ignored him. "Don Juan!" cried Columbus, and the peg-leg came toward Danny.
"I'm sorry, Don Martin," he said, "but—"
Still holding Nina's hand, Martin stiff-armed him out of the way and ran for the side. Someone jerked the rope-ladder out of reach and someone else leaped on Martin. For, he was Martin now, Martin Pinzon. His own identity seemed submerged far below the surface, as if somehow he could look on all this without risking anything. He knew that he was merely a defense mechanism, to ward off fear: for, it wasn't true. If Martin Pinzon were hurt, he would be hurt.
He hurled the man from his back. Nina screamed as a cutlass flashed in the sun. Martin-Danny ducked, felt the blade whizz by overhead.
"Jump!" Martin-Danny cried.
"But I can't swim!"
"I can. I'll save you." It was Danny again, completely Danny. He felt himself arise to the surface, submerging Martin Pinzon. Because the Spaniard probably couldn't swim at all, and if Danny made promises, it was Danny who must fulfill them.
He squeezed Nina's hand. He went up on the side—and over. The water seemed a very long way down. They hit it finally with a great splash.
Down they went and down, into the warm murky green depths. Down—and finally up. Danny's head broke surface. He was only yards from the skiff. He had never let go of Nina's hand, but now he did, getting a lifeguard's hold on her. He struck out for the skiff.
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later, they were aboard the Nina. "I command here," Danny told the crew. "Is that correct?"
"Aye, sir," said Don Hernan, the mate.
"Even if Columbus tells you different?"
"Columbus?" spat Don Hernan. "That drunkard is in command of the Santa Maria, not the Nina. We follow Martin Pinzon here."
"Even if I give one set of orders and Columbus another?"
"Even then, my commander. Yes."
"Then we're sailing west," Danny cried. "Up anchor! Hurry."
"But I—" Nina began.
"Don't you see? He thinks I'm abducting you. Or he thinks I'm sailing west with you to certain death. He will follow with the Santa Maria and the Pinta, trying to rescue you. And we'll reach the Indies. Columbus will sail across the Western Sea to save his daughter, but what's the difference why he'll sail. The important thing is, Queen Isabella gave him the charter and the caravels and with them he's making history. You see?"
"I...I think so," Nina said doubtfully.
A heady wind sprang up. The square-rigged sails billowed. The Nina began to surge forward—into the unknown West.
Tackle creaked aboard the nearby Santa Maria and Pinta. The two other caravels came in pursuit. But they won't catch us, Martin knew. They won't catch us until we reach—Hispaniola. And then, pursuit will be no more. Then, it will no longer matter and we'll all be heroes....
* * * *
Which is the way it turned out—almost.
The Santa Maria and Pinta pursued all through August and September and into October, but the Nina kept its slim lead. The ships were never out of sight of one another and once or twice Columbus even hailed them, imploring them to return to Spain with him. When they ignored him, his deep voice boomed to his own crew and the crew of the Pinta: "Then sail on, sail on!" It was these words, Danny knew, that history would record. Not the others.
One morning in October, he awoke with a start. Something had disturbed his sleep—something...
"Good morning, captain," a voice said.
He looked up. It was a giant of a man, with a hard face and brutal-looking eyes. He knew that face. Pietro! The giant of the tavern.
"But you—"
"I was aboard all the time, my captain," Pietro said. "An auxiliary rower. You never knew." He said nothing else. He lunged at Martin's bunk—for I'm Martin again, Danny thought—a knife gleaming in his big hand.
* * * *
Martin-Danny sat up, bringing the covers with him, hurling them like a cloak at Pietro. The giant's knife-hand caught in the covers and Danny swung to his feet, shoving the big man. Pietro stumbled into the bunk, then lashed around quickly, unexpectedly, the knife loose again. Danny felt it grating across his ribs hotly, searingly. He staggered and almost fell, but somehow made it to the door and on deck. He needed room. Facing that knife in the close confines of the cabin, he was a dead man and knew it.
He hit the stairs and headed for the deck. He reached the door—tugged. It held fast. He heard Pietro's laughter, then threw himself to one side. The knife thudded into the wood alongside Danny's shoulder.
Then the door came open, throwing him back. He stumbled, regained his balance, plunged outside. With a roar, Pietro followed him, knife again in hand.
Danny backed away slowly. Only a few crew members were on deck now, and a watch high up in the crow's nest. The watch was crying in an almost-delirious voice: "Land, land! Land ho-oo!" But Martin-Danny hardly heard the words. Pietro came at him—
Suddenly Don Hernan was in front of him. Don Hernan's hand nipped up and then down and a knife arced toward Danny. He caught it by the haft, swung to face the giant. But, he thought, I don't know how to use a knife. I'm Danny Jones, I...
Pietro leaped, the knife down, held loosely at his side, underhanded, ready to slash and rip. Danny sidestepped and Pietro went by in a rush. Danny waited.
Pietro came back carefully this time, crouching, balanced easily on the balls of his feet. For all his size, he fought with the grace of a dancer.
Danny felt warm wetness where the blood was seeping from his ribs. Feet pounded as more of the crew came on deck in response to the watch's delirious words. Instead of crowding at the prow, though, they formed a circle around Danny and Pietro. Danny thought: But I'm the captain. The captain. They ought to help me...they... He knew though that they would not. They were a fierce, proud people and the law of single combat would apply even to the captain who had piloted them across an unknown ocean.
Pietro came by, attempting to slash with his knife from outside. Danny moved quickly—not quick enough. The knife point caught his arm this time. He felt his hand go numb. His own knife clattered to the deck as blood oozed from his biceps.
Once more Pietro charged him. Weaponless, Danny waited. Pietro was laughing, sure of himself—
Careless.
Danny slipped aside as Pietro brought the knife around in a wicked swipe. He spun with it and when he came around Danny was waiting for him. He drove his left fist into the great belly and his right to the big, bearded jaw. Pietro slumped, disbelief in his eyes. He swung the knife again but only succeeded in wrapping his giant arm around Danny. He bent his head, shook it to clear it of the sting of Danny's blows. And Danny rabbit-punched him.
Pietro went down heavily and someone shouted. "The face! Kick him in the face!"
Wearily, Danny shook his head. He went with Nina to the rail and saw the green palm-fringed island of the New World. Nina smiled at him, then ripped something from what she was wearing and began to bandage his ribs, his arm.
* * * *
They heard a splash. Danny looked around, saw Don Hernan and a member of the crew gazing serenely down. Pietro was down there, where they had tossed him. For a while the body floated, then the limbs splashed wildly as Pietro regained consciousness. He drifted back away from the ship. He went under, and came up. He went under again, and stayed under....
"The Indies," Nina said.
"The Indies," Danny said. He did not make the distinction between east and west. They must learn for themselves.
The Pinta and the Santa Maria came up alongside. All thoughts of pursuit were gone. Columbus waved. He was very close now on the deck of the Santa Maria. There was something in his face, something changed. Columbus was a new man now. He had been shamed. He had followed his daughter and Martin Pinzon across an unknown ocean and he was changed now. Somehow, Danny knew he could now make voyages on his own.
"Martin," Nina whispered. "They may say it was father. But it was you. I'll know in my heart, it was you."
Danny nodded. She put her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him. He liked this slim girl—he liked her immensely, and it wasn't right. She wasn't his, not really. She was Martin Pinzon's. He let the Spaniard come to the surface, willed his own mind back and down and away. She's all yours, Pinzon, he told the other mind in his body. She—and this world. I'm a—stranger here.
But once more he kissed Nina, fiercely, with passion and longing.
"Goodbye, my darling," he said.
"Goodbye! What—"
He let Martin Pinzon take it from there. "Hello," said Martin Pinzon. "I mean, hello forever, darling."
She laughed. "Goodbye to your bachelorhood, you mean."
"Yes," he said. "Yes."
But it was Martin Pinzon talking now. Completely Martin Pinzon.
He was back in his grand-uncle's basement. He was in the trunk and he felt stiff. Mostly, his right arm and the right ribs felt stiff. He felt his shirt. It was caked with blood.
Proof, he thought. If I needed proof. What happened to Pinzon happened to me.
He stood up. He felt weak, but knew he would be all right. He knew about Columbus now. At first, a weak drunkard. But after the first voyage, thanks to Martin Pinzon and Nina, an intrepid voyager. For history said Columbus would make four voyages to the New World—and four he would make.
Danny went outside, to where the lawyer was waiting for him. The trunk was Danny's now, the time trunk. And he would use it again, often. He knew that now, and it was wrong to deflate a dream.
Columbus was a hero. He would never say otherwise again.
EARTHSMITH
Someone in the crowd tittered when the big ungainly creature reached the head of the line.
"Name?"
The creature swayed back and forth foolishly, supporting the bulk of his weight first on one extremity and then on the other. His face which had a slight rosy tint anyway got redder.
"Come, come. Planet? Name?" The registrar was only a machine, but the registrar could assume an air of feminine petulance. "We want to keep the line moving, so if you will please—"
The creature drew a deep breath and let the two words come out in a rush. "Earth, Smith," he said. Being nervous, he could not modulate his voice. Unable to modulate his voice, he heard the words come out too deep, too loud.
"Did you hear that voice?" demanded the man who had tittered. "On a cold wet night they say the karami of Caulo boom like that. And look at Earthsmith. Just look at him. I ask you, what can they accept at the school and still call it a school? Hey you, Earthsmith, what courses will you take?"
"I don't know," the creature confessed. "That's what I'm here for. I don't even know what they teach at the school."
"He doesn't know." More tittering.
The registrar took all this in impassively, said: "What planet, Earthsmith?"
The creature was still uncomfortable. "Earth. Only my name is not Earthsmith. Smith—"
The titterer broke into a loud guffaw. "Earthsmith doesn't even know what planet he's from. Good old Earthsmith." He was a small thin man, this titterer, with too-bright eyes, vaguely purple skin, and a well-greased shock of stiff green hair.
Smith squared his wide shoulders and looked into the colored lights of the registrar. "It's a mistake. My name is Smith."
"What planet, Smith?"
"Earth. The planet Earth." Smith had a rosy, glistening bald head and a hairless face. A little bead of sweat rolled into his left eye and made him blink. He rubbed his eye.
"Age?" The machine had a way of asking questions suddenly, and Smith just stared.
"Tell me your age. Age. How old are you?"
Smith wanted to sit down, only there were no chairs. Just the room with its long line of people behind him, and the machine up front. The registrar.
"I'm twenty-seven."
"Twenty-seven what?"
"You asked me my age. I'm twenty-seven years old, and three months."
Except for the clicking of the machine, there was a silence. The voice of the machine, feminine again, seemed confused when it spoke. "I cannot correlate years, Smith of Earth. How old are you?"
It wasn't an ordeal, really, but Smith felt more uncomfortable every moment. Was the machine making fun of him? If it were, then it had an ally in the crowd, because the man who had tittered was laughing again, the green shock of hair on his head bobbing up and down.
"Earthsmith doesn't even know how old he is. Imagine."
The machine, which was more feminine than not, asked Smith how far the planet Earth was from its primary, and what the orbital speed of the planet was. Smith told her, but again the terminology was not capable of correlation.
"Unclassified as to age, Smith. It's not important. I wonder, are you dominant or receptive?"
"I'm a man. Male. Dom—"
"That doesn't matter. Smith, tell me, how long has it been since anyone from the planet Earth has attended the school?"
Smith said he didn't know, but, to his knowledge, no one from Earth had ever been here. "We don't get around much any more. It's not that we can't. We just go and then we don't like it, so we come back to Earth."
"Well, from the looks of you I would say you are a receptive. Very definitely receptive, Smith." Given sufficient data, the registrar could not be wrong. Given sufficient data the registrar could tell you anything you wanted to know, provided the answer could be arrived at from the data itself. "The male and female distinction no longer holds, of course. On some planets the female is dominant, on some she's not. It's generally according to the time of colonization, Smith. When was Earth colonized?"
"It wasn't."
"What do you mean, it wasn't?"
"We were always there. We colonized the rest of the galaxy. Long ago."
The registrar clicked furiously, expressed itself still more femininely this time. "Oh, that planet! You certainly are the first, Smith. The very first here at the school. Room 4027, dominant companion." Neuter voice again. "That's all, Smith of Earth. Next."
The vaguely purple-skinned man stood before the registrar, winked at the flashing lights. "You know, now I can see what they mean when we're told of a missing link in the chain between man and animal. Old Earthsmith...."
"Name?" said the machine.
The man pointed at Smith, shook with silent laughter. The back of Smith's head, which could not properly be called bald because he had never had any hair on it, was very red.
"Name's Jorak."
"Planet?" demanded the fully neuter machine.
* * * *
There was the red star, a monstrous blotch of crimson swollen and brooding on the horizon and filling a quarter of the sky. There was the fleck of white high up near the top of the red giant, its white-dwarf companion in transit. These were the high jagged crags, falling off suddenly to the sundered, frothy sea with its blood-red sun-track fading to pink and finally to gray far away on either side.
Smith watched the waves break far below him, and he almost stumbled when someone tapped his shoulder.
"That was mean of the man named Jorak." She might have been a woman of Earth, except that she was too thin, cast in a too-delicate mould. Yet beautiful.
Smith shrugged, felt the heat rise to his face and knew that he must have looked like a mirror for the red sun.
"Is that really a blush, Smith? Are you blushing?"
He nodded. "I can't help it. I—"
"Don't be foolish. I don't want you to stop. I think it looks nice."
Smith rubbed his pate, watched the hot wind blow the girl's yellow hair about her face. "They tell me my great great grandfather had a little fringe of hair around his head. I've seen pictures."
"How nice—"
"If you're trying to make fun of me, please go away. It wasn't nice, it was ugly. Either you have hair or you don't. The men of Earth used to have it, long ago. The women still do."
She changed the subject. "I'll bet you think this place is ugly, Smith."
Smith shook his head. "No, it's stark. If you like things that way, it isn't really ugly. But Earth is a planet of green rolling hills and soft rains and—you're making fun of me."
"You say that again and I'll take it as an insult." She smiled. "We have our green rolling hills on Bortinot, only it's cold. I like it here because it's warm. And, of course, I have a lot to learn at school."
"Would you think I'm stupid if I ask you what?"
"No. And you were really serious in there when you said you didn't know what they teach."
"How could I know? I'm the first student here from Earth. Every five years—say, twenty times during the course of one lifetime—we get the application. This time the government finally decided someone should go. Me."
"Well, they teach just about everything that could be of value in a transtellar culture."
"What?"
"Things like astrogation and ethics—"
"I caught the school express at a Denebian planet. Someone told me there that the school is decadent."
She smiled up at him. "Deneb is a slothful place, then. It is true that the school never stands still, changing its courses to meet the demands of a changing society. If Deneb cannot keep pace with the changes, that could explain the feeling. Right now they'll be concentrating in dreams and dream-empathy, in some of the newer Garlonian dances, Sarchian cooking for the receptives and Wortan fighting for the dominants. Quite a virile program, Smith, provided one is up to it."
"What happened to your astrogation and ethics?"
"That? Oh, that's just a catch-all phrase. Your courses will depend on such things as your D or R classifications—"
"It makes me laugh a little," Smith admitted. "But they've classified me as a receptive. I guess they know what they're doing. Still—"
"You think you're strong, eh?"
"Well, I didn't see anyone in the registrar's room who would worry me very much in a fight."
"Society is sophisticated, Smith. There's more to strength than mere brawn. What sort of psi-powers have they cultivated on the planet Earth?"
In a general sense, but in a general sense only, Smith knew what she meant. "Well, there's hypnotism, and some people play at telepathy and clairvoyance. Nothing much, really."
"That isn't much, my friend."
"Why? What else is there?" Smith smiled for the first time. "I didn't know—" He shook his head, suddenly, to clear it. He felt tilted. He looked and he saw that everything was straight, but still he felt tilted. He tried to right himself, and down he went. On his stomach he lay, his legs twisted under him a little. Foolishly, he tried to get up. He couldn't.
"There's that." The girl laughed. "Suggestion without the need for hypnotism."
Smith stood up, said, "I see what you mean."
"Think so?"
It began to rain. A brisk wind came up abruptly, and off in the distance Smith heard the roar of thunder. It came closer. Still closer. Like in a straight line. Smith watched the lightnings prance.
"We'd better get back to the school!" he cried. He didn't think she could hear his voice above the thunder. He started to shout again, but lightning crackled before his eyes. Between him and the girl. Something rumbled, and Smith started to fall. They had been blasted off the crag, and now they hurtled down through the sheets of hot rain....
"Feel yourself," the girl told him. The huge crimson sun still sat on the horizon. The air was hot and warm and Smith was dry.
"Suggestion," she smiled again. "Most of us have it to some degree, but we of Bortinot have it still more. Still think you should be a dominant?"
"Well—" The girl's face swam before his eyes. Lovely. Smith took a step forward, reached out and placed his big hands on her shoulders.
"Well what?" She was smiling.
"What's your name?"
"Geria."
His lips were big and hers were little, if full. He quivered as he kissed her. "I love you, Geria."
"I know it," she said.
"The reason I went outside to watch the sea," Smith said, "was because I didn't know how to get to room 4027. I didn't want to ask anyone, not after—"
"That makes sense. I'll take you, Smith. I'm just down the hall from you, anyway."
"Thank you, Geria." Smith wondered how he knew her name was Geria. Nice name. "What happened after I thought there was a storm, Geria?" Smith suppressed a smile.
"Oh, nothing much. I just planted another suggestion in your mind. For now you've forgotten, but you will remember. Shall we go?"
They walked back down the path from the top of the crag, and soon Smith saw other students in groups of two and three. Ahead was the long low school, a dull rectangle of metal perhaps two miles long and half as wide. With Geria, Smith entered through one of the hundreds of doorways and followed her wordlessly up a mechanical staircase.
They flashed past many landings, and after a time Smith followed the girl across one of them and into a long hall.
"Simple," she said. "You have the twenty-seventh room here on the fortieth floor. Mine is room eighteen. Will we be seeing more of each other, Smith?"
"As much as you'd like," he said, but it made him feel foolish. He had merely spoken to the girl for a few minutes, and yet he could not quite fathom his emotions. To some extent she had made him feel the same as had the man Jorak, and yet she liked him. She wanted to see more of him. She said so.
"Smith, you're blushing again. I tell you what: if you can do that every day, then I will see you every day. It's so nice and—unaffected."
Was that the word she really had in mind? Smith remembered once when he was little, a farmer had come to the city and everyone had called him an ancient word which they said came from a still more ancient name. Rube they had called him. Rube. He didn't like it. He had had a fight, Smith recalled, and a big plateglass window was broken. He went to jail for a few weeks on the moon, and after that he didn't come to the city any more. Smith was little at the time, but he had never forgotten the look on the farmer's face when the security officers took him off to the moon rocket.
Had he known it, Jorak would have used the word rube, but what about Geria?
The green number on the white door was painted sharply—4027. "Here's my room," Smith said. He tried an indifferent wave, but it hardly worked, and he began to blush again.
Geria skipped lightly down the hall, and he couldn't see her face to tell if she were smiling. He shrugged, opened the door.
* * * *
"Earthsmith! Oh, no...I come half way across the galaxy to get here, so what are the odds against any particular room mate? Huge, that's what. But I got me—hello, Earthsmith."
It was the purple man, Jorak. He had just recently greased his shock of bright green hair, and he had turned away from the mirror when Smith opened the door. Now he turned back to the tinted glass and held his head at various angles.
"Well, can you change rooms if you want to?" Smith asked pleasantly.
"You're not going to chase me out of my own room, Earthsmith. You can change if you'd like. Not me."
"All right if you want me to I'll change."
"If I want you to! Don't pass the blame to me, Earthsmith. I didn't say a thing about changing, not me. Don't you think I'm good enough for you?"
"I don't care one way or the other," Smith said. "I suggested you change because I thought you'd be happier that way. Look, I'll mind my own business and pretend you are not even here. How's that?"
"Pretend I'm not here? Like cepheid you will. If you want to be ornery, Smith, or Earthsmith, or whatever your name is, I'll give you plenty to be ornery about. I'm a dominant, you know, so just watch out."
"I'll change if that will make you happy." Smith didn't want any trouble. He still felt more than a little strange and out of place here, and a fight with Jorak wouldn't help matters. Briefly, he wondered what sort of psi-powers Jorak possessed.
The purple man stood up. "What kind of a slap in the face is that? We haven't even started courses or anything. You think I'd need you to help me with my work or something?"
"No, I'm quite sure you wouldn't. But I'll change my room, anyway. I'll probably get in your way—"
"Well, I wouldn't get into your hair, satellite-head! If you think you're going to leave here and say I started a fight or something.... My father made quite a record for himself here at the school, and I'll have to beat it, of course."
"Of course," Smith agreed, but he did not really know why.
"Are you implying anyone, just anyone, could top my father's record, Earthsmith? Not a man from Gyra ever did it, and intellectually Gyra is top planet in its own sector. Not a woman from Bortinot came close, but then, you probably don't even know where Bortinot is."
Smith said no, he didn't, but he had just met a woman from Bortinot. Perhaps if he changed the subject....
Jorak ran his fingers up along each side of his shock of hair. They came away greasy green. "Exquisite, those women of Bortinot. But then, you probably wouldn't appreciate them, eh, Earthsmith?"
Smith said that he could appreciate them very well indeed, especially since, except for a few minor structural differences, they looked like women of Earth. It was a mistake, and the muscles in Jorak's cheeks began to twitch.
"I say they look exquisite, you say they look like women of Earth. Which is it, Earthsmith? Not both, surely—a contradiction in terms. I believe you're trying to provoke me."
Smith sighed. He wanted no trouble—they had spent a year with him on Earth, indoctrinating that. He was to be a paragon at the school, as Earth's first student there, he had to be a paragon—even if he turned out to be more awkward in this situation than the farmer on Earth everyone had called Rube.
"I think I will go to sleep," Smith said.
"Why, don't you men of Earth ever eat, Smith?"
Smith said yes, they ate, but he wasn't very hungry now. As a matter of fact, he was ravenously hungry, but he did not relish the idea of going to some public eating place either with Jorak or alone. His heart began to beat a little faster when he thought that he might meet Geria if he did, but then he felt the heat rise up his neck and into his cheeks. He'd hardly know what to say to her, and besides, he knew there was something he should remember but couldn't quite. No, he'd skip dinner this first day at the school.
Now he watched Jorak open the door and step into the hallway, and for a moment he heard gay voices and the shuffling of many feet, and Jorak's voice louder than the rest: "Kard of Shilon! How long has it been? I can remember that day near Raginsdild...."
Smith turned to the window, and for a long time he sat watching the fat red sun.
* * * *
He got up early and he showered, and then he heard a clicking sound. Two cards had been deposited in a tray from a slot in the wall. At the top of one were the words "Jorak of Gyra," and Smith's name and planet were printed on the other. He picked it up and began to read, and then Jorak sat up and took the other card.
"Programs," said Jorak. "Everyone takes transtellar history, of course, and a section or two in the humanities. My electives are Wortan fighting and dream-empathy."
Smith smiled. "Me too—same program. I suppose we'll be in class together, Jorak."
"Rather stupid," the purple man observed. "They've given you a dominant's program. But then, I remember you questioned your receptive classification, and the registrar's known to do this on occasion, just to put you in your place. You'll be in Garlonian dancing in a few days, Earthsmith."
"Well, I sure hope not. I didn't come here to learn how to dance—"
"Hah! So what? If you're an R you'll learn how to dance and like it. Cook, too. There's no such thing as a misfit at the school, not permanently. They'll find you out soon enough, Earthsmith. Hmmm, wait till Kard of Shilon finds out what they've put in Wortan. Kard's top man in his sector, and it's just possible they'll pair you off with him.
"Well, you going to eat this morning? I'd hate to see you in Wortan without a good meal in you. But I suppose it really wouldn't help, anyway. Coming, Earthsmith?"
There weren't any people out in the hall this early, and Smith breathed more easily when they moved in a direction opposite that of Geria's room. Soon they had descended a score of levels, and the moving ramp became more crowded. Smith tried to ignore the eager hum of conversation, but it was all around him. He realized he should be feeling that way too. But you couldn't drum up a student's eager appetite within yourself, not when you didn't feel that way, not when your entire planet waited to see how you made out here and you felt unsure of yourself, even in such simple things as eating.
That part of it at least turned out better than Smith had hoped. There were eggs, and while he was sure he would not recognize the fowl if he saw it, he could at least order his over-light and get something familiar. And there were long strips of fatty meat which almost could have been bacon, except Smith was sure the pig wouldn't be a pig at all.
And Smith was lost in the hordes of white men, green men, purple, orange and brown, and no one paid him too much attention. Jorak busied himself remembering old times with a gruff burly orange man named Kard, whose planet was Shilon, and Smith ate in silence. Once he thought he saw Geria far off at another table, but it could have been his imagination, and when he looked again she was gone.
Home, Smith always had been a quick eater, but now he found himself pawing at his food. Soon the great dining room began to clear. Jorak and Kard leaned back in their chairs, watching Smith.
Jorak yawned. "How long does it take you to breakfast?"
"Different rate of digestion on Earth," Kard suggested.
"Don't be foolish. Earthsmith's in no hurry to attend his first class, so he's loafing. Right, Earthsmith?"
Smith mumbled something about unfamiliar food under his breath, and Jorak said, "Well, no matter. We'll give you another moment or two, Earthsmith. Then we'll have to be going. We all three have transtellar history, you know."
Smith knew it all too well. Gyra and Bortinot and Shilon were so many names to him and he silently cursed Earth's provincial histories. For those here at the school, the three names and a hundred others might be magical stepping stones to the culture, the lore, the history of a galaxy—but all Smith knew now was that Jorak came from Gyra, and so some of Gyra's people at least must be purple, that Geria came from Bortinot where the women were D and the men were R and where the women looked like those of Earth, that Kard, finally, came from a place that bore the name Shilon, where some of the men at least were orange. But Shilon could have been anyplace from the hub to the fringe, Gyra might swim dizzily out near Ophiuchus or it might be the new culture name for one of Earth's near neighbors. And Bortinot—he wished he knew more about Bortinot.
* * * *
The instructor of transtellar history was a little fat man with a round gold face and green eyes that blinked too much. He wore the tight black uniform of the instructor and his green armband proclaimed his subject to be history. He smiled too much, too vacantly, as if he had been practicing it a long time and now forgot what it really meant.
"Greetings!" he cried jovially, after everyone had been seated on the long low benches around the room. "I bring you history. No one is to talk unless I tell him to. Everyone is to listen unless I tell him not to. Clear?" He smiled.
No one said anything.
"Excellent. History encompasses thousands of years and countless cubic parsecs. Only the big things count. We will forget the little things. Little things belong to little people and we of the school are the elite of a transtellar culture. Questions?"
There were none.
"Good, because I have some. What would you say was the first event of importance? Luog of Panden, talk."
Said green-skinned Luog, a very young Pandenian: "You mean ever?"
"I would have specified had I meant otherwise. Yes, ever. Talk, Luog of Panden."
"Well—"
"Halt a moment, please. Who thinks the question is a relative one which cannot properly be answered? I clair it is Brandog of Hulpin."
An albino woman three seats down from Smith flushed. "I am sorry," she said.
"Who told you to talk now? This is not Hulpin, Brandog. The course is intensive. You must concentrate. Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. No extraneous thoughts." The instructor smiled. "Luog of Panden, talk."
Smith felt the little beads of sweat forming on his forehead. The instructor could read minds—and how many of these others could? They just sat there as if it were the most natural thing in the world....
Only Brandog of Hulpin seemed ruffled, and it would be many moments before her albino skin looked again like soft alabaster. But no one seemed to notice. Luog was saying, "—exodus from the prehistoric Sirian worlds to the first culture in the Denebian system, the Var one. More than ten thousand Vars ago."
"Satisfactory for a Receptive, Luog of Panden," the instructor smiled. "The Dominants would go back a bit further and talk of the Sirian wars, but that much is a matter of opinion, since the wars are largely mythical, anyway. And so we have set the stage for history. We have—"
Smith wanted to get up indignantly and tell the instructor, tell them all, what the most glorious epochs of history really were. You would find it in the museums of earth, on the plaques and in the statues and on the old old records of Earth. There was a lot Smith wanted to tell them because there was so much only he could tell them, so much they had forgotten.
But he merely sat and stared politely at the black-uniformed instructor. You don't show yourself as a provincial—what was the word?—rube, not when your culture, while temporarily the oldest, is in a lot of ways the most neophite of them all.
You just sat and stared, looking interested.
The instructor's voice cut into his thoughts, "Earth of Smith—"
"Smith of Earth," he said, automatically.
"I did not tell you to talk, Smith of Earth. And if your card says Earth of Smith, how am I to know? A mistake, yes—but an understandable one. I'm a historian, and I have heard of neither planet. Where is this Earth? Talk, Smith!"
He stood up, although it wasn't really necessary, and he could feel his knees trembling slightly. "Earth is a few parsecs from Sirius, and Sirius I think you know."
"I know Sirius. Now talk!"
"What is it you want me to say? I don't feel much like talking—"
"Yet you speak so loud that the room fairly rocks with it. I wanted you to tell us why you did not agree with the answer just now rendered. It is, I feel, a good one. Talk."
"Then I agree, it is a good one." Smith did not want to get involved. He wanted to be a good, quietly efficient student. Nothing more. But he forgot that the instructor could read minds.
"You lie, Smith of Earth. I won't go into it any further, because it is your privilege if you want to lie. But you are not to listen for the remainder of this lecture. Do not listen."
Smith nodded, cursed himself mentally because he had made such a mess of things here at his very first lecture, and headed for the door.
"Smith of Earth! Just where under the red sun do you think you are going?"
"You told me not to listen, so—"
"I didn't say talk. Talk now."
"—so I'm leaving the room."
"No one leaves until the lecture has been concluded. Sit if you will, or stand, but stay here. And do not listen."
Smith nodded, turned back to the row of benches dumbly. He found a place next to Brandog of Hulpin, sat near the albino woman. Down the bench, he saw Jorak grinning broadly. Smith did not know how he was going to sit there without listening, but he decided he'd better not ask that question now.
* * * *
"This is your course in Wortan fighting," boomed the giant of an instructor. "Dominants only, or such Receptives as question their classification." The instructor's massive face was beefy, the color of new-spilled blood, and the muscles rippled and bulged and seethed under his black uniform.
"Me for this!" confided Kard of Shilon, slapping Smith's back. "Perhaps Jorak has told you that I am not without ability on the Wortan mats."
Smith hardly heard him. Two dozen paces across the room, on the other side of the circle that surrounded the instructor, stood Geria, hands on hips, lips soft-smiling when she saw Smith, silver tunic to her knees, yellow hair hanging free to shoulders.
"Join me, Smith of Earth?" she called, and knees watery again, Smith made his way around the circle.
While Jorak gaped, Geria took Smith's hand when they met half way around the circle, and she smiled up at him. "I wouldn't have believed it, but you're blushing again. Earth trait, Smith?"
"No, not really," he stammered.
The slim girl was about to say something, but the instructor cleared his throat ominously, and the room became silent again. "Now, then," declared the giant, "there's no trick to fighting with psi-powers. Anyone can do that, and the women of Bortinot, as you know, are particularly adept. But the people of Wortan have no such powers, and they must depend on tooth and nail, on sinew and bone and animal cunning. Such is the way the Wortanians do battle—and, purely for sport, such is the way of Wortan fighting. Any questions?"
"Yes," Geria told him, "I have one. Are we not permitted to use any psi-powers?"
"None. They disqualify you."
"Well, then I suppose I must withdraw from the course. I can't be expected to stand up to a man physically. I'm not built that way—and very few women are, Dominant or Receptive."
Smith had not expected this, but now he felt a warm glow in his breast. He almost wanted to put his arm about the woman's shoulders, protectively. How could such a delicate beautiful thing be expected to fight?
The instructor said, "I won't argue with you. I can't remember a woman ever lasting in Wortan fighting, but if they're Dominants they're automatically entered. The rest of you can do like—"
The words came out before Smith could stop them. "In that case, can anyone tell me the difference between a Dominant and a Receptive?"
There was a lot of laughter in the room, and Smith thought it would have been the same had he, as a child, asked the difference between boy and girl. "Ah, old Earthsmith!" he heard Jorak's voice. "Everytime he opens his mouth new wisdom spews forth."
Pale eyes looked out of the instructor's blood-red face. "Obviously, you're joking. I'm here to answer questions, among other things, but you couldn't be serious."
And Smith heard his own dull voice reply:
"No, certainly not. I was only joking."
Said Geria, "Silly, a Dominant has more psi-powers, that's all. But you really didn't know, did you?"
"There are no psi-powers on Earth to speak of," Smith reminded her.
"Hmm, very true. In that case, maybe you're all Receptives—male and female. But don't feel too badly, Smith; Wortan's the same way, and Wortan has a first-rate culture. Look: they even have an instructor here at the school."
The instructor of Wortan fighting was a Wortanian, of course. And here, in Wortan fighting, Smith might feel at home. But he hardly expected to excel at the school by breaking someone's back, or pinning him helplessly to the Wortan mat. Suddenly he found himself thinking of Earth, thinking of the trust that had been put in him as Earth's first student at the school. But his thoughts did not remain there long—his eyes took in the soft yellow of Geria's hair, and Earth faded far away.
"—volunteers," the instructor was saying. "Does anyone want to step on the mat with me for a fall or two?"
"I recommend Earthsmith," came Jorak's voice. "Positively—Earthsmith's your man."
Smith felt his face becoming very red again, but Geria nudged him with an elbow. "Go ahead, Smith—why not? You told me once you didn't fear anyone in the room of the registrar, not in physical combat. Go ahead."
"I know, but—"
"Go ahead, Smith. Show me."
He could do that. Yes, he could show her. But what if he were wrong—they might know a trick or two that would make him look foolish. And he wouldn't want that, not in front of Geria. "I am tired," he said. "I didn't sleep well last night."
The instructor rescued him. "I didn't ask you to recommend. I asked for volunteers. But you who spoke, what's your name?"
"I am Jorak of Gyra," said Jorak, purple face paling.
"You'll do. On the mat, man of Gyra."
Jorak stepped forward, slowly, in no hurry to meet the giant. Smith heard Kard's mocking laugh. "Ho, Jorak—he'll tear you in half. Now if he had asked for a man of Shilon...a real man...."
And still laughing, the Shilonian heaved mightily with both his hands and sent Jorak stumbling out onto the mat. The man of Gyra fell and skidded on his stomach, turned over once and finally came up into a sitting position at the instructor's feet. Kard was grinning, but Jorak saw nothing funny in what had happened. He stood up slowly, wheezing, and his gaze raked the circle. It flicked past Kard rapidly, kept going, poised a moment on Geria, then reached Smith. Jorak shook his fist. "All right, Earthsmith, I'll get you for this."
Geria smiled. "I would say that you have an enemy there."
The instructor bellowed a warning and came for Jorak.
* * * *
For some reason Smith found he couldn't keep his eyes off the fray, and he found his own breath coming in ragged gasps. Geria watched with a dispassionate interest. "Poor man of Gyra," she said. "It might be a different story if he could use some of his psi-powers. The men of Gyra have a little of that, you know."
"Well, why can't he?"
"He'd be disqualified, shamed—and maybe worse. I never knew that psi-powers were not permitted on the Wortan mat, but I did know that the rules must be adhered to rigidly."
The instructor's massive body stood between them and Jorak, and one of the great arms circled the man of Gyra's neck. Jorak's purple face glared straight at Smith, and his body thrashed and wriggled furiously, like a snake, head held fast by a forked stick. Abruptly, the instructor stepped back and let go. Jorak fell and lay writhing on the mat, legs and arms pounding.
"Brute strength is what we want in Wortan," said the instructor, smoothing his black uniform.
Said Kard of Shilon: "You outweigh Jorak, but I see your point. I wonder how you would do with a man of Shilon."
The instructor smiled. "Well, we will pair off now. You can select me, if you wish. Those who want to drop out of the course, step back from the circle. We need room—"
All the women moved away, slowly, reluctantly. They were Dominants, every one, and Smith sensed they longed to use their psi-powers. Some of them trembled nervously from the exhibition they had seen, some wiped sweat from white and pink and green brow. One tall albino woman seemed hesitant, stepped back toward the circle, but she backed away again when a gold man big as Kard of Shilon strode forward eagerly.
Against the wall stood the dozen women, rapt eyes intent on the men as they paired off. And this, Smith thought bitterly, is culture. This is what Earth had missed by closing its star lanes. Well, Earth....
"Don't sulk, Smith of Earth," Geria told him, and Smith realized, shamefully, that he had slunk off with the women. "I say there is something glorious about fighting tooth and nail. Not depraved, certainly, unless you insist on judging it by a hidebound ethic. Go back to the mats, Smith—for me."
He looked long at the woman, saw no guile in her eyes. Who was he to judge? Could he dare pass judgment on a society that had left Earth behind a score of thousand years ago? The men of Earth hadn't sent him here, half way across the galaxy to do that.
* * * *
He turned and walked stiffly to the mats. By now the men had paired off two and two, stood facing each other in pairs. Kard of Shilon and the thick-thewed instructor, great gold man and chunky red, reed-slender green man and giant orange, albinos two like alabaster statues.
From the circle came Jorak, hands to bruised neck. He stopped, looked Smith up and down grimly, smiled. "You have no partner, Earthsmith?"
"I'm looking for one."
"Well, look no more. I am tired and hurt, but I'd like to join you on the mat." He shrugged. "Of course, if you're afraid—"
Smith still did not feel like fighting. It might as well be Jorak as any other—he certainly had more reason to fight Jorak. Vaguely, it seemed a needless expenditure of energy. But he had done it again: he had put the shoe on the wrong foot—he, Smith, stood up for judgment, not the school. "Good enough, Jorak," he said.
In a moment, the instructor signaled them all to begin, and Smith had one brief look at the dozen pairs of men, grappling, heard the instructor shout, "one fall, and one fall only!" And then Jorak was upon him.
Jorak seemed for all the world like a snake, writhing and twisting with a deceptive sinewy strength. But calmly Smith stepped out of his reach, cuffing his ears roundly when he came too close.
"You're afraid, afraid, afraid!" Jorak taunted. "Fight!"
Smith shrugged. If he did not want to fight, he did not want to. But the women hooted, and they were hooting him, all but Geria who remained glumly silent.
"This is getting me nowhere," Jorak hissed. "You're making me look like a fool, Earthsmith." Perspiration bathed the purple face, stained the sides of Jorak's tunic darkly.
And then he smiled. Smith felt giddy, hardly could keep his legs under him, yet hardly had Jorak touched him. Then the man of Gyra was using his psi-powers, despite the sanction. Oddly, Smith felt detached from it all. Let him use his powers then—that would end it. Let him....
"Fight back, Smith!" Geria cried.
Jorak's powers were not like the woman's. He could induce giddiness, yes, but not in any overpowering quantities. Smith swayed foolishly, tipped first to left, then to right, stood for a moment with arms at sides. Jorak rushed upon him and struck out with both fists, and Smith stumbled back half a dozen steps, crashed into a pair of struggling figures, was dimly aware that both fell.
Jorak came on, cocky, confident, and Smith rocked for a moment on the balls of his feet. Once and once only he lashed out with his right arm, smeared Jorak's nose flat against his face. Jorak toppled backward and fell, writhing.
Smith looked around him, panting. The other contestants ceased their struggles, and the instructor said:
"Someone has used psi. I don't know who, but someone—"
Jorak pointed weakly, said, "Earthsmith!"
"Snap judgment," the instructor admitted. "Your word only. Still, you alone were bested, Jorak of Gyra—and, hah, that makes twice, doesn't it?"
"Once with psi," said Jorak.
"You sure?"
"I ought to know what hit me! He held me rigid, I tell you, and then he struck me. What could I do? I ask you, what?"
Smith knew that the instructor could read minds—with limitations. He knew the psi-power had been used, but he did not know who had used it.
* * * *
Jorak wiped the blood from his face with the back of one hand. "Listen," he confided, "Earthsmith is a savage, really and truly, of the planet Earth. Terribly barbaric. Obviously, he'd have no compunctions against dirty fighting."
"Well—" said the instructor.
"There's only one thing wrong with all this," Smith told him. "Nobody on Earth uses psi-power."
Jorak slapped his hand against the mat. "Then you admit that there are psi-powers on Earth?"
"Yes," Smith said. "There are psi-powers on Earth." Things were happening to Smith. He felt vague stirrings inside of him, and he dampered them.
"There. He admits it," Jorak said. "The men of Earth are not without their psi-powers, and Smith or Earthsmith—I still don't know the barbarian's name—used them on me." He shook his fist. "You just can't trust these barbarians."
The instructor still did not seem sure of himself, but there were angry mutterings in the crowd, and the albino woman who had almost but not quite joined the fighters said, "Let me try a fall with him. Probably I would lose, but we of Nugat can perceive the psi-powers readily."
Smith stormed away from her, felt hot anger rushing through him. "I wouldn't fight with a woman."
Jorak taunted, "He's afraid she'll discover—"
"Nothing! I'm afraid of nothing, Jorak. I just won't fight a woman." He was shouting now, and he couldn't help it. Again, there was the odd feeling that part of his mind at least stood away from all this, observing, shaking its head and telling him to curb his temper.
A hand lay heavily on his shoulder, big gnarled, orange. "Kard of Shilon would like a fall with you, Earthsmith of Earth. Perhaps I am not as subtle as the woman from Nugat, but still I think I could tell."
The instructor nodded, and Kard spun Smith around, kept him spinning with a short chopping blow to his jaw. Smith hardly felt it. But something told him deep inside his whirling brain to fall, fall, fall—and the faintest shadow of a smile flickered across Jorak's lips.
Win or lose—what was the difference? Those who could would feel the psi-powers, and Smith would be their man.
By crotch and collar he caught the huge man of Shilon, lifted him. Kard's arms and legs flailed air, helplessly. He bellowed as Smith began to whirl, slowly at first, but then faster. Up he raised the great orange hulk, held it aloft on outstretched arms for one moment—hurled it.
Arms and legs still flailing wildly, Kard struck the mat, seemed almost to bounce, landed in a heap atop Jorak.
Geria jumped up and down delightedly, but the woman of Nugat scowled. "Psi," she said. "I felt it."
"As did I," admitted the instructor. "Faintly. Smith of Earth—"
"Don't tell me you didn't see me use my arms then, just my arms?"
"Kard appeared awful helpless—"
"I felt the psi," said the woman of Nugat.
"And I," a man agreed.
"As I said," Jorak declared smugly, "when you bring a barbarian to the school you must expect barbarous behavior. Oh well," he stifled a yawn, "I'll get my nose fixed, of course, but this sort of thing could continue. Unpleasant, is it not?"
The instructor nodded slowly, dismissed class.
* * * *
"Did you or didn't you, Smith?"
"What do you think, Geria?"
"I'd say no, but I did feel the psi when you threw Kard."
"That was Jorak—and he used it on me."
"Not very strong then, because I remember how readily I—"
"Look, Geria. What's the difference? They've made up their minds, and I can't do a thing about it. I didn't use the psi, I can tell you that and you'll believe me. But it doesn't matter, really. They're convinced. What happens next?"
The woman of Bortinot frowned. "I don't know. They could expel you possibly. You forget I'm new at the school, too. Let's forget all about it. You will, anyway, in dream empathy."
It was easy for her to say that, but Smith couldn't forget. The more he had tried to convince them he had not employed the psi-power, could not employ it, the more they thought that he did. He was of Earth—primitive by their standards, a barbarian. They had said so. Culture had leaped past Earth in all directions, had leaped so far that he could not even recognize it as such, had encompassed the stars and broad new concepts as big as the parsecs of space between the stars. How could he understand—ever?
Or was there anything to understand? If he could take everything at its face value, if he could trust his own judgment, this was not culture at all. But he had forgotten again: his judgment didn't matter. He was being judged, not the school.
"—be strictly a neophyte in dream empathy," Geria was saying. "But not me. I've had my share of it on Bortinot, and they'll be pairing us off, experienced and novice. I'll take you as a partner if you'd like, Smith."
"You bet I'd like it!" He felt genuinely cheerful again, quite suddenly. Geria was the one bright spot at the school, and at least he had that. And yet there was something he could not remember, something pushing against the fringes of consciousness, and it concerned Geria. What actually had happened yesterday on the crags? He could remember, remember—but he couldn't at all, not really, and somehow he knew that the most important item of all remained tantalizingly close, yet just beyond his immediate reach.
He said, "Just what is this dream empathy?"
"Now you are joking."
"No. I don't know a thing about it."
"What do you people of Earth do for entertainment?"
"Well, we talk, or we dance, or we play games, ride horses, take walks in the country, see a show—anything anyone else does, I guess."
"No one else does any of that, because d.e.'s a lot better. You know anything about dreams, Smith?"
"A little. Very little. They've always been something of a mystery on Earth."
"Well, do you read or watch the telios on Earth?"
"Of course. But it's strictly local stuff on Earth. That's why I'm here."
"Well, if it's fiction, why do you read?"
"Excitement I guess. Interest, suspense. I watch the hero, I struggle with him, succeed when he does if the book's a good one—"
"Exactly. You go into empathy with him. Smith—how would you like to do that—with me?"
"Hunh?"
"Take a dream. I dream it, not you. It's a good one, under control. A vivid dream, more real than life itself in a lot of ways, emotions highlighted, maintained, increased—and exactly what I want to dream because I know we'll both like it.
"I dream it, not you. But you feel it with me. You grow tired of your own thoughts, so you switch in on someone else's. Control there. Gorgeous dreams, fantastic dreams, even horrible ones, if both would like it. Complete empathy—in a dream world.
"Then later, when you're experienced, you dream and I emp. How does it sound, Smith?"
He smiled. "Not much privacy. But I'd be a liar if I said I wouldn't want to take a peek at your dreams, Geria. It sounds fine."
Geria laughed softly, a lilting feminine sound. "It's a little more private than that, provided I know what I'm doing. There's a control. I can dream what I want, and can restrict it. You'll see."
Smith very much wanted to see. Almost, he forgot about Jorak and the psi-power. But briefly in his mind he saw the black uniformed giant from Wortan, felt again the flailing Kard raised high overhead, saw accusation in the woman of Nugat's eyes....
* * * *
They lay on two adjacent couches, Smith and the woman of Bortinot. A bare cubicle of a room with just the two couches in it. A door, now closed, led into a room in which they had received their instructions. But Smith hardly had listened. Geria knew the game well enough, and he'd let it go at that. The rasping voice of the female instructor had annoyed him, anyway, but he noticed that she was a woman of Bortinot, not beautiful like Geria, but of her planet nonetheless.
"Psi-powers again," Geria told him. "Hypnotism and telepathy mostly. You'll see...."
Something which looked like a candle-flame seen through a long dark tube flickered from the ceiling. It came closer, steadied, flickered no more. Smith couldn't draw his eyes away from it.
"You're asleep," Geria told him, matter-of-factly.
He was. Not really, because in sleep there was a lack of awareness. But he could not move and everything was dark and he could only think.
He felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. A mind without a body, in complete darkness. The tingle of awareness which you hardly regard as such because it always is with you was gone. Nothing.
And then it returned. He felt his heart beating again. His ear itched and he scratched it. He shifted his left arm which had fallen asleep.
Oddly, the ceiling light had moved. It had been just to the right of center—now it was just to the left, flickering again, retreating. It was gone.
He turned over on his left side, sleepily, contentedly—on the brink of real sleep. Geria knew what she was doing. He'd rest. He looked—at his own sleeping figure!
Madness toyed with the edges of his mind, gained inroads, made him look again. The silent figure to his left—himself. He raised his hands, felt the hair, long, flowing, billowing about his head—looked down, could see the gentle rounded rise of breast.
A voice nibbled at consciousness, repeated itself, became clearer, laughing: "We will go to sleep now, Smith. How does it feel to be here with me? Let's dream. Dream—"
The voice reassured, and Smith-Geria relaxed, slept.
* * * *
He, Geria of Bortinot—really she, then—stood on a hill. A weathered hill and aged, on a frigid world where winds of winter raged and howled and battered mountains into submissive mounds. Fearful place, grim and almost dead it was—and yet he liked it. Smiling, he stood atop the hill and bade the tempest strike. The winds hurled him headlong and he stumbled, but he felt elated, wild and free, part of the elements that did battle there in that country of the weathered hills. And there were others and they were men. They came up the hill and they tried to take him in their arms, strong men and fair, but he ran laughing with the wind. His identity faded in that wind, was torn to tatters by it—left only was Geria of Bortinot, her feelings, her thoughts, but his awareness.
She stumbled, fell, turned over and over, much too slowly. Winds still howled, but above her here at hill's bottom. Wraiths of fog swirled in eddying gusts, came closer and faded, appeared again and swept away.
She cried a name because the fog brought her an image and the name and the image were one. "Smith of Earth, of Earth, of Earth...." And he came to her, this image, on a charger, an animal much too thick through the shoulders to be a horse, with three pairs of legs. Low out of saddle he leaned, graceful, handsome bald head pink with excitement. He clutched at her, lifted her through the mists, above them. The six-legged horse soared high, above the hills, above the winds, carried her higher and higher. Smith stroked her yellow hair, kissed her. She tingled....
* * * *
"Wake up Smith! Up, come on now, the class is over for today."
He stirred. The dream—Gods of Earth, what a dream!
"Well, how'd you like it? See what I mean about dream empathy, Smith? Beats everything, doesn't it?"
Smith hardly heard her. They say dreams fulfill wishes, they say—and what was it Geria had dreamed? Suddenly, it was very important to Smith, terribly important, more important than anything, because he remembered, without knowing how or why, what had happened yesterday on the crags.
"Geria," he said. He tried to make his voice soft, but it boomed loudly, almost startled her.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Why nothing is the matter. You remember yesterday on the crag, Geria?"
She nodded.
"And your dream—Geria?"
Again, the casual nod.
"Geria, I—I love you. I think I want to marry you. I think—"
He stopped. She looked at him for what seemed a long time but really was only a few seconds, and then she grinned. There was nothing malicious about it, Smith knew, just a grin. It spread, and the woman of Bortinot began to laugh. Softly at first, but soon she was laughing very hard and Smith felt foolish. He wanted very much to be out of there, any place but in that room, but he did not know for sure that he knew how to operate the door.
"Oh, Smith, Smith," she said, "if you could see yourself now. But I suppose I deserve it. I planted the suggestion, you fought it, now you're pretending. All right, I admit defeat. But stop now; you should see your face."
Serious. She was serious. She thought he was joking. Post-suggestively you tried to get someone to do something—anything, and it was very very funny if they did. Funnier yet if they didn't, because then they beat you at your own game, made fun of you, laughed at you, but eventually with you. Of course it was like that, let her think it was like that.
He smiled. "All right, I'll—stop."
And together, laughing, they walked out of the room. Smith was surprised to find he had no trouble at all with the door.
* * * *
Jorak had a friendly smile for Smith when he entered their room. "There's a card for you in the box, Smith. Read it." Jorak, it seemed, had stopped playing with his name.
Smith took the card, read it. "Smith of Earth, report to Registrar at once."
"You know why, don't you?" Jorak asked him. But the smile was no longer friendly.
"How should I know?"
"Trouble, that's what. But you asked for it. Psi and Wortan don't mix, barbarian."
Smith was glad when he hardly felt any impulse to strike the purple man. But he said, mocking Jorak's own tones, "Don't provoke me," and Jorak cowered in a corner.
* * * *
Smith looked into the banks of the Registrar's lights, spoke into the speaker. "Smith of Earth," he said. This time his voice didn't boom with loudness. And it didn't seem to matter much anymore.
And this time, the Registrar's voice wasn't so femininely petulant. It sounded masculine, authoritative.
"Smith of Earth. Item. Garnot of Jlob feels you are an inferior history student, recommends withdrawal from the school.
"Item: Sog-chafka of Wortan announces your wanton use of psi-powers in Wortan fighting, recommends clemency because you are a barbarian.
"Item: Kard of Shilon wants to meet you in Wortan again. Promises to kill you.
"Item: both Jorak of Gyra and Geria of Bortinot have questioned your mentality, want you tested."
Vaguely Smith listened. He felt removed, resigned. But then certain words struck hard....
"...Geria of Bortinot questions your mentality....
"Smith of Earth. Are you listening?"
"I'm listening," Smith said.
"I feel you have two choices," the Registrar said. "We can request your withdrawal from the school, or we can keep you here under observation and give you an exhaustive battery of tests. The decision is in your hands."
"...Geria of Bortinot questions your mentality...."
"...the decision is in your hands."
Jorak moved, slipped along the wall. His face was sneering and fearful too. The purple mask of his face seemed to swim before Smith's eyes like something seen through watered glass. Smith was pacing. He felt the emotions beginning to work yeastily and he longed to take that face and twist it off its snaky neck.
"You had better go back to Earth, Smith," Jorak said. "Wherever it is."
Abruptly, Smith felt the tendons writhing between his hands. He lifted. He held the squirming figure off the floor, held it there and looked into it curiously.
"You'd better use some of your psi-power, my little green friend," Smith said, "While you can."
The green face was turning purple. Words choked off somewhere down in the tubular length of the neck. Smith could feel it now! He could feel it! And he knew. The desperate tendrils of psi-power flailing out. And Smith began to smile.
"I could tell you some things, Jorak. You have some psi-power, but that and anything else you've got, including some very bad features, you got them all from Earth. You got the germs for it all a long time back. And what you have left is just something that's a kind of left-over after a few thousand years. The Earth has forgotten more psi-power, friend, than you'll ever have."
Jorak's eyes popped. Veins were coloring thickly through them.
"You're here to learn something, Jorak. Listen. We developed psi-power on Earth so long ago we don't bother remembering when it was."
Smith felt the power all right. Latent psi-power, dormant and unused and unneeded and uninteresting for aeons.
He threw Jorak into the corner. Jorak curled up there, sucking in air and rubbing his bruised neck.
"We had it. We threw it away," Smith said. "We had a defense against it too. But we don't use psi, or the defense anymore. We outgrew it. It had its day and then we forgot about it, Jorak. Why? We lost interest. Individual sanctity was better. Privacy of the human mind was something a lot more to be desired than being able to pry into someone else's brain, or vice versa. But you take a lot of pride, Jorak, in having a little residue floating around."
Smith grinned more widely. It was funny in a way, and sad too. And he didn't particularly care about pushing it any further.
"...the decision is in your hands."
* * * *
He wished his thoughts would organize, fuse somehow with the stirring, rebelling emotions. Integration right now was vital. You lose, or you're not equal to something. And a really top-notch defense-mechanism will turn the whole thing around and say IT is not equal to YOU. That's a danger. And of that he was afraid.
Could he, should he, pass judgment? On a culture that had left Earth wallowing in the cosmic back-waters? Twice, thrice, he had tried to pass that judgment, but he could not. He should be judged, theoretically, not the school.
So what if their concept of history was primitive, basking in its own importance, ignoring the philosophical precepts upon which the social sciences are based? Surely they had reason, and he shouldn't question....
And if they valued Wortan fighting above all else...if it made their women look like eager animals waiting to see the blood spill...how could he question? Why should he dare assume that the whole culture was depraved, simply because he regarded it that way by Earth standards?
And their dream empathy was enjoyable, he had to admit that—but it was too enjoyable. No wonder Earth had dropped that sort of thing long ago. It was a good gimmick to divert attention from important things. It was also regressive, a kind of sick introversion. It was decadence, an invasion of privacy, an offense against the dignity of human privacy of the mind—the individual's last precarious citadel.
He jumped a little when the Registrar barked: "Your decision, Smith of Earth."
He smiled at the bank of lights. He had broad duties. He had a duty to Earth. And an indirect duty to the Galaxy. He should report all this. And Earth should try to do something to bring many worlds out of sloth, decadence, regression and inverted self-importance.
But first of all, a man had a duty to himself, his own psychic health. Maybe the two weren't inseparable either. Maybe Earth would share the humiliation if he, Smith, suffered its scars to remain on him.
He wanted to consider himself as more than a mere projection of Earth, more than a mere symbol. He was of Earth, sure. But first of all he was Smith. Just plain Smith. A guy with a human spirit, with dignity that could be affronted and had been here.
He thought of Geria, of what that dream empathy had suggested. He felt her lips again, the softly curving line of her hips under the silver tunic to her knees, the yellow hair falling free to shoulders....
"Your decision, Smith of Earth," the Registrar's voice was louder.
"I'm not going back to Earth," said Smith softly. "Yet."
He watched Jorak slipping up the side of the wall, then rushing out the exit.
Smith went to the exit too, then into the hall. He started walking down it, and the smile clung to his lips like an old memory.
* * * *
From the monochromatic light harmonies playing softly from the walls, from the abstract gentleness of music that never stopped filtering through the gardens and over the mists of fountains, from the ever-coruscating and subdued twilight that surrounded the school—from these things, Smith extracted the tone of decadence, the static, hidebound turning of a wheel upon itself.
The women from Bortinot stared oddly at him as his bulk, high and broad passed near. He heard their whispers... "barbarian...savage...."
His smile broadened. The cycle closed. Strange, how the old became decadent, and the young revolted and itself became sophisticated and sick, and the old became young again and the old values turned fresh and clear like a tree blooming out of winter's snow.
The sounds of voices died abruptly as Smith went in. Faces turned...Brandog of Hulpin with the albino skin like alabaster; Luog the young, green-skinned Pandenian...varieties of form and color...the white, pink, orange and green brows. But there was the sameness of inversion and static culture.
Mouths gaped as Smith strode up to the front of the class room in transtellar history and looked curiously at the little man with the round gold face and green eyes that still blinked too much, and who, even now, smiled too much, too vacantly, as if he had been practicing a long time and had forgotten what it meant.
But Garnot of Jlob's smile was slightly strained now and his face had a pale look, under its sheath of gold.
"What a boorish intrusion," the instructor said. His voice got higher. "The entire school knows of course, Earth of Smith...."
"Smith of Earth," Smith said softly.
"Whatever it is, the entire school knows that already you have disgraced yourself and your planet—which was to be expected. And that I have recommended your withdrawal from the school as an inferior student."
"And so," Smith said.
"Therefore, it should be obvious that you are not particularly welcome as a member of this class. Surely you have not chosen to remain, and even if you have, it should be obvious that you will not be part of any class of mine until you have successfully passed certain tests, and have been kept under observation. Need I add that after you have taken these tests, we will not be expecting you to remain...."
Several students tittered.
"I'm going to talk now, Garnot of Jlob," Smith said. "You asked me questions earlier. Now I'm going to answer them."
"But I did not...."
"They're questions that should be answered, even though I'm not at all sure that there's enough free-thought here to grasp the real meaning of what I'm going to say."
"I did not tell you to talk."
"I'm Smith of Earth, and this is supposedly a free institution. On Earth I wasn't accustomed to being told when I could talk, when I could listen, when I could think. You asked me once where Earth is. I'll tell you."
"But I do not care and...."
"Earth, interstellarly speaking, is a few parsecs from Sirius. Spaceo-graphically speaking, it isn't very important where it is, not really. Historically, it was at the apex of civilized culture before Jlob ever existed except as a steaming carboniferous swamp peopled largely by a species of amphibian. Socio-psychologically, Earth is a few aeons ahead of the worlds so badly represented here."
"You have not been told to talk!" screamed Garnot of Jlob.
"But you are supposed to listen," Smith insisted. A gasp sounded through the room. "You asked what was the first interstellar event of importance. I'm going to tell you." He turned so that he was looking at the class. "It wasn't the exodus from the prehistoric Sirian worlds to the first culture in the Denebian system. Nor was it the Sirian wars. Those things didn't set the stage for Interstellar history. Interstellar history had already begun and grown old on the planet Earth, half a million years before...."
An intensity boiled up through the wick of Smith's body. "The question itself is shallow, meaningless in an academic sense. It was asked only to be answered in such a way as to reinforce egotistical concepts of culture. The most important event in Interstellar history was when men on the planet Earth developed speech perhaps, or some other event even long before that...and started the scientific process that led finally to the most glorious epoch in history. And what was that? I can remember with pride the engravings of the first proud Earth ships that blasted off for the Centaurian system aeons ago. And other pictures of the early days of the new Centaurian culture, and still others. Of discontent and over-population. And the migration to Sirius.
"Or even earlier, of the stern, thin-lipped face of Matthew Merkle whose tincan of a spaceship carved a loop in space around the Moon—a satellite of Earth—and returned.
"You think of history in terms of challenge and response, and the earlier challenges were the most significant ones. It was harder to get a spaceship across a mere quarter of a million miles to the Moon then, than it is to send it, translight, to the farthest star today."
Garnot of Jlob was quivering. His face had a deep purplish cast.
Smith turned completely around, his back to the instructor.
"If you want the truth about interstellar history, my friends, come to Earth. That was where it started. That's where anything decent about it has remained. And I'm not at all sure that Earth isn't where it will end...if it ever really ends."
Half way to the exit, he turned to Garnot of Jlob. "You can stop trying to use psi-power to make me shut up, you pompous phony."
Laughing softly, Smith went out and down the hall. Behind him he heard a loud coughing as though someone was choking.
* * * *
The word had spread before him to the room where Sog-chafka of Wortan, and Kard of Shilon, and the crowd waited. The two giants were on the mats and around the rows of up-circling benches, were the eager, hungry faces of the women of Bortinot. The Dominants, their lips moist and slightly open and their eyes shiny with anticipation.
Geria stared at him, her body shifting slightly, her lips apart and her teeth shining white, eyes glistening. He remembered how the kiss had been. He smiled at her. She seemed scornful now, a little sad, pitying, as he walked onto the mats.
"Ah, Earthsmith," boomed the instructor. His massive blood-colored face was shiny as he stood there, muscles rippling and seething under the black uniform. Kard of Shilon grinned. The spectators laughed as Smith tripped on the mat and almost sprawled.
Kard of Shilon said, "I'm going to kill you, Earthsmith."
Smith said, "That's an odd way to express your elite tastes, Kard, but I can understand how you feel. Earth knew a lot of killing in its day."
To Sog-chafka, Smith said, "You accused me of using psi-power in Wortan fighting. It was kind of you to recommend clemency. However, I deny the accusation."
"He has psi-power," screamed Jorak of Gyra from the top bench. He shook green fists.
"You said only a few Earthmen had psi-power," Sog-chafka said.
"I didn't. I said it's never used on Earth. There's a difference."
"You said you...."
"Didn't use it," Smith said. "What psi-power you have, came from Earth. We of Earth developed it. But it's been a long time since we have bothered with it. But though I'm a little bit rusty now, I'll show you—"
None of them ever knew what a dreadful moment that was for Smith...who knew his capacity for psi-power, but had never bothered to use it before.
He concentrated.
Twenty Dominant women of Bortinot fell writhing on the mats.
They writhed for a while, then got up and sat down again. Perspiration was heavy on their faces, and they panted heavily, and their eyes were slightly glazed with psychic shock.
Smith's head ached. But he would never show it. He was rusty all right.
Sog-chafka and Kard shifted once and seemed uneasy.
Smith said. "I did that to demonstrate a point, which is that if I want to use psi-power here, I'll not fool around with any puny amount of it such as I was accused of doing earlier. I prefer fighting the Wortan way. Psi-power fighting is pretty unhealthy stuff. Minds getting all wrapped up together in combat. It's finally like beating yourself...."
Smith laughed at the two giants. "Well," he said.
Kard rushed. Smith dropped to hands and knees, pinched Kard's legs, held them perpendicular from the knees down. Kard's rushing weight carried his body on over. His knees popped. He screamed and fell moaning on the mat.
Sog-chafka was already rushing and he tried to duck as Smith lunged upward. The sound in the room was cracking and sharp. Sog-chafka, the instructor in Wortan fighting, stumbled back and his thick arms dug at the air and a laxness showed under the skin-tight black uniform. Blood ran on the mats as Sog-chafka refused to go down any further than his knees. His head hung loosely and he slowly raised his blood-shot eyes.
His massive face twisted. Kard of Shilon lay groaning a little, nursing dislocated knees.
Sog-chafka remained bent, powerful thighs driving as his toes dug into the mat in a pounding, hurtling running dive, head down, hands reaching. It was a ferocious thing to see. Smith could hear the gasps of anticipation as he waited.
* * * *
Smith chopped down with cupped hands as he stepped aside. He brought his knee up into Sog-chafka's face and the instructor spun crazily across the mat, his body sinking lower and lower and finally sliding forward on his belly and lying there without moving at all. "Brute strength," Smith said, "is what you want on Wortan."
Smith glanced at Geria. "As you said earlier, Geria, there's something glorious about fighting tooth and nail. That's what you said."
Smith's foot was jerked from under him as Kard heaved. Smith's heavy body thudded on the mat. Before he could twist around, Kard's powerful arm was around his throat. Smith's wind was cut off. He felt his eyes bulge, and he knew that Kard would kill him. "I think, Earthsmith, it only right you should come down here with me!"
Smith put his right hand under Kard's right elbow. He clenched Kard's right wrist with the other hand. He pushed up with his right hand, heaved down with his left. Kard screamed a second time as his elbow popped.
He had to let go or his arm would break, so he let go. As Kard rolled free, Smith aimed for that vital point just to the left of the tip of Kard's chin. The back of Kard's head thudded on the mat, his eyes rolled up.
Smith got to his feet. He could hear Jorak of Gyra yelling. "He used psi! He used psi!"
Smith hated to acquire another headache, but he felt this had to be done. He concentrated on Jorak who started to sweat. Then Jorak came down to the mats and began to writhe and hop around in a weird and formless dance. Round and round the mats Jorak danced, his face working fitfully.
Sog-chafka was on one knee. His face was swelling and blood ran from his chin. He grinned and a broken tooth fell out. He looked up at the row of spectators. "He didn't use any psi on me. I guess you could say it wasn't necessary."
There was no applause from the spectators. There was a kind of bitter ferment working, a wonderment and a suspicion and a dull kind of shock that blanks out facing unpleasant truths.
Smith started past the first row, then stopped and looked down at the woman. He'd miss her, she had seen to that, and she had only been jesting. He'd think of how it might have been, at another time, in another way—but he'd forget in time. You forgot and you grew. Especially, when you had a job to do.
"There's one thing this school has," he said, "that Earth doesn't have...and never did...and probably never will. And that is Geria of Bortinot."
When he went out, she was staring after him with an odd expression he couldn't identify. And behind her, Jorak of Gyra danced round and round the mats.
* * * *
The Registrar's lights blinked with what might almost have been nervousness.
"Smith of Earth. Item: Garnot of Jlob has withdrawn his recommendation that you leave the school. However, his transtellar history class will have a new instructor for a week. His name is Khrom of Khaldmar.
"Item: Sog-chafka of Wortan withdraws his accusation that you used psi-power in Wortan fighting. Wortan fighting classes have been dropped for two weeks.
"Item: Kard of Shilon does not wish to meet you again in Wortan.
"Item: Jorak of Gyra and Geria of Bortinot do not question your mentality and formally request that you release Jorak from psi-power suggestion which is causing Jorak to dance himself to death."
Smith listened rather absently and then went to the window and looked out over the strange landscape.
"Smith of Earth...as yet you have not taken the battery of tests here, and the tests will determine your stay here. The choice is yours. We can request your withdrawal from the school, or we can keep you here. Your Dominant classification has been thoroughly validated. We are sure you would be happy here, and the tests will be presented in such a way that you will...."
Well, he hadn't let himself down. He'd defended his integrity as a human being. But he'd been told not to let Earth down.
Well, would he be letting Earth down by leaving? Would he be? If he returned and said that the galaxy had a school but we'd better not send students because the school is decadent—could Earth stand up in the face of its pricked bubble?
What is, and what is not, letting your planet down? Smith knew it for an almost meaningless phrase, standing here before the clicking Registrar. The important thing was to learn, for from learning are sowed the seeds of progress, and surely he had learned.
Yes, he had learned a great deal about the Galactic culture.
The Registrar's voice droned on, being very logical and again petulant in a feminine way. It was a compliant machine. It got along well, maintaining a nice balance, with everyone. With Dominants it became slightly recessive. With Receptives, it was just a little bit Dominant.
He watched the monstrous blotch of the red star, swelling and crimson, old and fading, yet filling a quarter of the sky, like a fat old man, getting fatter while his brain rotted away in his skull.
He turned as the door opened. His breath shortened as she came toward him. Smith rubbed his bald pate, and felt the heat rise to his face.
"You made a fool of me, Smith," she whispered. "Now you're blushing...and that's just an act isn't it? You're still making a fool of me."
"No," he said. "The way I felt about you and the things I said, I meant them. I still do."
"But you let me use that psi-power on you...and...and if you'd wanted to...you could have...." He stared. She was sobbing a little.
He had felt it before, but the feeling was strong enough now to motivate action. He put his arms about her, protectively. He looked out the window at the cragged horizon and the dying red star behind.
"The psi-power," he said. "I didn't realize I had it then. When you used it...and later, the dream-empathy, it stirred up a lot of old capacities. I wasn't trying to fool anyone. I love you, Geria of Bortinot. And I'm not fooling...."
"Your decision, Smith of Earth...."
Well, he had learned a great deal about Galactic culture, so what should he do? A duty to Earth, to civilization. He had learned:
...That the superior cultures out here among the stars were a myth.
...That something had gone haywire in the startrails, that everyone you met was either psychotic or highly neurotic by Earth standards.
...That the exceptions might be the hope of the Galaxy. But they were very few.
...That Earth had better seek out the reasons for all this, try to eliminate them at their sources if possible, but certainly keep them from contaminating the home planet.
...That Earth had a big job, but if he came back and reported and worked at it, he might convince Earth she was up to it.
That was one way.
"Your decision, Smith of Earth, the battery of tests or...."
She was looking up at him. "Well?"
"What do you think, Geria?"
She put her face against his chest. "Whatever you decide," she whispered. "You're the Dominant...."
He smiled at the banks of lights. "When's the next ship for Deneb?" he asked. "We're going back to Earth."
VOYAGE TO ETERNITY
When the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues of Center City with green, the riots started.
The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility. Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.
But Center City, like most communities in United North America, had survived the Riots before and would survive them again. On past performances, the damage could be estimated, too. Two-hundred fifty-seven plate glass windows would be broken, three-hundred twelve limbs fractured. Several thousand people would be treated for minor bruises and abrasions, Center City would receive half that many damage suits. The list had been drawn clearly and accurately; it hardly ever deviated.
And Center City would meet its quota. With a demonstration of reluctance, of course. The healthy approved way to get over social trauma once every seven-hundred eighty days.
"Shut it off, Kit. Kit, please."
The telio blared in a cheaply feminine voice, "Oh, it's a long way to nowhere, forever. And your honey's not coming back, never, never, never...." A wailing trumpet represented flight.
"They'll exploit anything, Kit."
"It's just a song."
"Turn it off, please."
Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. "They'll announce the names in ten minutes," he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw taut.
"Tell me again, Kit," Stephanie pleaded. "How old are you?"
"You know I'm twenty-six."
"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time, you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it."
"Nine minutes," said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months had spoiled their feeling of seclusion.
"Tell me again, Kit."
"What."
"You know what."
He let her come to him, let her hug him fiercely and whimper against his chest. He remained passive although it hurt, occasionally stroking her hair. He could not assert himself for another—he looked at his strap chrono—for another eight minutes. He might regret it, if he did, for a lifetime.
"Tell me, Kit."
"I'll marry you, Steffy. In eight minutes, less than eight minutes, I'll go down and get the license. We'll marry as soon as it's legal."
"This is the last time they have a chance for you. I mean, they won't change the law?"
Temple shook his head. "They don't have to. They meet their quota this way."
"I'm scared."
"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy."
She was trembling against him. "It's cold for June."
"It's warm in here." He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.
"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes."
"Five minutes to freedom," he said jauntily. He did not feel that way at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers, almost making it difficult for him to breathe.
"Turn it on, Kit."
He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile. Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.
"Every seven-hundred eighty days," said the announcer, "two-hundred of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system."
"Liar!" Stephanie cried. "No one ever comes back. It's been thirty years since the first group and not one of them...."
"Shh," Temple raised a finger to his lips.
"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly referred to as the Nowhere Journey," said the announcer. "Obviously, the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere. That is quite meaningless."
"Hooray for him," Temple laughed.
"I wish he'd get on with it."
"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it impossible to...."
"Yes, yes," said Stephanie impatiently. "Go on."
"...therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.
"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center City is naturally obligated...."
"No one ever said it isn't our duty," Stephanie argued, as if the announcer could indeed hear her. "We only wish we knew something about it—and we wish it weren't forever."
"It isn't forever," Temple reminded her. "Not officially."
"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever."
"...to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time...."
"No one would want to sponsor that," Temple whispered cheerfully.
"Kit," said Stephanie, "I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time, too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free."
"He's starting," Temple told her.
A large drum filled the entire telio screen. It rotated slowly, from bottom to top. In twenty seconds, the letter A appeared, followed by about a dozen names. Abercrombie, Harold. Abner, Eugene. Adams, Gerald. Sorrow in the Abercrombie household. Despair for the Abners. Black horror for Adams.
The drum rotated.
"They're up to F, Kit."
Fabian, Gregory G....
Names circled the drum slowly, like viscous alphabet soup. Meaningless, unless you happened to know them.
"Kit, I knew Thomas Mulvany."
N, O, P....
"It's hot in here."
"I thought you were cold."
"I'm suffocating now."
R, S....
"T!" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the bottom of the drum.
Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....
Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed nervously. Now—or never. Never?
Now.
Stephanie whimpered despairingly.
TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.
* * * *
"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones."
"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late."
"I've come in response to your ad."
"I know. You look old."
"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?"
"Not if you don't, Mr. Smith. Let me look at you. Umm, you seem the right height, the right build."
"I meet the specifications exactly."
"Good, Mr. Smith. And your price."
"No haggling," said Smith. "I have a price which must be met."
"Your price, Mr. Smith?"
"Ten million dollars."
The man called Jones coughed nervously. "That's high."
"Very. Take it or leave it."
"In cash?"
"Definitely. Small unmarked bills."
"You'd need a moving van!"
"Then I'll get one."
"Ten million dollars," said Jones, "is quite a price. Admittedly, I haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—"
"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask less."
"Sir?"
"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith."
"Sir?" Jones gasped again.
Smith coughed discreetly. "But I have one advantage. I know you. You don't know me, Mr. Arkalion."
"Eh? Eh?"
"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?"
"How did you know?" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.
"When I saw your ad," said not-Smith, "I said to myself, 'now here must be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King."
"What will you do with the ten million dollars?" demanded Arkalion, not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his fortune.
"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest it. Spend it."
"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—" Arkalion bit his tongue.
"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third. Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when I studied their family ties?"
"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—"
"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said something about the flower of our young manhood?"
"Shakespeare?" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting importance came from the bard.
"Sophocles," said Smith. "But, no matter. I will take young Alaric's place for ten million dollars."
Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might have been a dangerous conversation. "You'll never get a chance to spend it on the Nowhere Journey."
"Let me worry about that."
"No one ever returns."
"My worry, not yours."
"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young."
"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to me. Is that clear?"
"Yes."
"I'll want it in writing, of course."
"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr. Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how can I put it in writing?"
Smith smiled. "I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly legal. My name is John X. Smith—now."
"That's where you're wrong," said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon entered. "Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—now."
The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with the casual expertness that comes with experience.
"Have to shorten the cheek bones."
"For ten million dollars," said Smith, "you can take the damned things out altogether and hang them on your wall."
* * * *
Sophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed her ersatz cigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.
"What do you want?" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.
Sophia showed her party card.
"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman."
"You're terribly observant, Comrade," said Sophia coldly. "I am here to volunteer."
"But a woman."
"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer."
"We don't make women volunteer."
"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will."
"Her—own—free will?" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles, scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. "You mean volunteer without—"
"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want to sign on for the next Stalintrek."
"Stalintrek, a woman?"
"That is what I said."
"We don't force women to volunteer." The man scratched some more.
"Oh, really," said Sophia. "This is 1992, not mid-century, Comrade. Did not Premier Stalin say, 'Woman was created to share the glorious destiny of Mother Russia with her mate?'" Sophia created the quote randomly.
"Yes, if Stalin said—"
"He did."
"Still, I do not recall—"
"What?" Sophia cried. "Stalin dead these thirty-nine years and you don't recall his speeches? What is your name, Comrade?"
"Please, Comrade. Now that you remind me, I remember."
"What is your name."
"Here, I will give you the volunteer papers to sign. If you pass the exams, you will embark on the next Stalintrek, though why a beautiful young woman like you—"
"Shut your mouth and hand me those papers."
There, sitting behind that desk, was precisely why. Why should she, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch, wish to volunteer for the Stalintrek? Better to ask why a bird flies south in the winter, one day ahead of the first icy gale. Or why a lemming plunges recklessly into the sea with his multitudes of fellows, if, indeed, the venture were to turn out grimly.
But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of gushing emotions, his worldliness. Pfooey!
It was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved, the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth, the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move. No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating, trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades, more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted but not her or any other person for that matter.
Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure. Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?
A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs. Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, "It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me. Better they should have taken his wife." That day Sophia could hardly contain herself.
As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking, foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women from the Stalintrek.
Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered, although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?
She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told. Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk at her.
She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost tore through the paper.
CHAPTER II
Three-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly looking weapons.
FIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't try to fight it. I know. I know.
SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records. I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for me.
THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on the base of my spine.
FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.
FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone as significant?
SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.
ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not thalamic at all.
THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?
ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peach-fuzz whiskers) It is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?
FIRST MAN: I read the magazines, too, chief. You think we're all going to the planet Mars. How original.
ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.
SECOND MAN: Mars?
FIRST MAN (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.
SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?
ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.
FIRST MAN: You're telling me.
ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?
FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your thunder, chief. Go ahead.
ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred and eighty days.
FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.
THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.
FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.
ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.
FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs) Orson Wells stuff, huh?
ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs. They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?
FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.
ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.
SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....
FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote got him in office.
SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.
ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.
FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.
SECOND MAN. Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.
FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.
SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I think our mail is censored.
ALARIC ARKALION: It is.
SECOND MAN: They better watch out. I'm losing my temper. I get violent when I lose my temper.
FIRST MAN: See? See how the guards are trembling.
SECOND MAN: Very funny. Maybe you didn't have a good job or something? Maybe you don't care. I care. I had a job with a future. Didn't pay much, but a real blue chip future. So they send me to Nowhere.
FIRST MAN: You're not there yet.
SECOND MAN: Yeah, but I'm going.
THIRD MAN: If only they let you know when. My back is killing me. I'm waiting to pull a sick act. Just waiting, that's all.
FIRST MAN: Go ahead and wait, a lot of good it will do you.
THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.
FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.
SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.
THIRD MAN: He'll get it.
ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time. Why don't you all relax?
SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.
FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.
SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come back? One bread line is as good as another.
FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.
SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away, someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back. It's for good, for keeps.
FIRST MAN: Tell it to your Congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a sick act, too?
THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!
GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....
ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars already—if I ever get to see it.
* * * *
They drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all alone on the rimrock highway.
"Where are we going, Kit?"
"Search me. Just driving."
"I'm glad they let you come out this once. I don't know what they would have done to me if they didn't. I had to see you this once. I—"
Temple smiled. He had absented himself without leave. It had been difficult enough and he might yet be in a lot of hot water, but it would be senseless to worry Stephanie. "It's just for a few hours," he said.
"Hours. When we want a whole lifetime. Kit. Oh, Kit—why don't we run away? Just the two of us, someplace where they'll never find you. I could be packed and ready and—"
"Don't talk like that. We can't."
"You want to go where they're sending you. You want to go."
"For God's sake, how can you talk like that? I don't want to go anyplace, except with you. But we can't run away, Steffy. I've got to face it, whatever it is."
"No you don't. It's noble to be patriotic, sure. It always was. But this is different, Kit. They don't ask for part of your life. Not for two years, or three, or a gamble because maybe you won't ever come back. They ask for all of you, for the rest of your life, forever, and they don't even tell you why. Kit, don't go! We'll hide someplace and get married and—"
"And nothing." Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the door for Stephanie. "Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else."
"I would. I would!"
"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm young and—'"
"Kit, that's cruel! I would not."
"Yes, you would. Steffy, I—" A lump rose in his throat. He'd tell her goodbye, permanently. He had to do it that way, did not want her to wait endlessly and hopelessly for a return that would not materialize. "I didn't get permission to leave, Steffy." He hadn't meant to tell her that, but suddenly it seemed an easy way to break into goodbye.
"What do you mean? No—you didn't...."
"I had to see you. What can they do, send me for longer than forever?"
"Then you do want to run away with me!"
"Steffy, no. When I leave you tonight, Steffy, it's for good. That's it. The last of Kit Temple. Stop thinking about me. I don't exist. I—never was." It sounded ridiculous, even to him.
"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?"
"It's happened before. It will happen again." That hurt, too. He was talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.
"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit... I know you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come back."
"How many people do you think said that before?"
"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of us at all. You're thinking of your brother."
"You know that isn't true. Sometimes I wonder about Jase, sure. But if I thought there was a chance to return—I'm a selfish cuss, Steffy. If I thought there was a chance, you know I'd want you all for myself. I'd brand you, and that's the truth."
"You do love me!"
"I loved you, Steffy. Kit Temple loved you."
"Loved?"
"Loved. Past tense. When I leave tonight, it's as if I don't exist anymore. As if I never existed. It's got to be that way, Steffy. In thirty years, no one ever returned."
"Including your brother, Jase. So now you want to find him. What do I count for? What...."
"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken." Almost five years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey. He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached, almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.
"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry...carrying on like this."
They had walked some distance from the ground-jet, through scrub oak and bramble bushes. They found a clearing, fragrant-scented, soft-floored still from last autumn, melodic with the chirping of nameless birds. They sat, not talking. Stephanie wore a gay summer dress, full-skirted, cut deep beneath the throat. She swayed toward him from the waist, nestled her head on his shoulder. He could smell the soft, sweet fragrance of her hair, of the skin at the nape of her neck. "If you want to say goodbye...." she said.
"Stop it," he told her.
"If you want to say goodbye...."
Her head rolled against his chest. She turned, cradled herself in his arms, smiled up at him, squirmed some more and had her head pillowed on his lap. She smiled tremulously, misty-eyed. Her lips parted.
He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye, not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the encampment.
This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This was auf weidersen.
And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....
* * * *
"I am Alaric Arkalion III," said the extremely young-looking man with the old, wise eyes.
How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The rest of him—a boy.
"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other," Arkalion went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.
"I'm Kit Temple," said Temple, extending his hand. "Arkalion, a strange name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have something to do with carpets or something?"
"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is right, the carpet king."
"I'll be darned," said Temple.
"Why?"
"Well," Temple laughed. "I never met a billionaire before."
"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417, a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers."
"Mars? You sound sure of yourself."
"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am reasonably certain it will be Mars."
Temple nodded in agreement. "That's what the Sunday supplements say, all right."
"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it."
"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?"
"That in itself is a contradiction," laughed Arkalion. "We'll find out, though, Temple."
They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together, followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.
"Contrariness has given way to fear," Arkalion observed. "You should have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center, a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where were you?"
"I—what do you mean?"
"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here."
"Did anyone else miss me?"
"But I remember you the first day."
"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?"
"No. Not that I know of."
"Then I was here," Temple said, very seriously.
Arkalion smiled. "By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple, we'll get along fine."
Temple said that was swell.
"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time."
Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward the setting sun.
* * * *
"Men, since we are leaving here in a few hours and since there is no way to get out of the encampment and no place to go over the desert even if you could," the microphone in the great, empty hall boomed as the two files of men marched in, "there is no harm in telling you where you are. From this point, in a limited sense, you shall be kept abreast of your progress.
"We are in White Sands, New Mexico."
"The Garden Spot of the Universe!" someone shouted derisively, remembering the bleak hot desert and jagged mountain peaks as they came down.
"White Sands," muttered Arkalion. "It looks like space travel now, doesn't it, Kit."
Temple shrugged. "Why?"
"White sands was the center of experiments in rocketry decades ago, when people still talked about those things. Then, for a long time, no one heard anything about White Sands. The rockets grew here, Kit."
"I can readily see why. You could look all your life without finding a barren spot like this."
"Precisely. Someone once called this place—or was it some other place like it?—someone once called it a good place to throw old razor blades. If people still used razor blades."
The microphone blared again, after the several hundred men had entered the great hall and milled about among the echoes. Temple could picture other halls like this, other briefings. "Men, whenever you are given instructions, in here or elsewhere, obey them instantly. Our job is a big one, complicated and exacting. Attention to detail will save us trouble."
Someone said, "My old man served a hitch in the army, back in the sixties. That's what he always said, attention to details. The army is crazy about things like that. Are we in the army or something?"
"This is not the army, but the function is similar," barked the microphone. "Do as you are told and you will get along."
Stirrings in the crowd. Mutterings. Temple gaped. Microphone, yes—but receivers also, placed strategically, all around the hall, to pick up sound. Telio receivers too, perhaps? It made him feel something like a goldfish.
Apparently someone liked the idea of the two-way microphones. "I got a question. When are we coming back?"
Laughter. Hooting. Catcalls.
Blared the microphone: "There is a rotation system in operation, men. When it is feasible, men will be rotated."
"Yeah, in thirty years it ain't been whatsiz—feasible—once!"
"That, unfortunately, is correct. When the situation permits, we will rotate you home."
"From where? Where are we going?"
"At least tell us that."
"Where?"
"How about that?"
There was a pause, then the microphone barked: "I don't know the answer to that question. You won't believe me, but it is the truth. No one knows where you are going. No one. Except the people who are already there."
More catcalls.
"That doesn't make sense," Arkalion whispered. "If it's space travel, the pilots would know, wouldn't they?"
"Automatic?" Temple suggested.
"I doubt it. Space travel must still be new, even if it has thirty years under its belt. If that man speaks the truth—if no one knows...just where in the universe are we going?"
CHAPTER III
"Hey, looka me. I'm flying!"
"Will you get your big fat feet out of my face?"
"Sure. Show me how to swim away through air, I'll be glad to."
"Leggo that spoon!"
"I ain't got your spoon."
"Will you look at it float away. Hey spoon, hey!"
"Watch this, Charlie. This will get you. I mean, get you."
"What are you gonna do?"
"Relax, chum."
"Leggo my leg. Help! I'm up in the air. Stop that."
"I said relax. There. Ha-ha, lookit him spin, just like a top. All you got to do is get him started and he spins like a top with arms and legs. Top of the morning to you, Charlie. Ha-ha. I said, top of the...."
"Someone stop me, I'm getting dizzy."
They floated, tumbled, spun around the spaceship's lounge room in simple, childish glee. They cavorted in festive weightlessness.
"They're happy now," Arkalion observed. "The novelty of free fall, of weighing exactly nothing, strikes them as amusing."
"I think I'm getting the hang of it," said Temple. Clumsily, he made a few tentative swimming motions in the air, propelling himself forward a few yards before he lost his balance and tumbled head over heels against the wall.
Arkalion came to him quickly, in a combination of swimming and pushing with hands and feet against the wall. Arkalion righted him expertly, sat down gingerly beside him. "If you keep sudden motions to a minimum, you'll get along fine. More than anything else, that's the secret of it."
Temple nodded. "It's sort of like the first time you're on ice skates. Say, how come you're so good at it?"
"I used to read the old, theoretical books on space-travel." The words poured out effortlessly, smoothly. "I'm merely applying the theories put forward as early as the 1950's."
"Oh." But it left Temple with some food for thought. Alaric Arkalion was a queer duck, anyway, and of all the men gathered in the spaceship's lounge, he alone had mastered weightlessness with hardly any trouble.
"Take your ice skates," Arkalion went on. "Some people put them on and use them like natural extensions of their feet the first time. Others fall all over themselves. I suppose I am lucky."
"Sure," said Temple. Actually, the only thing odd about Arkalion was his old-young face and—perhaps—his propensity for coming up with the right answers at the right times. Arkalion had seemed so certain of space-travel. He'd hardly batted an eyelash when they boarded a long, tapering, bullet-shaped ship at White Sands and thundered off into the sky. He took for granted the change-over to a huge round ship at the wheel-shaped station in space. Moments after leaving the space station—with a minimum of stress and strain, thanks to the almost-nil gravity—it was Arkalion who first swam through air to the viewport and pointed out the huge crescent earth, green and gray and brown, sparkling with patches of dazzling silver-white. "You will observe it is a crescent," Arkalion had said. "It is closer to the sun than we are, and off at an angle. As I suspected, our destination is Mars."
* * * *
Then everyone was saying goodbye to earth. Fantastic, it seemed. There were tears, there was laughter, cursing, promises of return, awkward verbal comparisons with the crescent moon, vows of faithfulness to lovers and sweethearts. And there was Arkalion, with an avid expression in the old eyes, Arkalion with his boyish face, not saying goodbye so much as he was calling hello to something Temple could not fathom.
Now, as he struggled awkwardly with weightlessness, Temple called it his imagination. His thought-patterns shifted vaguely, without motivation, from the gleaming, polished interior of the ship with its smell of antiseptic and metal polish to the clear Spring air of Earth, blue of sky and bright of sun. The unique blue sky of Earth which he somehow knew could not be duplicated elsewhere. Elsewhere—the word itself bordered on the meaningless.
And Stephanie. The brief warm ecstasy of her—once, forever. He wondered with surprising objectivity if a hundred other names, a hundred other women were not in a hundred other minds while everyone stared at the crescent Earth hanging serenely in space—with each name and each woman as dear as Stephanie, with the same combination of fire and gentle femininity stirring the blood but saddening the heart. Would Stephanie really forget him? Did he want her to? That part of him burned by the fire of her said no—no, she must not forget him. She was his, his alone, roped and branded though a universe separated them. But someplace in his heart was the thought, the understanding, the realization that although Stephanie might keep a small place for him tucked someplace deep in her emotions, she must forget. He was gone—permanently. For Stephanie, he was dead. It was as he had told her that last stolen day. It was.... Stephanie, Stephanie, how much I love you....
Struggling with weightlessness, he made his way back to the small room he shared with Arkalion. Hardly more than a cubicle, it was, with sufficient room for two beds, a sink, a small chest. He lay down and slept, murmuring Stephanie's name in his sleep.
* * * *
He awoke to the faint hum of the air-pumps, got up feeling rested, forgot his weightlessness and floated to the ceiling where only an outthrust arm prevented a nasty bump on his head. He used hand grips on the wall to let himself down. He washed, aware of no way to prevent the water he splashed on his face from forming fine droplets and spraying the entire room. When he crossed back to the foot of his bed to get his towel he thrust one foot out too rapidly, lost his balance, half-rose, stumbled and fell against the other bed which, like all other items of furniture, was fastened to the floor. But his elbow struck sleeping Arkalion's jaw sharply, hard enough to jar the man's teeth.
"I'm sorry," said Temple. "Didn't mean to do that," he apologized again, feeling embarrassed.
Arkalion merely lay there.
"I said I'm sorry."
Arkalion still slept. It seemed inconceivable, for Temple's elbow pained him considerably. He bent down, examined his inert companion.
Arkalion stirred not a muscle.
Vaguely alarmed, Temple thrust a hand to Arkalion's chest, felt nothing. He crouched, rested the side of his head over Arkalion's heart. He listened, heard—nothing.
What was going on here?
"Hey, Arkalion!" Temple shook him, gently at first, then with savage force. Weightless, Arkalion's body floated up off the bed, taking the covers with it. His own heart pounding furiously, Temple got it down again, fingered the left wrist and swallowed nervously.
Temple had never seen a dead man before. Arkalion's heart did not beat. Arkalion had no pulse.
Arkalion was dead.
Yelling hoarsely, Temple plunged from the room, soaring off the floor in his haste and striking his head against the ceiling hard enough to make him see stars. "This guy is dead!" he cried. "Arkalion is dead."
Men stirred in the companionway. Someone called for one of the armed guards who were constantly on patrol.
"If he's dead, you're yelling loud enough to get him out of his grave." The voice was quiet, amused.
Arkalion.
"What?" Temple blurted, whirling around and striking his head again. A little wild-eyed, he reentered the room.
"Now, who is dead, Kit?" demanded Arkalion, sitting up and stretching comfortably.
"Who—is dead? Who—?" Open-mouthed, Temple stared.
* * * *
A guard, completely at home with weightlessness, entered the cubicle briskly. "What's the trouble in here? Something about a dead man, they said."
"A dead man?" demanded Arkalion. "Indeed."
"Dead?" muttered Temple, lamely and foolishly. "Dead...."
Arkalion smiled deprecatingly. "My friend must have been talking in his sleep. The only thing dead in here is my appetite. Weightlessness doesn't let you become very hungry."
"You'll grow used to it," the guard promised. He patted his paunch happily. "I am. Well, don't raise the alarm unless there's some trouble. Remember about the boy who cried wolf."
"Of course," said Temple. "Sure. Sorry."
He watched the guard depart.
"Bad dream?" Arkalion wanted to know.
"Bad dream, my foot. I accidentally hit you. Hard enough to hurt. You didn't move."
"I'm a sound sleeper."
"I felt for your heart. It wasn't beating. It wasn't!"
"Oh, come, come."
"Your heart was not beating, I said."
"And I suppose I was cold as a slab of ice?"
"Umm, no. I don't remember. Maybe you were. You had no pulse, either."
Arkalion laughed easily. "And am I still dead?"
"Well—"
"Clearly a case of overwrought nerves and a highly keyed imagination. What you need is some more sleep."
"I'm not sleepy, thanks."
"Well, I think I'll get up and go down for breakfast." Arkalion climbed out of bed gingerly, made his way to the sink and was soon gargling with a bottle of prepared mouthwash, occasionally spraying weightless droplets of the pink liquid up at the ceiling.
Temple lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, made his way to Arkalion's bed while the man hummed tunelessly at the sink. Temple let his hands fall on the sheet. It was not cold, but comfortably cool. Hardly as warm as it should have been, with a man sleeping on it all night.
Was he still imagining things?
"I'm glad you didn't call for a burial detail and have me expelled into space with yesterday's garbage," Arkalion called over his shoulder jauntily as he went outside for some breakfast.
Temple cursed softly and lit another cigarette, dropping the first one into a disposal chute on the wall.
* * * *
Every night thereafter, Temple made it a point to remain awake after Arkalion apparently had fallen asleep. But if he were seeking repetition of the peculiar occurrence, he was disappointed. Not only did Arkalion sleep soundly and through the night, but he snored. Loudly and clearly, a wheezing snore.
Arkalion's strange feat—or his own overwrought imagination, Temple thought wryly—was good for one thing: it took his mind off Stephanie. The days wore on in endless, monotonous routine. He took some books from the ship's library and browsed through them, even managing to find one concerned with traumatic catalepsy, which stated that a severe emotional shock might render one into a deep enough trance to have a layman mistakenly pronounce him dead. But what had been the severe emotional disturbance for Arkalion? Could the effects of weightlessness manifest themselves in that way in rare instances? Temple naturally did not know, but he resolved to find out if he could after reaching their destination.
One day—it was three weeks after they left the space station, Temple realized—they were all called to assembly in the ship's large main lounge. As the men drifted in, Temple was amazed to see the progress they had made with weightlessness. He himself had advanced to handy facility in locomotion, but it struck him all the more pointedly when he saw two hundred men swim and float through air, pushing themselves along by means of the hand-holds strategically placed along the walls.
The ever-present microphone greeted them all. "Good afternoon, men."
"Good afternoon, mac!"
"Hey, is this the way to Ebbetts' Field?"
"Get on with it!"
"Sounds like the same man who addressed us in White Sands," Temple told Arkalion. "He sure does get around."
"A recording, probably. Listen."
"Our destination, as you've probably read in newspapers and magazines, is the planet Mars."
Mutterings in the assembly, not many of surprise.
"Their suppositions, based both on the seven hundred eighty day lapse between Nowhere Journeys and the romantic position in which the planet Mars has always been held, are correct. We are going to Mars.
"For most of you, Mars will be a permanent home for many years to come—"
"Most of us?" Temple wondered out loud.
Arkalion raised a finger to his lips for silence.
"—until such time as you are rotated according to the policy of rotation set up by the government."
Temple had grown accustomed to the familiar hoots and catcalls. He almost had an urge to join in himself.
"Interesting," Arkalion pointed out. "Back at White Sands they claimed not to know our destination. They knew it all right—up to a point. The planet Mars. But now they say that all of us will not remain on Mars. Most interesting."
"—further indoctrination in our mission soon after our arrival on the red planet. Landing will be performed under somewhat less strain than the initial takeoff in the Earth-to-station ferry, since Mars exerts less of a gravity pull than Earth. On the other hand, you have been weightless for three weeks and the change-over is liable to make some of you sick. It will pass harmlessly enough.
"We realize it is difficult, being taken from your homes without knowing the nature of your urgent mission. All I can tell you now—and, as a matter of fact, all I know—"
"Here we go again," said Temple. "More riddles."
"—is that everything is of the utmost urgency. Our entire way of life is at stake. Our job will be to safeguard it. In the months which follow, few of you will have any big, significant role to play, but all of you, working together, will provide the strength we need. When the cadre—"
"So they call their guards teachers," Arkalion commented dryly.
"—come around, they will see that each man is strapped properly into his bunk for deceleration. Deceleration begins in twenty-seven minutes."
Mars, thought Temple, back in his room with Arkalion. Mars. He did not think of Stephanie, except as a man who knows he must spend the rest of his life in prison might think of a lush green field, or the cool swish of skis over fresh, powdery snow, or the sound of yardarms creaking against the wind on a small sailing schooner, or the tang of wieners roasting over an open fire with the crisp air of fall against your back, or the scent of good French brandy, or a woman.
Deceleration began promptly. Before his face was distorted and his eyes forced shut by a pressure of four gravities, Temple had time to see the look of complete unconcern on Arkalion's face. Arkalion, in fact, was sleeping.
He seemed as completely relaxed as he did that morning Temple thought he was dead.
CHAPTER IV
"Petrovitch, S. A.!" called the Comrade standing abreast of the head of the line, a thin, nervous man half a head shorter than the girl herself. Sophia Androvna Petrovitch strode forward, took a pair of trim white shorts from the neat stack at his left.
"Is that all?" she said, looking at him.
"Yes, Comrade. Well, a woman. Well."
Without embarrassment, Sophia had seen the men ahead of her in line strip and climb into the white shorts before they disappeared through a portal ahead of the line, depositing their clothing in a growing pile on the floor. But now it was Sophia's turn, after almost a two hour wait. Not that it was chilly, but....
"Is that all?" she repeated.
"Certainly. Strip and move along, Comrade." The nervous little man appraised her lecherously, she thought.
"Then I must keep some of my own clothing," she told him.
"Impossible. I have my orders."
"I am a woman."
"You are a volunteer for the Stalintrek. You will take no personal property—no clothing—with you. Strip and advance, please."
Sophia flushed slightly, while the men behind her began to call and taunt.
"I like this Stalintrek."
"Oh, yes."
"We are waiting, Comrade."
Quickly and with an objective detachment which surprised her, Sophia unbuttoned her shirt, removed it. Her one wish—and an odd one, she thought, smiling—was for wax for her ears. She loosened the three snaps of her skirt, watched it fall to the floor. She stood there briefly, lithe-limbed, a tall, slim girl, then had the white shorts over her nakedness in one quick motion. She still wore a coarse halter.
"All personal effects, Comrade," said the nervous little man.
"No," Sophia told him.
"But yes. Definitely, yes. You hold up the line, and we have a schedule to maintain. The Stalintrek demands quick, prompt obedience."
"Then you will give me one additional item of clothing."
The man looked at Sophia's halter, at the fine way she filled it. He shrugged. "We don't have it," he said, clearly enjoying himself.
In volunteering for the Stalintrek, Sophia had invaded man's domain. She had watched not with embarrassment but with scorn while the men in front of her got out of their clothing. She had invaded man's domain, and as she watched them, the short, flabby ones, the bony ones with protruding ribs and collar-bones, those of milky white skin and soft hands, she knew most of them would bite off more than they could chew if ever they tried what was the most natural thing for men to try with a lone woman in an isolated environment. But she was in a man's world now, and if that was the way they wanted it, she would ask no quarter.
She reached up quickly with one hand and unfastened the halter, catching it with her free hand and holding it in front of her breasts while the nervous little man licked his lips and gaped. Sophia grabbed another pair of the white shorts, tore it quickly with her strong fingers, fashioning a crude covering for herself. This she pulled around her, fastening it securely with a knot in back.
"You'll have to give that back to me," declared the nervous little Comrade.
"I'll bet you a samovar on that," Sophia said quietly, so only the man heard her.
He reached out, as if to rip the crude halter from her body, but Sophia met him half-way with her strong, slim fingers, wrapping them around his biceps and squeezing. The man's face turned quickly to white as he tried unsuccessfully to free his arm.
"Please, that hurts."
"I keep what I am wearing." She tightened her grip, but gazed serenely into space as the man stifled a whimper.
"Well—" the man whispered indecisively as he gritted his teeth.
"Fool!" said Sophia. "Your arm will be black and blue for a week. While you men grow soft and lazy, many of the women take their gymnastics seriously, especially if they want to keep their figures with the work they must do and the food they must eat. I am stronger than you and I will hurt you unless—" And her hand tightened around his scrawny arm until her knuckles showed white.
"Wear what you have and go," the man pleaded, and moaned softly when Sophia released his numb arm and strode through the portal, still drawing whistles and leers from the other men, who missed the by-play completely.
* * * *
"So we're on Mars!"
"It ain't Nowhere after all, it's Mars."
"Wait and see, buster. Wait and see."
"Kind of cold, isn't it? Well, if this was Venus and some of them beautiful one-armed dames was waiting for us—"
"That's just a statue, stupid."
"Lookit all them people down there, will you?"
"You think they're Martians?"
"Stupid! We ain't the first ones went on the Nowhere Journey."
"What are we waiting for? It sure will feel good to stretch your legs."
"Let's go!"
"Look out, Mars, here I come!"
It would have been just right for a Hollywood epic, Temple thought. The rusty ochre emptiness spreading out toward the horizon in all directions, spotted occasionally with pale green and frosty white, the sky gray with but a shade of blue in it, distant gusts of Martian wind swirling ochre clouds across the desert, the spaceship poised on its ungainly bottom, a great silver bowling ball with rocket tubes for finger holes, and the Martians from Earth who had been here on this alien world for seven-hundred-eighty days or twice seven-eighty or three times, and who fought in frenzied eagerness, like savages, to reach the descending gangplank first.
Earth chorus: Hey, Martians, any of you guys speak English? Hah-ha, I said, any of you guys....
Where are all them canals I heard so much about?
You think maybe they're dangerous? (Laughter)
No dames. Hey, no dames....
Who were you expecting, Donna Daunley?
What kind of place is Mars with no women?
What do they do here, anyway, just sit around and wait for the next rocket?
I'm cold.
Get used to it, brother, get used to it.
Look out, Mars, here I come!
Martian chorus: Who won the Series last year, Detroit?
Hey, bud, tell me, are dames still wearing those one piece things, all colors, so you see their legs up to about here and their chests down to about here? (Gestures lewdly)
Which one of you guys can tell me what it's like to take a bath? I mean a real bath in a real bath tub.
Hey, we licked Russia yet?
We heard they were gonna send some dames!
Dames—ha-ha, you're breaking my heart.
Tell me what a steak tastes like. So thick.
Me? Gimme a bowl of steamed oysters. And a dame.
Dames. Girls. Women. Females. Chicks. Tomatoes. Frails. Dames. Dames. Dames....
They did not seem to mind the cold, these Earth-Martians. Temple guessed they never spent much time out of doors (above ground, for there were no buildings?) because all seemed pale and white. While the sun was weaker, so was the protection offered by a thinner atmosphere. The sun's actinic rays could burn, and so could the sand-driving wind. But pale skins could not be the result of staying indoors, for Temple noted the lack of man-made structures at once. Underground, then. The Earth-Martians lived underground like moles. Doing what? And for what reason? With what ultimate goal, if any? And where did those men who did not remain on Mars go? Temple's head whirled with countless questions—and no answers.
Shoulder to shoulder with Arkalion, he made his way down the gangplank, turning up the collar of his jumper against the stinging wind.
"You got any newspapers, pal?"
"Magazines?"
"Phonograph records?"
"Gossip?"
"Newsfilm?"
"Who's the heavyweight champ?"
"We lick those Commies in Burma yet?"
"Step back! Watch that man. Maybe he's your replacement."
"Replacement. Ha-ha. That's good."
All types of men. All ages. In torn, tattered clothing, mostly. In rags. Even if a man seemed more well-groomed than the rest, on closer examination Temple could see the careful stitching, the patches, the fades and stains. No one seemed to mind.
"Hey, bud. What do you hear about rotation? They passed any laws yet?"
"I been here ten years. When do I get rotated?"
"Ain't that something? Dad Jenks came here with the first ship. Don't you talk about rotation. Ask Dad."
"Better not mention that word to Dad Jenks. He sees red."
"This whole damn planet is red."
"Want a guided tour of nowhere, men? Step right up."
Arkalion grinned. "They seem so well-adjusted," he said, then shuddered against the cold and followed Temple, with the others, through the crowd.
* * * *
They were inoculated against nameless diseases. (Watch for the needle with the hook.)
They were told again they had arrived on the planet Mars. (No kidding?)
Led to a drab underground city, dimly lit, dank, noisome with mold and mildew. (Quick, the chlorophyll.)
Assigned bunks in a dormitory, with four men to a room. (Be it ever so humble—bah!)
Told to keep things clean and assigned temporarily to a garbage pickup detail. (For this I left Sheboygan?)
Read to from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Public Law 1182 (concerned with the Nowhere Journey, it told them nothing they did not already know).
Given as complete a battery of tests, mental, emotional and physical, as Temple ever knew existed. (Cripes, man! How the hell should I know what the cube root of −5 is? I never finished high school!)
Subjected to an exhaustive, overlong, and at times meaningless personal interview. (No, doc, honest. I never knew I had a—uh—anxiety neurosis. Is it dangerous?)
"How do you do, Temple? Sit down."
"Thank you."
"Thought you'd like to know that while your overall test score is not uncanny, it's decidedly high."
"So what?"
"So nothing—not necessarily. Except that with it you have a very well balanced personality. We can use you, Temple."
"That's why I'm here."
"I mean—elsewhere. Mars is only a way station, a training center for a select few. It takes an awful lot of administrative work to keep this place going, which explains the need for all the station personnel."
"Listen. The last few weeks I had everything thrown at me. Everything, the works. Mind answering one question?"
"Shoot."
"What's this all about?"
"Temple, I don't know!"
"You what?"
"I know you find it hard to believe, but I don't. There isn't a man here on Mars who knows the whole story, either—and certainly not on Earth. We know enough to keep everything in operation. And we know it's important, all of it, everything we do."
"You mentioned a need for some men elsewhere. Where?"
The psychiatrist shrugged. "I don't know. Somewhere. Anywhere." He spread his hands out eloquently. "That's where the Nowhere Journey comes in."
"Surely you can tell me something more than—"
"Absolutely not. It isn't that I don't want to. I can't. I don't know."
"Well, one more question I'd like you to answer."
The psychiatrist lit a cigarette, grinned. "Say, who is interviewing whom?"
"This one I think you can tackle. I have a brother, Jason Temple. Embarked on the Nowhere Journey five years ago. I wonder—"
"So that's the one factor in your psychograph we couldn't figure out—anxiety over your brother."
"I doubt it," shrugged Temple. "More likely my fiancee."
"Umm, common enough. You were to be married?"
"Yes." Stephanie, what are you doing now? Right now?
"That's what hurts the most.... Well, yes, I can find out about your brother." The psychiatrist flicked a toggle on his desk. "Jamison, find what you can on Temple, Jason, year of—"
"1987," Temple supplied.
"1987. We'll wait."
After a moment or two, the voice came through, faintly metallic: "Temple, Jason. Arrival: 1987. Psychograph, 115b12. Mental aggregate, 98. Physcom, good to excellent. Training: two years, space perception concentrate, others. Shipped out: 1989."
So Jase had shipped out for—Nowhere.
"Someday you'll follow in your brother's footsteps, Temple. Now, though, I have a few hundred questions I'd like you to answer."
The psychiatrist hadn't exaggerated. Several hours of questioning followed. Once reminded of her, Temple found it hard to keep his thought off Stephanie.
He left the psychiatrist's office more confused than ever.
* * * *
"Good morning, child. You Stephanie Andrews?"
Stephanie hadn't felt up to working that first morning after Kit's final goodbye. She answered the door in her bathrobe, saw a small, middle-aged woman with graying hair and a kind face. "That's right. Won't you come in?"
"Thank you. I represent the Complete Emancipation League, Miss Andrews."
"Complete Emancipation League? Oh, something to do with politics. Really, I'm not much interested in—"
"That's entirely the trouble," declared the older woman. "Too many of us are not interested in politics. I'd like to discuss the C.E.L. with you, my dear, if you will bear with me a few minutes."
"All right," said Stephanie. "Would you like a glass of sherry?"
"In the morning?" the older woman smiled.
"I'm sorry. Don't mind me. My fiance left yesterday, took his final goodbye. He—he embarked on the Nowhere Journey."
"I realize that. It is precisely why I am here. My dear, the C.E.L. does not want to fight the government. If the government decides that the Nowhere Journey is vital for the welfare of the country—even if the government won't or can't explain what the Nowhere Journey is—that's all right with us. But if the government says there is a rotation system but does absolutely nothing about it, we're interested in that. Do you follow me?"
"Yes!" cried Stephanie. "Oh, yes. Go on."
"The C. E. L. has sixty-eight people in Congress for the current term. We hope to raise that number to seventy-five for next election. It's a long fight, a slow uphill fight, and frankly, my dear, we need all the help we can get. People—young women like yourself, my dear—are entirely too lethargic, if you'll forgive me."
"You ought to forgive me," said Stephanie, "if you will. You know, it's funny. I had vague ideas about helping Kit, about finding some way to get him back. Only to tackle something like that alone.... I'm only twenty-one, just a girl, and I don't know anyone important. No one ever comes back, that's what you hear. But there's a rotation system, you also hear that. If I can be of any help...."
"You certainly can, my dear. We'd be delighted to have you."
"Then, eventually, maybe, just maybe, we'll start getting them rotated home?"
"We can't promise a thing. We can only try. And I never did say we'd try to get the boys rotated, my dear. There is a rotation system in the law, right there in Public Law 1182. But if no men have ever been rotated, there must be a reason for it."
"Yes, but—"
"But we'll see. If for some reason rotation simply is not practicable, we'll find another way. Which is why we call ourselves the C.E.L.—Complete Emancipation League—for women. If men must embark on the Nowhere Journey—the least they can do is let their women volunteer to go along with them if they want to—since it may be forever. Let a bunch of women get to this Nowhere place and you'll never know what might happen, that's what I say."
Something about the gray haired woman's earthy confidence imbued Stephanie with an optimism she never expected. "Well," she said, smiling, "if we can't bring ourselves to Mohammed.... No, that's all wrong!...to the mountain...?"
"Yes, there's an old saying. But it isn't important. You get the idea. My dear, how would you like to go to Nowhere?"
"I—to Kit, anywhere, anywhere!" I'll never forget yesterday, Kit darling. Never!
"I make no promises, Stephanie, but it may be sooner than you think. Morning be hanged, perhaps I will have some sherry after all. Umm, you wouldn't by any chance have some Canadian instead?"
Humming, Stephanie dashed into the kitchen for some glasses.
* * * *
There were times when the real Alaric Arkalion III wished his father would mind his own business. Like that thing about the Nowhere Journey, for instance. Maybe Alaric Sr. didn't realize it, but being the spoiled son of a billionaire wasn't all fun. "I'm a dilettante," Alaric would tell himself often, gazing in the mirror, "a bored dilettante at the age of twenty-one."
Which in itself, he had to admit, wasn't too bad. But having reneged on the Nowhere Journey in favor of a stranger twice his age who now carried his, Alaric's, face, had engendered some annoying complications. "You'll either have to hide or change your own appearance and identity, Alaric."
"Hide? For how long, father?"
"I can't be sure. Years, probably."
"That's crazy. I'm not going to hide for years."
"Then change your appearance. Your way of life. Your occupation."
"I have no occupation."
"Get one. Change your face, too. Your fingerprints. It can be done. Become a new man, live a new life."
In hiding there was boredom, impossible boredom. In the other alternative there was adventure, intrigue—but uncertainty. One part of young Alaric craved that uncertainty, the rest of him shunned it. In a way it was like the Nowhere Journey all over again.
"Maybe Nowhere wouldn't have been so bad," said Alaric to his father, choosing as a temporary alternative and retreat what he knew couldn't possibly happen.
Couldn't it?
"If I choose another identity, I'd be eligible again for the Nowhere Journey."
"By George, I hadn't considered that. No, wait. You could be older than twenty-six."
"I like it the way I am," Alaric said, pouting.
"Then you'll have to hide. I spent ten million dollars to secure your future, Alaric. I don't want you to throw it away."
Alaric pouted some more. "Let me think about it."
"Fair enough, but I'll want your answer tomorrow. Meanwhile, you are not to leave the house."
Alaric agreed verbally, but took the first opportunity which presented itself—that very night—to sneak out the servants' door, go downtown, and get stewed to the gills.
At two in the morning he was picked up by the police for disorderly conduct (it had happened before) after losing a fistfight to a much poorer, much meaner drunk in a downtown bar. They questioned Alaric at the police station, examined his belongings, went through his wallet, notified his home.
Fuming, Alaric Sr. rushed to the police station to get his son. He was met by the desk sergeant, a fat, balding man who wore his uniform in a slovenly fashion.
"Mr. Arkalion?" demanded the sergeant, picking at his teeth with a toothpick.
"Yes. I have come for Alaric, my son."
"Sure. Sure. But your son's in trouble, Mr. Arkalion. Serious trouble."
"What are you talking about? If there are any damages, I'll pay. He didn't—hurt anyone, did he?"
The sergeant broke the toothpick between his teeth, laughed. "Him? Naw. He got the hell beat out of him by a drunk half his size. It ain't that kind of trouble, Mr. Arkalion. You know what an 1182 card is, mister?"
Arkalion's face drained white. "Why—yes."
"Alaric's got one."
"Naturally."
"According to the card, he should have shipped out on the Nowhere Journey, mister. He didn't. He's in serious trouble."
"I'll see the district attorney."
"More'n likely, you'll see the attorney general. Serious trouble."
CHAPTER V
The trouble with the Stalintrek, Sophia thought, was that it took months to get absolutely nowhere. There had been the painful pressure, the loss of consciousness, the confinement in this tight little world of dormitories and gleaming metal walls, the uncanny feeling of no weight, the ability—boring after a while, but interesting at first—to float about in air almost at will.
Then, how many months of sameness? Sophia had lost all track of time through ennui. But for the first brief period of adjustment on the part of her fellows to the fact that although she was a woman and shared their man's life she was still to be inviolate, the routine had been anything but exciting. The period of adjustment had had its adventures, its uncertainties, its challenge, and to Sophia it had been stimulating. Why was it, she wondered, that the men who carried their sex with strength and dignity, the hard-muscled men who could have their way with her if they resorted to force were the men who did not violate her privacy, while the weaklings, the softer, smaller men, or the average men whom Sophia considered her physical equals were the ones who gave her trouble?
She had always accepted her beauty, the obvious attraction men found in her, with an objective unconcern. She had been endowed with sex appeal; there was not much room in her life to exploit it, even had she wanted to. Now, now when she wanted anything but that, it gave her trouble.
Her room was shared, of necessity, with three men. Tall, gangling Boris gave her no trouble, turned his back when she undressed for the evening, even though she was careful to slip under the covers first. Ivan, the second man, was short, thin, stooped. Often she found him looking at her with what might have been more than a healthy interest, but aside from that he kept his peace. Besides, Ivan had spent two years in secondary school (as much as Sophia) and she enjoyed conversing with him.
The third man, Georgi, was the troublemaker. Georgi was one of those plump young men with red cheeks, big, eager eyes, a voice somewhat too high. He was an avid talker, a boaster and a boor. In the beginning he showered attentions on Sophia. He insisted on drawing her wash-basin at night, escorted her to breakfast every morning, told her in confidence of the conquests he had made over beautiful women (but not as beautiful as you, Sophia). He soon began to take liberties. He would sit—timorously at first, but with growing boldness—on the corner of her bed, talking with her at night after the others had retired, Ivan with his snores, Boris with his strong, deep breathing. And night after night, plump Georgi grew bolder.
He would reach out and touch Sophia, he would insist on tucking her in at night (let me be your big brother), he would awaken her in the morning with his hand heavy on her shoulder. Finally, one night at bedtime, she heard him conversing in low whispers with Ivan and Boris. She could not hear the words, but Boris looked at her with what she thought was surprise, Ivan nodded in an understanding way, and both of them left the room.
Sophia frowned. "What did you tell them, Georgi?"
"That we wanted to be alone one evening, of course."
"I never gave you any indication—"
"I could see it in your eyes, in the way you looked at me."
"Well, you had better call them back inside and go to bed."
Georgi shook his head, approached her.
"Georgi! Call them back or I will."
"No, you won't." Georgi followed her as she retreated into a corner of the room. When she reached the wall and could retreat no further, he placed his thick hands on her shoulders, drew her to him slowly. "You will call no one," he rasped.
* * * *
She ducked under his arms, eluded him, was on the point of running to the door, throwing it open and shouting, when she reconsidered. If she did, she would be asking for quarter, gaining a temporary reprieve, inviting the same sort of thing all over again.
She crossed to the bed and sat down. "Come here, Georgi."
"Ah." He came to her.
She watched him warily, a soft flabby man not quite so tall as she was, but who nevertheless out-weighed her by thirty or forty pounds. In his eagerness, he walked too fast, lost his footing and floated gently to the ceiling. Smiling as demurely as she could, Sophia reached up, circled his ankle with her hand.
"I never could get used to this weightlessness," Georgi admitted. "Be nice and pull me down."
"I will be nice. I will teach you a lesson."
He weighed exactly nothing. It was as simple as stretching. Sophia merely extended her arm upwards and Georgi's head hit the ceiling with a loud thunk. Georgi groaned. Sophia repeated the procedure, lowering her arm a foot—and Georgi with it—then raising it and bouncing his head off the ceiling.
"I don't understand," Georgi whined, trying to break free but only succeeding in thrashing his chubby arms foolishly.
"You haven't mastered weightlessness," Sophia smiled up at him. "I have. I said I would teach you a lesson. First make sure you have the strength of a man if you would play a man's game."
Still smiling, Sophia commenced spinning the hand which held Georgi's ankle. Arms and free leg flailing air helplessly, Georgi began to spin.
"Put me down!" he whined, a boy now, not even pretending to be a man. When Sophia shoved out gently and let his ankle go he did a neat flip in air and hung suspended, upside down, his feet near the ceiling, his head on a level with Sophia's shoulders. He cried.
She slapped his upside down face, carefully and without excitement, reddening the cheeks. "I was—only joking," he slobbered. "Call back our friends."
Sophia found one of the hard, air-tight metal flasks they used for drinking in weightlessness. With one hand she opened the lid, with the other she grasped Georgi's shoulder and spun him in air, still upside down. She squirted the water in his face, and because he was upside down and yelling it made him choke and cough. When the container was empty she lowered Georgi gently to the floor.
Minutes later, she opened the door, summoned Boris and Ivan, who came into the room self-consciously. What they found was a thoroughly beaten Georgi sobbing on the floor. After that, Sophia had no trouble. Week after week of boredom followed and she almost wished Georgi or someone else would look for trouble...even if it were something she could not handle, for although she was stronger than average and more beautiful, she was still a woman first, and she knew if the right man....
* * * *
"Did you know that radio communication is maintained between Earth and Mars?" the Alaric Arkalion on Mars asked Temple.
"Why, no. I never thought about it."
"It is, and I am in some difficulty."
"What's the matter?" Temple had grown to like Arkalion, despite the man's peculiarities. He had given up trying to figure him out, feeling that the only way he'd get anywhere was with Arkalion's co-operation.
"It's a long story which I'm afraid you would not altogether understand. The authorities on Earth don't think I belong here on the Nowhere Journey."
"Is that so? A mistake, huh? I sure am glad for you, Alaric."
"That's not the difficulty. It seems that there is the matter of impersonation, of violating some of the clauses in Public Law 1182. You're glad for me. I'm likely to go to prison."
"If it's that serious, how come they told you?"
"They didn't. But I—managed to find out. I won't go into details, Kit, but obviously, if I managed to embark for Nowhere when I didn't have to, then I wanted to go. Right?"
"I—uh, guess so. But why—?"
"That isn't the point. I still want to go. Not to Mars, but to Nowhere. I still can, despite what has happened, but I need help."
Temple said, "Anything I can do, I'll be glad to," and meant it. For one thing, he liked Arkalion. For another, Arkalion seemed to know more, much more than he would ever say—unless Temple could win his confidence. For a third, Temple was growing sick and tired of Mars with its drab ochre sameness (when he got to the surface, which was rarely), with its dank underground city, with its meaningless attention to meaningless detail. Either way, he figured there was no returning to Earth. If Nowhere meant adventure, as he suspected it might, it would be preferable. Mars might have been the other end of the galaxy for all its nearness to Earth, anyway.
"There is a great deal you can do. But you'll have to come with me."
"Where?" Temple demanded.
"Where you will go eventually. To Nowhere."
"Fine." And Temple smiled. "Why not now as well as later?"
"I'll be frank with you. If you go now, you go untrained. You may need your training. Undoubtedly, you will."
"You know a lot more than you want to talk about, don't you?"
"Frankly, yes.... I am sorry, Kit."
"That's all right. You have your reasons. I guess if I go with you I'll find out soon enough, anyway."
Arkalion grinned. "You have guessed correctly. I am going to Nowhere, before they return me to Earth for prosecution under Public Law 1182. I cannot go alone, for it takes at least two to operate...well, you'll see."
"Count me in," said Temple.
"Remember, you may one day wish you had remained on Mars for your training."
"I'll take my chances. Mars is driving me crazy. All I do is think of Earth and Stephanie."
"Then come."
"Where are we going?"
"A long, long way off. It is unthinkably remote, this place called Nowhere."
Temple felt suddenly like a kid playing hookey from school. "Lead on," he said, almost jauntily. He knew he was leaving Stephanie still further behind, but had he been in prison on the next street to hers, he might as well have been a million miles away.
As for Arkalion—the thought suddenly struck Temple—Arkalion wasn't necessarily leaving his world further behind. Perhaps Arkalion was going home....
* * * *
Stephanie picked up the phone eagerly. In the weeks since her first meeting with Mrs. Draper of the C.E.L., the older woman had been a fountain of information and of hope for her. Stephanie for her part had taken over Mrs. Draper's job in her own section of Center City: she was busy contacting the two hundred mothers and fifty sweethearts of the Nowhere Journey which had taken Kit from her. And now Mrs. Draper had called with information.
"We've successfully combined forces with some of the less militant elements in both houses of Congress," Mrs. Draper told her over the phone. "Do you realize, my dear, this marks the first time the C.E.L. has managed to put something constructive through Congress? Until now we've been content merely to block legislation, such as an increase in the Nowhere contingent from...."
"Yes, Mrs. Draper. I know all that. But what about this constructive thing you've done."
"Well, my dear, don't count your chickens. But we have passed the bill, and we expect the President won't veto it. You see, the President has two nephews who...."
"I know. I know. What bill did you pass?"
"Unfortunately, it's somewhat vague. Ultimately, the Nowhere Commission must do the deciding, but it does pave the way."
"For what, Mrs. Draper?"
"Hold onto your hat, my dear. The bill authorizes the Nowhere Commission to make as much of a study as it can of conditions—wherever our boys are sent."
"Oh." Stephanie was disappointed. "That won't get them back to us."
"No. You're right, it won't get them back to us. That isn't the idea at all, for there is more than one way to skin a cat, my dear. The Nowhere Commission will be studying conditions—"
"How can they? I thought everything was so hush-hush, not even Congress knew anything about it."
"That was the first big hurdle we have apparently overcome. Anyway, they will be studying conditions with a view of determining if one girl—just one, mind you—can embark on the Nowhere Journey as a pilot study and—"
"But I thought they could make the journey only once every seven-hundred-eighty days."
"Get Congress aroused and you can move mountains. It seems the expense entailed in a trip at any but those times is generally prohibitive, but when something special comes up—"
"It can be done! Mrs. Draper, how I love to talk with you!"
"See? There you go, my dear, counting your chickens. One girl will be sent, if the study indicates she can take it. One girl, Stephanie, and only after a study. She'd merely be a pilot case. But afterwards.... Ah, afterwards.... Perhaps someday soon qualified women will be able to join their men in Nowhere."
"Mrs. Draper, I love you."
"Naturally, you will tell all this to prospective C.E.L. members. Now we have something concrete to work with."
"I know. And I will, I will, Mrs. Draper. By the way, how are they going to pick the girl, the one girl?"
"Don't count your chickens, for Heaven's sake! They haven't even studied the situation yet. Well, I'll call you, my dear."
Stephanie hung up, dressed, went about her canvassing. She thought happy thoughts all week.
* * * *
"Shh! Quiet," cautioned Arkalion, leading the way down a flight of heavy-duty plastic stairs.
"How do you know your way around here so well?"
"I said quiet."
It was not so much, Temple realized, that Arkalion was really afraid of making noise. Rather, he did not want to answer questions.
Temple smiled in the semi-darkness, heard the steady drip-drip-drip of water off somewhere to his left. Eons before the coming of man on this stopover point to Nowhere, the Martian waters had retreated from the planet's ancient surface and seeped underground to carve, slow drop by drop, the caverns which honey-combed the planet. "You know your way around so well, I'd swear you were a Martian."
Arkalion's soft laugh carried far. "I said there was to be no noise. Please! As for the Martians, the only Martians are here all around you, the men of Earth. Ahh, here we are."
At the bottom of the flight of stairs Temple could see a door, metallic, giving the impression of strength without great weight. Arkalion paused a moment, did something with a series of levers, shook his head impatiently, started all over again.
"What's that for?" Temple wanted to know.
"What do you think? It is a combination lock, with five million possible combinations. Do you want to be here for all of eternity?"
"No."
"Then quiet."
Vaguely, Temple wondered why the door wasn't guarded.
"With a lock like this," Arkalion explained, as if he had read Temple's thought, "they need no other precaution. It is assumed that only authorized personnel know the combination."
Then had Arkalion come this way before? It seemed the only possible assumption. But when? And how? "Here we are," said Arkalion.
The door swung in toward them.
Temple strode forward, found himself in a great bare hall, surprisingly well-lighted. After the dimness of the caverns, he hardly could see.
"Don't stand there scowling and fussing with your eyes. There is one additional precaution—an alarm at Central Headquarters. We have about five minutes, no more."
At one end of the bare hall stood what to Temple looked for all the world like an old-fashioned telephone booth, except that its walls were completely opaque. On the wall adjacent to it was a single lever with two positions marked "hold" and "transport". The lever stood firmly in the "hold" position.
"You sure you want to come?" Arkalion demanded.
"Yes, I told you that."
"Good. I have no time to explain. I will enter the conveyor."
"Conveyor?"
"This booth. You will wait until the door is shut, then pull the lever down. That is all there is to it, but, as you can see, it is a two-man operation."
"But how do I—"
"Haste, haste! There are similar controls at the other end. You pull the lever, wait two minutes, enter the conveyor yourself. I will fetch you—if you are sure."
"I'm sure, dammit!"
"Remember, you go without training, without the opportunity everyone else has."
"You already told me that. Mars is half-way to eternity. Mars is limbo. If I can't go back to Earth I want to go—well, to Nowhere. There are too many ghosts here, too many memories with nothing to do."
Arkalion shrugged, entered the booth. "Pull the lever," he said, and shut the door.
Temple reached up, grasped the lever firmly in his hand, yanked it. It slid smoothly to the position marked "transport." Temple heard nothing, saw nothing, began to think the device, whatever it was, did not work. Did Arkalion somehow get moved inside the booth?
Temple thought he heard footfalls on the stairs outside. Soon, faintly, he could hear voices. Someone banged on the door to the hall. Licking dry lips, Temple opened the booth, peered inside.
Empty.
The voices clamored, fists pounded on the door. Something clicked. Tumblers fell. The door to the great, bright hall sprung outward. Someone rushed in at Temple, who met him savagely with a short, chopping blow to his jaw. The man, temporarily blinded by the dazzling light, stumbled back in the path of his fellows.
Temple darted into the booth, the conveyor, and slammed it shut.
Fingers clawed on the outside.
A sound almost too intense to be heard rang in Temple's ears. He lost consciousness instantly.
CHAPTER VI
"What a cockeyed world," said Alaric Arkalion Sr. to his son. "You certainly can't plan on anything, even if you do have more money than you'll ever possibly need in a lifetime."
"Don't feel like that," said young Alaric. "I'm not in prison any longer, am I?"
"No. But you're not free of the Nowhere Journey, either. There is an unheralded special trip to Nowhere, two weeks from today, I have been informed."
"Oh?"
"Yes, oh. I have also been informed that you will be on it. You didn't escape after all, Alaric."
"Oh. Oh!"
"What bothers me most is that scoundrel Smith somehow managed to escape. They haven't found him yet, I have also been informed. And since my contract with him calls for ten million dollars 'for services rendered,' I'll have to pay."
"But he didn't prevent me from—"
"I can't air this thing, Alaric! But listen, son: when you go where you are going, you're liable to find another Alaric Arkalion, your double. Of course, that would be Smith. If you can get him to cut his price in half because of what has happened, I would be delighted. If you could somehow manage to wring his neck, I would be even more delighted. Ten million dollars—for nothing."
* * * *
"I'm so excited," murmured Mrs. Draper. Stephanie watched her on one of the new televiewers, recently installed in place of the telephone.
"What is it?"
"Our bill has been passed by a landslide majority in both houses of Congress!"
"Ooo!" cried Stephanie.
"Not very coherent, my dear, but those are my sentiments exactly. In two weeks there will be a Journey to Nowhere, a special one which will include, among its passengers, a woman."
"But the study which had to be made—?"
"It's already been made. From what I gather, they can't take it very far. Most of their conclusions had to be based on supposition. The important thing, though, is this: a woman will be sent. The way the C.E.L. figures it, my dear, is that a woman falling in the twenty-one to twenty-six age group should be chosen, a woman who meets all the requirements placed upon the young men."
"Yes," said Stephanie. "Of course. And I was just thinking that I would be—"
"Remember those chickens!" cautioned Mrs. Draper. "We already have one hundred seventy-seven volunteers who'd claw each other to pieces for a chance to go."
"Wrong," Stephanie said, smiling. "You now have one hundred seventy-eight."
"Room for only one, my dear. Only one, you know."
"Then cross the others off your list. I'm already packing my bag."
* * * *
When Temple regained consciousness, it was with the feeling that no more than a split second of time had elapsed. So much had happened so rapidly that, until now, he hadn't had time to consider it.
Arkalion had vanished.
Vanished—he could use no other word. He was there, standing in the booth—and then he wasn't. Simple as that. Now you see it, now you don't. And goodbye, Arkalion.
But goodbye Temple, too. For hadn't Temple entered the same booth, waiting but a second until Arkalion activated the mechanism at the other end? And certainly Temple wasn't in the booth now. He smiled at the ridiculously simple logic of his thoughts. He stood in an open field, the blades of grass rising to his knees, as much brilliant purple as they were green. Waves of the grass, stirred like tide by the gentle wind, and hills rolling off toward the horizon in whichever direction he turned. Far away, the undulating hills lifted to a half soft mauve sky. A somber red sun with twice Sol's apparent disc but half its brightness hung midway between zenith and horizon completing the picture of peaceful other-worldliness.
Wherever this was, it wasn't Earth—or Mars.
Nowhere?
Temple shrugged, started walking. He chose his direction at random, crushing an easily discernible path behind him in the surprisingly brittle grass. The warm sun baked his back comfortably, the soft-stirring wind caressed his cheeks. Of Arkalion he found not a trace.
Two hours later Temple reached the hills and started climbing their gentle slopes. It was then that he saw the figure approaching on the run. It took him fully half a minute to realize that the runner was not human.
* * * *
After months of weightless inactivity, things started to happen for Sophia. The feeling of weight returned, but weight as she never had felt it before. It was as if someone was sitting on every inch of her body, crushing her down. It made her gasp, forced her eyes shut and, although she could not see it, contorted her face horribly. She lost consciousness, coming to some time later with a dreadful feeling of loginess. Someone swam into her vision dimly, stung her arm briefly with a needle. She slept.
She was on a table, stretched out, with lights glaring down at her. She heard voices.
"The new system is far better than testing, comrade."
"Far more efficient, far more objective. Yes."
"The brain emits electromagnetic vibration. Strange, is it not, that no one before ever imagined it could tell a story. A completely accurate story two years of testing could not give us."
"In Russia we have gone far with the biological, psychological sciences. The West flies high with physics. Give them Mars; bah, they can have Mars."
"True, Comrade. The journey to Jupiter is greater, the time consumed is longer, the cost, more expensive. But here on Jupiter we can do something they cannot do on Mars."
"I know."
"We can make supermen. Supermen, comrade. A wedding of Nietzsche and Marx."
"Careful. Those are dangerous thoughts."
"Merely an allusion, comrade. Merely a harmless allusion. But you take an ordinary human being and train him on Jupiter, speeding his time-sense and metabolic rate tremendously with certain endocrine secretions so that one day is as a month to him. You take him and subject him to big Jupiter's pull of gravity, more than twice Earth's—and in three weeks you have, yes—you have a superman."
"The woman wakes."
"Shh. Do not frighten her."
Sophia stretched, every muscle in her body aching. Slowly, as in a dream, she sat up. It required strength, the mere act of pulling her torso upright!
"What have you done to me?" she cried, focussing her still-dim vision on the two men.
"Nothing, comrade. Relax."
Sophia turned slowly on the table, got one long shapely leg draped over its edge.
"Careful, comrade."
What were they warning her about? She merely wanted to get up and stretch; perhaps then she would feel better. Her toe touched the floor, she swung her other leg over, aware of but ignoring her nakedness.
"A good specimen."
"Oh, yes, comrade. So this time they send a woman among the others. Well, we shall do our work. Look—see the way she is formed, so lithe, loose-limbed, agile. See the toning of the muscles? Her beauty will remain, comrade, but Jupiter shall make an amazon of her."
* * * *
Sophia had both feet on the floor now. She was breathing hard, felt suddenly sick to her stomach. Placing both her hands on the table edge, she pushed off and staggered for two or three paces. She crumpled, buckling first at the knees then the waist, and fell in a writhing heap.
"Pick her up."
Hands under her arms, tugging. She came off the floor easily, dimly aware that someone carried her hundred and thirty pounds effortlessly. "Put me down!" she cried. "I want to try again. I am crippled, crippled! You have crippled me...."
"Nothing of the sort, comrade. You are tired, weak, and Jupiter's gravity field is still too strong for you. Little by little, though, your muscles will strengthen to Jupiter's demands. Gravity will keep them from bulging, expanding; but every muscle fibre in you will have twice, three times its original strength. Are you excited?"
"I am tired and sick. I want to sleep. What is Jupiter?"
"Jupiter is a planet circling the sun at—never mind, comrade. You have much to learn, but you can assimilate it with much less trouble in your sleep. Go ahead, sleep."
Sophia retched, was sick. It had been years since she cried. But naked, afraid, bewildered, she cried herself to sleep.
Things happened while she slept, many things. Certain endocrine extracts accelerated her metabolism astonishingly. Within half an hour her heart was pumping blood through her body two hundred beats per minute. An hour later it reached its full rate, almost one thousand contractions every sixty seconds. All her other metabolic functions increased accordingly, and Sophia slept deeply for a week of subjective time—in hours. The same machine which had gleaned everything from her mind far more accurately than a battery of tests, a refinement of the electro-encephalogram, was now played in reverse, giving back to Sophia everything it had taken plus electrospool after electrospool of science, mathematics, logic, economics, history (Marxian, these last two), languages (including English), semantics and certain specialized knowledge she would need later on the Stalintrek.
Still sleeping, Sophia was bathed in a warm whirlpool of soothing liquid; rubbed, massaged, her muscle-toning begun while she rested and regained her strength. Three hours later, objective time, she awoke with a headache and with more thoughts spinning around madly inside her brain than she ever knew existed. Gingerly, she tried standing again, lifting herself nude and dripping wet from a tub of steaming amber stuff. She stood, stretched, permitted her fright to vanish with a quick wave of vertigo which engulfed her. She had been fed intravenously, but a tremendous hunger possessed her. Before eating, however, she was to find herself in a gymnasium, the air close and stifling. She was massaged again, told to do certain exercises which seemed simple but which she found extremely difficult, forced to run until she thought she would collapse, with her legs, dragging like lead.
She understood, now. Somehow she knew she was on Jupiter, the fifth and largest planet, where the force of gravity is so much greater than on Earth that it is an effort even to walk. She also knew that her metabolic rate had been accelerated beyond all comprehension and that in a comparatively short time—objective time—she would have thrice her original strength. All this she knew without knowing how she knew, and that was the most staggering fact of all. She did what her curt instructors bid, then dragged her aching muscles and her headache into a dining room where tired, forlorn-looking men sat around eating. Well, the food at least was good. Sophia attacked it ravenously.
* * * *
It did not take Temple long to realize that the creature running downhill at him, leaving a crushed and broken wake in the purple and green grass, was not human. At first Temple toyed with the idea of a man on horseback, for the creature ran on four limbs and had two left over as arms. Temple gaped.
The whole thing was one piece!
Centaur?
Hardly. Too small, for one thing. No bigger than a man, despite the three pairs of limbs. And then Temple had time to gape no longer, for the creature, whatever it was, flashed past him at what he now had to consider a gallop.
More followed. Different. Temple stared and stared. One could have been a great, sentient hoop, rolling downhill and gathering momentum. If he carried the wheel analogy further, a huge eye stared at him from where the hub would have been. Something else followed with kangaroo leaps. One thick-thewed leg propelled it in tremendous, fifteen-foot hopping strides while its small, flapper-like arms beat the air prodigiously.
Legions of creatures. All fantastically different. I'm going crazy, Temple thought, then said it aloud. "I'm going crazy."
Theorizing thus, he heard a whir overhead, whirled, looked up. Something was poised a dozen feet off the ground, a large, box-like object seven or eight feet across, rotors spinning above it. That, at least, he could understand. A helicopter.
"I'm lowering a ladder, Kit. Swing aboard."
Arkalion's voice.
Stunned enough to accept anything he saw, Temple waited for the rope ladder to drop, grasped its end, climbed. He swung his legs over a sill, found himself in a neat little cabin with Arkalion, who hauled the ladder in and did something to the controls. They sped away. Temple had one quick moment of lucid thought before everything which had happened in the last few moments shoved logic aside. What he had observed looked for all the world like a foot-race.
"Where the hell are we?" Temple demanded breathlessly.
Arkalion smiled. "Where do you think? Journey's end. Welcome to Nowhere, Kit. Welcome to the place where all your questions can be answered because there's no going back. Sorry I set you down in that field by mistake, incidentally. Those things sometimes happen."
"Can I just throw the questions at you?"
"If you wish. It isn't really necessary, for you will be indoctrinated when we get you over to Earth city where you belong."
"What do you mean, there's no going back? I thought they had a rotation system which for one reason or another wasn't practical at the moment. That doesn't sound like no going back, ever."
Arkalion grunted, shrugged. "Have it your way. I know."
"Sorry. Shoot."
"Just how far do you think you have come?"
"Search me. Some other star system, maybe?"
"Maybe. Clean across the galaxy, Kit."
Temple whistled softly. "It isn't something you can grasp just by hearing it. Across the galaxy...."
"That isn't too important just now. How long did you think the journey took?"
Temple nodded eagerly. "That's what gets me. It was amazing, Alaric. Really amazing. The whole trip couldn't have taken more than a moment or two. I don't get it. Did we slip out of normal space into some other—uh, continuum, and speed across the length of the galaxy like that?"
"The answer to your question is yes. But your statement is way off. The journey did not take seconds, Kit."
"No? Instantaneous?"
"Far more than seconds. To reach here from Earth you travelled five thousand years."
"What?"
"More correctly, it was five thousand years ago that you left Mars. You would need a time machine to return, and there is no such thing. The Earth you know is the length of the galaxy and five thousand years behind you."
CHAPTER VII
It could have been a city in New England, or maybe Wisconsin. Main Street stretched for half a mile from Town Hall to the small department store. Neon tubing brightened every store front, busy proprietors could be seen at work through the large plate glass windows. There was the bustle you might expect on any Main Street in New England or Wisconsin, but you could not draw the parallel indefinitely.
There were only men. No women.
The hills in which the town nestled were too purple—not purple with distance but the natural color of the grass.
A somber red sun hung in the pale mauve sky.
This was Earth City, Nowhere.
Arkalion had deposited Temple in the nearby hills, promised they would see one another again. "It may not be so soon," Arkalion had said, "but what's the difference? You'll spend the rest of your life here. You realize you are lucky, Kit. If, you hadn't come, you would have been dead these five thousand years. Well, good luck."
Dead—five thousand years. The Earth as he knew it, dust. Stephanie, a fifty generation corpse. Nowhere was right. End of the universe.
Temple shuffled his feet, trudged on into town. A man passed him on the street, stooped, gray-haired. The man nodded, did a mild double-take. I'm an unfamiliar face, Temple thought.
"Howdy," he said. "I'm new here."
"That's what I thought, stranger. Know just about everyone in these here parts, I do, and I said to myself, now there's a newcomer. Funny you didn't come in the regular way."
"I'm here," said Temple.
"Yeah. Funny thing, you get to know everyone. Eh, what you say your name was?"
"Christopher Temple."
"Make it my business to know everyone. The neighborly way, I always say. Temple, eh? We have one here."
"One what?"
"Another fellow name of Temple. Jase Temple, son."
"I'll be damned!" Temple cried, smiling suddenly. "I will be damned. Tell me, old timer, where can I find him?"
"Might be anyplace. Town's bigger'n it looks. I tell you, though, Jase Temple's our co-ordinator. You'll find him there, the co-ordinator's office. Town Hall, down the end of the street."
"I already passed it," Temple told the old man. "And thanks."
Temple's legs carried him at a brisk pace, past the row of store fronts and down to the Town Hall. He read a directory, climbed a flight of stairs, found a door marked:
JASON TEMPLE
Earth City Co-ordinator
Heart pounding, Temple knocked, heard someone call, "Come in."
He pushed the door in and stared at his brother, just rising to face him.
* * * *
"Kit! Kit! What are you doing...so you took the journey too!"
Jason ran to him, clasped his shoulders, pounded them. "You sure are looking fit. Kit, you could have knocked me over with half a feather, coming in like that."
"You're looking great too, Jase," Temple lied. He hadn't seen his brother in five years, had never expected to see him again. But he remembered a full-faced, smiling man somewhat taller than himself, somewhat broader across the shoulders. The Jason he saw looked forty-five or fifty but was hardly out of his twenties. He had fierce, smouldering eyes, gaunt cheeks, graying hair. He seemed a bundle of restless, nervous energy.
"Sit down, Kit. Start talking, kid brother. Start talking and don't stop till next week. Tell me everything. Everything! Tell me about the blue sky and the moon at night and the way the ocean looks on a windy day and...."
"Five years," said Temple. "Five years."
"Five thousand, you mean," Jason reminded him. "It hardly seems possible. How are the folks, Kit?"
"Mom's fine. Pop too. He's sporting a new Chambers Converto. You should see him, Jase. Sharp."
"And Ann?" Jason looked at him hopefully. Ann had been Jason's Stephanie—but for the Nowhere Journey they would have married.
"Ann's married," Temple said.
"Oh. Oh. That's swell, Kit. Really swell. I mean, what the hell, a girl shouldn't wait forever. I told her not to, anyway."
"She waited four years, then met a guy and—"
"A nice guy?"
"The best," said Temple. "You'd like him."
Temple saw the vague hurt come to Jason's smouldering eyes. Then it was the same. One part of Jason wanted her to remain his over an unthinkable gap, another part wanted her to live a good, full life.
"I'm glad," said Jason. "Can't expect a girl to wait without hope...."
"Then there's no hope we'll ever get back?"
Jason laughed harshly. "You tell me. Earth isn't merely sixty thousand light years away. Kit, do you know what a light year is?"
Temple said he thought he did.
"Sixty thousand of them. A dozen eternities. But the Earth we know is also dead. Dead five thousand years. The folks, Center City, Ann, her husband—all dust. Five thousand years old.... Don't mind me, Kit."
"Sure. Sure, I understand." But Temple didn't, not really. You couldn't take five thousand years and chuck them out the window in what seemed the space of a heart beat and then realize they were gone permanently, forever. Not a period of time as long as all of recorded civilization—you couldn't take it, tack it on after 1992 and accept it. Somehow, Temple realized, the five thousand years were harder to swallow than the sixty thousand light years.
"Well," with a visible effort, Jason snapped out of his reverie. Temple accepted a cigarette gratefully, his first in a long time. In fifty centuries, he thought bitterly, burrowing deeper into a funk.
"Well," said Jason, "I'm acting like a prize boob. How selfish can I get? There must be an awful lot you'd like to know, Kit."
"That's all right. I was told I'd be indoctrinated."
"Ordinarily, you would. But there's no shipment now, none for another three months. Say, how the devil did you get here?"
"That's a long story. Nowhere Journey, same as you, with a little assist to speed things up on Mars. Jase, tell me this: what are we doing here? What is everyone doing here? What's the Nowhere Journey all about? What kind of a glorified foot-race did I see a while ago, with a bunch of creatures out of the telio science-fiction shows?"
Jason put his own cigarette out, changed his mind, lit another one. "Sort of like the old joke, where does an alien go to register?"
"Sort of."
"It's a big universe," said Jason, evidently starting at the beginning of something.
"I'm just beginning to learn how big!"
"It would be pretty unimaginative of mankind to consider itself the only sentient form of life, Earth the only home of intelligence, both from a scientific and a religious point of view. We kind of expected to find—neighbors out in space. Kit, the sky is full of stars, most stars have planets. The universe crawls with life, all sorts of life, all sorts of intelligent life. In short, we are not alone. It would be sort of like taking the jet-shuttle from Washington to New York during the evening rush and expecting to be the only one aboard. In reality, you're lucky to get breathing space.
"There are biped intelligences, like humans. There are radial intelligences, one-legged species, tall, gangling creatures, squat ones, pancake ones, giants, dwarfs. There are green skins and pink skins and coal black—and yes, no skins. There are...but you get the idea."
"Uh-huh."
"Strangely enough, most of these intelligences are on about the same developmental level. It's as if the Creator turned everything on at once, like a race, and said 'okay, guys get started.' Maybe it's because, as scientists figure, the whole universe got wound up and started working as a unit. I don't know. Anyway, that's the way it is. All the intelligences worth talking about are on about the same cultural level. Atomics, crude spaceflight, wars they can't handle.
"And this is interesting, Kit. Most of 'em are bipedal. Not really human, not fully human. You can see the difference. But seventy-five percent of the races I've encountered have had basic similarities. A case of the Creator trying to figure out the best of all possible life-patterns and coming up with this one. Offers a wide range for action, for adaptation, stuff like that. Anyway, I'm losing track of things."
"Take it easy. From what you tell me I have all the time in the world."
"Well, I said all the races are developmentally parallel. That's almost true. One of them is not. One of them is so far ahead that the rest of us have hardly reached the crawling stage by comparison. One of them is the Super Race, Kit.
"Their culture is old, incredibly old. So old, in fact, that some of us figure it's been hanging around since before the Universe took shape. Maybe that's why all the others are on one level, a few thousand million years behind the Super Race.
"So, take this Super Race. For some reason we can't understand, it seems to be on the skids. That's just figurative. Maybe it's dying out, maybe it wants to pack up and leave the galaxy altogether, maybe it's got other undreamed of business other undreamed of places. Anyway, it wants out. But it's got an eon-old storehouse of culture and maybe it figures someone ought to have access to that and keep the galaxy in running order. But who? That's the problem. Who gets all this information, a million million generations of scientific problems, all carefully worked out? Who, among all the parallel races on all the worlds of the Universe? That's quite a problem, even for our Super Race boys.
"You'd think they'd have ways to solve it, though. With calculating machines or whatever will follow calculating machines after Earthmen and all the others find the next faltering step after a few thousand years. Or with plain horse sense and logic, developed to a point—after millions of years at it—where it never fails. Or solve the problem with something we've never heard of, but solve it anyway."
"What's all this got to do with—? I mean, it's an interesting story and when I get a chance to digest it I'll probably start gasping, but what about Nowhere and...."
"I'm coming to that. Kit, what would you say if I told you that the most intelligent race the Universe has ever produced solves the biggest problem ever handed anyone—by playing games?"
"I'd say you better continue."
"That's the purpose of Nowhere, Kit. Every planet, every race has its Nowhere. We all come here and we play games. Planet with the highest score at the end of God knows how long wins the Universe, with all the science and the wisdom needed to fashion that universe into a dozen different kinds of heaven. And to decide all this, we play games.
"Don't get the wrong idea. I'm not complaining. If the Superboys say we play, then we play. I'd take their word for it if they told me I had fifteen heads. But it's the sort of thing which doesn't let you get much sleep. Oh, Earth has a right to be proud of its record. United North America is in second place on a competition that's as wide as the Universe. But we're not first. Second. And I have a hunch from what's been going on around here that the games are drawing to a close.
"Fantastic, isn't it? Out of thousands of entrants, we're good enough to place second. But some planet out near the star Deneb has us hopelessly outclassed. We might as well get the booby prize. They'll win and own the Universe—us included."
Jason had leaned forward as he spoke, and was sitting on the edge of his chair now. The room was comfortably cool, but sweat beaded his forehead, dripped from his chin.
Temple lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply. "You said the United States—North America—was second. I thought this was a planet-wide competition, planet against planet."
"Earth is the one exception I've been able to find. The Deneb planet heads the list, then comes North America. After that, the planet of a star I never heard of. In fourth place is the Soviet Union."
"I'll be damned," said Temple. "Well, okay. Mind if I store that away for future reference? I've got another question. What kind of—uh, games do we play?"
"You name it. Mental contests. Scientific problems to be worked out with laboratories built to our specifications. Emotional problems with scores of men driven neurotic or worse every year. Problems of adaptability. Responses to environmental challenge. Stamina contests. Tests of strength, of endurance. Tests to determine depths of emotion. Tests to determine objectivity in what should be an objective situation. But the way everything is organized it's almost like a giant-sized, never ending Olympic Games, complete with some cockeyed sports events too, by the way."
"With all the pageantry, too?"
"No. But that's another story."
"Anyway, what I saw was a foot-race! And sorry, Jase, but I have another question."
Jason shrugged, spread his hands wide.
"How come all this talk about rotation? It isn't possible, not with a fifty century gap."
"I know. They just let us in on that little deal a couple of years ago. Till then, we didn't know. We thought it was distance only. In time, after all this was over, we could go home. That's what we thought," Jason said bitterly. "Actually, it's twice five thousand years. Five to come here, five to return. Ten thousand years separate us from the Earth we know, and even if we could go home, that wouldn't be going home at all—to Earth ten thousand years in the future.
"Oh, they had us hoodwinked. Afraid we might say no or something. They never mentioned the length or duration of the trip. I don't understand it, none of us do and we have some top scientists here. Something to do with suspended animation, with contra-terrene matter, with teleportation, something about latent extra-sensory powers in everyone, about the ability to break down an object—or a creature or a man—to its component atoms, to reverse—that's the word, reverse—those atoms and send them spinning off into space as contra-terrene matter.
"It all boils down to putting a man in a machine on Mars, pulling a lever, materializing him here five thousand years later." Jason smiled with only a trace of humor, "Any questions?"
"About a thousand," said Temple. "I—"
* * * *
Something buzzed on Jason's desk and Temple watched him pick up a microphone, say: "Co-ordinator speaking. What's up?"
The voice which answered, clear enough to be in the room with them and without the faintest trace of mechanical or electrical transfer, spoke in a strange, liquid-syllabled language Temple had never heard. Jason responded in the same language, with an apparent ease which surprised Temple—until he remembered that his brother had always had a knack of picking up foreign languages. Maybe that was why he held the Co-ordinator's job—whatever it was he co-ordinated.
There was fluency in the way Jason spoke, and alarm. The trouble-lines etched deeply on his face stood out sharply, his eyes, if possible, grew more intense. "Well," he said, putting the mike down and staring at Temple without seeing him, "I'm afraid that does it."
"What's the trouble?"
"Everything."
"Anything I can do?"
"Item. The Superboys have discovered that Earth has two contingents here—us and the Soviets. They're mad. Item. Something will be done about it. Item. Soviet Russia has made a suggestion, or that is, its people here. They will put forth a champion to match one of our own choosing in the toughest grind of all, something to do with responding to environmental challenge, which doesn't mean a hell of a lot unless you happen to know something about it. Shall I go on?"
And, when Temple nodded avidly. "We automatically lose by default. One of the rules of that particular game is that the contestant must be a newcomer. It's the sort of game you have to know nothing about, and incidentally, it's also the sort of game a man can get killed at. Well, the Soviets have a whole contingent of newcomers to pick from. We don't have any. As the Superboys see it, that's our own tough luck. We lose by default."
"It seems to me—"
"How can anything 'seem to you?' You're new here.... I'm sorry Kit. What were you saying?"
"No. Go ahead."
"That's only the half of it. Right after Russia takes our place and we're scratched off the list, the games go into their final phase. That was the rumor all along, and it's just been confirmed. Interesting to see what they do with all the contestants after the games are over, after there's no more Nowhere Journey."
"We could go back where we came from."
"Ten thousand years in the future?"
"I'm not afraid."
"Well, anyway, the Soviets put up a man, we can't match him. So it looks like the U. S. S. R. represents Earth officially. Not that it matters. We hardly have the chance of a very slushy snowball in a very hot hell. But still—"
"Our contestant, this guy who meets the Russian's challenge, has to be a newcomer?"
"That's what I said. Well, we can close up shop, I guess."
"You made a mistake. You said no newcomers have arrived. I'm here, Jase. I'm your man. Bring on your Russian Bear." Temple smiled grimly.
CHAPTER VIII
"You got to hand it to Temple's kid brother."
"Yeah. Cool as ice cubes."
"Are you guys kidding? He doesn't know what's in store for him, that's all."
"Do you?"
"Now that you mention it, no. Isn't a man here who can say for sure what kind of environmental challenges he'll have to respond to. Hypno-surgery sees to it the guys who went through the thing won't talk about it. As if that isn't security enough, the subject's got to be a brand new arrival!"
"Shh! Here he comes."
The brothers Temple entered Earth City's one tavern quietly, but on their arrival all the speculative talk subsided. The long bar, built to accommodate half a hundred pairs of elbows comfortably, gleamed with a luster unfamiliar to Temple. It might have been marble, but marble translucent rather than opaque, giving a beautiful three-dimensional effect to the surface patterns.
"What will it be?" Jason demanded.
"Whatever you're drinking is fine."
Jason ordered two scotches, neat, and the brothers drank. When Jason got a refill he started talking. "Does T.A.T. mean anything to you, Kit?"
"Tat? Umm—no. Wait a minute! T.A.T. Isn't that some kind of projective psychological test?"
"That's it. You're shown a couple of dozen pictures, more or less ambiguous, never cut and dry. Each one comes from a different stratum of the social environment, and you're told to create a dramatic situation, a story, for each picture. From your stories, for which you draw on your whole background as a human being, the psychometrician should be able to build a picture of your personality and maybe find out what, if anything, is bothering you."
"What's that to do with this response to environmental challenge thing?"
"Well," said Jason, drinking a third scotch, "the Super Boys have evolved T.A.T. to its ultimate. T.A.T.—that stands for Thematic Apperception Test. But in E.C.R.—environmental challenge and response, you don't see a picture and create a dramatic story around it. Instead, you get thrust into the picture, the situation, and you have to work out the solution—or suffer whatever consequences the particular environmental challenge has in store for you."
"I think I get you. But it's all make believe, huh?"
"That's the hell of it," Jason told him. "No, it's not. It is and it isn't. I don't know."
"You make it perfectly clear," Temple smiled. "The red-headed boy combed his brown hair, wishing it weren't blond."
Jason shrugged. "I'm sorry. For reasons you already know, the E.C.R. isn't very clear to me—or to anyone. You're not actually in the situation in a physical sense, but it can affect you physically. You feel you're there, you actually live everything that happens to you, getting injured if an injury occurs...and dying if you get killed. It's permanent, although you might actually be sleeping at the time. So, whether it's real or not is a question for philosophy. From your point of view, from the point of view of someone going through it, it's real."
"So I become part of this—uh, game in about an hour."
"Right. You and whoever the Russians offer as your competition. No one will blame you if you want to back out, Kit; from what you tell me, you haven't even been adequately trained on Mars."
"If you draw on the entire background of your life for this E.C.R., then you don't need training. Shut up and stop worrying. I'm not backing out of anything."
"I didn't think you would, not if you're still as much like your old man as you used to be. Kit...good luck."
* * * *
The fact that the technicians working around him were Earthmen permitted Temple to relax a little. Probably, it was planned that way, for entering the huge white cube of a building and ascending to the twelfth level on a moving ramp Temple had spotted many figures, not all of them human. If he had been strapped to the table by unfamiliar aliens, if the scent of alien flesh—or non-flesh—had been strong in the room, if the fingers—or appendages—which greased his temples and clamped an electrode to each one had not felt like human fingers, if the men talking to him had spoken in voices too harsh or too sibilant for human vocal chords—if all that had been the case whatever composure still remained his would have vanished.
"I'm Dr. Olson," said one white-gowned figure. "If any injuries occur while you lie here, I'm permitted to render first aid."
"The same for limited psychotherapy," said a shorter, heavier man. "Though a fat lot of good it does when we never know what's bothering you, and don't have the time to work on it even if we did know."
"In short," said a third man who failed to identify himself, "you may consider yourself as the driver of one of those midget rocket racers. Do they still have them on Earth? Good. You are the driver, and we here in this room are the mechanics waiting in your pit. If anything goes wrong, you can pull out of the race temporarily and have it repaired. But in this particular race there is no pulling out: all repairs are strictly of a first-aid nature and must be done while you continue whatever you are doing. If you break your finger and find a splint appearing on it miraculously, don't say you weren't warned."
"Best of luck to you, young man," said the psychotherapist.
"Here we go," said the doctor, finding the large vein on the inside of Temple's forearm and plunging a needle into it.
Temple's senses whirled instantly, but as his vision clouded he thought he saw a large, complex device swing down from the ceiling and bathe his head in warming radiation. He blinked, squinted, could see nothing but a swirling, cloudy opacity.
* * * *
Approximately two seconds later, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch watched as the white-gowned comrade tied a rubber strap around her arm, waited for the vein to swell with blood, then forced a needle in through its thick outer layer. Was that a nozzle overhead? No, rather a lens, for from it came amber warmth...which soon faded, with everything else, into thick, churning fog....
Temple was abruptly aware of running, plunging headlong and blindly through the fiercest storm he had ever seen. Gusts of wind whipped at him furiously. Rain cascaded down in drenching torrents. Foliage, brambles, branches struck against his face; mud sucked at his feet. Big animal shapes lumbered by in the green gloom, as frightened by the storm as was Temple.
His head darted this way and that, his eyes could see the gnarled tree trunks, the dense greenery, the lianas, creepers and vines of a tropical rain forest—but dimly. Green murk swirled in like thick smoke with every gust of wind, with the rain obscuring vision almost completely.
Temple ran until his lungs burned and he thought he must exhale fire. His leaden feet fought the mud with growing difficulty for every stride he took. He ran wildly and in no set direction, convinced only that he must find shelter or perish. Twice he crashed bodily into trees, twice stumbled to his knees only to pull himself upright again, sucking air painfully into his lungs and cutting out in a fresh direction.
He ran until his legs balked. He fell, collapsing first at the knees, then the waist, then flopping face down in the mud. Something prodded his back as he fell and reaching behind him weakly Temple was aware for the first time that a bow and a quiver of arrows hung suspended from his shoulders by a strong leather thong. He wore nothing but a loin cloth of some nameless animal skin and he wondered idly if he had slain the animal with the weapon he carried. Yet when he tried to recollect he found he could not. He remembered nothing but his frantic flight through the rain forest, as if all his life he had run in a futile attempt to leave the rain behind him.
Now as he lay there, the mud sucking at his legs, his chest, his armpits, he could not even remember his name. Did he have one? Did he have a life before the rain forest? Then why did he forget?
A sense not fully developed in man and called intuition by those who fail to understand it made him prop his head up on his hands and squint through the downpour. There was something off there in the foliage...someone....
A woman.
Temple's breath caught in his throat sharply. The woman stood half a dozen paces off, observing him coolly with hands on flanks. She stood tall and straight despite the storm and from trim ankles to long, lithe legs to flaring loin-clothed hips, to supple waist and tawny skin of fine bare breasts and shoulders, to proud, haughty face and long dark hair loose in the storm and glistening with rain, she was magnificent. Her long, bronzed body gleamed with wetness and Temple realized she was tall as he, a wild beautiful goddess of the jungle. She was part of the storm and he accepted her—but strangely, with the same fear the storm evoked. She would make a lover the whole world might relish (what world, Temple thought in confusion?) but she would make a terrible foe.
And foe she was....
"I want your bow and arrows," she told him.
* * * *
Temple wanted to suggest they share the weapon, but somehow he knew in this world which was like a dream and could tell him things the way a dream would and yet was vividly real, that the woman would share nothing with anybody.
"They are mine," Temple said, climbing to his knees. He remembered the animal-shapes lumbering by in the storm and he knew that he and the animals would both stalk prey when the storm subsided and he would need the bow and arrows.
The woman moved toward him with a liquid motion beautiful to behold, and for the space of a heartbeat Temple watched her come. "I will take them," she said.
Temple wasn't sure if she could or not, and although she was a woman he feared her strangely. Again, it was as if something in this dream-world real-world could tell him more than he should know.
Making up his mind, Temple sprang to his feet, whirled about and ran. He was plunging through the wild storm once more, blinded by the occasional flashes of jagged green lightning, deafened by the peals of thunder which followed. And he was being pursued.
Minutes, hours, more than hours—for an eternity Temple ran. A reservoir of strength he never knew he possessed provided the energy for each painful step and running through the storm seemed the most natural thing in the world to him. But there came a time when his strength failed, not slowly, but with shocking suddenness. Temple fell, crawled a ways, was still.
It took him minutes to realize the storm no longer buffeted him, more minutes to learn he had managed to crawl into a cave. He had no time to congratulate himself on his good fortune, for something stirred outside.
"I am coming in," the woman called to him from the green murk.
Temple strung an arrow to his bow, pulled the string back and faced the cave's entrance squatting on his heels. "Then your first step shall be your last. I'll shoot to kill." And he meant it.
Silence from outside. Deafening.
Temple felt sweat streaming under his armpits; his hands were clammy, his hands trembled.
"You haven't seen the last of me," the woman promised. After that, Temple knew she was gone. He slept as one dead.
When Temple awoke, bright sunlight filtered in through the foliage outside his cave. Although the ground was a muddy ruin, the storm had stopped. Edging to the mouth of the cave, Temple spread the foliage with his hands, peered cautiously outside. Satisfied, he took his bow and arrows and left the cave, pangs of hunger knotting his stomach painfully.
The cave had been weathered in the side of a short, steep abutment a dozen paces from a gushing, swollen stream. Temple followed the course of the stream as it twisted through the jungle, ranging half a mile from his cave until the water course widened to form a water-hole. All morning Temple waited there, crouching in the grass, until one by one, the forest animals came to drink. He selected a small hare-like thing, notched an arrow to his bow, let it fly.
The animal jumped, collapsed, began to slink away into the undergrowth, dragging the arrow from its hindquarters. Temple darted after it, caught it in his hands and bashed its life out against the bole of a tree. Returning to his cave he found two flinty stones, shredded a fallen branch and nursed the shards dry in the strong sunlight. Soon he made a fire and ate.
* * * *
In the days which followed, Temple returned to the water-hole and bagged a new catch every time he ventured forth. Things went so well that he began to range further and further from his cave exploring. Once however, he returned early to the water-hole and found footprints in the soft mud of its banks.
The woman.
That she had been observing him while he had hunted had never occurred to Temple, but now that the proof lay clearly before his eyes, the old feeling of uncertainty came back. And the next day, when he crept stealthily to the water-hole and saw the woman squatting there in the brush, waiting for him, he fled back to his cave.
The thought hit him suddenly. If she were stalking him, why must he flee as from his own shadow? There would be no security for either of them until either one or the other were gone—and gone meant dead. Then Temple would do his own stalking.
For several nights Temple hardly slept. He could have found the water-hole blindfolded merely by following the stream. Each night he would reach the hole and work, digging with a sharp stone, until he had fashioned a pit fully ten feet deep and six feet across. This he covered with branches, twigs, leaves and finally dirt.
When he returned in the morning he was satisfied with his work. Unless the woman made a careful study of the area, she would never see the pit. All that day Temple waited with his back to the water-hole, facing the camouflaged pit, the trap he had set, but the woman failed to appear. When she also did not come on the second day, he began to think his plan would not work.
The third day, Temple arrived with the sun, sat as before in the tall grass between the pit and the water-hole and waited. Several paces beyond his hidden trap he could see the tall trees of the jungle with vines and creepers hanging from their branches. At his back, a man's length behind him was the water-hole, its deepest waters no more than waist-high.
Temple waited until the sun stood high in the sky, then was fascinated as a small antelope minced down to the water-hole for a drink. You'll make a fine breakfast tomorrow, he thought, smiling.
Something, that strange sixth sense again, made Temple turn around and stand up. He had time for a brief look, a hoarse cry.
The woman had been the cleverer. She had set the final trap. She stood high up on a branch of one of the trees beyond the hidden pit and for an instant Temple saw her fine figure clearly, naked but for the loincloth. Then the soft curves became spring-steel.
The woman arched her body there on the high branch, grasping a stout vine and rocking back with it. Temple raised his bow, set an arrow to let it fly. But by then, the woman was in motion.
Long and lithe and graceful, she swung down on her vine, gathering momentum as she came. Her feet almost brushed the lip of Temple's pit at the lowest arc of her flight, but she clung to the vine and it began to swing up again like a pendulum—toward Temple.
At the last moment he hunched his shoulder and tried to raise his arms for protection. The woman was quicker. She gathered her legs up under her, still clutching the vine with her slim, strong hands. The vine's arc carried her up at him; her knees were at a level with his head and she brought them up savagely, close together striking Temple brutally at the base of his jaw. Temple screamed as his head was jerked back with terrible force.
The bow flew from his fingers and he fell into the water-hole, flat on his back.
Sophia let the vine carry her out over the water, then dropped from it. Waist deep, she waded to where the man lay, unconscious on his back, half in, half out of the shallowest part of the water. She reached him, prodded his chest with her foot. When he did not stir, she rocked her weight down gracefully on her long leg, forcing his head under water. With a haughty smile, she watched the bubbles rise....
* * * *
In the small room where Temple's body lay in repose on a table the white-smocked doctor looked at the psychotherapist questioningly. "What's happening?"
"Can't tell, doctor. But—"
Suddenly Temple's still body rocked convulsively, his neck stretched, his head shot up and back. Blood trickled from his mouth.
The doctor thrust out expert hands, examined Temple's jaw dexterously.
"Broken?" the psychotherapist demanded in a worried voice.
"No. Dislocated. He looks like he's been hit by a sledge hammer, wherever he is now, whatever's happening. This E.C.R. is the damndest thing."
Temple's still form shuddered convulsively. He began to gasp and cough, obviously fighting for breath. An ugly blue swelling had by now lumped the base of his jaw.
"What's happening?" demanded the psychotherapist.
"I can't be sure," said the doctor, shaking his head. "He seems to have difficulty in breathing...it's as if he were—drowning."
"Bad. Anything we can do?"
"No. We wait until this particular sequence ends." The doctor examined Temple again. "If it doesn't end soon, this man will die of asphyxiation."
"Call it off," the psychotherapist pleaded. "If he dies now Earth will be represented by Russia. Call it off!"
Someone entered the room. "I have the authority," he said, selecting a hypodermic from the doctor's rack and piercing the skin of Temple's forearm with it. "This first test has gone far enough. The Russian entry is clearly the winner, but Temple must live if he is to compete in another."
The wracking convulsions which shook Temple's body subsided. He ceased his choking, began to breathe regularly. With grim swiftness, the doctor went to work on Temple's dislocated jaw while the man who had stopped the contest rendered artificial respiration.
The man was Alaric Arkalion.
* * * *
The Comrade Doctor was exultant. "Jupiter training, comrade, has given us a victory."
"How can you be sure?"
"Our entrant is unharmed, the contest has been called. Wait...she is coming to."
Sophia stretched, rubbed her bruised knees, sat up.
"What happened, Comrade?" the doctor demanded.
"My knees ache," said Sophia, rubbing them some more. "I—I killed him, I think. Strange, I never dreamed it would be that real."
"In a sense, it was real. If you killed the American, he will stay dead."
"Nothing mattered but that world we were in, a fantastic place. Now I remember everything, all the things I couldn't remember then."
"But your—ah, dream—what happened?"
Sophia rubbed her bruised knees a third time, ruefully. "I knocked him unconscious with these. I forced his head under water and drowned him. But—before I could be sure I finished the job—I came back.... Funny that I should want to kill him without compunction, without reason." Sophia frowned, sat up. "I don't think I want anymore of this."
The doctor surveyed her coldly. "This is your task on the Stalintrek. This you will do."
"I killed him without a thought."
"Enough. You will rest and get ready for the second contest."
"But if he's dead—"
"Apparently he's not, or we would have been informed, Comrade Petrovitch."
"That is true," agreed the second man, who had remained silent until now. "Prepare for another test, Comrade."
Sophia was on the point of arguing again. After all it wasn't fair. If in the dream-worlds which were not dream worlds she was motivated by but one factor and that to destroy the American and if she faced him with the strength of her Jupiter training it would hardly be a contest. And now that she could think of the American without the all-consuming hatred the dream world had fostered in her, she realized he had been a pleasant-looking young man, quite personable, in fact. I could like him, Sophia thought and hoped fervently she had not drowned him. Still, if she had volunteered for the Stalintrek and this was the job they assigned her....
"I need no rest," she told the doctor, hardly trusting herself, for she realized she might change her mind. "I am ready any time you are."
CHAPTER IX
His name was Temple and it was the year 1960. Hectic end of a decade, 1960. Ancient Joe Stalin was still alive, drugged half senseless against the tortures of an incurable stomach cancer, although the world thought he died in 1953. He would hang on grimly another year and a half, yielding the reins of empire to stout Malenkov who in the space of a few years would lose them to a crafty schoolteacherish whiplash called Beria. 1960—eleventh year of the fantastic Korean situation, in which the Land of the Morning Sun had become, with no pretentions to the contrary, a glorified training camp for the armies of both sides.
The Cold War flared hot in Burma by mid-1960. Indo-China was a Red Fortress and with Tibet hopelessly behind the Iron Curtain, India awoke to the fact that neutrality was an impossibility in the era of pushbuttonry, lending her chaotic bulk to the West. Mao Tse Tung fell before an assassin's bullet in Peking, but a shining new political sewage system cleared the streets of celebration before it fairly got under way. Inside of forty-eight hours, China had a new Red boss—imported from Moscow.
For some reason, it took until 1960 for the first batch of Hiroshima-Nagasaki mutants not to miscarry, and Sunday Supplement editors had a field day with the pathetic little creatures, one of which was born with two heads and actually survived for ten years. In 1960 the first manned spaceship reached Luna, but the public knew nothing of this for another fourteen months. In the United States the increase in taxes and prices was matched everywhere except in the pocketbook of the white collar worker by an increase in wages. Shortages in all branches of engineering forced the government to subsidize engineering students and exempt them permanently from the draft and the soon-to-be-started Nowhere Journey, while engineers' salaries rose to match those of top business executives. Big news in the world of sports was the inclusion in the baseball Major Leagues of eight teams from the Pacific Coast, replacing the World Series with what was to become a mathematician's nightmare, the Triangle Game.
But Christopher Temple had his own problems. He had his own life, too, which had nothing to do with the life of the real Christopher Temple, departed thirty-odd years later on the Nowhere Journey. Or rather, this was Christopher Temple, living his second E.C.R.... Temple who had lost once, and who, if he lost again, would take the dreams and hopes of the Western world down into the dust of defeat with him. But as the fictional (although in a certain sense, real) Christopher Temple of 1960, he knew nothing of this.
The world could go to pot. The world was going to pot, anyway. Temple shuddered as he poured a fourth Canadian, downing it in a tasteless, burning gulp. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with government subsidized degrees from three universities including the fine new one at Desert Rock. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with top-secret government clearance. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with more military secrets buzzing around inside his head than in a warehouse of burned Pentagon files.
Temple was also a thermo-nuclear engineer whose wife spied for the Russians.
* * * *
He'd found out quite by accident, not meaning to eavesdrop at all. Returning home early one afternoon because the production engineer called a halt while further research was done on certain unstable isotopes, Temple was surprised to find his wife had a gentleman caller. He heard their voices clearly from where he stood out in the sun-parlor, and for a ridiculous instant he was torn between slinking upstairs and ignoring them altogether or barging into the living room like a high school boy flushed with jealousy. The mature thing to do, of course, was neither, and Temple was on the point of walking politely into the living room, saying hello and waiting for an introduction, when snatches of the conversation stopped him cold.
"Silly Charles! Kit doesn't suspect a thing. I would know."
"How can you be sure?"
"Intuition."
"On a framework of intuition you would place the fate of Red Empire?"
"Empire, Charles?" Temple could picture Lucy's raised eyebrow. He listened now, hardly breathing. For one wild moment he thought he would retreat upstairs and forget the whole thing. Life would be much simpler that way. A meaningless surrender to unreality, however, and it couldn't be done.
"Yes, Empire. Oh, not the land-grabbing, slave-dominating sort of things the Imperialists used to attempt, but a more subtle and hence more enduring empire. Let the world call us Liberator, we shall have Empire."
Lucy laughed, a sound which Temple loved. "You may keep your ideology, Charles. Play with it, bathe in it, get drunk on it or drown yourself in it. I want my money."
"You are frank."
Temple could picture Lucy's shrug. "I am a paid, professional spy. By now you have most of the information you need. I shall have the rest tonight."
"I'll see you in hell first!" Temple cried in rage, stalking into the room and almost smiling in spite of the situation when he realized how melodramatic his words must sound.
"Kit! Kit...." Lucy raised hand to mouth, then backed away flinching as if she had been struck.
"Yeah, Kit. A political cuckold, or does Charles get other services from you as well?"
"Kit, you don't...."
The man named Charles motioned for silence. Dapper, clean-cut, good-looking except for a surly, pouting mouth, he was a head shorter than either Temple or Lucy. "Don't waste your words, Sophia. Temple overheard us."
Sophia? thought Temple. "Sophia?" he said.
Charles nodded coolly. "The real Mrs. Temple was observed, studied, her every habit and whim catalogued by experts. A plastic surgeon, a psychologist, a sociologist, a linguist, a whole battery of experts molded Sophia here into a new Mrs. Temple. I must congratulate them, for you never suspected."
"Lucy?" Temple demanded dully. Reason stood suspended in a limbo of objective acceptance and subjective disbelief.
"Mrs. Temple was eliminated. Regrettable because we don't deal in senseless mayhem, but necessary."
Temple was not aware of leaving limbo until he felt the bruising contact of his knuckles with Charles' jaw. The short man toppled, fell at his feet. "Get up!" Temple cried, then changed his mind and tensed himself to leap upon the prone figure.
"Hold it," Charles told him quietly, wiping blood from his lips with one hand, drawing an automatic from his pocket with the other. "You'd better freeze, Temple. You die if you don't."
* * * *
Temple froze, watched Charles slither away across the high-piled green carpet until, safely away across the room, he came upright groggily. He turned to the dead Lucy's double. "What do you think, Sophia?"
"I don't know. We could get out of here, probably get along without the final information."
"That isn't what I mean. Naturally, we'll never receive the final facts. I mean, what do you think about Temple?"
Sophia said she didn't know.
"Left alone, he would go to the police. Kidnapped, he would be worse than useless. Harmful, actually, for the authorities would suspect something. Even worse if we killed him. The point is, we don't want the authorities to think Temple gave information to anybody."
"Gave is hardly the word," said Sophia. "I was a good wife, but also a good gleaner. One hundred thousand dollars, Charles."
"You bitch," Temple said.
"Later," Charles told the woman. "The solution is this, Sophia: we must kill Temple, but it must look like suicide."
Sophia frowned in pretty concern. "Do we have to...kill him?"
"What's the matter, my dear? Have you been playing the wifely role too long? If Temple stands in the way of Red Empire, Temple must die."
Temple edged forward.
"Uh-uh," said Charles, "mustn't." He waved the automatic and Temple subsided.
"Is that right?" Sophia demanded. "Well, you listen to me. I have nothing to do with your Red Empire. I fled the Iron Curtain, came here to live voluntarily—"
"Do you really think it was on a voluntary basis that you went? We allowed you to go, Sophia. We encouraged it. That way, the job of our technicians was all the simpler. Whether you like it or not, you have been a cog in the machine of Red Empire."
"I still don't see why he has to die."
"Leave thinking to those who can. You have a smile, a body, a certain way with men. I will think. I think that Temple should die."
"I don't," Sophia said.
"We're delaying needlessly. The man dies." And Charles raised his automatic, sufficiently irked to forget his suicide plan.
A gap of eight or nine feet separated the two men. It might as well have been infinity—and it would be soon, for Temple. He saw Charles' small hand tighten about the automatic, saw the trigger finger grow white. The weapon pointed at a spot just above his navel and briefly he found himself wondering what it would feel like for a slug to rip into his stomach, burning a path back to his spine. He decided to make the gesture at least, if he could do no more. He would jump for Charles.
Sophia beat him to it—and because Lucy was dead and Sophia looked exactly like her and Temple could not quite accept the fact, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Cat-quick, Sophia leaped upon Charles' back and they went down together in a twisting, thrashing tangle of arms and legs.
Temple did not wait for an invitation. He launched himself down after them, and then things began to happen...fast.
Sophia rolled clear, rose to her hands and knees, panting. Charles sat up cursing, nursing a badly scratched face. Temple hurtled at him, stretched him on his back again, began to pound hard fists into his face.
Charles did not have the automatic. Neither did Temple.
Something exploded against the back of Temple's head violently, throwing him off Charles and tumbling him over. Dimly he saw Sophia following through, the automatic in her hand, butt foremost. Temple's senses reeled. He tried to rise, succeeded only in a kind of shuddering slither before he subsided. He wavered between consciousness and unconsciousness, heard as in a dream snatches of conversation.
"Shoot him...shoot him!"
"Shut up...I have...gun...go to hell."
"...kill...only way."
"My way is different...out of here...discuss later."
"...feel...."
"I said...out of here...."
The voices became a meaningless liquid torrent cascading into a black pit.
* * * *
Now Temple sat with a water-glass a third full of Canadian in his hand, every once in a while reaching up gingerly to explore the bruised swelling on his head, the blood-matted hair which covered it. To be a cuckold was one thing, but to be the naive, political pawn sort of cuckold who is not a cuckold at all, he told himself, is far worse. To live with his woman, eat the meals she cooked for him, talk to her, think she understood him, sympathize with him, to make love to her with passion while she responds with play-acting for a hundred thousand dollar salary was suddenly the most emasculating thing in the world for Temple. He had not thought to ask how long it had been going on. Better, perhaps, if he never knew. And somewhere lost in the maze of his thoughts was the grimmest, bleakest reality of them all: Lucy was dead. Lucy—dead. But where did Lucy leave off, where did Sophia begin? Was Lucy dead that night they returned more than a little drunk from the Chamber's party, that night they danced in the living room until dawn obscured the stars and he carried Lucy upstairs. Lucy or Sophia? And the day they motored to the lake, their secret lake, hardly more than a dammed, widened stream and dreamed of the things they could do when the Cold War ended? Lucy—or Sophia? Had he ever noticed a difference in the way Lucy-Sophia cooked, in the way she spoke, the way she let him make love to her? He thought himself into a man-sized headache and found no answers. This way at least the loss of his wife was not as traumatic as it might have been. He knew not when she died or how and, in fact, Lucy-Sophia seemed so much like the real thing that he did not know where he could stop loving and start hating.
And the girl, the Russian girl, had saved his life. Why? He couldn't answer that one either, unless if it were as Charles suggested: Sophia had studied Lucy so carefully, had learned her likes and dislikes, her wants and desires, had memorized and practised every quirk of her character to such an extent that Sophia was Lucy in essence.
Which, Temple thought, would make it all the harder to seek out Sophia and kill her.
That was the answer, the only answer. Temple felt a dull ache where his heart should have been, a pressure, a pounding, an unpleasant, unfamiliar lack of feeling. If he took his story to the F.B.I. he had no doubt that Charles, Sophia and whoever else worked this thing with them would be caught, but he, Temple, would find himself with a lifelong, unslakable emotional thirst. He had to quench it now and then feel sorry so that he might heal. He had to quench it with Sophia's blood...alone.
* * * *
He found her a week later at their lake. He had looked everywhere and had about given up, almost, in fact, ready to turn his story over to the police. But he had to think and their lake was the place for that.
Apparently Sophia had the same idea. Temple parked on the highway half a mile from their lake, made his way slowly through the woods, golden dappled with sunlight. He heard the waters gushing merrily, heard the sounds of some small animal rushing off through the woods. He saw Sophia.
She lay on their sunning rock in shorts and halter, completely relaxed, an opened magazine face down on the rock beside her, a pair of sunglasses next to it. She had one knee up, one leg stretched out, one forearm shielding her eyes from the sun, one arm down at her side. Seeing her thus, Temple felt the pressure of his automatic in its holster under his arm. He could draw it out, kill her before she was aware of his presence. Would that make him feel better? Five minutes ago, he would have said yes. Now he hesitated. Kill her, who seemed as completely Lucy as he was Temple? Send a bullet ripping through the body which he had known and loved, or the body that had seemed so much like it he had failed to tell the difference?
Murder—Lucy?
"No," he said aloud. "Her name is Sophia."
The girl sat up, startled. "Kit," she said.
"Lucy."
"You can't make up your mind, either." She smiled just like Lucy.
Dumbly, he sat down next to her on the rock. Strong sunlight had brought a fine dew of perspiration to the bronzed skin of her face. She got a pack of cigarettes out from under the magazine, lit one, offered it to Temple, lit another and smoked it. "Where do we go from here?" she wanted to know.
"I—"
"You came to kill me, didn't you? Is that the only way you can ever feel better, Kit?"
"I—" He was going to deny it, then think.
"Don't deny it. Please." She reached in under his jacket, withdrawing her hand with the snub-nosed automatic in it. "Here," she said, giving it to him.
He took the gun, hefted it, let it fall, clattering, on the rock.
"Listen," she said. "I could have told you I was Lucy. If I said now that I am Lucy and if I kept on saying it, you'd believe me. You'd believe me because you'd want to."
"Well," said Temple.
"I am not Lucy. Lucy is dead. But...but I was Lucy in everything but being Lucy. I thought her thoughts, dreamed her dreams, loved her loves."
"You killed her."
"No. I had nothing to do with that. She was killed, yes. Not by me. Kit, if I asked you when Lucy stopped, and...when I began, could you tell me?"
He had often thought about that. "No," he said truthfully. "You're as much my wife as—she was."
* * * *
The clutched at his hand impulsively. Then, when he failed to respond, she withdrew her own hand. "Then—then I am Lucy. If I am Lucy in every way, Lucy never died."
"You betrayed me. You stood by while murder was committed. You are guilty of espionage."
"Lucy loved you. I am Lucy...."
"...Betrayed me...."
"For a hundred thousand dollars. For the chance to live a normal life, for the chance to forget Leningrad in the wintertime, watery potato soup, rags for clothing, swaggering commissars, poverty, disease. Do you think I realized I could fall in love with you so completely? If I did, don't you think that would have changed things? I am not Sophia, Kit. I was, but I am not. They made me Lucy. Lucy can't be dead, not if I am she in every way."
"What can we do?"
"I don't know. I only want to be your wife...."
"Well, then tell me," he said bitterly. "Shall I go back to the plant and continue working, knowing all the time that our most closely guarded secret is in Russian hands and that my wife is responsible?" He laughed. "Shall I do that?"
"Your secrets never went anywhere."
"Shall I...what?"
"Your secrets never went anywhere. Charles is dead. I have destroyed all that we took. I am not Russian any longer. American. They made me American. They made me Lucy. I want to go right on being Lucy, your wife."
Temple said nothing for a long time. He realized now he could not kill her. But everything else she suggested.... "Tell me," he said. "Tell me, how long have you been Lucy? You've got to tell me that."
"How long have we been married?"
"You know how long. Three years."
Sophia crushed her cigarette out on the rock, wiped perspiration (tears?) from her cheek with the back of her hand. "You have never known anyone but me in your marriage bed, Kit."
"You—you're lying."
"No. They did what they did on the eve of your marriage. I have been your wife for as long as you have had one."
Temple's head whirled. It had been a quick courtship. He had known Lucy only two weeks in those hectic post-graduate days of 1957. But for fourteen brief days, it was Sophia he had known all along.
"Sophia, I—"
"There is no Sophia, not any more."
He had hardly known Lucy, the real Lucy. This girl here was his wife, always had been. Had the first fourteen days with Lucy been anything but a dream? He was sorry Lucy had died—but the Lucy he had thought dead was Sophia, very much alive.
He took her in his arms, almost crushing her. He held her that way, kissed her savagely, letting passion of a different sort take the place of murder.
This is my woman, he thought, and awoke on his white pallet in Nowhere.
* * * *
"I am awake," said Temple.
"We see that. You shouldn't be."
"No?"
"No. There is one more dream."
Temple dozed restfully but was soon aware of a commotion. Strangely, he did not care. He was too tired to open his eyes, anyway. Let whatever was going to happen, happen. He wanted his sleep.
But the voice persisted.
"This is highly irregular. You came in here once and—"
"I did you a favor, didn't I?" (That voice is familiar, Temple thought.)
"Well, yes. But what now?"
"Temple's record is now one and one. In the second sequence he was the victor. The Soviet entry had to extract certain information from him and turn it over to her people. She extracted the information well enough but somehow Temple made her change her mind. The information never went anyplace. How Temple managed to play counterspy I don't know, but he played it and won."
"That's fine. But what do you want?"
"The final E.C.R. is critical." (The voice was Arkalion's!) "How critical, I can't tell you. Sufficient though, if you know that you lose no matter how Temple fares. If the Russian woman defeats Temple, you lose."
"Naturally."
"Let me finish. If Temple defeats the Russian woman, you also lose. Either way, Earth is the loser. I haven't time to explain what you wouldn't understand anyway. Will you cooperate?"
"Umm-mm. You did save Temple's life. Umm-mm, yes. All right."
"The third dream sequence is the wrong dream, the wrong contest with the wrong antagonist at the wrong time, when a far more important contest is brewing...with the fate of Earth as a reward for the victor."
"What do you propose?"
"I will arrange Temple's final dream. But if he disappears from this room, don't be alarmed. It's a dream of a different sort. Temple won't know it until the dream progresses, you won't know it until everything is concluded, but Temple will fight for a slave or a free Earth."
"Can't you tell us more?"
"There is no time, except to say that along with the rest of the Galaxy, you've been duped. The Nowhere Journey is a grim, tragic farce.
"Awaken, Kit!"
Temple awoke into what he thought was the third and final dream. Strange, because this time he knew where he was and why, knew also that he was dreaming, even remembered vividly the other two dreams.
* * * *
"Stealth," said Arkalion, and led Temple through long, white-walled corridors. They finally came to a partially open door and paused there. Peering within, Temple saw a room much like the one he had left, with two white-gowned figures standing anxiously over a table. And prone on the table was Sophia, whom Temple had loved short moments before, in his second dream. Moments? Years. (Never, except in a dream.)
"She's lovely," Arkalion whispered.
"I know." Like himself, Sophia was garbed in a loose jumper and slacks.
"Stealth," said Arkalion again. "Haste." Arkalion disappeared.
"Well," Temple told himself. "What now? At least in the other dreams I was thrust so completely into things, I knew what to do." He rubbed his jaw grimly. "Not that it did much good the first time."
Temple poked the partially-ajar door with his foot, pushing it open. The two white-smocked figures had their backs to him, leaned intently over the table and Sophia. Without knowing what motivated him, Temple leaped into the room, grasped the nearer figure's arm, whirled him around. Startled confusion began to alter the man's coarse features, but his face went slack when Temple's fist struck his jaw with terrible strength. The man collapsed.
The second man turned, mouthing a stream of what must have been Russian invective. He parried Temple's quick blow with his left hand, crossing his own right fist to Temple's face and almost ending the fight as quickly as it had started. Temple went down in a heap and was vaguely aware of the Russian's booted foot hovering over his face. He reached out, grabbed the boot with both hands, twisted. The man screamed and fell and then they were rolling over and over, striking each other with fists, knees, elbows, gouging, butting, cursing. Temple found the Russian's throat, closed his hands around it, applied pressure. Fists pounded his face, nails raked him, but slowly he succeeded in throttling the Russian. When Temple got to his feet, trembling, the Russian stared blankly at the ceiling. He would go on staring that way until someone shut his eyes.
Not questioning the incomprehensible, Temple knew he had done what he must. Hardly seeking for the motive he could not find he lifted the unconscious Sophia off the table, slung her long form across his shoulder, plodded with her from the room. Arkalion had said haste. He would hurry.
He next was aware of a spaceship. Remembering no time lag, he simply stood in the ship with Arkalion. And Sophia.
* * * *
He knew it was a spaceship because he had been in one before and although the sensation of weightlessness was not present, they were in deep space. Stars you never see through an obscuring atmosphere hung suspended in the viewports. Cold-bright, not flickering against the plush blackness of deep space, phalanxes and legions of stars without numbers, in such wild profusion that space actually seemed three dimensional.
"This is a different sort of dream," said Sophia in English. "I remember. I remember everything. Kit—"
"Hello." He felt strangely shy, became mildly angry when Arkalion hardly tried to suppress a slight snicker. "Well, that second dream wasn't our idea," Temple protested. "Once there, we acted...and—"
"And...." said Sophia.
"And nothing," Arkalion told them. "You haven't time. This is a spaceship, not like the slow, blumbling craft your people use to reach Mars or Jupiter."
"Our people?" Temple demanded. "Not yours?"
"Will you let me finish? Light is a laggard crawler by comparison with the drive propelling this ship. Temple, Sophia, we are leaving your Galaxy altogether."
"Is that a fact?" said Sophia, her Jupiter-found knowledge telling her they were traveling an unthinkable distance. "For some final contest between us, no doubt, to decide whether the U. S. S. R. or the U. S. represents Earth? Kit, I l-love you, but...."
"But Russia is more important, huh?"
"No. I didn't say that. All my training has been along those lines, though, and even if I'm aware it is indoctrination, the fact still remains. If your country is truly better, but if I have seen your country only through the eyes of Pravda, how can I...I don't know, Kit. Let me think."
"You needn't," said Arkalion, smiling. "If the two of you would let me get on with it you'd see this particular train of thought is meaningless, quite meaningless." Arkalion cleared his throat.
"Strange, but I have much the same problem as Sophia has. My indoctrination was far more subtle though. Far more convincing, based upon eons of propaganda methods. Temple, Sophia, those who initiated the Nowhere Journey for hundreds of worlds of your galaxy did so with a purpose."
"I know. To decide who gets their vast knowledge."
"Wrong. To find suitable hosts in a one-way relationship which is hardly symbiosis, really out and out parasitism."
"What?"
And Sophia: "What are you talking about?"
"The sick, decadent, tired old creatures you consider your superiors. Parasites. They need hosts in order to survive. Their old hosts have been milked dry, have become too highly specialized, are now incapable physically or emotionally of meeting a wide variety of environmental challenges. The Nowhere Journey is to find a suitable new host. They have found one. You of Earth."
"I don't understand," Temple said, remembering the glowing accounts of the 'superboys' he had been given by his brother Jason. "I just don't get it. How can we be duped like that? Wouldn't someone have figured it out? And if they have all the power everyone says, there isn't much we can do about it, anyway."
Arkalion scowled darkly. "Then write Earth's obituary. You'll need one."
"Go ahead," Sophia told Arkalion. "There's more you want to say."
"All right. Temple's thought is correct. They have tremendous power. That is why you could be duped so readily. But their power is not concentrated here. These much-faster-than-light ships are an extreme rarity, for the power-drive no longer exists. Five ships in all, I believe. Hardly enough to invade a planet, even for them. It takes them thousands of years to get here otherwise. Thousands. Just as it took me, when I came to Mars and Earth in the first place."
"What?" cried Temple. "You...."
"I am one of them. Correct. I suppose you would call me a subversive, but I have made up my mind. Parasitism is unsatisfactory, when the Maker got us started on symbiosis. Somewhere along the line, evolution took a wrong turn. We are—monsters."
"What do you look like?" Sophia demanded while Temple stood there shaking his head and muttering to himself.
* * * *
"You couldn't see me, I am afraid. I was the representative here to see how things were going, and when my people found you of the Earth divided yourselves into two camps they realized they had been considering your abilities in halves. Put together, you are probably the top culture of your galaxy."
"So, we win," said Temple.
"Right and wrong. You lose. Earthmen will become hosts. Know what a back-seat driver is, Temple? You would be a back seat driver in your own body. Thinking, feeling, wanting to make decisions, but unable to. Eating when the parasite wants to, sleeping at his command, fighting, loving, living as he wills it. And perishing when he wants a new garment. Oh, they offer something in return. Their culture, their way of life, their scientific, economic, social system. It's good, too. But not worth it. Did you know that their economic struggle between democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism ended almost half a million years ago? What they have now is a system you couldn't even understand."
"Well," Temple mused, "even if everything you said were true—"
"Don't tell me you don't believe me?"
"If it were true and we wanted to do something about it, what could we do?"
"Now, nothing. Nothing but delay things by striking swiftly and letting fifty centuries of time perform your rearguard action. Destroy the one means your enemy has of reaching Earth within foreseeable time and you have destroyed his power to invade for a hundred centuries. He can still reach Earth, but the same way you journeyed to Nowhere. Ten thousand years of space travel in suspended animation. You saw me that way once, Temple, and wondered. You thought I was dead, but that is another story.
"Anyway, let my people invade your planet, ten thousand years hence. If Earth takes the right direction, if democracy and free thought and individual enterprise win over totalitarian standardization as I think they will, your people will be more than a match for the decadent parasites who may or may not have sufficient initiative to cross space the slow way and attempt invasion in ten thousand years."
"Ten thousand?" said Temple.
"Five from Earth to Nowhere. The distance to my home is far greater, but the rate of travel can be increased. Ten thousand years."
"Tell me," Temple demanded abruptly, "is this a dream?"
Arkalion smiled. "Yes and no. It is not a dream like the others because I assure you your bodies are not now resting on a pair of identical white tables. Still in the other dreams physical things could happen to you, while now you'll find you can do things as in a dream. For example, neither one of you knows the intricacies of a spaceship, yet if you are to save your planet, you must know the operation of the most intricate of all space ships, a giant space station."
"Then we're not dreaming?" asked Temple.
"I never said that. Consider this sequence of events about half way between the dream stage you have already seen and reality itself. Remember this: you'll have to work together; you'll have to function like machines. You will be handling totally alien equipment with only the sort of knowledge which can be played into your brains to guide you."
Sophia sighed. "Being an American, Kit is too much of an individual to help in such a situation."
Temple snorted. "Being a cog in a simple, state-wide machine is one thing—orienting yourself in a totally new situation is another."
"Yes, well—"
"See?" Arkalion cautioned. "See? Already you are arguing, but you must work together completely, with not the slightest conflict between you. As it is, you hardly have a chance."
"What about you?" said Sophia practically. "Can't you help?"
* * * *
Arkalion shook his head. "No. While I'd like to see you come out of this thing on top, I would not like to sacrifice my life for it—which is exactly what I'd do if I remained with you and you lost.
"So, let's get down to detail. Imagine space being folded, imagine your time sense slowing, imagine a new dimension which negates the need for extensive linear travel, imagine anything you want—but we are in the process of moving nine hundred thousand light years through deep space. There is a great galaxy at that distance, almost a twin of your Milky Way: you call it the Andromeda Nebula. Closer to your own system are the two Magellanic Clouds, so called, something else which you table NGC 6822, and finally the Triangulum Galaxy. All have billions of stars, but none of the stars have life. To find life outside your galaxy you must seek it across almost a million light years. My people live in Andromeda.
"Guarding the flank of their galaxy and speeding through inter-galactic space at many light years per minute is what you might call a space station—but on a scale you've never dreamed of. Five of your miles in diameter, it is a fortress of terrible strength, a storehouse of half a million years of weapon development. It has been arranged that the one man running this station—"
"Just one?" Temple asked.
"Yes. You will see why when you get there. It has been arranged that he will leave, ostensibly on a scouting expedition. You see, I am not alone in this venture. At any rate, he will report that the space station has been taken—as, indeed, it will be, by the two of you. The only ships capable of overtaking your station in its flight will be the only ships capable of reaching your galaxy before cultural development gives you a chance to survive. They will attack you. You will destroy them—or be destroyed yourselves. Any questions?"
The whole thing sounded fantastic to Temple. Could the fate of all Earth rest on their shoulders in a totally alien environment? Could they be expected to win? Temple had no reason to doubt the former, as wild as it sounded. As for the latter, all he could do was hope. "Tell me," he said, "how will we learn the use of all the weapons you claim are at our disposal?"
"Can you answer that for him, Sophia?" Arkalion wanted to know.
"Umm, I think so. The same way I had all sorts of culture crammed into me on Jupiter."
"Precisely. Only take it from me our refinement is far better, and the amount you have to learn actually is less."
"What I'd like to know—" Sophia began.
"Forget it. I want some sleep and you'll learn everything that's necessary at the space station."
And after that, ply Arkalion as they would with questions, he slumped down in his chair and rested. Temple could suddenly understand and appreciate. He felt like curling up into a tight little ball himself and sleeping until everything was over, one way or the other.
CHAPTER X
"It's all so big! So incredible! We'll never understand it! Never...."
"Relax, Sophia. Arkalion said—"
"I know what Arkalion said, but we haven't learned anything yet."
Hours before, Arkalion had landed them on the space station, a gleaming, five-mile in diameter globe, and had quickly departed. Soon after that they had found themselves in a veritable labyrinth of tunnels, passageways, vaults. Occasionally they passed a great glowing screen, and always the view of space was the same. Like a magnificent, elongated shield, sparkling with a million million points of light, pale gold, burnished copper, blue of glacial ice and silver white, the Andromeda Galaxy spanned space from upper right to lower left. Off at the lower right hand corner they could see their space station; apparently the viewer itself stood far removed in space, projecting its images here at the globe.
Awed the first time they had seen one of the screens, Temple said, "All the poets who ever wrote a line would have given half their lives to see this as we see it now."
"And all the writers, musicians, artists...."
"Anyone, who ever thought creatively, Sophia. How can you say it's breathtaking or anything like that when words weren't ever spoken which can...."
"Let's not go poetic just yet," Sophia admonished him with a smile. "We'd better get squared away here, as the expression goes, before it's too late."
"Yes.... Hello, what's this?" A door irised open for them in a solid wall of metal. Irised was the only word Temple could think of, for a tiny round hole appeared in the wall spreading evenly in all directions with a slow, uniform, almost liquid motion. When it was large enough to walk through, they entered a completely bare room and Temple whirled in time to see the entrance irising shut.
"Something smells," said Sophia, sniffing at the air.
Sweet and cloying, the odor grew stronger. Temple may have heard a faint hissing sound. "I'm getting sleepy," he said.
Nodding, Sophia ran, banged on the wall where the door had opened so suddenly, then closed. No response. "Is it a trap?"
"By whom? For what?" Temple found it difficult to keep his eyes from closing. "Fight it if you want, Sophia. I'm going to sleep." And he squatted in the center of the floor, staring vacantly at the bare wall.
Just as Temple was drifting off into a dream about complex machinery he did not yet understand but realized he soon would, Sophia joined him the hard way, collapsing alongside of him, unconscious and sprawling gracelessly on the floor.
Temple slept.
* * * *
"Sleepy-head, get up." Sophia stirred as he spoke and shook her. She yawned, stretched, smiled up at him lazily. "How do you feel now?"
"Hungry, Kit."
"That's a point. It's all right now, though. I know exactly where the food concentrates are kept. Three levels below us, second segment of the wall. You can make those queer doors iris by pressing the wall twice, with about a one second interval."
They found the food compartment, discovered row on row of cans, boxes, jars. Temple opened one of the cans, gazed in disappointment on a sorry looking thing the size of his thumb. Brown, shriveled, dry and almost flaky, it might have been a bird.
Sophia turned up her nose. "If that's the best this place has to offer, I'm not so hungry anymore."
Suddenly, she gaped. So did Temple. A savory odor attracted their attention, steam rising from the small can added to their interest. Amazing things happened to the withered scrap of food on exposure to the air. Temple barely had time to extract it from the can, burning his fingers in the process, when it became twice the can's size. It grew and by the time it finished, it was as savory looking a five pound fowl as Temple had ever seen. Roasted, steaming hot, ready to eat.
They tore into it with savage gusto.
"Stephanie should see me now," Temple found himself saying and regretted it.
"Stephanie? Who's that?"
"A girl."
"Your girl?"
"What's the difference? She's a million light years and fifty centuries away."
"Answer me."
"Yes," said Temple, wishing he could change the subject. "My girl." He hadn't thought of Stephanie in a long time, perhaps because it was meaningless to think of someone dead fifty centuries. Now that the thoughts had been stirred within him, though, he found them poignantly pleasant.
"Your girl...and you would marry her if you could?"
He had grown attached to Sophia, not in reality, but in the second of their dream worlds. He wished the memory of the dream had not lingered for it disturbed him. In it he had loved Sophia as much as he now loved Stephanie although the one was obtainable and the other was a five-thousand year pinch of dust. And how much of the dream lingered with him, in his head and his heart?
"Let's forget about it," Temple suggested.
"No. If she were here today and if everything were normal, would you marry her?"
"Why talk about what can't be?"
"I want to know, that's why."
"All right. Yes, I would. I would marry Stephanie."
"Oh," said Sophia. "Then what happened in the dream meant...nothing."
"We were two different people," Temple said coolly, then wished he hadn't for it was only half-true. He remembered everything about the dream-which-was-more-than-a-dream vividly. He had been far more intimate with Sophia, and over a longer period of time, than he had ever been with Stephanie. And even if Stephanie appeared impossibly on the spot and he spent the rest of his life as her husband, still he would never forget his dream-life with Sophia. In time he could let himself tell her that. But not now; now the best thing he could do would be to change the subject.
"I see," Sophia answered him coldly.
"No, you don't. Maybe some day you will."
"There's nothing but what you told me. I see."
"No...forget it," he told her wearily.
"Of course. It was only a dream anyway. The dream before that I almost killed you out of hatred anyway. Love and hate, I guess they neutralize. We're just a couple of people who have to do a job together, that's all."
"For gosh sakes, Sophia! That isn't true. I loved Stephanie. I still would, were Stephanie alive. But she's—she's about as accessible as the Queen of Sheba."
"So? There's an American expression—you're carrying a torch."
Probably, Temple realized, it was true. But what did all of that have to do with Sophia? If he and Sophia...if they...would it be fair to Sophia? It would be exactly as if a widower remarried, with the memory of his first wife set aside in his heart...no, different, for he had never wed Stephanie, and always in him would be the desire for what had never been.
"Let's talk about it some other time," Temple almost pleaded, wanting the respite for himself as much as for Sophia.
"No. We don't have to talk about it ever. I won't be second best, Kit. Let's forget all about it and do our job. I—I'm sorry I brought the whole thing up."
Temple felt like an unspeakable heel. And, anyway, the whole thing wasn't resolved in his mind. But they couldn't just let it go at that, not in case something happened when the ships came and one or both of them perished. Awkwardly, for now he felt self-conscious about everything, he got his arms about Sophia, drew her to him, placed his lips to hers.
That was as far as he got. She wrenched free, shoved clear of him. "If you try that again, you will have another dislocated jaw."
Temple shrugged wearily. If anything were to be resolved between them, it would be later.
When the ships came moments afterwards—seven, not the five Arkalion predicted—they were completely unprepared.
* * * *
Temple spotted them first on one of the viewing screens, half way between the receiver and the space station itself, silhouetted against the elongated shield of Andromeda. They soared out of the picture, appeared again minutes later, zooming in from the other direction in two flights of four ships and three.
"Come on!" Sophia cried over her shoulder, irising the door and plunging from the room. Temple followed at her heels but her Jupiter trained muscles pushed her lithe legs in long, powerful strides and soon she outdistanced him. By the time he reached the armaments vault, breathless, she was seated at the single gun-emplacement, her fingers on the controls.
"Watch the viewing screen and tell me how we're doing," Sophia told him, not taking her eyes from the dials and levers.
Temple watched, fascinated, saw a thin pencil of radiant energy leap out into space, missing one of the ships by what looked like a scant few miles. He called the corrective azimuth to her, hardly surprised by the way his mind had absorbed and now could use its new-found knowledge.
Temple understood and yet did not understand. For example, he knew the station had but one gun and Sophia sat at it now, yet in certain ways it didn't make sense. Could it cover all sectors of space? His mind supplied the answer although he had not been aware of the knowledge an instant before: yes. The space station did not merely rotate. Its surface was a spherical projection of a moving Moebius strip and although he tried to envision the concept, he failed. The weapon could be fired at any given point in space at twenty second intervals, covering every other conceivable point in the ensuing time.
Sophia was firing again and Temple watched the thin beam leap across space. "Hit!" he roared. "Hit!"
Something flashed at the front end of the lead ship. The light blinded him, but when he could see again only six ships remained in space—casting perfect shadows on the Andromeda Galaxy! The source of light, Temple realized triumphantly, was out of range, but he could picture it—a glowing derelict of a ship, spewing heat, light and radioactivity into the void.
"One down," Sophia called. "Six to go. I like your American expressions. Like sitting ducks—"
She did not finish. Abruptly, light flared all around them. Something shrieked in Temple's ears. The vault shuddered, shook. Girders clattered to the floor, stove it in, revealing black rock. Sophia was thrown back from the single gun, crashing against the wall, flipping in air and landing on her stomach.
Temple ran to her, turned her over. Blood smeared her face, trickled from her lips. Although she did not move, she wasn't dead. Temple half dragged, half carried her from the vault into an adjoining room. He stretched her out comfortably as he could on the floor, ran back into the vault.
Molten metal had collected in one corner of the room, crept sluggishly toward him across the floor, heating it white-hot. He skirted it, climbed over a twisted girder, pushed his way past other debris, found himself at the gun emplacement.
"How dumb can I get?" Temple said aloud. "Sophia ran to the gun, must have assumed I set up the shields." Again, it was an item of information stored in his mind by the wisdom of the space station. Protective shields made it impossible for anything but a direct hit on the emplacement to do them any harm, only Temple had never set the shields in place. He did so now, merely by tripping a series of levers, but glancing at a dial to his left he realized with alarm that the damage possibly had already been done. The needle, which measured lethal radiation, hovered half way between negative and the critical area marked in red and, even as Temple watched it, crept closer to the red.
* * * *
"How much time did he have? Temple could not be sure, bent grimly over the weapon. It was completely unfamiliar to his mind, completely unfamiliar to his fingers. He toyed with it, released a blast of radiant energy, whirled to face the viewing screen. The beam streaked out into the void, clearly hundreds of miles from its objective.
Cursing, Temple tried again, scoring a near miss. The ships were trading a steady stream of fire with him now, but with the shielding up it was harmless, striking and then bouncing back into space. Temple scored his first hit five minutes after sitting down at the gun, whooped triumphantly and fired again. Five ships left.
But the dial indicated an increase in radioactivity as newly created neutrons spread their poison like a cancer. Behind Temple, the vault was a shambles. The pool of molten metal had increased in size, almost cutting off any possibility of escape. He could jump it now, Temple realized, but it might grow larger. Consolidating its gains now, it had sheared a pit in the floor, had commenced vaporizing the rock below it, hissing and lapping with white-hot insistence.
Something boomed, grated, boomed again and Temple watched another girder bounce off the floor, dip one end into the molten pool and clatter out a stub. Apparently the damage was extensive; a structural weakness threatened to make the entire ceiling go.
Temple fired again, got another ship. He could almost feel death breathing on his shoulder, in no great hurry but sure of its prize. He fired the weapon.
If one ship remained when they could no longer use the gun, they would have failed. One ship might make the difference for Earth. One....
Three left. Two.
They raked the space station with blast after blast—futilely. They spun and twisted and streaked by, offering poor targets. Temple waited his chance...and glanced at the dial which measured radioactivity. He yelped, stood up. The needle had encroached upon the red area. Death to remain where he was more than a moment or two. Not quick death, but rather slow and lingering. He could do what he had to, then perish hours later. His life—for Earth? If Arkalion had known all the answers, and if he could get both ships and if there weren't another alternative for the aliens, the parasites.... Temple stabbed out with his pencil beam, caught the sixth ship, then saw the needle dip completely into the red. He got up trembling, stepped back, half tripped on the stump of a girder as his eyes strayed in fascination to the viewing screen. The seventh ship was out of range, hovering off in the void somewhere, awaiting its chance. If Temple left the gun the ship would come in close enough to hit the emplacement despite its protective shielding. Well, it was suicide to remain there—especially when the ship wasn't even in view.
Temple leaped over the molten pool and left the vault.
* * * *
He found Sophia stirring, sitting up.
"What hit me?" she said, and laughed. "Something seems to have gone wrong, Kit...what...?"
"It's all right now," he told her, lying.
"You look pale."
"You got one. I got five. One ship to go."
"What are you waiting for?" And Sophia sprang to her feet, heading for the vault.
"Hold it!" Temple snapped. "Don't go in there."
"Why not. I'll get the last ship and—"
"Don't go in there!" Temple tugged at her arm, pulled her away from the vault and its broken door which would not iris closed any more.
"What's the matter, Kit?"
"I—I want to finish the last one myself, that's all."
Sophia got herself loose, reached the circular doorway, peered inside. "Like Dante's Inferno," she said. "You told me nothing was the matter. Well, we can get through to the emplacement, Kit."
"No." And again he stopped her. At least he had lived in freedom all his life and although he was still young and did not want to die, Sophia had never known freedom until now and it wouldn't be right if she perished without savoring its fruits. He had a love, dust fifty centuries, he had his past and his memories. Sophia had only the future. Clearly, if someone had to yield life, Temple would do it.
"It's worse than it looks," he told her quietly, drawing her back from the door again. He explained what had happened, told her the radioactivity had not quite reached critical point—which was a lie. "So," he concluded, "we're wasting time. If I rush in there, fire, and rush right out everything will be fine."
"Then let me. I'm quicker than you."
"No. I—I'm more familiar with the gun." Dying would not be too bad, if he went with reasonable certainty he had saved the Earth. No man ever died so importantly, Temple thought briefly, then felt cold fear when he realized it would be dying just the same. He fought it down, said: "I'll be right back."
Sophia looked at him, smiling vaguely. "Then you insist on doing it?"
When he nodded she told him, "Then,—kiss me. Kiss me now, Kit—in case something...."
Fiercely, he swept her to him, bruising her lips with his. "Sophia, Sophia...."
At last, she drew back. "Kit," she said, smiling demurely. She took his right hand in her left, held it, squeezed it. Her own right hand she suddenly brought up from her waist, fist clenched, driving it against his jaw.
Temple fell, half stunned by the blow, at her feet. For the space of a single heartbeat he watched her move slowly toward the round doorway, then he had clambered to his feet, running after her. He got his arms on her shoulders, yanked at her.
When she turned he saw she was crying. "I—I'm sorry, Kit. You couldn't fool me about.... Stephanie. You can't fool me about this." She had more leverage this time. She stepped back, bringing her small, hard fist up from her knees. It struck Temple squarely at the point of the jaw, with the strength of Jovian-trained muscle behind it. Temple's feet left the floor and he landed with a thud on his back. His last thought of Sophia—or of anything, for a while—made him smile faintly as he lost consciousness. For a kiss she had promised him another dislocated jaw, and she had kept her promise....
Later, how much later he did not know, something soft cushioned his head. He opened his eyes, stared through swirling, spinning murk. He focussed, saw Arkalion. No—two Arkalions standing off at a distance, watching him. He squirmed, knew his head was cushioned in a woman's lap. He sighed, tried to sit up and failed. Soft hands caressed his forehead, his cheeks. A face swam into vision, but mistily. "Sophia," he murmured. His vision cleared.
It was Stephanie.
* * * *
"It's over," said Arkalion. "We're on our way back to Earth, Kit."
"But the ships—"
"All destroyed. If my people want to come here in ten thousand years, let them try. I have a hunch you of Earth will be ready for them."
"It took us five thousand to reach Nowhere," Temple mused. "It will take us five thousand to return. We'll come barely in time to warn Earth—"
"Wrong," said Arkalion. "I still have my ship. We're in it now, so you'll reach Earth with almost fifty centuries to spare. Why don't you forget about it, though? If human progress for the next five thousand years matches what has been happening for the last five, the parasites won't stand a chance."
"Earth—five thousand years in the future," Stephanie said dreamily. "I wonder what it will be like.... Don't be so startled, Kit. I was a pilot study on the Nowhere Journey. If I made it successfully, other women would have been sent. But now there won't be any need."
"I wouldn't be too sure of that," said the real Alaric Arkalion III. "I suspect a lot of people are going to feel just like me. Why not go out and colonize space. We can do it. Wonderful to have a frontier again.... Why, a dozen billionaires will appear for every one like my father. Good for the economy."
"So, if we don't like Earth," said Stephanie, "we can always go out."
"I have a strong suspicion you will like it," said Arkalion's double.
Alaric III grinned. "What about you, bud? I don't want a twin brother hanging around all the time."
Arkalion grinned back at him. "What do you want me to do, young man? I've forsaken my people. This is now my body. Tell you what, I promise to be always on a different continent. Earth isn't so small that I'll get in your hair."
Temple sat up, felt the bandages on his jaw. He smiled at Stephanie, told her he loved her and meant it. It was exactly as if she had returned from the grave and in his first exultation he hadn't even thought of Sophia, who had perished all alone in the depths of space that a world might live....
He turned to Arkalion. "Sophia?"
"We found her dead, Kit. But smiling, as if everything was worth it."
"It should have been me."
"Whoever Sophia was," said Stephanie, "she must have been a wonderful woman, because when you got up, when you came to, her name was...."
"Forget it," said Temple. "Sophia and I have a very strange relationship and...."
"All right, you said forget it. Forget it." Stephanie smiled down at him. "I love you so much there isn't even room for jealousy.... Ummm.... Kit...."
"Break up that clinch," ordered Arkalion. "We're making one more stop at Nowhere to pick up anyone who wants to return to Earth. Some of 'em probably won't but those who do are welcome...."
"Jason will stay," Temple predicted. "He'll be a leader out among the stars."
"Then he'll have to climb over my back," Alaric III predicted happily, his eyes on the viewport hungrily.
Temple's jaw throbbed. He was tired and sleepy. But satisfied. Sophia had died and for that he was sad, but there would always be a place deep in his heart for the memory of her: delicious, somehow exotic, not a love the way Stephanie was, not as tender, not as sure...but a feeling for Sophia that was completely unique. And whenever the strangeness of the far-future Earth frightened Temple, whenever he felt a situation might get the better of him, whenever doubt clouded judgment, he would remember the tall lithe girl who had walked to her death that a world might have the freedom she barely had tasted. And together with Stephanie he would be able to do anything.
Unless, he thought dreamily as he drifted off to sleep, his head pillowed again on Stephanie's lap, he'd wind up with a bum jaw the rest of his life.
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT
Published under the pseudonym "Adam Chase"
Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village.
He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing, parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius' second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.
He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest time as a boy.
He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and brought the ladle to his lips.
He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.
Poisoned.
He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.
The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too late for anything.
He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard scurried away.
"Earthman!" a quavering voice called.
Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center, a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin, which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.
Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the canteen and said:
"What happened here?"
"They're gone. All gone."
"Yes, but what happened?"
"The Kumaji—"
"You're Kumaji."
"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now they're gone."
"But you stayed here—"
"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."
Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened." Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy, Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government, so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions, almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.
"When did it happen?" Steve demanded.
"Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go, and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses."
"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City, built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground, was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....
"They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women and children. The Kumaji are after them."
Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists, trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or death.
"Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two in a pinch."
"You're going after them?"
"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long."
"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember."
"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell."
"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow."
"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—"
"I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good, long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?"
"No," Steve said.
"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck."
"But you can't—"
"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow."
Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.
Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.
The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people...hurry...Kumaji looking for them to kill...desert wind ought to wipe out their trail...but hurry...."
The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind. Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.
Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....
"Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said. "I'm one of you."
Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh, no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?"
The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now, Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation. Perhaps that explained his bitterness.
"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell."
The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly. They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve said. She was the only family he remembered.
Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died from the poisoned water last night."
For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death. Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.
* * * *
The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl. She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the girl said.
"Young Cantwell. Remember?"
So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly. She was a woman now....
"Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your aunt. If there's anything I can do...."
Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was completely genuine.
He appreciated it.
Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be poor again. We could have been rich."
Steve asked, "What happened to all your profits?"
"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll never see it again."
Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.
But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was comforting and reassuring.
* * * *
Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.
The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day. Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.
"But why?" someone asked. "Why?"
At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the Kumaji."
None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.
"Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said.
"Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the colony. "I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?"
"That's what I was told," Steve said.
"All right," Gort went on relentlessly. "Then this is what I figure must have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight."
"No?" someone asked.
"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness.
Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?"
"N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.
Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?"
Steve shook his head. "Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel, Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each day. He won't get far."
"He'll crash in the desert?"
"Crash or crash-land," Steve said.
Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.
"We've got to stop him," Gort said. "And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji, they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find us—or are led to us—and attack."
Steve said, "I should have taken something out of the 'copter every night, so it couldn't start. I'll go."
Mary came forward boldly. "I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying."
Gort looked at her. "And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?"
"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise."
"That's good enough for me," Steve said.
A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find mounted.
* * * *
The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding. Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in order to regain his fortune.
On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the Kumaji encampment by now.
"It doesn't seem badly damaged," Mary said.
The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.
"No," Steve said. "It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it all right."
"To go—to them?"
"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm sorry."
"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?"
"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on."
"North?"
"North."
"And if by some miracle we find him?"
Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?
As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on their thlots. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel aside. "They'd kill us," he said. "We can only surrender."
They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular tent.
Tobias Whiting was in there.
"Mary!" he cried. "My God! Mary...."
"We came for you, Dad," she said coldly. "To stop you. To...to kill you if necessary."
"Mary...."
"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?"
"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live the sort of life I planned for you. You...."
"Whiting," Steve said, "did you tell them yet?"
"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our...."
"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?"
"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now, now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I couldn't stand to see them hurt you."
"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing."
"You won't have to," Whiting said. "I'll tell them when we reach the larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me."
"Then we've got to get out of here tonight," Steve said.
The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlotskin wall of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon. When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....
They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, "Dad, I don't want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were doing it for me...."
"I've made up my mind," Tobias Whiting said.
Mary turned to Steve, in despair. "Steve," she said. "Steve. Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand."
Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information? Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....
Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one guard, the man outside, came....
* * * *
Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.
Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.
"Are you asleep?" Mary asked.
"No," Steve said.
"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!"
Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's voice surprised him. "I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—"
"I'm going to kill you," Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting. He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.
Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside. Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies. The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.
The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek another.
* * * *
They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned, but Steve hardly heard him.
When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to kill attacked a man....
"Steve!"
It was Mary, calling his name and crying.
"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—"
Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.
"My stomach," Whiting said, gasping for breath. "The pain...."
Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying softly.
"You two..." Whiting gasped. "You two...Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what you want?"
"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!"
"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?"
"I think so," Steve said.
"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan. You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary."
She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: "Isn't there anything we can do for him?"
Steve shook his head. "But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to deceive them."
"I'll live long enough," Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he would. "Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man...."
* * * *
Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots. The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him, and they glided off across the sand.
Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.
Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said, "Steve, do you have to tell them?"
"We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death, sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction."
"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first."
"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can make a mistake, can't he?"
"I love you, Steve. I love you."
Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all reach Oasis City in safety.
With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.
THE ONE AND THE MANY
There are some who tell me it is a foolish war we fight. My brother told me that, for one, back in the Sunset Country. But then, my brother is lame and good for nothing but drawing pictures of the stars. He connects them with lines, like a child's puzzle, and so makes star-pictures. He has fish stars, archer stars, hunter stars. That, I would say, is what is foolish.
Perhaps that is what started it all. I was looking at the stars, trying to see the pictures, when I should have been minding my sentry post. They took me like a baby, like a tot not yet given to the wearing of clothing. The hand came out of the darkness and clamped over my mouth, and I ceased my struggling when I felt a sharp blade pricking at the small of my back.
At first I feared that they would slay the entire camp as it slept and I cursed my brother for his star-pictures, cursed our leader who had sent us here, twenty archers, against the Onist outpost on our country's border. But the Onists had other ideas. They took me away. I had to admire their vitality, because all night we ran through the silent woodlands, and they seemed tireless. I could maintain their pace, of course: but I'm a Pluralist.
I could see their village from a long way off, its night fires glowing in the dark. It was only then that we slowed our pace. Soon we entered the place, a roughly circular area within a stockade, and my captors thrust me within a hut. I couldn't do much worrying about tomorrow, not when I was so tired. I slept.
I dreamed a stupid dream about the Onist beliefs, the beliefs of an unimaginative people who could picture one Maker and one Maker only. I must have chuckled in my sleep.
* * * *
"You're awake."
A brilliant statement, that—because I had sat up, squinted into the bright sunlight streaming in through the doorway, yawned and stretched. The Onists, I tell you, lack imagination.
The girl who spoke was a pretty enough little thing for an Onist. She smiled, showing even white teeth. "Do you Pluralists eat?"
I nodded and rubbed my belly. I was to have had dinner after my turn as sentry the night before, and now I felt like I could do justice to my portion even at one of the orgies for which the Onists are so famous.
"Bring on your food and I'll show you," I told her, and she turned her back to walk outside. It was early and the village seemed silent—surely they hadn't intended this one slim maid to guard me! Yet she seemed alone.
I leaped at her, circled her neck with my arm, prepared to make my exit. They would laugh around our fire when I told them of this fine example of the Onist lack of foresight....
Except that the girl yelped. Not loudly, but it was loud enough, and a big muscular Onist came striding in with his throwing spear. He backed me off into a corner, prodding my hungry belly with his weapon.
"Will you behave?"
I told him I would and he backed outside, but this time I could see his shadow across the doorway.
The girl brought food and partook of it with me. I was surprised, because we Pluralists will not eat with an Onist out of choice. Well, I have said they are a strange people. Soon the girl stood up, patting her mouth daintily with a square of cloth, and in that, of course, she was trying to mime our graceful Pluralist women. "I suppose you think we are going to kill you," she said. Just like that.
"To tell you the truth, I haven't given it much thought. There isn't much I can do about it."
"Well, we're not. We could have done that back at your camp. We could have killed all of you. No, we want to show you something."
I had a ridiculous thought that they made star-pictures, too—even those who are not lame like my brother. I said, "Well, what will happen to me after you show me?"
She smiled. "You still think we're going to kill you. What's your name?"
I told her, but I thought: she can't even keep a conversation going without changing the subject.
"Jak," she repeated after me. "That's a common enough name. We have Jaks among our Onist people, you know."
"No, I didn't. But you probably copied it."
"I doubt that. We were here first, Jak. Our records say so. Probably, you once captured a man with that name, long ago, liked it, and took it for your people."
"You were here first!" I sneered. "Maybe that's what your records tell you, but it isn't so. Look: the Makers endowed us with life, then went away in to the sky. By mistake they left one idiot-Maker behind, and he had nothing to do. He made you Onists before he perished, and that is why you think there is only one Maker."
She seemed highly insulted. "Idiot-Maker? Idiot! There was only one Maker, ever, but because your minds cannot conceive of all that glory residing in one figure, you invented a score."
Now it was my turn to be indignant. "A score? Hundreds, you mean; thousands—more than there are leaves on the trees."
"Well, I won't argue with you. Our war has been arguing that point well enough." I was sorry she would not argue. She looked very pretty when she argued, her breasts heaving, her eyes sparkling fire.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Nari. My name is Nari. And don't tell me you had that name first!"
I smiled blandly. "Of course we did. I have an aunt, my mother's sister, who goes by that name. My brother's wife's cousin, also; but she is very ugly."
"And am I ugly?" Nari wanted to know. I guess in that sense at least, women are the same everywhere—Pluralist or Onist, it doesn't matter.
I looked at her. I looked at her so hard that it made her blush, and then she looked even prettier. But I didn't tell her so.
"You will pass, for an Onist," I admitted. "I guess the Onists might consider you pretty; the Onist men might stamp their feet and shout if you go by—but then, they are Onists."
At that, she seemed on the verge of leaving my prison hut, but something made her change her mind. She stayed all morning and on into the afternoon. We argued all the time, except at midday, when she went outside to get our lunch. She stumbled a little and fell half against my shoulder. I moved toward her to hold her up, and it was the most natural thing in the world to take her in my arms and kiss her. She must have thought so, too; she responded beautifully—for an Onist.
After lunch, Nari did not mention the kiss, nor did I. It now seemed the most natural thing in the world not to talk about it. We argued some more, Nari defending her primitive beliefs, I trying to show her the light of truth. But it was no use: the war had been fought and the war would continue.
Later that day we set out. That came as a surprise to me, because I had taken it for granted that whatever the Onists wanted to show me was right here in this little village. A dozen of us went, and when we had been on the trail for some little time, Nari joined us, declaring that she wanted to see it again—whatever it was.
We went for three days, and although these Onists turned out to be better woodsmen than I had thought, still, they could not match the skill we Pluralists have mastered over the generations. I believe I could have escaped, had I wanted to; but I hardly seemed a prisoner of war, and besides, once or twice when we had lagged to the rear of the column, Nari stumbled against me like that day in the hut, and what could I do but kiss her?
It was another village we reached at the end of our march, much bigger than the first. Surprisingly, it looked a lot like a Pluralist town, although it may only have seemed so because I had been out in the woodlands for three days. They took me straightways to the village square, and it was there that I saw the statue.
* * * *
These statues of the Makers are rare, and I was surprised to see one in an Onist village. I got on my knees at once to do it reverence. I realize it was impious to look up, but I did—I had to see if it were the genuine thing. And it was, to the last detail. Constructed of the forbidden substance known as metal, it towered three times a Pluralist's height, or three times an Onist's, for that matter. I have always wondered why the Makers did not create our ancestors in their own substance, as they had fashioned us in their image. But that is an impious thought.
A stern gray-haired Onist who said he was Nari's father took me aside afterwards. "Now, Jak," he asked me, "what can you say of what you have seen?"
I shrugged. "I can say that somehow you've found one of the Maker statues. What more?"
"It's one, is it not?"
"Of course it's one. They are rare, but I have seen three, all told, in Pluralist villages."
"And each time they were separate? You never saw a group?"
"No. No, I didn't."
He slapped his hands together triumphantly. "Then that proves it. Each is a copy of the original Maker, but there was only one. Otherwise you would have seen statues in groups. And that is why you are here, Jak: we want you to go back to your people and tell them what you saw."
I shook my head. "What you say isn't logical. So what if the statues are never in pairs or groups? We've only seen a few, when once there must have been many. Also, when your artists do their magic with dyes and create portraits, are they generally done one at a time or in groups?"
"One at a time, so the artist may capture the personality in each face, naturally. I have seen group portraits, but I think they are silly things."
"Exactly." Now I was triumphant. "Exactly as the Makers thought, which is why the statues are always single—"
"But it is impious to say there was more than one Maker! He had all the knowledge in the world at his fingertips, and so there was no need for more than one. More than this world, even: he went to the stars. Or don't you believe that?"
"Of course I believe it. Only, they went to the stars, the thousands of Makers. It isn't impious, because if you can think of one being as great as that, try to picture thousands. Yes, thousands. That makes me thousands of times more pious than you Onists."
He shook his head wearily. "What's the use? It is for this we are fighting our war, and we thought if we took one of you here, showed him the undeniable truth of our statue.... Well, will you at least return to your people with a tale of what you have seen?"
I agreed readily enough: probably, the alternative was death. Although Pluralists on rare occasions have been known to take Onist women as their wives, an Onist prisoner of war was an unwanted thing. The reverse would also be true.
* * * *
They all bid me goodbye, except for Nari. I could not find her anywhere in the village, and a little sadly I set out on my long journey back to the Sunset Land. By now our raiding party had finished its work on the small Onist village on the rim of our country, and I could do nothing but return to my people, where we might plan new strategy against the unbelievers.
But I had wanted to bid Nari farewell.
I met her in the woodlands, a travel bag slung over her shoulder like a male's. "I wanted to say goodbye privately," she told me.
"Good," I said, but I knew she was lying. Else why the travel bag?
"Goodbye," Nari whispered, but she was not looking at me. Looking, instead, behind her, at the land of her people.
"Nari," I told her, "I have to admit it. You are very pretty—even by Pluralist standards. You are—"
This time she did not stumble against me. It wasn't necessary. I drew her to me, and I kissed her a long kiss. Then I told her I loved her, and women, I suppose, will always be women, because she said she knew it.
I will take Nari back to our village in the Sunset Land, where we will be married by the laws of my people. And if ever there is to be peace between the Pluralists and the Onists, it may, after all, come on these grounds. The Onists have their beliefs, and so I hate them for their impious thoughts. But the love of a man for a maid exists apart from that.
It won't be easy. Our arguing continued all the way back to the Sunset Land, and Nari is as stubborn as I am firm.
"There is one Maker," she said.
And I told her, "No, there are many."
Or later, as we neared the Sunset Land, we picked up the thread of our thoughts again. Pluralist or Onist, we androids are dogmatic creatures.
"One Robot created us all before he went to the stars," said Nari.
"Robots," I said. "Many Robots." But I kissed her.
QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE
Published under the pseudonyms "Ivar Jorgensen" and "Adam Chase" (Ivar Jorgensen is either Paul W. Fairman or Randall Garrett)
CHAPTER I
Mansion of Mystery
In a secluded section of a certain eastern state which must remain nameless, one may leave the main highway and travel up a winding road around tortuous bends and under huge scowling trees, into wooded country.
Upon a certain night—the date of which must remain vague—there came a man who faced and was not turned back by a series of psychological barriers along this road which made it more impregnable than a steel wall. These barriers, which had kept out a hundred years of curiosity-seekers until that certain night, were forged by the scientific magic of a genius on a planet far beyond the sun....
The man who boldly followed his headlights up the road was of middle age with calm, honest eyes and a firm mouth indicating bargains made in his name would be kept. He pushed on, feeling the subtle force of the psychological powers against him but resisting because he vaguely understood them.
He left his car presently and raised his hand to touch the hard outline of a small book he carried in his breast pocket and with the gesture his determination hardened. He set his jaw firmly, snapped on the flashlight he had taken from the dash of his convertible and moved on up the road.
His firm, brisk steps soon brought him to its end, a great iron gate, its lock and hinges rusted tight under the patient hand of Time. It was high and spiked and too dangerous for climbing. But someone had smashed the lock with a heavy instrument and had applied force until the rusted hinges gave and the gate stood partially open. From the look of the metal, this could have been done recently—even in the past few minutes.
* * * *
The man entered and found a flagstone pathway. He followed this for a time with the aid of his flashlight. Then he stopped and raised the beam.
It revealed the outline of a great stone mansion, its myriad windows like black, sightless eyes, its silent bulk telling of long solitude, its tongueless voice whispering: Go away, stranger. Only peril and misfortune await you here.
But I am not exactly a stranger, the man told himself, approaching the door and half hoping to find the scowling panel locked.
But it was not locked. The ponderous knob turned under his hand. The panel moved back silently. The man gripped his flashlight and stepped inside.
The knowledge that he was no longer alone came as a shock. It was brought to him by the sound of labored breathing and he flashed the light about frantically trying to locate the source of the harsh sound. Then the bright circle picked out a huddled form on the floor nearby. The man moved forward instantly and went to his knees.
He was looking into an incredibly ancient face. The skin was so deeply lined as to hang in folds around the sunken eyes. The mouth was but a toothless maw and the body so shrunken as to seem incapable of clinging to life. The voice was a harsh whisper.
"Thank God you have come. I am dying. The opening of the gate took all my remaining strength."
"You have been waiting for me?"
"I have been waiting out the years—striving to keep life in my body until the moment of destiny. I wanted to see him. I wanted to be there when the door to his resting place opens and he comes forth to right the terrible wrongs that have been done our people."
The strength of the ancient one was ebbing fast. The words he spoke had been an effort. The kneeling man said, "I don't understand all this."
"That matters not. It is important only that you keep the bargain made long ago with your sire, and that you are here. Someone must be with him at the awakening."
The newcomer again touched the book in his pocket. "I came because our word had been given—"
The dying man picked feebly at his sleeve. "Please! You must go below! The great clock has measured the years. Soon it tolls the moment. Soon a thundering on the Plains of Ofrid will herald the new age—the Fighting Age—and a new day will dawn."
While the visitor held his frail shoulders, the dying man gasped and said, "Hasten! Hurry to the vault below! Would that I could go with you, but that is not to be."
And then the visitor realized he was holding a corpse in his arms. He laid it gently down and did as he had been directed to do.
CHAPTER II
The Great Clock of Tarth
The Plains of Ofrid on the planet Tarth stretched flat and monotonous as far as the eye could reach, a gently waving ocean of soft, knee-high grass where herds of wild stads grazed and bright-hued birds vied in brilliance with the flaming sun.
From the dark Abarian Forests to the Ice Fields of Nadia, the plain stretched unbroken except for the tall, gray tower in its exact center and it was toward this tower that various groups of Tarthans were now moving.
Every nation on the planet was represented in greater or lesser number. The slim, erect Nadians in their flat-bottomed air cars that could hang motionless in space or skim the surface of the planet at a thousand jeks an hour. The grim-faced Abarians, tall and finely muscled on their powerful stads, their jeweled uniforms flashing back the glory of the heavens. The Utalians, those chameleon men of Tarth, their skins now the exact color of the grasses across which they rode, thus causing their stads to appear unmounted and unguided.
All the nations of Tarth were represented, drawn toward the tower by a century-old legend, a legend which Retoc the Abarian clarified as he rode at the head of his own proud group.
He waved a hand, indicating the vast plain and spoke to Hultax, his second in command, saying, "Little would one think that this flat, empty land was once the site of a vast and powerful nation. One of the greatest upon all Tarth!" A smile of cruelty and satisfaction played upon his handsome features as he surveyed the plain.
"Aye," Hultax replied. "The realm of the Ofridians. Truly they were a great nation."
"But we Abarians were greater," Retoc snapped. "We not only defeated them but we leveled their land until not one stone stood upon another."
"All save the tower," Hultax said. "No weapon known could so much as scratch its surface."
A new voice cut in. "Quite true. Portox's scientific skill was too great for you." Both Abarians turned quickly to scowl at the newcomer, Bontarc of Nadia, who had swung close in his one-man car and was hovering by their side.
Retoc's hand moved toward the hilt of his long whip-like sword, driven there by the look of contempt in Bontarc's eyes. But Retoc hesitated. A formidable squadron of Bontarc's Nadian fighting men hovered nearby and the Abarian had no taste for a battle in which the odds were close to even.
"We defeated the Ofridians fairly," he said.
"And slaughtered them fairly? Cut down the men and women and children alike until the entire nation was obliterated?"
The systematic annihilation had taken place a century before when Bontarc had been but a child and Retoc a young man. Karnod, Retoc's father, now dead, had planned the war that defeated the Ofridians, his winning card having been spies in the court of Evalla, Queen of Ofrid. Karnod had been fatally wounded during the last battle and had delegated to his son the task of annihilating the Ofridians and levelling their nation. This task, Retoc accepted with relish, reserving for himself the pleasure of slaying Queen Evalla. Details of the torture to which Retoc subjected the beautiful Evalla were whispered over the planet and it was said the sadistic Retoc had taken photographs of the Queen in her agony to enjoy in later years.
It had been the scientific ability of Portox of Ofrid that had engendered the Abarian hatred and jealousy in the first place. Portox used his science for the good of all on the planet Tarth, but when Karnod, Lord of Abaria, struck, no other nation came to Ofrid's aid. Then it was too late, because Abaria's military might greatened as a result of the Ofridian defeat and only an alliance of all other nations could have conquered them.
Ironically, Portox had never been captured.
Now as the tall gray tower came into view, Bontarc's mind was filled with thoughts of Portox, the Ofridian wizard. It was said that Portox had been able to travel through space to other planets that were known to exist, that he had left Tarth and found safety somewhere across space, first building his tower which would never be destroyed; that a great clock within it was measuring off one hundred years—the time on the planet Tarth of an infant's development into manhood—and that at the end of that span the clock would toll and there would come forth a man to avenge the slaughter of the Ofridians.
Bontarc turned suddenly upon the dour Retoc. "Tell me," he said, "is there any truth to the legend that the clock in the tower will toll the end of one hundred years?"
"None whatever," the sadistic Abarian snapped. "A rumor passed from the lips of one old woman to another."
Bontarc smiled. "Then why are you here? The hundred years are up today."
Retoc's hand moved toward his whip-sword. "Are you calling me a liar?"
* * * *
Bontarc watched alertly as the blade came partly from its scabbard. "If we fight we may miss the tolling of the clock," he said evenly.
With an oath, Retoc pushed the sword back into its scabbard and put sharp heels to his stad's flanks. The animal screamed indignantly and rocketed ahead. Bontarc smiled and turned his car back toward his own group.
And now they were assembled and waiting, the curious of the planet Tarth. Would the clock toll as it was rumored Portox had said? Would an avenger come forth to challenge Retoc and his Abarian hordes?
There was not much time left. Swiftly the clock ticked off the remaining moments and the end of one hundred years was at hand. Silence settled over the assembled Tarthans.
Then a great sound boomed over the plains; a single ringing peal that rose majestically into the air, reverberated across the empty land that once had been the site of a thriving, prosperous nation. The first part of the legend had been fulfilled.
Then, suddenly, chaos reigned. With a great thundering that shook the ground upon which they stood, the gray tower exploded in crimson glory; a great mushrooming blossom of red fire erupted skyward hurling the assembled Tarthans to the ground where they lay in numbed stupor.
The thunderous report echoed across the plain ten thousand times louder than the tolling of the clock. But aside from the initial dulling shock, no Tarthan was injured because the crushing power rose upward.
There was an expression of mute wonder on Bontarc's face. And he thought: We have not seen the end of this. It is only the beginning. But the beginning of what? Only Portox could have known. And Portox was—where?
Bontarc started his car and moved across the plain sensing cosmic events but not knowing....
Not knowing that the sound of the tolling clock had gone with more than the speed of light across the void, had been flung arrow-straight to a brooding mansion in the heart of a thick forest upon another planet; to the door of a cavern deep in the rock beneath the mansion.
That even now the lock of this door had responded to the electronic impulse and the huge panel was swinging slowly open.
CHAPTER III
The Man in the Cavern
As the sound of the tolling clock died out across the Plains of Ofrid, a man opened his eyes on the planet far away and saw for the first time the place in which he had spent one hundred years.
He awoke with neither fright nor surprise but rather with a sense of wonder. He arose slowly from the great bed upon which he had lain and allowed his attention to roam about the strange place in which he found himself.
In the wall opposite the bed there was set a full length mirror and as the man turned he saw himself for the first time; a tall, broadly-muscled figure of heroic proportions. Completely naked, his body was reflected as masculine perfection in every detail.
For a few moments, the man stared at the body as though it belonged to someone else. Then he spoke musingly. "You did your work well, Portox, my friend."
The sound of his own voice startled him but not so much so as the content of the words. A baffled expression touched his handsome face. Who was Portox? And what work had he done? What place was this—and for that matter, who was he himself, this naked figure which looked back at him from the glittering mirror?
The questions were annoying because he felt that he knew the answers. Yet they would not come within reach of his conscious mind.
He had little time to ponder this enigma however because at that moment he became aware of a second presence in the room. He turned. A man stood just inside the open door.
The naked one stared at the other with an interest that left no room for self-consciousness nor shame. "Who are you?" he asked.
"My name is John Pride," the man answered. He was a man of erect bearing and though there was wonder and surprise in his voice he bore himself with a quiet dignity. "And now," he added, "may I ask you the same question?"
* * * *
The naked man looked down at his own body and for the first time seemed conscious of its nudity. He glanced around the room and saw a robe of royal purple lying across a chair by the bed. He stepped over and lifted the robe and put it on. As he was tying the rich purple cord around his waist he looked frankly back at John Pride and said, "I do not know. I honestly do not know."
John Pride said, "I have wondered what I would find in this cavern—wondered through the years. Only in my wildest fancies did I tell myself that a fellow human—or even a living creature—awaited me here. But now I find this is true."
The younger man regarded his visitor with a calmness that belied any wariness between them. John Pride noted this with admiration and respect. The young man said, "Won't you be seated?" and when his guest was comfortable, regarded him with a smile. "Perhaps there are some things we should talk over."
"Perhaps there are. You say you do not know your own name?"
"That only begins to sum up my ignorance. I am not only unaware of my identity but I haven't the faintest notion of what this place is—where it is—or how I came here."
It was John Pride's turn to stare. While doing so, he analyzed the younger man keenly. He saw honesty and an inner warmth that attracted him. There was something almost godlike in the clean lines of the body he had seen and in the face. These things coupled with what he already knew, intrigued him mightily and he resolved to approach this strange affair with an open mind and not play the role of the unbelieving cynic. It was time to go ahead.
* * * *
John Pride said, "First, are you aware that there is another in this mansion—or was?"
"I did not even know this was a mansion. It seems only one room."
"It is an enormous structure set deep in the forest."
"This other one—?"
"A very old man. He died as I arrived here tonight."
"You do not know his name or how came he here?"
"I have a vague idea."
The young man's dazzling blue eyes narrowed in thought. "A while ago you said you have wondered through the years as to what you would find in this room. That indicates you were aware of its existence."
"True. Perhaps at this point I had better tell you the complete story—as much of it as I know."
"I would be in your debt."
"No, I will merely be discharging the last of a very old obligation."
With that, John Pride took from his pocket a small leather covered book. He handled it gently, almost with affection, and said, "This was my father's notebook. In it, is an account of this remarkable affair, put down by my great grandfather and handed down through the line. When my father died he placed it in my hand saying it entailed an obligation both business and personal and it was my obligation as well as his.
"I have read the account of what transpired many times and with your permission I will put it into my own words. Then, when I am done, I will give you the book and the affair will be over so far as I and my family are concerned."
John Pride had settled back in his chair and was just ready to begin when the young man held up a sudden hand. "Just one moment—please," he said, and a look of concentration came upon his face. Then he went on and his words took the form of a rhyme:
"An ape, a boar, a stallion,
A land beyond the stars.
A virgin's feast, a raging beast,
A prison without bars."
He flushed and added: "I don't know why I was possessed to recite that doggerel at just this moment but there is something strange about it. Strange in that I have a feeling it was taught to me at some long distant time in the past. I sense that it is very important to whatever destiny awaits me. Yet I know not who taught me the verse nor what it means."
"That verse is inscribed in this book and I believe I know how it entered your mind and memory. I believe too, that I understand how you are able to converse with me though you know nothing of this land or even this room," John Pride said quietly.
"Then please tell me!"
"I think it better that I start at the beginning rather than give you the story piece-meal. That way, your mind will be better able to assimilate and to judge."
"I await your pleasure," the young man said with impatience he strove to conceal.
"Very well," John Pride said, his eyes growing vague with a far-away look.
CHAPTER IV
John Pride's Story
"I am a member," John Pride began, "of a firm called Pride, Conroy, and Wilson. We are a very old firm of private bankers with offices in Wall Street. Both Conroy and Wilson died before I was born, leaving no issue, so the company has been controlled by a Pride for many years.
"This affair in which we are interested had its inception one hundred years ago. At that time, a man came to see my great grandfather in his office. He was a most remarkable man and gained my grandfather's respect and confidence from the very first. He never stated from whence he came, being more interested in the future than in the past. He put up at a New York City hotel and my great grandfather knew there were three in his party; the man himself, another man and a woman both somewhat older than he.
"At one time when my great grandfather visited them in their hotel suite, he saw the woman fleetingly as she was leaving the room. She was carrying something that he thought could have been an infant snuggled in a blanket. He could not be sure however and he did not ask questions.
"The man was interested in obtaining a place of abode, a place that had to possess certain definite qualifications. First, it had to be built upon solid rock and set in the most secluded location possible.
"Second, it had to be so completely free of legal involvements that when he secured title, no possible claim of another could ever be taken seriously enough to even cause the property to be visited. In short, the strange man said, details relevant to the property must integrate to a point where no one would visit it for one hundred years."
At this place in his narrative, John Pride stopped a moment to rest his voice. After a pause, the young man in the purple robe inquired, "Why do you smile?"
"At the recollection. My great grandfather had just a white elephant—"
"A white elephant?"
"Merely a descriptive term. A place that had been built before the Revolution but which even at that early time had been bypassed by the trend of progress until it was completely isolated. No one wanted it. No one would ever want it so far as my great grandfather could judge."
"Except this strange man you speak of."
"Precisely. He was delighted with the place and when my great grandfather pointed out that even with the location and the high surrounding wall there was no guarantee that wandering adventurers might not move in and take possession at some distant date, the man smiled cryptically and said he would see to it that that did not occur."
The young man was scowling. "I know that man. He is somewhere back in my mind, but he will not come forward."
John Pride regarded his listener for a moment and then went on. "The man seemed in ample funds and paid for the property with a giant ruby the like of which my great grandfather had never before set eyes on.
"But the affair was far from ended. The man moved his ménage into the mansion saying he would call upon my great grandfather later.
* * * *
"All the legal formalities had been of course taken care of—an indisputable deed, guaranteed by the strongest trust company in the land. But that was not enough.
"After a few weeks, during which time the man had inquired of my great grandfather where certain materials could be obtained, he returned to the old gentleman's office with the most startling request of all.
"He said that he had set in motion a procedure that would terminate in exactly one hundred years from a given moment and that he wished to retain grandfather's firm as trust agents in relation to that procedure. The duties of the firm would be negligible during the hundred-year period. My great grandfather and his issue were merely to remain completely away from the property which was certainly a simple thing to do.
"But knowledge of what had taken place must be passed down to his son and in case the latter did not survive the one hundred years, to his son's son.
"At this point my great grandfather interposed reality in the form of a question: 'I have a son but suppose he is so inconsiderate as to not duplicate with a male heir?'
"The man smiled and said he was sure that would not be the case. He was right, but whether it was a gamble on his part or whether he spoke from a knowledge beyond us, we never knew.
"But regardless—at the end of one hundred years the surviving issue was, by sacred trust, to be present in this mansion. The door of a vault beneath it would open and the trustee was to enter and deliver therein a written account of the series of events leading up to that moment.
"In payment for this service, the man insisted upon presenting my great grandfather with jewels the value of which on a yearly basis transcended all our other income combined. My great grandfather demurred but the man said nothing brightens memory so much as material gain and he did not want the agreement to be forgotten."
"What happened to the man?" the young listener asked.
John Pride shook his head sadly. "We never knew. When all the arrangements were made, he came again to the office, thanked my great sire for his services, and was never seen again."
"He must have given you his name."
John Pride frowned. "He used a name of course but there was the impression of its not being his true one. The book mentions this. The name he used was C. D. Bram."
"Portox!" the young man cried suddenly.
"What did you say?"
"Portox. The name is back in my mind. I used it as I awoke."
"A strange name."
"And stranger still is the fact that I know nothing of it—wait!" The young man's handsome features strained as he concentrated with all his power. Sweat stood out on his forehead. But then a look of disappointment came into his face and his broad shoulders sagged. "No. The knowledge is somewhere back in my mind but I cannot capture it."
John Pride was about to speak but the young man stayed him with a sudden intense look. "One thing however is very clear to me."
"And that is—?"
"The face of my mother."
"The woman who held you in her arms in the hotel suite?"
"No, I do not think so. But I see a face clearly in my mind. A sad and beautiful face. There is a marked resemblance between it and what I see in that mirror. She is the most beautiful woman who ever lived and I yearn to find her and take her in my arms."
"I hope you succeed."
* * * *
A tragic light appeared in the young man's eyes. "But where is she? How can I find her? Why did she leave me in this place?"
"I do not have the answers to those questions. But I have a theory concerning you and the elapsed years."
"Tell me!"
John Pride spoke firmly but with obvious awe. "I think you were brought here as an infant for some reason known only to the one who called himself C. D. Bram."
"Or Portox."
"Perhaps. I think you were placed in that bed and left there for one hundred years."
"But—"
"Consider. That door has never been opened. There is certainly no other exit to this cavern."
"And I have no recollection of ever having lived before," the young man said slowly.
"Yet you can converse with me. You obviously have been given an education."
"But how?"
"It is known that knowledge can be injected into the subconscious while the receiver sleeps. I'm sure the man you insist upon calling Portox was aware of this—this and perhaps other scientific miracles. Who are we to say that you were not nourished by some means beyond our knowledge?"
But that investigation was never to be made because as John Pride extended his hand to touch the box it suddenly burst into a glow and he withdrew his fingers quickly.
Before the younger man could answer a glowing point of light sprang into being and brightened and a wave of searing heat erupted from the walls of the room, searing the eyes of John Pride and leaving him to grope helplessly as in the heart of a furnace. The younger man was beyond his reach. Blinding pain caused him to reel.
CHAPTER V
Question Upon Question
John Pride opened his eyes as a moan escaped his lips. The haze cleared and he found himself lying upon a cool stone floor looking up into the concerned face of the younger man. "What happened?" John Pride asked feebly. He tried to refocus.
"I don't know except that the heat of that fire was upon us with such swiftness that we were almost incapacitated. I picked you up and started walking. Fortunately I moved in the direction of the door. Otherwise we would have been doomed."
"I am in your debt."
"No more so than I in yours."
"Did you extinguish the fire?"
"It burned out of its own accord. But only after the cave was completely gutted. There is nothing left in there but the bare rock walls."
John Pride sat up with quick concern. "The book!"
"It is gone." The young man looked ruefully down at his own naked body. "Gone—together with my precious robe."
"That can easily be replaced along with other raiment but the book—I was supposed to deliver it—"
"—to the cavern. You did that, my friend. It was not through you that the fire consumed it. You have dispatched your obligation. Let your mind be at ease."
John Pride got to his feet. He shook his head in the negative. "No. A portion of my obligation still exists. Fortunately I did not bring forth the second and last item I was to place in the cavern."
"The second item?"
"Yes, and I believe the most important."
With that, Pride took from his pocket a small box wrapped in heavy material and sealed and resealed with a sort of rubberized wax.
"This," he said. "I know not what is in the box nor I think, did my father, my grandfather, nor my great grandfather before me. We have been given to understand that its delivery to the cavern was the most important single duty of the trust. So I now place it in your hands, praying that this act fulfills the long-standing obligation of my family."
The younger man had salvaged a portion of his robe, a length of material that went over his shoulders and draped skimpily down the sides of his body. This did nothing whatever in the way of covering his nudity but rather accentuated and added to it.
He took the box and was scanning it with great interest when the excitement and strenuous action of the preceding few minutes again took grip upon John Pride's comparatively less rugged physique.
His eyes closed and he began sinking again to the floor whereupon the younger man slipped the box hastily in the pocket that had not burned away from his robe and caught John Pride in his arms.
He lifted the elder man and carried him up from the mansion caverns and into the great hall that swept forward to the main entrance. As he walked, bearing the heavy burden as though it were but a mere feather, he was of two minds.
One mind entertained concern for his new-found friend and the other was occupied with interest in these new and strange surroundings.
Dawn had broken over the forest and in a brooding light within the great hall, he saw the withered body of the dead man on the floor. He paused for a moment and then went out across the flagstone porch and into the open air.
He marveled at the green expanse of forest that reared in majesty about him. He drew in deep gusts of the cool air and found it good. He smiled.
Then John Pride stirred in his arms and showed signs of returning consciousness. The young man laid the financier on the soft grass and watched until his eyes opened.
"Are you feeling better? Is there anything I can do?"
John Pride smiled feebly as he raised himself with the younger man's aid. "I'm afraid this has been more strenuous than I bargained for. If I'd known what would transpire I would have kept myself in better condition."
"But you feel better now?"
"Yes. If you will be so good as to help me to my car, I'll be all right."
"Certainly. Your car—?"
"A means of conveyance that will take me back to the city. It stands but a few yards down the road beyond the gate."
A short time later, the two men stood at the place that was to be the parting of their ways. Both sensed this and Pride held out his hand. The younger man grasped it firmly.
"Godspeed to you, my friend," John Pride said. "I fear I can help you no further but if there is ever a time when my services are needed, I will be waiting for your command."
"Thank you. Whatever befalls me I will always remember you as the first friend I ever set eyes upon in this world."
With that, John Pride turned his car and drove off down the winding road. As he left, the younger man realized the older man had said nothing of the dead ancient in the great hall but realized it was because of the strain Pride had suffered. The man was still somewhat dazed from the shock of the fire.
* * * *
He turned and walked slowly back toward the mansion until he stood again in the great front yard. There he stopped and stood looking up at the sun as it topped the hill east of the mansion.
"Who am I?" he asked himself. "Why was I given knowledge but not all the knowledge necessary to intelligently pursue my destiny? In my heart there is a certainty that I am an educated man. I am aware of the fact that there are different groups of people who speak different languages and I know I will be able to converse with any I meet.
"I know that there are planets and stars and moons and I know what is to be known of the universe. But where is the exact personal knowledge that would help me in my dealings with the future? Why was I left here carefully tended and provided for these hundred years only to be hurled suddenly upon my own?"
He walked slowly into the great hall and knelt beside the still figure on the floor. A feeling of compassion stirred him but there was no warmth of recognition, no personal sorrow as a result of the ancient's death.
"Have I ever seen you before?" he asked softly. "Were you—Portox?"
The dead one did not answer and the young man lifted him and took him from the hall and buried him. He could find no tools to dig the soil but located a hole that had once been a shallow well. He dropped the body therein and followed it with stones until the hole was filled. He did this with no sense of callousness but rather with an impersonal reverence he instinctively felt but could not analyze.
The cryptic verse had become a visual symbol in Bram's mind.
Returning slowly to the front yard, he pondered the dimension of time. How, he wondered, could John Pride's line have gone through three sires to John Pride, the last of the males, while he himself lay for one hundred years to emerge in his obvious prime? Or perhaps even on the near side of his prime.
He pondered this and other points until his mind grew weary from unanswered questions and turned to things of the moment.
"I know not what my destiny is but at least I am able to have a name. What shall it be?"
He remembered the one Portox had used—C. D. Bram. "Bram," he said. "That I like." But the C. D. meant nothing to him and Bram seemed somehow incomplete.
"John Price had a name of two parts," he said, "so why should I not have the same?"
He looked about him and a breeze in the green branches above seemed to whisper the answer. He heard and considered, then smiled to himself, raised his voice.
"I christen myself Bram Forest, to be known from this moment on by that name."
Suddenly his smile deepened, then laughter welled from his great chest; a laughter arising from the sheer joy of this new thing called living into which he had stepped.
Now he stretched his arms over his head, palms upward as though supplicating to some far-off deity. He leaped high in the air testing his muscles and finding them good.
Then he was running, naked and golden off across the open hill. He ran until his huge chest pounded with delicious pain as his lungs labored for air. Finally he dropped to the ground and lay spread-eagled looking up at the sky.
He laughed long and joyously.
He lay for a long time thus, then suddenly remembered the box John Pride had given him. But the scanty garment had dropped from his shoulders so he sprang to his feet and ran back until he discovered it.
The box was still there. He examined it curiously turning it over and over in his hands. The seal was stubborn but it finally gave and he peeled off the heavy wrapping. A small white box came to light.
This he opened to stand frowning at what it contained. An odd instrument of some sort—a flat disc about two inches in diameter and possibly a quarter of an inch thick. Both faces were of shining, crystalline metal reflecting back anything that was imaged upon them.
Two short metal straps appended from opposite sides of the queer instrument, one of which held a buckle at its end. He held the shining disc to his ear but there was no sound that he could detect.
Frustrated he looked again into the box. It appeared to be empty. But no. As he was about to fling it away, he noted that what appeared to be its inner bottom was in reality a second flat package that fitted perfectly into the receptacle. He shook it free and found it to be merely a flat rectangle wrapped tightly in white paper.
He was about to rip the paper with his thumbnail when his attention switched suddenly to the shining disc. He had envisioned a use for it; or at least a place for which it seemed constructed.
He tested his theory and found the straps fit snugly and perfectly around his wrist. He pondered which wrist to place it on and decided the right one would be appropriate. Quickly, he snapped the buckle into its hasp and then held forth his arm to admire the brightness of the queer device.
If he had expected anything to happen, he was disappointed and he stood there wondering what use was to be found from such a seemingly useless device.
After a while he unbuckled the disc and moved it to his left wrist. Perhaps it would look better there. Again he raised his arm to admire it and had stood thus for some moments when he became conscious of an odd sickness in the pit of his stomach.
He did not associate this with the disc at all and immediately forgot the thing, giving his whole attention to the uncomfortable feeling that had come upon him.
The sickness increased in intensity and he bent down, doubling over his abdomen as the nausea became a pain. As he sank to his knees, he noted the disc had changed, had taken on an odd, transparent glow.
There had to be a connection between his illness and the abominable device and he clawed at the buckle, seeking to loosen it and hurl the thing away.
But there was no time. The pain sharpened and a black cloud dimmed his sight. He clawed feebly at the buckle and then his numbed fingers weakened, fell away from it.
The darkness increased and seemed to lift him from the ground upon which he lay. It clawed at his throat, entered his nostrils like a malignant force.
As his consciousness faded a single thought was in his mind: Born but to live a few brief moments and die again. What sense is there to such a farce as this? Born—but—to die—again. Portox! Help me! It can't be—There must be some help!
CHAPTER VI
On the Plains of Ofrid
Jlomec the Nadian guided his air car across the grassy plains of Ofrid but a scant few feet above the tops of the waving grasses.
It was a fine day and the Nadian was taking full advantage of it. One of a race of proud and noble fighting men, Jlomec was an exception to the rule in that he was a dreamer rather than a fighter, a thinker rather than a doer, a poet rather than a military strategist.
Thus, his mind dwelt upon the historic incident of the previous days when, standing beside his brother, Bontarc, he had watched the gray tower of Portox the Ofridian explode into a fine cloud of dust.
And it was characteristic of the gentle Jlomec that his mind was more occupied with the romantic aspect of the incident than the violent. He thought of the poem, the bit of doggerel carved in the foundation stone of the tower. For a century all Tarthans had puzzled over the verse put there by Portox so long ago:
An ape, a boar, a stallion,
A land beyond the stars,
A virgin's feast, a raging beast,
A prison without bars.
Had it any meaning? Jlomec wondered. A thousand different interpretations had been put upon the verse over the years, but no one knew for sure.
That it had something to do with the slaughter of the Ofridians, Jlomec was sure. But what?
As he ruminated thus, Jlomec's attention was caught by moving figures some ten jeks to the south. He knew this to be the location of one of the great wells that dotted the Plains of Ofrid.
In the times before the great massacre, these wells had been located in the hearts of the fine Ofridian cities of which the Abarians stood in great envy. These wells gushed endlessly of cool crystal water which kept the fabulous hanging gardens of Ofrid multicolored and beautiful.
But all that was in the past. The Ofridians had been slain to a man and their cities leveled until not a stone stood upon a stone. Now lonely grasses grew where once glittered the results of Portox's great scientific genius. Now there were only round steel doors in the ground to mark the locations of the great Ofridian wells.
These thoughts occupied Jlomec's mind as he turned his car and coursed it in the direction of the well. The figures came clearly into view, causing Jlomec to frown in puzzlement.
What manner of people were these? There were a half dozen of them—two men, three females, and one babe-in-arms. Jlomec got the impression that—though they were erect and finely formed—that they were of short stature.
But now he realized he had got this impression only by their comparison to the seventh figure by the well. He knew at a glance that this seventh was an Abarian warrior, exceptionally tall and wearing the look of grim cruelty so characteristic of his race.
Jlomec paid the Abarian scant heed however, so engrossed was he in studying the strange half-dozen. Their skins were richly browned and they wore almost no clothing.
Who could they be? Jlomec wondered, and from whence had they come? Mightily intrigued, he moved forward until he came within earshot of the party. Then, for reason of the words he heard spoken, he halted his air car and frowned.
The Abarian, he recognized as the famed Retoc himself. A fierce stad pawed the ground nearby indicating how the tall, sneering commander of the Abarians had arrived at this spot. Retoc was known to roam the Plains of Ofrid at times, still savoring the destruction he and his sire, Harnod, had accomplished; pleasuring himself with memories of bodies piled high, of bloody swords and helpless cries of the dying.
Or was it for some other reason that Retoc roamed the plains? Was it a nameless fear that drove him there? Did the accusing face of Portox the Ofridian genius still hang balefully in his memory? Had Portox acquainted the Abarian devil with knowledge that he alone carried in his guilty heart? And did that knowledge generate a fear that Retoc the Abarian could not rid himself of?
At any rate, he now stood between the brown people and the Ofridian well, enjoying a useless cruelty as was his custom.
The leader of the group extended his hands in supplication and said, "We only ask water, sire. A small thing, but long have we waited to quench our thirst."
Retoc said, "What manner of people are you?"
"Harmless ones. See? We are unarmed and peaceful."
"That does not answer my question. Tell me who you are and from whence you came. Then we will see whether my fancy dictates that you shall have water from this well."
Indignation and rage dimmed Jlomec's better judgment. He had glided in beyond range of Retoc's vision and now he leaped from his car and drew his wandlike whip-sword. "Is there no drop of common decency or compassion left in you, Retoc, that you do this thing to helpless people?"
The Abarian whirled with alarm not knowing what force might be arrayed against him. But when he saw the lone Jlomec, his composure returned and his self-assurance again took charge. Had the newcomer been Bontarc, the dreamy Jlomec's skillful brother, Retoc the Abarian would have conducted himself differently. But as it was, he sneered at the gentle Nadian and asked, "What business of this is yours, Jlomec?"
"Injustice is everyone's business. These people, whoever they are, ask only to drink." Jlomec's eyes blazed. "And drink they shall, Abarian!"
Retoc's handsome eyes glowed. No doubt as to the outcome of this contest. He drew his own sword and whipped its supple length through the air. "Since you choose to champion this scum, let's get on with it."
Had Jlomec's indignation not been of a quality to blind him to consequences, he would have perhaps hesitated. But hot with this injustice, he whipped his own sword and leaped at Retoc.
The latter, with a grim smile of confidence, parried the thrust with ease and manipulated his own whip-sword with a skill which few fighting men on the planet Tarth could have equalled.
The weapons were strange ones by Earth standards and would have probably been considered impractical. They were a good six feet in length with the supple resiliency of a fly casting rod. The trick of using them effectively lay in controlling the sway and whip of the long thin blades by skillful use of the wrist. An expert Tarthan swordsman could parry a thrust with a lightning whip of his blade, arc the singing steel in the opposite direction and perhaps bring his opponent down with a thrust that would enter between his shoulder blades, the sword still arced to describe half a circle.
* * * *
In essence, this favorite weapon of the Tarthans was a combination of whip and sword and combat was a matter of thrusting at angles far wider than could be achieved with a stiff blade. A good Tarthan swordsman would have been an excellent billiard player on Earth for his knowledge of workable angles was of necessity supreme.
Retoc the Abarian was a master at this swordplay. Enjoying himself hugely because there was little risk, he toyed with the less skillful Nadian. He did not intend to kill Jlomec, fearing the wrath of Bontarc. He meant only to teach the stupid Nadian a lesson he would not forget.
But as his blade sang and stung, its needle point darting in like the fangs of a snake's head, and as Jlomec's clumsy blade sought desperately to parry, Retoc's blood lust rose to the fore. The joy of dealing death to the helpless was upon him and with a swift thrust he allowed his blade to enter Jlomec's unprotected back just above the kidney, to streak upward through his body and pierce his heart.
Frightened at what he had done he jerked the blade free. Its entwined force whirled Jlomec in a complete circle from which he fell limply, dead before he hit the ground.
Retoc stood scowling at the fallen Nadian, his dripping blade rising and falling gently in the breeze as he held it extended. The Abarian's eyes darted to the group of brown-skinned folk, his anger centering upon them as he nimbly switched the blame for this foul murder from his own shoulders to theirs. If they had not been at the well—
He was ready to extend his slaughter in their direction, to wipe out the lot of them, when he paused, his scowl deepening. There was fear and awe upon their faces but they were not regarding either Retoc or his fallen adversary.
Their eyes were turned in another direction and Retoc sent his own glance after theirs. His eyes held upon what he saw. A naked man. But such a man as he had never before seen on all the planet Tarth.
CHAPTER VII
The White God
Bram Forest returned to consciousness and realized the black nausea of his previous moments had vanished. All traces of the sickness were gone as he opened his eyes, his mind intent upon the small flat package that had dropped from the box in which he had found the strange disc-like instrument. But the package was not within reach.
This caused only a small part of his bewilderment however. His attention was riveted mainly upon the tableaux being enacted before him. A group of people, almost as naked as himself, deeply browned of skin, stood huddled nearby.
Almost as though for the entertainment of these, two grim and uniformed warriors were facing each other on the level turf before the strange circular ground-entrance beside which Bram Forest found himself.
The two warriors possessed strange supple swords which they manipulated with much skill. At least, one of the warriors did. The other seemed clumsy in comparison but there was no hint of cowardice in his manner.
Upon closer inspection the two warriors who had seemed of a cut at first glance were quite dissimilar. The one of greater skill was dark and possessed of a cruel mouth and venomous dark eyes. The other was slim and fair with contemptuous blue eyes. He fought with an erect stiffness in his shoulders which was both awkward and dignified at the same time.
The sympathy of Bram Forest went out instinctively to the fair one but the dark, sinister swordsman held his attention. There was something naggingly familiar about the dark one's cruel face. A tantalizing familiarity that bemused Bram Forest even as the singing swords thrust and parried with that of the dark warrior always on the offensive and the other fighter striving more for self-preservation than for aggressiveness.
Where, Bram Forest wondered, had he seen the dark one before? Nowhere, of course. Any previous contact was impossible. Or was it? Dared he, Bram Forest, call anything impossible after what had already occurred?
Bram Forest glanced down and realized he had been removing the disc from his left wrist and placing it on his right. He had committed the act instinctively, in the same manner he breathed and moved and his mind went back momentarily to the two tubes he had found in his ears when he awoke in the cavern back on Earth.
Back on Earth? How did he know he was not still on that planet? I've got to stop questioning these things I possess knowledge of but know not why. I must take them at face value and without wonder. Otherwise I shall spend all my years in conflict with my own mind.
At that moment, the dark warrior's whip-sword whined in a skillful arc and entered the body of the fair one. A moan of sympathy arose from the waiting group as the defeated warrior sank to the ground, his face strained in agony and fast becoming a death-mask.
The dark warrior stepped back, a cruel sneer of satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. Bram Forest, sickened by the unequal contest rose up from where he lay and moved forward. This drew the attention of both the group and the victorious warrior and the effect was electric.
The huddled observers reacted with a mixture of consternation, awe, and fear that would have been comic under less tense circumstances. They dropped as one to their knees. They placed their foreheads upon the ground. A concerted moan escaped them that far transcended in depth and feeling the one with which they had reacted to the death of the fair warrior.
* * * *
In a language Bram Forest was completely familiar with, their voices sounded a chant of fear and awe. "The white god has come! The white god has come! The white god has come!"
Bram Forest scarcely considered them. He was advancing upon the dark warrior with the clean, stalking movements of a tiger, his great shoulders low, his magnificent legs tense for the death spring.
The dark one was frozen from surprise. From whence had this naked white creature erupted? He stood stiff from sudden fear and uncertainty a moment too long and the hands of the avenger were upon him. The fingers of those hands were like steel talons driving deep into his throat and in his panicked mind he looked upon the face of death and found it horrible. He was being driven down to the ground, lower and lower in abject submission by this strange and terrible manifestation the brown-skinned ones had called a white god.
The dark warrior's mind raced and in his terrorized desperation a native cunning sprang to his aid. Using every ounce of his remaining strength, he forced words up from his tortured throat. "Would you kill an unarmed man?"
The words touched a responsive chord in Bram Forest's mind. The craven spoke aptly. By killing him thus, was not Bram Forest doing the same thing for which he had condemned the other?
Bram Forest straightened and hurled the cringing figure from him. "Then defend yourself, swine!" he cried and seized up the dead warrior's shining whip sword.
The dark one sought means of escape but he feared turning from this avenger as much as facing him. He could only play for time.
Rising, he retrieved his own sword and faced the other with his expression of fear not one whit abated. The man of the steel hands whipped the sword experimentally and the dark one was struck by a ray of hope. The other's actions with the blade were as clumsy as had been those of Jlomec the Nadian. Perhaps all was not lost.
* * * *
The dark one gripped his blade and moved forward in the customary crouch of the Tarthan fighting man. Then elation welled up within him as the answering posture of the other revealed him as knowing nothing whatever of the whip-sword's use. The dark one's smile returned. God or not, the skill of this one with the ancient weapon of Tarth was even less than that of the pathetic Jlomec.
The dark warrior parried a clumsy thrust with ease and whipped his blade around to harass the other's exposed back. "You are a fool!" he said, "whatever else you may be. As you die, give thought to the fact that you join a large company. Those who have faced the greatest swordsman of Tarth and fallen ignobly before his blade."
With that the dark one whipped his blade home and spun his adversary expertly in order to discover the exact point of entrance of the blade. His aim was true.
It was just a trifle low but the other fell heavily and the dark warrior withdrew his blade and wiped it uneasily. His nervousness sprang from fear. If one of these so-called gods had appeared, why not two, or four, or a dozen? The Tarthan swordsman, well up on the principles of discretion, felt a sudden urge to be quit of this locality.
It was indeed a disconcerting place. Brown folk, the identity and origin of which he knew not. A white creature with steel hands appearing from nowhere. What would the next manifestation be?
The dark warrior moved swiftly toward his waiting stad. He mounted and rode away and not until the figures about the well were tiny spots almost beyond range of his vision, did he again breathe easily.
CHAPTER VIII
The Brown Virgin
Bram Forest moved from unconscious into a dark half-world of pain and frustration. He felt his flame-seared body to be hanging upon the edge of a black abyss into which he could neither fall nor draw away from.
At times, it seemed, gentle hands reached out to explore but were without the strength to draw him back from the perilous precipice upon which he hung.
There was an endless time of balance in this dark half-world and then the thick blackness faded to a gray, the precipice seemed to draw away of its own volition, and the pain within him lessened.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed of soft, cool moss in a semi-dark cavern with the sound of tinkling water in the distance. He lay staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering into what manner of place he had come and how. Then his keen ears caught the sound of breathing other than his own; a soft breathing that fell gently upon his senses and calmed rather than alerted him.
He turned his head and saw a beautiful, naked brown-skinned girl kneeling nearby but beyond his reach. He was struck first by the beauty of her face and form and then by the fact that she was not as completely brown as his first impression had given him to believe. Her breasts and loins were of pure white and droplets of shining water ran down her body.
She was in the act of replacing a sort of leather harness upon her person and Bram Forest realized she had just returned from bathing at whatever place the unseen water gurgled and laughed and that she was now dressing herself.
He held his peace until the act was completed, not wishing to embarrass her by making his consciousness known while she was nude.
After a few moments, the harness was in place and she rose to stand erect and shake out her dark shining hair. Bram Forest chose this time to speak. "I do not know who you are, but I am obviously in your debt. My gratitude."
The girl reacted like a startled fawn and drew back several paces. "You have regained consciousness?"
"It seems so. Where is this place and how came I here?"
"We brought you."
Bram Forest's brow furrowed in thought. "Oh, yes. Now I remember. There were a group of people such as you at the place I tried to fight the dark swordsman with his own weapons." Bram Forest chuckled ruefully. "It seems I did not fare so well."
"When we discovered you were not our god, the others wanted to leave you there to die but I resisted this as being inhuman and made them bring you here."
"Where are the rest?"
"They have returned."
"Returned whence?"
The girl lowered her beautiful head sadly. "That I cannot tell you."
Bram Forest smiled. "Be not so sad. The fact that you prefer to keep the information to yourself is no reason for near-tears."
"I am not sad for that reason, sire."
"Then why?"
"Because you asked the question and are even more surely therefore, not our god."
Bram Forest was deeply curious and half-amused at the trend of this conversation. "Tell me this, then. Why does my asking the question eliminate all possibility of my being your god?"
"Because if you were the god we seek and yearn for, you would not have to ask where my people went. You would know."
"Instead of clarifying the situation," Bram Forest mused, "each question sends me deeper and deeper into a mental labyrinth."
"We risked our lives in going to the place you found us. It was forbidden to credit the ancient legend of our people. Therefore—"
"What legend?"
"That upon this day and at that place our god would appear to deliver us."
Bram Forest, now desperately seeking a question that would clarify rather than further befuddle, held up his hand. "Wait. If you expected a god to appear and I arrived on schedule, how can you be so sure that I am not he?"
"We thought so when you advanced upon the hideous Abarian and took his throat in your great hands. But when you not only allowed him to live but also suffered him to take up his whip-sword and come within an eyelash of killing you, we knew you were not our god."
Bram Forest nodded with understanding. "I can see now how stupid that act was. Certainly not a manner in which a genuine god would conduct himself." He glanced at the girl and smiled. "Please come closer that I may see you better."
She moved her head in the negative, reluctantly, Bram Forest thought, and replied, "If you were our god I would gladly place myself in your power to do with me as you would, but as you are mortal, I must remain away from you."
Bram Forest frowned. "Again things get murky."
"I am a virgin," the beautiful girl explained simply and with no self-consciousness whatever. "I must remain so until my time is ordained. If I lost my virginity, even through violation that I resist, I would immediately be delivered into the Golden Ape."
Bram Forest came upright, causing the girl to retreat a step further in alarm. "The Golden Ape, did you say?"
"Yes."
"And you are a virgin—"
This last was a statement rather than a question as Bram Forest sank back, his eyes misty with thought. "An ape, a boar, a stallion—" he pondered. "A virgin's feast—"
The girl eyed him with concern. "Are you sure that your wound has not caused—"
"It is not that," he said, switching his mind back to things of the moment. "I'm just wondering—might you tell me your name without breaking any rules of reticence?"
"I am Ylia," she said with a childlike solemnity that touched Bram Forest.
"And does Ylia never smile?"
It seemed to him she made an effort to do this but was so unfamiliar with the expression that she could not manage it.
He extended a hand, not disconcerted that she did not come close and take it. He said, "Ylia, I would not again ask a question you did not wish to answer before. But I am mightily puzzled about the life you must have led—about that manner of males you have had contact with. They are certainly a miserable lot if a female of their race must look to her virtue every waking moment.
"As for me, Ylia—and please believe—I would no more touch you in desire than I would knowingly injure a child. You are safe in my presence as in the most guarded room of a nunnery."
If he expected gratitude or a pat on the back for his nobility, he was rudely surprised. Ylia straightened, her young breasts protruding gracefully and if she did not react with anger, her face mirrored something close to it.
"Then I am not desirable?"
Bram Forest blinked. "I did not say that. You are one of the fairest I have ever set eyes upon."
This puzzled Ylia completely. "Then in the name of the Golden Ape, why—?"
Bram Forest raised his hand with a gesture of both interruption and surrender. "Please! Let us pursue this subject no further. The waters grow deep and I suspect quicksand at their bottom. There are questions in my mind. Allow me to bring them forth with the understanding that you do not have to answer any you do not wish to."
It was evident that Ylia's mind was also a bag of conundrums relative to this late candidate for godhood who had insulted her desirability and yet complimented her upon it at the same time. She moved forward and sat gracefully down near the moss resting place of her patient.
Bram Forest was aware of her tenseness. She was like a beautiful animal ready to spring away at the first sign of hostile movement on his part. But he also got the impression that coming within reach of his arms thrilled her. He believed this even while knowing that she would have fought like a tigress against any advance upon his part.
He said, "Ylia, you are indeed a strange child. You remained here after your people left and brought me back from the brink of death even with the fear that I would rise up and violate you as soon as I acquired the strength to do so. Your thought processes are difficult to understand."
Ylia lowered her eyes. "You wished to ask some questions, sire."
"My name is Bram Forest. The sire ill-becomes you."
"Bram—Forest," she murmured experimentally. Then she raised her eyes and there dawned upon her face the most brilliant of smiles. Her look was one of both dignity and gratitude. "You do me much honor, Bram Forest!"
"Honor? I fail to understand."
Ylia's eyes glowed proudly. "Why, you treat me with such respect that I could be even Volna herself!"
"And who is this Volna?"
* * * *
Ylia was startled at this strange man's ignorance. "Why, everyone on Tarth knows of Volna, Princess of Nadia, sister of Bontarc, who is Prince of Nadia and ruler of that great nation. She is the most exquisitely beautiful woman ever to be born on Tarth."
"Fancy that," Bram Forest said with a lack of enthusiasm that proved marked disinterest. "I'm afraid I've never had the pleasure of the lady's acquaintance, nor of her illustrious brother, either."
Ylia lowered her eyes in sadness. "She was also the sister of Jlomec."
"And who, pray is Jlomec?"
"I thought you knew since you tried to avenge his death. He was the Nadian the cruel Abarian Retoc slew under your very eyes."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Bram Forest said. But the cowardly death had been accomplished and Bram Forest's mind did not dwell upon it as he could not see where it affected him one way or another.
"Ylia," he said, "take it as a supposition that I was born this very moment and know nothing of this world or its customs. With that in mind, tell me of it—the things you would tell a wondering child."
She glanced at him strangely. "I will tell you all that I am not bound to hold secret."
"I would not wish to know more."
The beautiful Ylia leaned forward, so preoccupied with the task she had set herself that all her reserve and wariness left her. Her action brought her lowered head close to Bram Forest's face and the sweet smell of her newly washed and shining hair was in his nostrils. Then he also became preoccupied with the map Ylia was drawing on the floor of the cavern.
Long they sat thus, Ylia enjoying her task and Bram Forest's facile mind drawing in each syllable she spoke and committing it to memory.
Finally the sun lowered and the interior of the cavern darkened until they could no longer see each other. The most important conviction Bram Forest arrived at from Ylia's discourse was indeed a startling one. He was certain that this Tarth was a twin planet to Earth of which there was complete knowledge in his mind. He could hardly escape the fact that Tarth swung in an orbit exactly opposite to that of its more familiar counterpart, thus remaining invisible from it.
This conviction came to him through several things Ylia said and it was buttressed by a bit of Tarthan mythology she chanced to mention. The legend told of a flame-god, obviously the sun, which stood forth in its wrath one long-distant day and hurled two great stones at a demon who came from far away bent upon torment. This last Bram Forest thought, was perhaps a comet of great size that tore both worlds from the sun and set them upon their orbits. The existence of the mythological legend indicated too, that civilization on Tarth was not backward or at least had not been in ages gone.
In the more exact realm, Bram Forest learned that Tarth was far less watery than its invisible sister, scarcely half its surface consisting of ocean. It had two ice caps at the poles, known as the Outer Reaches and an equator termed the Inner Belt.
* * * *
There were no isolated continents according to Ylia's map, all the dry surfaces being connected by wide passages of land through the continuous ocean.
Ylia's description of the people interested Bram Forest most intensely. On Tarth, he learned, there was no association of nations, each mistrusting the others in a world where a state of continuous war at some point of the globe was an accepted state of affairs which no one sought to ameliorate.
Ylia herself was hazy upon the description and number of the nations. She thought some two hundred existed but only the most important could she describe.
* * * *
The Abarians were the most successfully warlike, fearing only the Nadians to the south. This because though the Nadians were not aggressive and even treated other lesser nations in a kindly fashion, they possessed an inherent fighting skill and a power potential that had not been tested in recallable history. Though they had not fought for centuries, their potential had not lessened because such a folly would have been considered tantamount to national suicide on Tarth.
There were also the Utalians that Bram Forest visualized as some sort of lizard men for the reason that they possessed the defensive characteristics of the chameleon. There was also another intriguing race, no member of which Ylia had ever seen. She referred to them as the Twin People of Coom, an area near the north Outer Reach. Bram Forest speculated upon what manner of people they would be and it came to him that the evolutionary processes on Tarth had not corresponded to those of Earth, where all members of the human race evolved into practically the same form.
Then a name came into Bram Forest's mind; a name that rose out of that mysterious well of knowledge in his subconscious; a well he could not explain but had been forced to accept. He no longer questioned it.
"Tell me of the Ofridians."
Ylia started as though he had slapped her. The deep brown of her beautiful face paled somewhat and her eyes grew very sad.
Bram Forest saw the sadness by the light of the moon, that had risen and was sending wan light in through the cavern's entrance. He only sensed the paleness from the tremor of Ylia's voice. "It grows late. I must go and bring food. Your strength must be nurtured and greatened."
With that, she hurried off in the direction of the sounding water, leaving Bram Forest both bewildered and intrigued. Why had she reacted so violently to his question? And for that matter, why had he been able to ask the question in the first place? By what process did he know the name Ofrid and that it designated a nation on Tarth, without knowing of that nation and already possessing the knowledge for which he had begged the patient and beautiful Ylia?
Then he remembered that he had resolved not to wonder about these things—and at the same instant, remembered something else.
The small, flat package that had fallen from the box back on Earth. It had been his first thought upon regaining consciousness near the Ofridian well but it had been pushed from his mind by subsequent events.
How long ago had that been? He tried to assess the passage of time but failed. The only indication of its length was the fact that he bore no wound where the Abarian's blade had entered his body. That pointed to a long span of unconsciousness but perhaps there were contributing factors.
* * * *
He had sensed that the mysterious Ylia had at her command something that had healed him very swiftly but he had no proof of this.
At any rate, he had to retrieve the package if possible. But would it be possible? Granted the strange disc had brought him somehow from Earth to Tarth, would it repeat the process in the opposite direction?
He resolved to find out and began unbuckling the disc from its place on his right wrist.
As he did this a sound manifested outside the cavern but he was so intent upon his task that he gave little note. Quickly, he strapped the disc into its potent position on his left wrist. Then he sat tensely awaiting the reaction.
As he waited, the sound without became so pronounced he could no longer ignore it. He raised his head and saw a tall, sinister form outlined against the moonlight. He was unable to distinguish the features, but the outline told a sickening truth. Also the drawn whip-sword spoke eloquently of who this intruder was.
The Abarian of the Ofridian well in search of prey. The cowardly assassin who would now enter and find a defenseless man and a beautiful girl who would set him aflame with lust.
Rage threw a red curtain over Bram Forest's eyes as he struggled up to meet the intruder. But the latter never saw him because at that moment the now-familiar nausea seized Bram Forest's vitals, doubling him over.
And when the Abarian had advanced into the cavern, he found only an empty bed of moss, Bram Forest having been snatched up and whirled into darkness by the relentless hand of time put into terrifying motion.
CHAPTER IX
In Custody
Bram Forest regained consciousness upon a grassy slope across which slanted the rays of a setting sun. The same sun that had warmed him upon the planet Tarth—of this he was certain.
He arose and glanced about quickly, realizing—while he was sure he had returned to Earth—that he could be many miles from the mysterious mansion under which he had spent one hundred years.
At first his heart sank because the terrain was not at all familiar. Then it rose again as he saw the tower of the gray mansion pushing somberly above the line of the forest top. He stood for a moment, orienting himself with the tower the center of his calculations. Then he moved out of the glade toward his right.
But he had gone scarcely ten feet into the wooded area when his sharpened instincts gave him quick warning and he dropped like a stone and lay still.
The sound of footsteps greatened until their echo came loud in his ears and a man passed not ten feet from his outstretched hands.
The man wore the blue uniform and smart cap of a state trooper and he was on the alert but not so much so as to detect the silent Bram Forest.
The latter, with the first moment he had had to give thought to himself since he had awakened in the cavern on the Plains of Ofrid, realized suddenly that he was no longer naked. He had of course been vaguely aware of this before but now he gave it his attention and realized what had happened. He focused on past events.
* * * *
During his time of unconsciousness from the treacherous Abarian's blade thrust, the beautiful Ylia had garbed him in the brilliant uniform of the slain Nadian, Jlomec. This uniform was both colorful and practical but it did nothing to either hide or encumber the great muscles of his chest and arms, thighs.
The State Trooper passed on his way and Bram Forest wondered what he was doing about the old mansion. But this did not occupy his thoughts for long. As soon as the way was clear, he moved like a great cat through the underbrush toward the spot from whence he had made his exodus to the planet Tarth. As he skirted the last glade, he prayed that the second article in the box containing the fabulous disc he had now switched to his right wrist, still lay where he had carelessly dropped it.
He came to the edge of the open field and warily surveyed the terrain. No one was in sight. He strained his ears for the sound of any approaching footsteps and heard nothing. He sprang swiftly into the open and ran across the field.
It was there—the flat white package—exactly where he had dropped it that first morning. He swept it up, intent upon returning to the shelter of the forest.
But his interest in what lay beneath the white paper wrapping had grown to such a point of intensity that his footsteps lagged, his attention riveted upon the tantalizing thing, and he came to a full stop mid-field while his strong fingers tore at the wrappings.
The white parchment came away and Bram Forest stared at what was revealed. Then a strange and terrifying change came over him. His handsome features contorted as every drop of blood was drained from his face. His great frame shook as with an illness and such a demoniacal rage came over him as few people in this or any other world have seen.
Now a great and terrifying cry arose from his throat; a cry that make even the beasts of this forest freeze in their tracks and crouch lower in their places of concealment. A cry of such rage and agony that even the trees of the forest seemed to pause and listen in mute wonder....
* * * *
Mulcahey Davis, State Trooper, picked brambles from the legs of his blue uniform and cursed his assignment in no uncertain terms.
Why in the name of law and decency had he and Mowbray been ordered to patrol this tangled, deserted spook-hole? Sure—the body of some old hobo had been found in a well with rocks thrown on it but what were he and Mowbray going to prove by tramping around through these brambles?
Mulcahey Davis heard footsteps and looked up to see Mowbray laboring across the last few yards of his beat. Mowbray broke from the last clutching strands of thorn bush and began beating burrs from his legs. "Find anything?" he asked.
"Not a blasted thing. It's downright crazy, our clambering around this woods. What will we find? A couple of rabbits?"
"That body in the well has to be investigated," Mowbray said, seriously. "Pretty odd deal."
"What progress have they made?"
"They've located the outfit that held this place in trust, but the guy in charge had a stroke or something. He can't be questioned. They may never be able to question him. An old guy named Pride. He's in pretty bad shape."
"Chances are he wouldn't know anything about it even if they could ask him. What would he have been doing out here?"
"There's that funny fire in the basement, too. Nothing routine about that. Fire so hot it melted rock. A lot of unanswered questions here."
"If they'd ask me, I'd tell them—"
Mulcahey Davis' throat froze as a terrible cry smote his ears. Mowbray paled suddenly and the two men looked at each other in instinctive fear.
But they were tried and tested law-enforcement officers and were not held in the grip of terror for long. "Did you hear that?" Mulcahey Davis said.
"Good lord, man! How could I help it!"
"Where'd it come from?"
"Over there."
"Let's go."
The two troopers plunged again into the undergrowth to emerge at the edge of an open field. And regardless of their personal courage and experience in their line of effort, what they saw froze them anew.
A giant of a man—a creature of godlike proportions stood in the open field, washed by the rays of the setting sun. His great arms were held aloft and he was looking up into the sky with a terrifying expression that was a mixture of pain and rage.
He was speaking and his great voice echoed in what was remindful of a thunderous prayer. "I know not the purpose for which I was created but well do I now know my dedicated task. Vengeance! Vengeance such as this world or any other has never seen!"
With this the giant—clad in a strange colorful uniform of some sort—dropped to his knees and lowered his great head into his hands.
Mowbray's face was grim and alert. "Come on," he whispered. "We're behind him so we get a break. Move in quietly. And let's get him before he sees us. I've got a hunch he could lick ten of us and we don't want to use our guns."
They crossed the field softly and moved in behind the kneeling man. They acted in concert with an expertness telling of lengthy experience.
Mowbray was thankful for the way it turned out. He knew not why the giant put up no resistance. The man seemed stunned as from a great blow and before he could recover, the troopers had him bound hand and foot with their belts.
Mulcahey Davis got to his feet and wiped the sweat from his face. "There's one for the psychos and a padded cell afterwards."
"You said it," Mowbray agreed heartily. "Let's take him in."
CHAPTER X
The Road to Nadia
The stads of Abaria, like the masters who rode them, were ill-accustomed to the clear cold air of Nadia. They snorted visible jets of vapor into the crisp air as their splayed feet scratched and slipped, seeking purchase on the ice-covered, up-tilted rocky plain.
"It's an accursed country, lord," Hultax told the king of the Abarians as their steeds advanced shoulder and shoulder.
Retoc sat tall and straight on the stad's broad back, his black cloak with the royal emblem billowing in the stiff wind, his hard handsome face ruddy with the cold air, his cruel eyes mere slits against the Nadian wind. "Quiet, you fool," he admonished Hultax. "Everything we Abarians say and do in Nadia must be sweetness and light—now."
The vanguard of the long column of Abarian riders had reached a rushing mountain stream, its waters too swift to freeze in the sub-zero temperature. Lifting one hand overhead, Retoc called a halt.
"They'll find out, lord," Hultax persisted. "They'll find out what you did. I know they will. They'll find out it was you who killed Jlomec, their ruler's brother."
Retoc smiled. The smile made Hultax' blood run cold, for he had seen such a smile before—when Retoc witnessed the execution of disloyal Abarian subjects. The smile hardened on Retoc's face, as if it had frozen there in the cold Nadian wind. "Dismount your steed," he said in a soft voice which only Hultax heard.
Trembling, Hultax obeyed his master's command. His stad, suddenly riderless, pawed nervously at the frost-hardened ground on the edge of the stream. Retoc withdrew his whip-sword and fondled the jewel-encrusted haft. "If you ever say that again, here in Nadia or elsewhere, I will kill you," he warned his lieutenant.
"But the brown girl—"
"The brown girl be damned!" roared Retoc in sudden fury.
"We haven't been able to find her. That day at the cave, she came rushing out, lord, while you—"
"I was detained," Retoc said, some of the passion gone from his voice. He would never forget the sight of the iron-thewed young man, who once had almost strangled him, growing suddenly, incredibly transparent, then disappearing. He had stood there, whip-sword in hand, mouth agape, while the brown girl ran past him and—according to what Hultax had told him later—mounted his own stad and vanished across the Ofridian plain.
"But lord, don't you see?" Hultax demanded. "The brown girl knows what happened to Jlomec, prince of the royal Nadian blood. If she attends the royal funeral. She will—"
Retoc laughed. Hultax blanched. He had heard such laughter when enemies of Retoc and thus of Abaria had died in pain. "Fool, fool!" he heard Retoc say now. "Think you a bedraggled wayfaring maid of the Ofridian desert will be invited to the funeral of a prince of the Nadian royal blood?"
"Nevertheless, sire," Hultax persisted, "that day at the cave I took the liberty to send three of our best stadsmen after the girl with orders to capture her or kill her on sight."
Slowly, as a thaw spreads in spring over the broad Nadian ice fields, Retoc smiled at his second in command. Hultax too let his face relax into a grateful grin: until now he had been teetering on the brink of violent death, and he knew it.
"You may mount," Retoc said.
Hastily Hultax climbed astride his stad. Retoc lifted his arm overhead and made a circular motion with his outstretched hand. The first of the Abarian stads advanced with some reluctance into the swift cold shallow water of the stream.
"What about the white giant?" Hultax asked unwisely when the entire party had reached the other side and Retoc was urging his stad up the slippery bank.
"Have your scouts been able to find the wayfarers who saw him?"
"No, sire. Only the girl nursed him back to health. The others fled."
"And wisely. They have learned to hold their tongues, as you should learn, Hultax. They will give us no trouble. As far as they are concerned, there is no white giant."
"But there is talk of what happened at the Tower, and of Portox' wizardry, and a god who would return, full-grown in exactly a hundred years—"
"Shut up!" Retoc cried, almost screaming the words.
But that night at the Abarian encampment a day and a half's march from Nadia city, Retoc dreamed of Queen Evalla, the lovely Ofridian ruler whose slow death by torture he had relished as the final act of his utter destruction of the once proud Ofridian nation. Evalla in the dream seemed happy and confident. Retoc awoke sweating although frigid winds howled over the Nadian ice-fields. Her confidence sent unknown fear through him.
* * * *
"Really, it's quite simple," the superbly-muscled prisoner said in the language which was not his own but which he could speak as well as a native. "You see, it wasn't simple at all until I saw what was in the package, but it's quite simple now. In the package was a picture of my mother, the dead Queen Evalla. I am her son. I am of the royal blood. When I saw the picture, it suddenly triggered my memory-responses, as Portox had arranged. Then—"
"What about the old guy in the well?" the trooper asked unimaginatively.
"I'm sorry. I can't answer your questions now. I have to return to my home. The handful of wayfarers who alone are left of a once great nation are waiting for vengeance. I will...."
His voice trailed on, earnestly, politely. The trooper looked at the man from the state mental hospital, who shook his head slowly. They left the powerful, polite prisoner in his cell and went through the corridor to the prison office.
"Real weirdy, huh, doc?" the trooper said.
"A—uh—weirdy to you, but rather cut and dry to me, I'm afraid," Dr. Slonamn said. "Delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. Advanced paranoia, I'm afraid."
"It's funny, doc. When they took everything away from him he might hurt himself with, he didn't mind at all. Only the bracelet. Three strong men had to hold him when they took the bracelet."
"Bracelet?" Dr. Slonamn said.
"We got it in the office. I'll show you."
The bracelet turned out to be a small, mesh-metal strap as wide around as a big man's upper arm. Attached to the strap was a disc of silvery metal.
"You'd think it was worth a million bucks," the trooper said.
Dr. Slonamn nodded sagely. "Paranoid. It helps confirm the diagnosis. You see, out of touch with the real world, a paranoid can attach great value to utterly worthless objects. Well, I'll write out my report, sergeant."
"Captain Caruthers said to thank you, sir."
"Not at all. Part of my job."
Meanwhile, back in his cell, the prisoner, big hands gripping the bars so tight that his knuckles were white, was thinking: I've got to make them understand. Somehow I've got to make them understand before it's too late.
He closed his eyes, lost in intense thought. When he did so, an image swam before his mind's eye. He did not know how this could be, but ascribed it to more of the dead Portox' magic.
What he saw was the barren ice fields of Nadia, with several great caravans making their slow way across the bleak blazing whiteness toward Nadia City. As was the custom in Nadia, the prisoner—whose name was Bram Forest—knew, great funeral games would be held to honor the memory of the late beloved Prince Jlomec. And it was here in frigid Nadia, at such a time as this, when all the royal blood of all the royal households of Tarth gathered, the wizardry of Portox seemed to tell him, that vengeance would come. Here, if only....
Ylia!
The image blurred. He had seen her once. His knuckles went white as bleached bone on the bars. He concentrated every atom of his will. Ylia, Ylia! But now with his eyes shut he saw nothing. With his eyes opened, only the bars of his cell and the cell-block corridor beyond. Ylia, Ylia! Hear me. There is danger on the road to Nadia. Ylia....
CHAPTER XI
On the Ice Fields of Nadia
B'ronth the Utalian left footprints in the snow.
Otherwise, B'ronth was invisible. But if a hidden observer watched the Utalian's slow progress across the ice fields of Nadia he would see where the ice was soft or where snow had fallen during the night into the gullies, the unexpected, mysterious appearance of footprints, a left staggered after a right, then another left, then a right again, then a left.
Actually, B'ronth the Utalian was not invisible. But like all Utalians, he was a chameleon of a man. Within seconds his skin would assume the color of its environment, utterly and completely. Thus, from above B'ronth the Utalian was the dazzling white of the Nadian ice-fields; from below, looking up at the pale cloudless sky, he was cold, transparent blue.
All morning he had been trailing the girl. He had reached her camp on the road to Nadia only moments after she had quit it in company with an old man. From the tattered snow cloaks they wore, they both clearly were wayfarers. B'ronth could have challenged them at once, sprinting across the ice toward them, but he hadn't done that. B'ronth the Utalian was a coward. He accepted the fact objectively: his people were notorious cowards. The proper time would come, he told himself. There would come a time when the girl and the old man were helpless. Then he, B'ronth, would strike.
The day before an Abarian warrior had given him a description of the girl and had promised him a bag of gold for her capture, half a bag of gold if he killed her and could prove it. A bag of gold, he thought. He would take her alive. It was a long, cold road to Nadia City. True, B'ronth the Utalian was small of stature, a puny creature like all his people. And there were certain disadvantages in his perfect camouflage. He was walking naked across the ice-fields in order to remain unseen. His flesh shivered and his bones were stiff. But a Nadian boy named Lulukee, whom B'ronth had promised half the gold, was not many minutes' march behind him with warm clothing, food, and drink. After he captured the girl....
* * * *
Invisible, he mounted a rise where solid sheet ice adhered to the shoulder of a rocky hill. Below him, traversing a snow-floored valley and so far away that they were mere dots against the snow, were the old man and the girl.
B'ronth the Utalian chuckled. The sound was swept up instantly and dispersed by the wind. It was a cold wind and it all but froze B'ronth to the marrow, but the Nadian sun was surprisingly warm and now seemed to beam down on him with promise of his golden reward. Shivering both from cold and delight, the invisible Utalian walked swiftly down into the snow-mantled valley.
There would be a trail of footprints for the boy Lulukee to follow....
* * * *
"Cold, Hammeth?" Ylia asked her companion.
"No, girl. I'll manage if you will. Is it much further?"
"Half a day's march to Nadia City yet, I'm afraid," Ylia said. "We could rest if you wish."
The man was extremely old by Tarthian standards, probably three hundred and fifty years old. He wore a snow-cape of purullian fur which the wind whipped about his bony frame and up over his completely bald head. "I'm sorry, Ylia," he said suddenly. There were tears in his eyes which the cold and the wind did not explain.
"What for? You came to the cave. You accompanied me here to Nadia."
"When Retoc the Abarian almost killed the White God, I fled with the others."
"If you didn't flee you too might have been slain, Hammeth."
"Yet you remained behind."
"He still lived. Someone had to tend him."
Hammeth's breath came in shallow gasps. He once had been a strong, big man, but the life and the strength had fled his frame when Retoc destroyed Ofrid, a hundred years before. As a wayfarer on the Plains of Ofrid, he had aged in those hundred years. And he had shrunk and shriveled with approaching senility. "Tell me, Ylia," he asked, panting, "is this Bram Forest you speak of indeed the—the god of the legend? The God of the Tower come to right the ancient wrongs?"
A frown marred the beauty of Ylia's matchless face. "At first," she said with a far-away look in her lovely eyes, "at first I thought he was. Hadn't he come, suddenly, from nowhere, at the ordained moment? But then when he did not slay Retoc, when instead he allowed Retoc the use of his whip-sword and was almost slain by Retoc, when he bled like any mortal, when he—" All at once Ylia was blushing.
"What is it, child?" Hammeth asked.
"Nothing. It is nothing."
"Ylia. You were the infant daughter of a lady in waiting of the royal court of Ofrid. I was a captain of the Queen's Guards. When Retoc's legions brought their death and destruction, I fled to the wilderness with you. I raised you from infancy. I—" the old man's eyes clouded over with emotion—"you have no secrets from me, child."
Ylia was still blushing. But a serene smile replaced the frown on her face. "Very well, Father Hammeth, I will tell you. There in the cave as I nursed the stranger back to health, as he grew stronger and could move about, as we conversed and came to know each other, I—I desired him."
Hammeth said nothing. His face was stern.
"Please," said Ylia, laughing now that her secret was out. "It wasn't the kind of desire that could make me a candidate for the Golden Ape, but—I desired him. It was a pure, sweet emotion, such as I have never felt before. I wanted him. I wanted to serve him. I wanted to spend my life helping him and...Hammeth...Father Hammeth...loving him. There, I have said it."
Hammeth only muttered. They plodded on through the snow, which here was deep and powdery so they floundered sometimes to their knees.
"But a girl shouldn't feel such desire for a god, so I told myself he was mortal." Abruptly and for no reason that Hammeth could fathom, Ylia began to cry.
"What is it, child? What is it?"
"He—he fled. He had lost much blood and he was weak, yes, but he didn't even stay to protect me. He fled from Retoc. Is that a god? Is that even a man who can bring retribution to Retoc? Is it, Hammeth? Is it?"
"Yet you're taking the road to Nadia even as legend says the White God will take the road to Nadia."
"Nonsense," said Ylia, wiping away her tears. "Someone has to tell the Nadians what really happened to poor Jlomec, that's all. Retoc, Retoc will have them eating off his hand. He'll have them believing whatever he says. They'll never know that he killed a prince of their royal blood."
"But what can Bontarc of Nadia—or anyone—do against the power of Retoc's Abarians?"
"The White God could—"
"Ah, you see? Then perhaps you do believe, after all."
"The White God or whoever he was," said Ylia coldly, "fled a coward from Retoc." She pouted. "And yet, and yet he seemed so confused."
"Perhaps he fled so that the Ofridians might live again in the pride of their greatness," Hammeth declared with vehemence.
"You believe, don't you, Father Hammeth?" Ylia asked simply.
"I want to believe, child."
"You're panting so. You're tired. We'll have to stop and rest."
They were traversing the deepest part of the valley where the Nadian wind, funneling through between the hills flanking the depression, had piled the snow into drifts twice the height of a man. They hunkered down in the lee of one of the snow-drifts, where the wind could not reach them. With stiff fingers Ylia withdrew strips of jerked stadmeat from the inside pocket of her snow cloak, sharing them with Hammeth. They munched the tough cold meat, Ylia looking at the old man with tenderness and affection. Her foster father, he had been the only parent she had ever known. She closed her eyes and for a moment thought back over the years they had spent as wayfarers on the Ofridian Plain, the years dreaming of revenge and succor which would never come, the years....
"Ylia! Ylia!"
Father Hammeth was calling her name, urgently. She shook herself from her reverie. They were seated with their backs to one of the great snow-drifts, where it fell off suddenly like a suspended, frozen sea wave. With a trembling hand Hammeth was pointing before him, out across the ice fields.
There in the soft snow which mantled the ice of Nadia to a depth of only a few inches, were footprints. They were not old prints, deposited there when some wayfarer had passed. Incredibly, they were being made even as Hammeth and Ylia watched, as if by some creature with no palpable existence. The icy wind seemed intensified.
* * * *
"It—it's coming toward us," Hammeth said, his voice a croaking whisper. Ylia knew that he was afraid again. Somehow with the advancing years, the steel and fire had gone from Hammeth's heart. Or perhaps, she thought in sympathy, the terrible defeat and destruction of Ofrid a hundred years ago had done this to him, had turned one of the Queen's proven champions into an aging craven wayfarer.
"We'll have to flee," Hammeth said breathlessly.
Behind them was the frozen wave of snow. To the right, far away across the snows, Abaria and the Plains of Ofrid. To the left, not half a day's journey, Nadia City. Ahead of them, the advancing footprints.
"Your whip-sword!" Ylia cried. "Quickly."
"I carry it, but I can't use it now," Hammeth protested. "I'm an old man, Ylia. An old man."
"Then let me have it."
"You? But you're just a girl. You couldn't—"
"Don't you see, Father Hammeth? It's only a man. An Utalian. It can't be anything else. If he comes in peace, well enough. Otherwise...here, give me that sword."
But Hammeth shook his head with unexpected pride and pulled the weapon from its scabbard.
Just then the footprints became wider spaced and appeared more quickly in the snow. The invisible Utalian was running toward them. Awkward, cursing at his own impotence, Hammeth fumbled with his weapon.
You who call yourself Bram Forest, Ylia thought, White God or whatever you are—help us, help us! Then she hated herself for the unbidden thought. Bram Forest had deserted her once, hadn't he, after she had saved his life? What help could she expect from a man like Bram Forest? Or was Father Hammeth right? Perhaps Bram Forest had fled so that Ofrid might one day live again to see the wrath of the gods fall on Retoc and his Abarians.
Or, Ylia thought with an abrupt flash of insight, perhaps Bram Forest's flight had been out of his control. Perhaps he was as yet a pawn in a game he barely understood....
Bram Forest, we need you!
The running footprints were almost upon them.
CHAPTER XII
Volna the Beautiful
Bram Forest had been day-dreaming.
Ylia? Hadn't Ylia been calling his name? But how could that be? Ylia was almost two hundred million miles away. Clearly, as long as they kept the magic disc away from him, he could never see Ylia again. And besides, now that he had been vouchsafed a vision of his dead mother, the former queen of Ofrid, and now that that vision had conjured up the entire tragic past for him, why was it that when he shut his eyes and allowed the bright sun to beat down on the lids through the cell window he saw an image of the sun-browned maid, Ylia?
Could it be, he asked himself, wondering if somehow he were profaning the memory of the mother he had never known, that Ylia stood not for the past but for the present and the future, and that it was in the present and the unknown future that Bram Forest must live and do his life's work and perhaps perish, although he was motivated from the past?
A guard brought food on a tray. The cell door clanged open, the tray was delivered, the cell door clanged shut. The guard did not pay particular attention to Bram Forest: he had been a docile enough prisoner.
Ylia, he thought.
He knew he must escape next time the guard brought food.
* * * *
Dr. Slonamn held up the bracelet with the metal disc on it and stared curiously at the contraption. He was a psychologist, he could hardly consider himself an expert on metallurgy. Still, he had never seen a metal like that from which the disc had been fashioned. It seemed too opaque for steel, too hard for silver. A steel and silver alloy, then? But he had never heard of a steel and silver alloy.
He held it up to the light. Like a fly's many-faceted eye it threw back manifold images of—himself. Somehow, it made him dizzy to gaze at the images. He drew his eyes away and had an impulse to fling the strange disc away across the room.
The sun was going down. He heard a clattering from the prison kitchen as the evening meal was prepared. Tomorrow, he thought, should see the completion of his work here. Another interview with the paranoid giant who had brought the disc, perhaps. The disc fascinated him.
He looked at it again. He didn't want to, and recognized the strange compulsion within himself. Then, before he quite realized it, he was staring at his multiple image again. His senses swam. There was a far-away rustling sound like—the words came unbidden to his mind from a poem by Kipling—like the wind that blows between the worlds. He gazed again at the disc. It seemed to draw him, as a magnet draws iron filings. Now he wanted to fight it, wanted to fight with every ounce of his strength. A wave of giddiness swept over him, leaving nausea in its wake. He clutched at the prison-office desk for support. The rustling grew louder.
He saw—or thought he saw—a girl, a lovely, sun-bronzed girl. There was a look of fear on her face. She seemed to be crying out for help.
An abyss yawned before his feet, before his very soul. He longed despite himself to plunge into the abyss, whatever the fearful consequences might be. He lurched back, fighting the longing. Yet he knew he wouldn't win. He took a step forward....
"Give it to me!"
The voice, urgent, distant, beckoned him back to reality. It seemed a great distance off, but it was something to which he could hold.
"Give me that disc!"
He felt himself dragged roughly back, saw the abyss retreating. The rustling of the wind between the worlds became distant, a sound imagined rather than heard.
"Give it to me!"
* * * *
He blinked. The nausea had washed over him. He felt weak, drained, exhausted. But the substantial reality of the prison office surrounded him.
The young giant stood before him, strapping the bracelet which held the disc on his powerful arm. A look of intense concentration was on his face. His skin was bathed with sweat although it was cool in the room.
"What did you do to the guard?" Dr. Slonamn asked, wondering if the prisoner would slay him.
"He'll be all right. I only hit him. I'm sorry. It was necessary." The giant spoke in haste. His eyes were clouded, dreamy, as if he had taken an overdose of barbituates.
"What are you going to do?"
"You saw? In the disc?"
"Yes," said Dr. Slonamn.
"I'm going. It's my home."
The giant took a step forward, then began to stagger.
"Your home?" Dr. Slonamn gasped. "Your home?"
The giant, who had given his name to the prison authorities as Bram Forest, did not answer. Dr. Slonamn reached out, as if to grab him. Bram Forest stood there, a smile and the acceptance of pain fighting for mastery of his face.
Dr. Slonamn staggered back as if struck. His hand had passed through Bram Forest's body.
Staggering, trembling, Dr. Slonamn leaned for support on the desk. He could see through Bram Forest now. See through him entirely.
A cold fierce wind, like no wind ever felt on Earth, touched him. He shuddered.
When he looked again, Bram Forest was gone....
* * * *
"Retoc the Abarian!" the seneschal's voice proclaimed.
An uneasy stir passed through the crowd of mourning courtiers in the palace chamber. Retoc, ruler of Abaria, did not often visit Nadia. A state of armed tension existed between Abaria and Nadia of the ice fields. Nadia alone of the many disunited nations of Tarth had strength in some ways comparable to that of black forested Abaria, but even then, if a war came between the two nations, the issue would never seriously be in doubt.
As a matter of diplomacy, Retoc had been invited to the funeral of Prince Jlomec, although neither Bontarc, ruler of Nadia, nor his sister, Volna the Beautiful, had ever dreamed he would come.
While the crowd milled about in their white mourning garments, Retoc told the seneschal: "I wish an audience with the Princess Volna."
The crowd was suddenly quiet. Volna the Beautiful, haughty, imperious, princess of the royal blood, would certainly refuse to see the Abarian ruler. Nevertheless, the seneschal bowed low, said, "Your request will be carried to the staff of the royal household, lord," and disappeared behind a hanging.
* * * *
Some time later, in another part of the palace, Bontarc was saying: "Volna, Volna, listen to me. You can't see that man now."
"I'm going to see him," Volna the Beautiful told her brother. "So it may not be said that a princess of the royal blood hid in fear behind a wall of tragedy."
"But sister! With dear Prince Jlomec still not on the burning barge which will carry him down the River of Ice on the final journey from which—"
"Please, brother," Volna said a little coldly. "I'm going to grant Retoc his audience. Don't you understand? He thinks me weakened by Jlomec's death. Oh, I loved the Prince, yes. He was always so—so quiet and aloof from affairs of state. But I can be strong if strong I have to be."
"Then you won't change your mind?" Bontarc asked. He was a fighting man by nature. The devious paths of diplomacy he set foot on only with reluctance.
For answer Volna said: "Let me prepare to greet the royal visitor." And she watched Bontarc leave her quarters.
At once she clapped her hands. Six serving maids skipped through the hangings into her huge bower and while they clustered jabbering about her like so many excited birds, she undid the fastening at her left shoulder and allowed her gown of mourning white to fall in a crumpled heap at her feet. She stood naked and perfectly still while the serving maids administered to her, each girl a master in one of the cosmetic arts. And Volna, she of the haughty face and glorious body, she who already had been beautiful to look upon, was soon transformed by the cosmetic arts into the loveliest woman the planet Tarth had seen since the Queen Evalla.
Her thoughts went to the dead queen of Ofrid as the maids dressed her again in the mourning garment. Evalla, a woman with beauty to match Volna's, had ruled the most powerful nation Tarth had ever known. Then, Volna smiled, why not another such woman, with hands strong enough, and vision clear enough, to grasp the chalice of power and drink deeply of its heady brew?
* * * *
"Retoc," she was saying a few moments later.
She clapped her hands. The maids in waiting withdrew, giggling.
"Volna, Volna," said the big Abarian ruler. "You are glorious. Every jek of the journey from the Plains of Ofrid across the ice fields of Nadia, I burned for you." He came very close to her. His face swam before her vision, a hard, strong, handsome face with the cruel eyes of a sadist. Fitting consort for a woman who would rule the world? His lips parted....
Volna, smiling, placed her cool hand over his mouth.
"Then let me put out the fire," she said coolly, "for we have much to discuss."
"But Princess, I—"
"Hush. And what, exactly, were you doing on the Plains of Ofrid?"
Retoc's big face flushed red. Then, when he saw Volna was still smiling, he said: "When we met last, you mentioned that two men stood between you and the throne of Nadia."
"Yes?" said Volna, mocking him, turning swiftly with the light behind her sending its bright beams through the white mourning garment and outlining the seductive curves of her body.
"Jlomec is dead," Retoc said simply.
Still smiling, Volna slapped the big man's face ringingly. Retoc stepped back, startled.
"Fool!" Volna hissed. "I can call the guards. I can have you slain."
"But I—"
"I did not say I was not pleased. But don't lie to me. That isn't why you slew my brother. Well, man, is it?"
Retoc bowed his head. Only in his eyes there was fury. "We'll make a strange pair, Volna, you and I," he said passionately.
"Is it?"
Retoc shook his head slowly.
"You see? I knew it. I knew it was you when they told us Jlomec had been slain, and yet because I know you and know too how you are quick to passion, I told myself you had not done it consciously because I had suggested it to you. Fool. Can I trust such as you?"
"Only Bontarc stands between you and empire. And Bontarc is a simple man."
"As you are a passionate man."
"Yet you need me, Volna. You need the strength of my arm—and my army. What a pair we'll make!"
Volna stepped into the embrace of his big arms and allowed herself to be kissed. Retoc burned for her. He had said so. All men burned for her, she knew that. And, before she was finished, every man of Tarth would kneel at her feet and call her Queen.
Retoc drew back finally, breathing hard. Volna had for him only a cool, mocking smile.
* * * *
At last he said, "There are some who might say Retoc of Abaria killed the royal prince."
"Dolt! Were you seen?"
Retoc shrugged as if it were not important. "A band of wayfarers on the Ofridian Plain. They were so frightened, they fled at once. After I had wounded the white giant."
Volna's eyes flashed suddenly. "There was someone else? You did not kill him?"
"I tried to. He escaped, Princess."
"Then you are more a fool than I thought."
"But I—"
"Begone! We can't be seen together too much. Take quarters in Nadia City, and let me know where you are. You understand?"
"Yes, Princess."
She allowed him to kiss her hand, then he withdrew. A few moments later, at her summons, the seneschal appeared. Subtly her face had changed. No longer was she the desiring and desirous princess. Instead, she was a grieving sister, whose brother's body still lay in state in the royal palace.
The seneschal, whose name was Prokliam, bowed obsequiously. He knew that by custom the body of a royal Nadian floated down the River of Ice in the company of two living servants—one man and one woman—who would perish with him in the Place of the Dead. He knew also that he had been Jlomec's favorite and now lived in constant fear that the Princess Volna would decree that he, Prokliam, must accompany his dead master on the Journey of No Return, to serve him in death as he had served him in life.
"Yes, lady?" the frightened Prokliam asked.
"Bontarc, our king, grieves mightily for the dead prince," Volna said.
"All Nadia grieves for Jlomec, lady," Prokliam said, and added hastily: "Although I must admit I do not grieve more than the next man. No, no, it is a mistake to think I was Jlomec's favorite."
"Be that as it may Bontarc grieves so that for a while at least some of the affairs of state will be in my hands."
"I hear and understand lady."
"Good. If anyone comes—anyone at all, whether wayfarers from Ofrid or others—with news of how Jlomec died, they are to be brought at once to me. Is that understood?"
"Yes, my princess." Prokliam the seneschal bowed low once more.
"Serve me well in this, Prokliam, and you will be rewarded in measure."
Prokliam smiled. "I will be the personification of discretion," he said boldly, baring his toothless old gums.
"Then perhaps I will still the rumors that you were the dead Jlomec's favorite."
Prokliam dropped at the royal feet and touched his lips to the royal toes. Then he bowed out of the room.
Volna stared for many moments at her beautiful face in the mirror. Queen, she thought. She said it aloud:
"Queen Volna."
CHAPTER XIII
The Journey of No Return
Earlier that day, on the ice fields half a dozen jeks from Nadia City, B'ronth the Utalian had sprinted boldly across the snow toward the girl and her elderly male companion. This had taken considerable effort, because B'ronth the Utalian had not been endowed with an abundance of courage. But B'ronth was a poor man, as Utalia was a poor country; a bag of gold would be a veritable fortune to him. Like most cowards, B'ronth had one passion which could over-ride his timidity: that passion in B'ronth's case was wealth.
The old man was fumbling clumsily for his whip-sword when B'ronth hurtled at them. The girl screamed:
"Look out, Father Hammeth! Look out!"
B'ronth smiled. They would not see the smile, of course. B'ronth, a chameleon man, was invisible. They would see his footprints in the snow, true. They would know him for a Utalian and understand his invisibility. But still the advantage of invisibility would be his. It had always been so when a Utalian fought. It would always be so.
B'ronth leaped upon the old man even as he prepared to strike out with the whip-sword. B'ronth was both naked and unarmed. The sword lashed whining at air a foot from his face. B'ronth wrenched its haft from the old man's hand. Hammeth stumbled back.
B'ronth swung the whip-sword. He was no duelist. A duelist would lunge and thrust with the whip-sword, allowing its mobile point some degree of freedom by controlling it deftly. A non-duelist like B'ronth would hack and slash, the deadly sword-point whipping about, curling, slashing, striking.
Hammeth held up his hands to defend himself. The whip-sword whined in the cold air. The girl screamed. Hammeth's right hand flew from his arm and blood jetted from the stump. Hammeth sank to the ground and lay there in a spreading pool of crimson. His eyes remained open. He was staring with hatred at B'ronth. In a matter of minutes, B'ronth knew, he would bleed to death. B'ronth turned on the girl.
She stood before him swaying. She had almost swooned, but as B'ronth approached her, she flung herself at him, crying Hammeth's name, and they both fell down in the snow. B'ronth let the whip-sword fall from his fingers. Half a bag of gold for a dead girl, but the whole bag if she lived. She fought like a wild cat and for a few moments B'ronth regretted dropping the weapon and actually feared for his life. But soon, his courage returning and his whole being contemplating the bag of gold, he subdued the girl.
She lay back exhausted in the snow. "Please," she said. "Please bind his arm. He'll bleed to death. Please."
B'ronth said nothing. Ylia staggered to her feet, then collapsed and crawled on her knees to Hammeth. The blood jetted from the stump of his arm. He was watching her. A little smile touched the corners of his mouth but pain made his eyes wild.
B'ronth licked his lips. He had earned his bag of gold and, earning it, thought of more wealth. He thought: why should I accept one bag of gold from a common Abarian soldier when there are millions of bags of gold in Nadia City? He could deliver the girl, who obviously knew something the Abarians did not wish the Nadians to know, to Nadia City. He could sell her to the Nadians. Or, if the Abarians outbid them, then the Abarians....
Bruised, her cloak in tatters, Ylia reached Hammeth. His eyes blinked. He smiled at her again, smiling this time with his whole face. Then he turned his head away and his eyes remained open and staring.
"You...killed...him," Ylia said, sobbing.
B'ronth dragged her to her feet. "Lulukee!" he called. "Lulukee!" Where was the boy?
Lulukee did not answer. Cursing, B'ronth stripped the corpse and dressed in its warm clothing. The blood on the right sleeve was already stiff with cold. Where could Lulukee have gone off to? wondered B'ronth. Well, no matter. They were only a few jeks from Nadia City, where wealth awaited him....
"Come," he said. He dragged the girl along. She looked back at the dead old man until a snow drift hid him from sight.
* * * *
After the Utalian had dragged the beautiful girl beyond the ridges of snow, Lulukee the Nadian came down into the valley. He was a small boy of some sixty winters who, like many of the Nadians who did not come from their country's single large city, had lived a hard life as an ice-field nomad. He had seen an opportunity to profit in the service of B'ronth the Utalian, but had not expected this service to include murder. Thus when the Utalian had called him, expecting the boy to drag his supply sled down into the snow-valley, Lulukee had remained hidden. Now, though, he made his way to the body of the dead man and, scavengerlike, went over it with the hope of turning a profit by B'ronth's deed.
In that he was disappointed. B'ronth had taken the dead man's snow cloak and his whip-sword: there was nothing left for Lulukee's gleaning. He was about to turn and trudge back the way he had come, when he realized that if he did so, if he exposed himself on the higher wind-ridges, B'ronth might see him. Therefore he remained a long time with the frozen body of Father Hammeth, actually falling into a light slumber while he waited.
He awoke with a start. He blinked, then cowered away from the apparition which confronted him. It was a man, but such a man as Lulukee the Nadian had never seen before, a superbly muscled man a head taller than the tall Abarians themselves.
"Where's the girl?" the man demanded.
"I—I don't know, lord."
"How did this happen?" The man looked down with compassion at Father Hammeth's corpse.
"I only just arrived, l-lord."
"You lie," the big man said. "You were sleeping here. You'll tell me, or—"
Lulukee blanched. He owed no loyalty to B'ronth the Utalian. If indeed he remained loyal he might be implicated in the murder of the old man. He said: "It was B'ronth the Utalian."
"Where is he?"
"G-going to Nadia City, I think."
"Alone?"
"No, lord. With his prisoner. A—a lovely woman."
"Ylia!" the giant cried. "You! How are you called?"
"I am Lulukee of Nadia, lord."
"Lead me to the city. Lead me after them."
"But lord—"
"Lead me." The giant did not shout. He did not menace of glower or threaten. Yet there was something in his bearing which made it impossible for the frightened Lulukee to do anything but obey. "Yes, lord," he said.
"Tell me—" as they started out, the boy's sled reluctantly left behind—"is this B'ronth the Utalian in Retoc's pay?"
"No, I don't think so. He works alone, lord. Reaping profit wherever he can."
"And he took the girl unwillingly?"
"Yes, lord."
"He won't profit in this venture," Bram vowed.
The wind howled behind them. Six jeks ahead of them was Nadia City.
* * * *
"Can't you see I'm busy? Can't you see I have no time for the likes of you?" Prokliam the seneschal whined in self-pity.
"Then make time," B'ronth said boldly, his cowardice obscured by dreams of avarice. "What I have brought through the Ice Gates is important to your ruler."
"Bontarc of Nadia," said the seneschal haughtily, "does not waste his time on every Utalian vagabond who reaches his court."
"True. But I assume Bontarc of Nadia wishes to know exactly how his brother, the Prince Jlomec, died?"
Prokliam fought to keep his puckered old face impassive. But his mind was racing and his heart throbbed painfully. Could the Utalian know anything about that? If so, and if he, Prokliam, brought this B'ronth before the Princess Volna as she had ordered....
"Wait here," Prokliam snapped arrogantly. "And keep your cloak on. We don't want invisible Utalians floating about the palace."
B'ronth offered a mock bow. Prokliam turned to go, then whirled about again. "If you're lying, wasting my time—"
B'ronth smiled unctuously. "In the ante-room, being amused by your palace guards, is one who has been on the Plains of Ofrid quite recently."
"So?"
"When the Prince Jlomec was there. She saw him slain."
"Wait here," said Prokliam a little breathlessly. He pushed the hanging aside and stalked down a corridor, and around a bend, and up a flight of stone stairs. He was busy, all right. That had been no lie. Preparations must be made for the funeral games of the Prince Jlomec, to which all the nobility of Tarth had been invited. But this, obviously, was more important. On this Prokliam's life might depend....
"Are they checking way-passes, lord?" Lulukee asked the big, silent man at his side. Ahead of them, filing slowly through the Ice Gates, were hundreds of visitors entering Nadia City for the funeral games. A flat-bottomed air-car hovered overhead, peltasts leaning over its sides, ready. Guards flanked the Ice Gates with drawn whip-swords, as if admitting the superiority of Abarian weapons of war.
"We'll get through," Bram Forest vowed. "Tell me, Lulukee, if you brought a prisoner to the city who might be worth much to the Abarians but also to the Nadians, and if you were intent on getting the biggest profit, where would you take her?"
"If I had great courage, lord?"
"If you dreamed of reward."
"I would take her to the royal palace, lord, to Bontarc the King or to his sister, Princess Volna the Beautiful, who, some say, is the real power behind the Nadian throne although Bontarc is a great soldier."
* * * *
They had reached the gate. "Way passes," a bored guard said.
Lulukee mumbled something uncertainly. His heart beat painfully against his ribs. His brain refused to function. There was intrigue here, he could sense that. More intrigue than he cared to have a hand in. As a Nadian citizen, he owned a way pass, of course. But the giant? Obviously the giant did not. Lulukee was sorry he had ever agreed to go along with B'ronth the Utalian. Now he only wanted to get out of the entire situation as quickly—and safely—as possible.
He pointed an accusing finger at Bram Forest. "He has no way pass!" Lulukee cried.
The guards stiffened, their whip-swords ready. They looked at Bram Forest. Overhead, the air-car hovered, its peltasts stationed there in the event of trouble, their slings poised.
Ylia was in there somewhere, a prisoner. Bram Forest spurned violence for its own sake, but Ylia might need him. Ylia, who had nursed him back to health when Retoc had left him for dead on the parched Plains of Ofrid. Ylia, the lovely.
"I'm going through," Bram Forest said softly. "Don't try to stop me."
For answer, the nearest guard let his left hand drop.
It had been a signal. Overhead, the peltasts drew back their slings. "Will you go in peace?" the guard asked, his eyes narrow slits now, his right arm tensed to bring the whip-sword around.
Bram Forest waited. Every muscle in his superbly-conditioned body cried for action, but he would not initiate it.
The guard pointed back along the path across the ice fields, where hundreds of visitors to the city were waiting impatiently. "Then go," he said harshly, "before your flesh feeds the stilt-birds on the banks of the River of Ice."
The guard raised his sword menacingly. Standing rigidly still and giving no warning, Bram Forest lashed out with his left fist, hitting the guard in the mouth. Lips split, teeth flew, blood covered the guard's face. Someone screamed. The guard fell, but his companion lashed out with his own whip-sword. Bram Forest lunged to one side and grabbed the sword-arm, twisting it. The guard howled, dropping his weapon. Lulukee made a dive for it. But the guard, his legs still free, kicked Lulukee in the face. As he fell, his senses blurring, Lulukee wondered why he had made that desperate, foolish attempt to help the big, silent man. He could not answer the question in mere words. But there was something about him, something about Bram Forest, which drew loyalty from you even as the sun drew dew from the ground....
* * * *
Bram Forest lifted the second guard by sword-girdle and scruff of neck and held him aloft. The guard's arms and legs flailed frantically. "No!" he screamed up at the peltasts. "No...."
But they had already unleashed their first volley of stones, pelting the helpless guard until he lost consciousness. Bram Forest flung him aside, leaped over the first fallen guard's supine body, and plunged recklessly into the crowds milling just inside the Ice Gates.
"He went that way!" a voice screamed.
"That way!"
"Over there!"
"There he is!"
It was an ancient city, with narrow, tortuous alleyways and overhanging buildings and little-used passageways. The wide streets—the few there were—mobbed with people.
For all his size, the giant had disappeared.
Lulukee picked himself up, dusted himself off, and showed his way pass to the guard. The guard said nothing. He had lost three teeth and his mouth was swollen, painful. Lulukee sensed that somehow the little he had done to help Bram Forest was all he would ever do for him. Yet he felt with a strange pride he did not fathom that although his role in the saga of the mysterious giant had come to an end, it was the most important event in his life and would remain so if he lived to be six-hundred. He felt somehow—and could not explain why he felt this—as if in his small way he had done something to make the world Tarth a better place in which to live.
Whistling, he pushed his way through the crowds and was lost to sight just as the giant who went before him.
* * * *
"B'ronth of Utalia!" Prokliam the seneschal proclaimed. Volna the Beautiful nodded. The doddering old seneschal had already told her about the Utalian. She was prepared to receive him now. If he knew what he claimed to know, if he knew the true details of the death of Prince Jlomec, then he must be silenced. Naturally, he wanted gold. They always wanted gold. But gold was not the way to silence them. Gold never worked. It only made them greedy for more.
With Volna were, instead of her usual ladies in waiting, two discreet palace guards. Grinning, she looked at their whip-swords. That was the way to silence one such as B'ronth the Utalian.
"He may enter," Volna told the seneschal. Prokliam bowed out, saying:
"And Princess, you will not forget—"
"No, Prokliam, I won't forget. You hardly knew the Prince Jlomec at all, did you? You certainly couldn't have been his favorite."
"Princess," breathed the seneschal tremulously as he withdrew.
A moment later, B'ronth the Utalian entered the royal chamber. He wore a snow-cloak. He was all but invisible except for the snow-cloak. He was, eerily, a disembodied cloak floating through air. Although, noticed Volna, if you looked closely you could see the faintest suggestion of a man's head above the cloak, as if you saw the rich wall tapestries of the room through a transparent, head-shaped glass. Likewise, the suggestion of arms and legs....
"You are B'ronth?" An unnecessary question, but Volna had not yet made up her mind what must be done.
"Yes, majesty," the cloak said in a different but somehow unctuous voice.
"You are alone?"
"No, majesty," said the cloak.
"Then—?"
"A girl. A wayfarer of the Plains of Ofrid. I accompany her."
"And the story you have to tell?"
"I realize, majesty, how the royal Princess must grieve at the loss of her royal brother, the Prince. I realize...."
"To the point, man. Get to the point. Are you trying to say you know how Prince Jlomec was slain? You know who killed him?"
"Yes," said the cloak boldly, eagerly.
Princess Volna smiled. Perhaps something in that smile warned B'ronth the Utalian. But of course, the warning came too late. In a quick jerky motion, the cloak retreated toward the doorway. "Princess...." B'ronth said.
Princess Volna told her guards: "Kill him."
B'ronth the Utalian had time for one brief scream which, if a sound could, seemed to embody all his frustrated dreams of wealth. Then one of the guards moved swiftly, his arm streaking out. The whip-sword in his hand lashed, blurring, toward the cloak. Bright red blood welled, jetted.
B'ronth the Utalian's head, no longer invisible, rolled on the floor at Volna's lovely feet. "Clean that up," she told one of the guards. To the other she said: "Now fetch the girl."
* * * *
"Mind, lord, I don't question you," Hultax the Abarian said. "But it's just—"
"Did you send the message?" Retoc cut him off.
"As you ordered, sire. Yes."
"Good."
"Sire, I hate inactivity. I loathe it. I am a soldier."
"As I am," said Retoc slowly, his hard cruel eyes staring at something Hultax could not—and would never be able to—see.
"So we just sit here in this rented house in Nadia City, cooling our heels. It doesn't make sense, sire."
"Sense?" mused Retoc. "What is sense? Is it victory and power for the strongest? Well, is it?"
"Yes, lord," Hultax responded. "But—"
"And you sent the message? Our legions will come?"
"Yes, lord. Two days hence they'll be encamped on the ice fields three jeks march from the city gates. But I don't see—"
"You obey, Hultax. I see. I do the seeing."
"But I thought you...the Princess Volna...together...."
"The Princess can serve me, now. If she can deliver Nadia without a fight, then Tarth is mine, Hultax, don't you see? In two days all the royal blood of all the royal families of Tarth will be assembled here in Nadia for the funeral games. If Bontarc's army doesn't interfere, then I will be master of Tarth."
"But if Bontarc finds out—"
"That, Hultax," said Retoc with a smile, "is why you sent the message."
"My sire," said the proud soldier Hultax humbly.
Soon, thought Retoc, all Tarth would call him that. My sire....
* * * *
Ahead of Bram Forest loomed the ramparts of the palace. He must hurry. He knew he had to hurry. He pushed impatiently through the crowd. Several times men looked up angrily, and would have said something. But when they saw his face, they turned away.
What they saw in Bram Forest's face made them afraid.
"Majesty?" Prokliam the seneschal said.
"Well?" Volna demanded. "Didn't the guards send you for the girl?"
"Majesty, I was thinking...."
"Well, Prokliam, what is it? Didn't you go for the girl?"
"Not yet, majesty, begging your pardon...."
"If you have something to say, then say it. And get the girl."
"Majesty, a seneschal knows the palace. It is his job...."
"I warn you, Prokliam, I have little patience today." Her anxiety was evident.
"No one wishes to be chosen," Prokliam blurted quickly, boldly, "even as I did not wish to be chosen to accompany the body of Prince Jlomec on the Journey of No Return. Now that you have spared me, in your royal benevolence, I thought I might in turn advise you...."
"Yes, what is it, man?"
"You should not have killed the Utalian, majesty. If it is ordained that a living man and a living woman accompany the Prince's body to the Place of the Dead, to die there with him, their spirits serving him in death, why choose from among the palace staff? We all have family, we all have friends, we all stand something to lose. But majesty, if you were to break with tradition, if you were to send instead two strangers whose loss meant nothing to the palace, the palace staff would love and revere you even more than they already do."
Volna's beautiful face smiled at him. He did not know what she was thinking. He never knew. No one did. She might reward him or have him slain on the spot. "Why do you tell me this, Prokliam?" she asked.
"For saving me when it was thought I would accompany—"
"No. There must be another reason."
"If you do this deed and if the palace and the people love you for it, and if the scepter of power should slip from Bontarc's hand to yours, and if, when it came time to select your prime minister...."
"Ha! Ha! Ha! We have an ambitious palace butler."
"But surely you—"
"Yes, Prokliam. I understand. I won't deny it. Perhaps I had the Utalian slain impetuously. But there's still the girl."
"I'll fetch her at once, majesty."
"And if," mused Volna, no longer aware of the seneschal's presence, "we could find another stranger, a man, to accompany the body of Prince Jlomec on the Journey of No Return, not only the palace, but the people as well would love me. A stranger...."
"Take me to your King," Bram Forest told the palace guard.
The guard smirked. "Do you think any stranger in the realm is granted an audience with King Bontarc, fool?"
"It is a matter of life and death."
"But whose life and death?" demanded the guard, roaring with laughter. "Yours, idiot?"
"It is about Ylia the Wayfarer."
"I know of no Ylia the Wayfarer. Begone, dolt!"
"It is about Prince Jlomec."
The guard's eyes narrowed. The word had been passed by no less a person than Prokliam the seneschal that anyone with information concerning the death of the royal Prince should be brought at once not to Bontarc but to Princess Volna. Could the guard, could he, Porfis, do less?
"Very well," he said. "Come with me."
Unarmed, but aware of his giant's strength and the mission which had seen him spend the first hundred years of his life in a crypt on Earth, Bram Forest went with the guard.
The way was long, through chambers in which priceless tapestries hung, through narrow, musty corridors into which the light of day barely penetrated, through rooms in which ladies in waiting and courtiers talked and joked, up bare stone stairs and through heavy wooden doors which Porfis the guard opened with a key which hung at his belt. The doors opened slowly.
Bram Forest entered a large room. It was, he could see at a glance, a woman's bower. Someone was standing at the far end of the room, in shadow. He squinted. He took two slow steps into the room. He began to run.
"Ylia! Ylia!" he cried.
Too late he saw the fetters binding her arms. Too late he saw her bite savagely at something and twist her neck and spit the gag from her mouth. Too late he heard her cry:
"Bram! Bram Forest! Behind you!"
He turned barely in time to see Porfis the guard, his whip-sword raised overhead hilt-first. He lifted his arm, but it was swept aside in the downward rush of the sword. Something exploded behind his eyes and all eternity seemed to open beneath his feet. He plunged into blackness with Ylia's name on his lips.
* * * *
Unconscious, he was taken with Ylia through subterranean passages to the Royal Dock on the River of Ice. The barge with Jlomec's embalmed body waited. It was very cold on the river. The Place of the Dead beckoned from the unseen end of the Journey of No Return.
CHAPTER XIV
Land Beyond the Stars
At first Retoc the Abarian was too stunned by what he witnessed to think coherently. With the other Tarthians of royal blood he had received an unexpected summons to appear at the Royal Dock on the River of Ice and, before he could even try to fathom what it was about, an escort of Nadian guards had come to fetch him.
It was cold and murky on the banks of the River of Ice. The two men, Retoc and Hultax had arrived barely in time to see them unfastening the hawsers of the Royal Barge. Curious, he pushed closer through the crowd of nobles. Suddenly, before the barge was quite unmoored, as it swayed and rocked on the currents of the river, Nadian soldiers appeared with a platform on poles slung across their shoulders, the usual means of intra-city transportation for Nadian royalty. But this was no royalty Retoc saw on the platform, although they were dressed as royalty.
The woman, conscious and bound hand and foot, was the Virgin of the Wayfarers who had witnessed Prince Jlomec's death. The man, unconscious, his head propped high on pillows, was the white giant who once on the Plains of Ofrid had almost strangled Retoc.
A hatred such as he had never known flashed through Retoc's brain. He was so close he could see the gentle up-and-down motion of the giant's chest as he breathed. Then, beyond the platform, he saw Volna. Volna smiled at him. The platform bobbed by, was placed on the barge at the foot of Jlomec's bier. The remaining hawsers were cut loose.
There was, Retoc thought triumphantly, no return from the Place of the Dead.
But still, the white giant had recovered from what looked like certain death once, had vanished abruptly and fantastically when he would have died again. What was good enough for Volna the Beautiful was not necessarily good enough for Retoc of Abaria. He watched only long enough to see the royal barge pushed out into the icy currents of the river, then he turned and made his way to the second tier of observers, where Hultax stood among the lesser nobility and the military officers of the planet Tarth. He found Hultax and whispered for a time in his ear.
Hultax's face blanched. "But lord," he protested, "there is no return...it is obvious the man will die...you couldn't expect me to...." Hultax, frightened, confused, could neither think clearly nor express himself properly. His mouth hung open.
"Earlier, Hultax," Retoc said with a hard smile, "you craved action. I give you action. Take a boat. There are some moored down-river for the use of Nadian priests on their religious pilgrimages to the banks where the stilt-birds dwell. Overtake the royal barge. Board it. Slay the man and the woman."
"But I—the Place of the Dead...."
"Fool!" hissed Retoc. "I didn't ask you to visit the Place of the Dead. That's up to you. If you slay them first, on the River of Ice, and can bring back proof...but the longer we talk, the further they are. You'll go?"
It was phrased as a question; actually, it was a command. Grim-faced, the whip-sword trailing at his side, Hultax left the crowd of soldiers and made his way downstream. A few moments later he had poled a wooden skiff out into the icy current and went down-river in pursuit of the royal barge.
* * * *
The guards had unbound Ylia's fetters on the barge, knowing she could never swim for safety in the waters of the River of Ice. She sat now at the foot of Jlomec's bier, with Bram Forest's handsome head cushioned on her lap. It was very cold there on the river. Wind blew, rustling the reeds which grew along the bank. They had long since emerged from the river's underground cavern. The swift current carried them now through a country of ice, a tundra. The reeds, twice as tall as a man, seemed to thrive on the riverbanks. They swallowed everything.
Bram Forest opened his eyes, and looked at her, and smiled. He tried to sit up, wincing as pain knifed through his head. "We seem to make a habit of this," he said, smiling again.
"Shh, you mustn't talk."
She leaned close. He could smell the animal perfume of her body, like musk and jasmine. Impulsively, she kissed him softly on the lips. His arm went around her neck. He pulled her head down and drank deeply of her.
"Why..." she began, all breathless.
"Because I love you. I think I loved you the first moment I saw you. But I didn't know it then." He laughed softly, gently, and she did not know why this should be so.
"Why do you laugh?"
"I was an infant, the son of the Queen. Of Queen Evalla. Portox the scientist fled with me, the last of the royal Ofridian blood, to the other side of the solar system, to a world the twin of this, a world we never see because the sun always stands between us, a world called Earth. There I would wait until maturity. There I would be given the strength and the wisdom I needed. And then I would return to Tarth and right the ancient wrong. Well, I have returned. I love you. It is enough, Ylia. I want to think of the future, not the past."
Ylia let him kiss her again. "Isn't it the same, the future and the past? Aren't they one? I too am of Ofridian blood, Bram Forest, of the lesser nobility. There are hundreds of us, living nomadic lives on the Ofridian Plains, where once our great nation stood."
"I didn't know that. It wasn't in Portox's training. Now Portox is dead. I buried him on this world called Earth. He could not even come back to his native Tarth."
"Darling, don't you see? That's exactly why the ancient wrong must be righted, why Retoc must pay for his infamous deeds. So Portox and the millions of other Ofridians, slain, all slain, can sleep eternally in peace. You are their champion."
"But revenge? What is revenge if—"
"You are the champion of the future too! Don't you see, oh, don't you? Of all the unborn tomorrows when the Ofridian nation may live again. Of all the unborn tomorrows when the nations of Tarth can live together in peace and harmony. Don't you understand that?"
"It's funny. I try to see my mother's face. Queen Evalla. But all I see is you. She's the past, Ylia. You're the future." He held her lightly.
"There is no future for anyone as long as Retoc the Abarian rules, and dreams of Tarth, all Tarth, as his domain."
Bram Forest stood up. The cold winds blew. He looked at the blue-cold body of Jlomec, lying in state, at the ice-choked river, at the banks of rustling reeds. He did not have to ask where they were. He knew. "Perhaps," he said at last. "I only mean that if I do this thing it will be more to see that future generations live in peace than to bring vengeance on a power-mad Abarian."
"Oh, Bram! That's what I wanted you to say. I wanted to hear you say that. For tomorrow! For all our tomorrows."
* * * *
Bram Forest walked to the rail of the barge, and gripped it, and looked out over the ice-flows. He recited:
"An ape, a boar, a stallion,
A land beyond the stars.
A Virgin's feast, a raging beast,
A prison without bars."
"Why, what an unusual poem!" Ylia cried. Then: "Hold me close, it's so cold. And I'm afraid, Bram Forest...."
"Of the Place of the Dead?"
"Yes, yes. The Place of the Dead."
"It and the poem are entwined," Bram Forest said musingly. "I know they are. Together, they're my destiny."
"And the destiny of all Tarth?"
"Perhaps. Portox liked to think so, I guess."
"I like to think so, Bram Forest." She smiled up at him tremulously. "And my destiny as well."
"Ylia," he asked abruptly, "what do you know about the Golden Ape? You mentioned it to me once, when you thought I...well, when you thought I endangered your virginity."
"Why, nothing beyond what the legends say."
"And what do the legends say?"
"It is written in the most ancient of our religious beliefs that the messenger to the Place of the Dead is a Golden Ape. Naturally, in these same beliefs, a defiled virgin is supposed to kill herself. Thus, in a way of speaking, she goes to the Golden Ape. You see?"
Bram Forest smiled down at her. "What would you think if I told you the Golden Ape was real? If I told you that there actually was a Place of the Dead?"
"For the spirits of the departed?" Ylia asked in a very small voice.
"No. Man can't presume to know about that. It's in the realm of the gods. I mean a place which somehow borders on Tarth and yet...yet is beyond the stars. A place which, when wayfarers returned from it miraculously long and long ago, gave rise to the legends."
"Borders on Tarth...yet beyond the stars? How can this be?"
"Portox found it and explained it with his science," Bram Forest insisted. "Earth and Tarth, twin worlds, yet so different, forever unseen one by the other, on opposite sides of the sun. They're unique in the solar system, Ylia. Portox thought—if the memory he planted in my mind is correct—that they're unique in the entire universe. Somehow, a million million years ago, a world split, becoming two worlds. But ordinary space...I don't know, the memory is confused...could not hold them. There is a warp of space, a place where space bends. Learn to master the warp and you go instantly from Tarth to Earth, or back again. That was the way Portox brought me, as an infant, to Earth." He held aloft his arm, showing her the steel-silver disc. "With this I can travel back and forth at will. Without it, either Earth or Tarth would be my prison...." His voice trailed off.
Then he blurted: "'A prison without bars!'"
"What...."
"The prophetic poem. Part of the poem. Anyway, Ylia, Earth and Tarth exist at either end of this space warp, connected thus through normal space where there should be no connection. And someplace along the warp—where ordinary space-time distances don't matter...."
"I'm sorry, Bram Forest. I don't understand you."
"I'm not sure I understand myself. Tarth is a primitive world. It is beyond our science. It is even beyond the science of Earth, I believe, and Earth is a millennium ahead of Tarth in its development. But Portox knew. Anyhow, someplace along the warp—in ordinary distances along the space-time continuum perhaps a billion light years distant from either Earth or Tarth, is a third world. On the warp it is very close. The River of Ice leads to it. We call it the Place of the Dead."
"But the Golden Ape—?"
"—inhabits the so-called Place of the Dead. Their world was dying, but Portox saved them. I think...the science is beyond me...the entropy of their galaxy was running down...their world perishing, freezing...when somehow with his great science Portox claimed for their use the unavailable energy in their...their thermodynamic system, and saved them."
"Why do you frown so?"
"Words. Words only. I don't understand. I can only act."
"You can act," Ylia said, hugging herself tight against him. "For Tarth and the future."
"For Tarth and the future," Bram Forest said, but he hardly heard the words.
Ahead of them in the cold clear air a wall seemed to rise. It came up so suddenly, and, in fact, the air had cleared so suddenly from the accustomed murkiness, that Ylia was afraid. "It is in the legend," she whispered. "The Black Wall, Bram Forest. And beyond it—the Place of the Dead."
"More accurately, an edge-on view of the space-warp, where it meets the normal world." But although he spoke the words of Portox, Bram Forest did not sound too confident.
"We're coming closer to it, Bram. Hold me!"
He held her. There was nothing else he could do. The current swept the barge on inexorably. The Black Wall reared ahead of them, frowned down at them, seemed to block off all the rest of the universe and all reality whether of Earth or of Tarth....
The barge penetrated the wall. Black and solid-seeming, solid as stone, it yet offered no resistance. The barge disappeared within it.
Behind the barge, rope-trailing so close that its prow almost scraped the royal wood, was a skiff in which, shaking and afraid yet somehow triumphant because he had heard Bram Forest's strange words, was Hultax the Abarian.
CHAPTER XV
The Golden Ape
Hultax the Abarian shook himself. He had lost consciousness as every nerve-ending in his body had screamed with pain. Did this have something to do with the warp—warping?—Bram Forest had mentioned. Hultax the Abarian did not know. But he did know that he was alive, as alive as anyone could be or had a right to be in the Place of the Dead. And he did know, gratefully, that the intense cold of the River of Ice was gone.
He wondered how long he had been unconscious. He blinked his eyes. A balmy, pink-tinted sky. A pink sun, not on the horizon, when indeed the sun might be pink, but overhead. On the horizon—Hultax blinked again and thought he was mad—a second sun, smaller, paler, the ghost of green in color.
The royal barge was in ruins. It had piled up on some rocks. The bier of Jlomec, Prince of Nadia, had been thrown clear. He could see it on the bank, also in ruins. He stood up unsteadily, then waded through the shallow water in which he'd regained consciousness, over to the wreck of the royal barge. The fingers of his right hand were poised inches from the hilt of his whip-sword. Slay Bram Forest and the girl if the wreck hadn't already killed them? He shook his head. Bram Forest knew more about this strange place, this world of the pink sun and the green sun, than he did.
* * * *
He climbed over the wreckage, and finally came upon the two bodies. He went down on his knees beside them. They were covered with blood. They were broken—broken being the only word that could describe them. They had been crushed, perhaps by falling timber, perhaps by the bier of Jlomec as it hurtled over the side. There probably was not a bone in either of their bodies, at least a major bone, which had not been crushed.
They were dead.
With a craftiness which surprised even himself, Hultax remembered the dead Bram Forest's words. It was the bracelet with the shining disc which gave Bram Forest the power to appear and disappear at will, as Retoc had described. Or, as Bram Forest had put it, to journey between the worlds. Carefully, Hultax took the bracelet—it was miraculously intact—from the crushed, broken arm of Bram Forest's corpse. He circled his own arm with it and felt, or imagined he felt, an instantaneous source of power surge through his body. Without looking back at the broken bodies of the man and woman who had found love and, finding it, died in each other's arms, he made his way from the river bank across a pleasant green meadow. Far in the distance he saw a dark blur which looked like a forest. It was many miles away, almost at the limit of vision.
Yet, incredibly, it seemed to rush up at him. It was not merely that Hultax the Abarian walked with a warrior's long stride toward the forest. It was as if the forest rushed toward him. A different world. He remembered Bram Forest's words vaguely. A warped world? Something like that. Naturally, Hultax was afraid. This was the Place of the Dead, wasn't it? But still, Bram Forest's cool if little-understood scientific explanation quieted his fear. Besides, didn't he have the bracelet-disc-amulet? What could happen to him now?
Bylanus the Golden Ape, only two-thousand seven hundred years old, quite young as Golden Apes went, saw the wreck of the barge from a great distance. He extended his vision through warp-space and spotted the tiny figure of a man trudging away from the wreckage. Bylanus squinted, and shifted his buttocks on the saddle. Bylanus was fifteen feet tall and weighed eight-hundred pounds. The steed he rode, about twice the size of an Earth elephant, looked like a blown-up cross between a Tarthian stad and an Earth horse.
Bylanus stared, then sat up very straight in his stirrups. Something gleamed on the man's arm. Bylanus gaped.
It was the bracelet of Portox-saviour.
Bylanus used his will to psychokinesthize the man. The man, still apparently trudging along, sped toward him.
Bylanus climbed down from his stallion and prepared to bow, all fifteen feet and eight hundred pounds of him, before the man.
At first Hultax could think only of fleeing. Abruptly before him stood a monster-stad and a man. No, not a man. A man-like figure pelted with soft, smooth, lusterous, golden fur. The stad—the not-quite-stad—was five times bigger than a stad had a right to be. The man, even as he unexpectedly bent before Hultax, was almost three times Hultax's height. Man? No, not a man. Hultax, rooted with fear to the spot, unable to run, opened his mouth to cry out. But his vocal chords were paralyzed.
This was no man. It was the Golden Ape of legend, the Golden Ape of the Place of the Dead....
"Portox-saviour," said the Golden Ape quite distinctly. Then he pointed a forefinger almost the size of Hultax' forearm at the bracelet Hultax wore.
Hultax took a deep breath and could feel the strength returning to his legs. Like all military officers, he was an opportunist. He had to be, for in battle one had to seize upon opportunity as soon as it appeared, if one were to win at all....
Hultax said, his voice surprisingly steady: "You may rise."
The Ape did so. The stallion pawed the ground, and great clods flew. Hultax was trembling, but the Ape, speaking in Hultax' own language, in the language of all Tarth, said: "Are you really from Portox? It seems like only yesterday he was here although, of course, your people and mine measure time differently."
"I am from Portox," Hultax said. He wished he could keep his knees from trembling.
"Portox-saviour said that one day a man would come, to ask us for help even as Portox helped us in our time of troubles," the Ape proclaimed.
"Yes," Hultax muttered.
"What kind of help do you wish?"
Hultax stared, saying nothing. He did not know what to say. He lacked the imagination to make something up. Somehow, he knew it was terribly important. He knew without knowing how he knew that his life might depend on his answer.
"Well?" the Golden Ape asked gently.
"I...that is...."
The Ape's eyes narrowed as he looked down at Hultax. "You are from Portox?"
"Yes, yes. Of course."
"I see you have the bracelet."
"Yes, here is the bracelet."
"And the cloak of Portox?" demanded the Ape. "The cloak Portox foretold you would wear?"
"I—I lost the cloak in my journey," lied Hultax, not knowing about any cloak. There, he thought, that ought to satisfy him.
But the Ape said: "There was no cloak."
"No cloak? No cloak!"
"I made that up, to test you. You're not from Portox."
The stallion pawed the ground and looked up and then down at Hultax, snorting. Hultax, trembling, wished he could melt into the ground.
"Still," Hultax said, shaking, "I am from Portox. You tried to trick me. You...."
"We shall see," the Ape said, still pleasantly. "Come."
The ground rolled, or so it seemed to Hultax. The forest loomed ahead of him, then trees were all around him, then they stood on a rolling plain again.
"Where—did you take me?"
The Ape smiled. He seemed quite human despite his size, despite his fur. The stallion pawed the ground impatiently.
"Behold," said the Ape.
Something on the fringe of the forest screamed. It was an awful sound and it made the hackles stand upright on Hultax's bull-neck. He drew his whip-sword and faced the forest.
"Well, man," chided the Golden Ape, "and do you need a weapon? Portox told us we would know his man because his man, unarmed, would be able to conquer the wild boar of the Kranuian Wood. And you?"
The screaming came again. Terrified, Hultax did not fling his weapon aside. Wild boar? What wild boar...time enough later...to convince the Ape....
The boar emerged. It was almost as big as a man and covered with dirty gray hair. Its tusks were two feet long. The stallion whinnied but remained perfectly still. The Golden Ape waited and watched. The boar charged.
Hultax's right arm blurred and the mobile blade of the whip-sword whizzed through air and struck the boar's meaty shoulder. The boar screamed, and came on.
It was, Hultax realized in despair, only a superficial wound. The boar came on, bleeding, furious. He tried to lunge aside. He yanked at the whip-sword and it came loose, making him lose his balance. The boar reached him, screaming.
Never slackening its pace, the boar gored him, and wheeled about, clods flying, to gore again. Hultax' voice bubbled in his throat. The boar was on him again, its tusks sharp as razors....
Finally it stood clear, nervously eyeing Bylanus and the stallion. Then it turned and, slowly, with great dignity, retreated into the Kranuian Wood, which was its home.
The man, Bylanus saw at a glance, was dead. As an imposter, he had deserved to die. Bylanus quickly dug a shallow grave with a large, sharp-edged stone, and rolled the body in. As he did so he noticed that the bracelet—the bracelet of Portox-saviour, or, more probably, a copy of that bracelet intended to trick him—had been battered, punctured, and broken by the boar. Even if it had been the real bracelet, the amazing steel-silver disc of Portox-saviour, it would now be useless. Sighing, Bylanus buried it with Hultax' body.
* * * *
Bylanus mounted his steed and galloped toward the river. He could have psychokinesthized himself there, but the day was brilliant and clear, and he was in no great hurry. At last he reached the wreck of the royal barge of Nadia. He did not pause to examine Jlomec's bier, he had seen such funerary devices before.
Something in the wreck itself confused him. There was a man. There was a woman. That fit the ritual—two servants to accompany dead royalty on its way. This was the custom of the Nadians. But the man....
On the man's crushed arm, the arm completely covered with blood, was a mark. It was as if something—say, a band of metal—had protected the arm at one point. For circling the upper arm was a band of skin not bloody like the rest, wide in the shape of a disc, then narrow all around.
The bracelet of Portox-saviour! thought Bylanus. Had this dead man worn it? Had the imposter, now slain by the wild boar, taken it from him?
Oh Portox-saviour, Portox-saviour, how long dead? Am I too late, is it too late for this man, your heir...?
As gently as he could, the huge Bylanus lifted the two bodies and put them in his saddle-bags. He faced the Kranuian Wood astride. The stallion held its head up, alert, ready. They psychokinesthized.
And disappeared in a twinkling with Bram Forest and Ylia, both of whom were dead.
CHAPTER XVI
The Raging Beast
Although once mighty Ofridia of Tarth and certainly the nations of Earth had outstripped Bylanus' world in the physical science, the planet of the pink and green suns was supreme in biology. Thus had it needed Portox' help, a hundred Earth-Tarthian years before, when run-down entropy threatened its very existence. On the other hand, through biology, the science of Bylanus' world had come a long way in the conquest of death and destroyed human tissue. So it was that with some faint ray of confidence Bylanus brought the two broken bodies to the single large city of his park-like planet. There, tenderly, he left them in the care of specialists at the regeneration station, and began his long vigil.
...sensation and movement.
Hardly anything at first. Bram Forest dreamed of dreaming. The motion was gentle, warm, comfortable.
The glow of life and not the cold breath of death....
With it, with the first stirrings of regeneration, came the shadow of pain. But it was far away and almost impalpable, pain understood rather than felt. And slowly the pain departed. There came a time when Bram Forest realized he was not breathing, was, indeed, immersed in liquid.
He floated, helpless, serene, strangely content.
...Until, with the first signs of impatience, strength flooded through his regenerated limbs.
* * * *
"In every cell of a living creature's body," Orro the bio-technician explained to Bylanus, "there is the potential for complete and perfect regeneration. For, whereas the eye is an organ to see with, in every one of the millions of tiny cells making up the eye is the gene-pattern not merely for the eye but for the rest of the body. Theoretically then, Bylanus, if we are given but a single intact cell of a living—or once-living—organism, we ought to be able to reproduce the organism in its entirety. This is not supernatural. It is not creation of life: we can create nothing. The secret of creation is not ours here at this laboratory. But we have mastered the secret of recreation. Nurtured by the life-giving fluid, their development controlled by their own genes, the two human beings you brought are being made whole again."
Bylanus nodded. Orro the bio-technician was loquacious and spoke quickly, confidently, with mild pedantic enthusiasm. As for Bylanus, he awaited the regeneration of the man who had worn Portox-saviour's bracelet. He looked at the bodies in the vat, hanging upside-down, floating head down, rocking gently in the warm, circulating life-fluid. He waited....
* * * *
Bram Forest took his first breath. The first thing he said was: "Ylia, Ylia...."
Bylanus met them after the vat had been drained and a door had opened for them. He told them what had happened, including the death of Hultax. Then he added:
"As far as I am concerned, there can be no doubt as to your identity. But the bracelet is lost forever and there will be some who doubt your identity." Abruptly, he seemed to change the subject: "How do you feel?"
"Good as new," Bram Forest said. He was naked. He was tingling with health and well-being, as if he'd awakened from a long, health-giving sleep. He looked at Ylia, her skin glowing, her hair gleaming, her glorious body a shining promise. Then he frowned. Bylanus' words took meaning. "You want me to fight the Boar of the Kranuian Wood, is that it?"
"Yes," Bylanus said.
Bram Forest shrugged. "Coming here was not my idea, although Portox somehow realized it would be so."
"Slay the Kranuian Boar, proving your identity without question, and all the Golden Apes will be yours to command."
"Yes, but did Portox really feel I must wreak upon Abaria and the Abarians the same destruction they brought to Ofridia? If I destroy Retoc the Abarian responsible for what happened a hundred years ago, wouldn't that be enough? I don't need the Golden Apes for that. I can do it myself. I must do it myself."
"Tarth," said Bylanus, "is a world of warring nations. But here on the planet of two suns we live in peace. We are strong but know not the meaning of war. Is that what Portox-saviour wished for your people?"
"Perhaps," Bram Forest said.
"Then," Ylia told him, speaking for the first time, "even if you slay Retoc, his legions will not willingly give up their arms."
Bram Forest nodded slowly. The idea of a Tarth-wide holocaust did not appeal to him, but if all Tarth could be shown the folly of war when its most powerful army went down to defeat before the Golden Apes....
"Thank you," Bram Forest said humbly to the Golden Ape. He had a vision—almost mystical—of a time in the future, perhaps the near future, when all Tarth knew nothing but the ways of peace. "When we return on the River of Ice we want you to accompany us. I'm ready to meet your boar."
Ylia held him. Tears glistened in her eyes. "Bram Forest," she said tremulously. "Now that I've found you, I don't want you to be hurt—ever again."
Bram Forest responded: "Don't worry, Ylia. If Portox hadn't known I'd be more than a match for the boar, he never would have established its conquest as proof of my identity."
"But...but don't you see, you've been regenerated, as Bylanus said. You may not be as strong as you were."
Bram Forest looked at Bylanus, who shrugged. Bylanus lifted them when Bram Forest nodded. The park-like terrain flashed by. A dark forest loomed. The Kranuian Wood....
Close at hand, an animal screamed.
* * * *
"How do I look, Prokliam?" Volna asked her seneschal.
He bowed before her. "You are lovely, O My Queen."
Volna smiled. She wore the royal purple of Nadia in a gown which fell, clinging as if sentient and voluptuous, to the wonderful curves of her body. "I'm not your Queen yet," she said, laughing.
"A mere formality, My Queen."
"I am Volna, Virgin Princess of Nadia, sister to Bontarc the King."
"Huh!" snorted the old man. "That is your official title. But what do titles matter? When this day ends you will rule all Tarth side by side with Retoc the Abarian."
Yes, Volna thought. With Retoc the Abarian. But how long would that alliance last? Would either of them be content to share power with the other? Wouldn't there come a day when she would give the nod to Prokliam and the legions would march against those of Abaria chanting, "All power to Volna! All power to Volna the Beautiful!" The thought of power, power over strong men, over leaders of nations, made her giddy with desire.
All the royal blood of Tarth was gathered in Nadia City now, for the funeral games. She knew Retoc's plan: her spies had confirmed it. Retoc's legions would slay the rulers of the multiple nations and clans of Tarth and one by one, stunned, leaderless, the small nations would flock to the banners of Abaria and Nadia. If, then, Retoc had in mind to betray her and claim all power for himself, her own legions would be rested and ready. And Bontarc? she thought. What of Bontarc, her brother?
As if he could read her thoughts, Prokliam said, "I have arranged the lists for the dueling which will end the games, majesty. Bontarc, as you know, expects a duel to the first blood with some competent whip-swordsman." Prokliam licked his thin, dry lips. "He will be confronted, instead by a duel to the death with Retoc, the best swordsman of all Tarth. To flee would mean cowardice. The army would then be loyal to you, majesty. To remain and fight would mean only one thing."
"Death," said Volna softly.
She could hear the legions. The legions seemed to chant in her ears: "All power to Volna the Beautiful!"
She thought of the day's funeral games. Games for the memory of Jlomec the Prince, indeed. They were games for her, for Volna. They would be a party celebrating the rise to power of Volna, Virgin Princess of Nadia. But of course neither Nadia nor Bontarc its rightful ruler knew that yet. And when they did, Retoc and his legions would make sure they could do nothing about it.
The Games would be a feast. Volna's feast....
All power to Volna.
* * * *
The Kranuian Boar came screaming from the forest.
Its small, close-set eyes found Bram at once. If it had seen Bylanus and Ylia, it ignored them. Four hundred pounds of muscle and sinew, it made, stomping and pawing, for Bram.
He side-stepped nimbly, saw the massive head go down, felt one of the wicked tusks brush his thigh with fire. He stumbled and almost fell. If he fell, he would not rise again. The boar would finish him first.
"Bram Forest!" Ylia screamed.
He got up and grasped the tusks. He was dragged along, furrowing the ground. The huge head snorted close to his own. The boar's breath almost made him gag. Then, before the boar could smash him into a tree-trunk, he let go and rolled over and over and quickly stood up.
The boar did not wait for him to regain his breath, but came charging at once. This time Bram Forest waited until the last possible instant before the tusks would impale him. Then he leaped, twisting around in air. It was a prodigious leap and brought a word of exclamation even to Bylanus' lips. He landed on the hard-muscled back of the boar and at once clamped his knees firmly against its sinewy flanks as if he had been trained all his life for this job.
The boar reared and bucked and swung its great body from side to side, trying to dislodge its tormentor. But Bram Forest clung as if all Tarth depended on the outcome of this contest—as, perhaps, it did.
The boar ducked its head. Bram Forest fell forward, but his knees locked. The boar rolled over, but moving so swiftly that the eye could hardly follow him, Bram Forest squirmed out from under and was seated astride again when the boar got to its feet.
Then, leaning forward, Bram Forest grasped the two tusks and began to pull the boar's head up and back toward him.
The animal's screaming became squealing. Slowly the head went back, the short, almost non-existent neck strained, the beady eyes darted.
Then there was a loud snapping sound and the boar squealed once and fell over on its side with a broken neck.
Bram Forest, panting, the muscles of his legs quivering, stood clear. Bylanus touched his great golden head to the ground. Ylia ran to Bram Forest and flung her arms about his neck. "I was afraid," she said. "I was so afraid you would be hurt."
Bram Forest kissed her. She clung to him, sobbing his name when their lips parted. Finally Bram Forest disengaged himself and said:
"The poem, Ylia. We've seen an ape, a boar, a stallion. This world is the 'land beyond the stars.' But was the boar also the raging beast?"
Ylia shrugged. Bylanus stood up and told Bram Forest, "The Golden Apes are ready to serve you in any way you wish."
Three worlds, Bram Forest thought. One which Portox had saved from doom, one which had been the haven in which Bram Forest had grown to manhood, and one in which all their destinies soon would be written.
"Then Tarth thanks you," Bram Forest told the Golden Ape Bylanus. "Assemble your fighters. We're going back up the River of Ice."
"To Nadia City?" Ylia asked.
Bram Forest nodded grimly. "To Nadia City—and Retoc."
* * * *
Bontarc, King of Nadia, asked his royal guest, "You like the Games so far?"
They sat, with Princess Volna, in the box of honor at the Amphitheater of Nadia. "Aye, I like them," Retoc said slowly. "But sire, I would like them much better if they were not to commemorate the passing of your noble brother, the Prince Jlomec."
Bontarc nodded his head in gratitude. "That was well-spoken, Retoc," he said.
Retoc went on: "Have you any idea who killed him so treacherously? Jlomec was not a fighting man."
"None," Bontarc admitted. He missed entirely the smile which passed between Retoc and Princess Volna.
"Well," Bontarc said after a while, "if you will excuse me, I must go down below to prepare for the dueling. Under the circumstances I'm hardly inclined to participate in the Games, but my people expect it of me."
"Yes, brother," Volna said softly. "They do. Oh, they do."
And Bontarc went. Retoc looked at Volna. "I'd best get ready myself," he said. Volna nodded her lovely head.
A blood-lusting animal cry welled up from a hundred thousand throats as the gladiators of Nadia marched out across the sands of the amphitheater to do battle with the fierce snow-sloths of the Plains of Ice.
While several jeks from the Gates of Ice, Retoc's legions waited....
* * * *
"Wait here," Bram Forest told Bylanus, who had led them safely, along with the vanguard of the Golden Apes, back up the River of Ice.
"What will you do, Bram Forest?"
"According to Ylia, we can trust Bontarc of Nadia. He's a fighting man, but he craves peace for all Tarth."
"I'm sure of it," Ylia said. "Bontarc didn't send us to the Place of the Dead. Princess Volna did. And long ago, according to the stories the Wayfarers of Ofrid tell, Bontarc and your mother, Queen Evalla, were allies striving to establish universal peace throughout Tarth. Besides, despite his civility and fairness, Bontarc losses no love on Retoc of Abaria."
"And if you need us?" Bylanus asked.
"We'll get a signal through to you," Bram Forest said. With Ylia he climbed into a skiff and poled it out into the river.
Now the riverbanks were deserted, except for the solitary stilt-birds, tall as men, wading out into the frigid water, their low-pitched calls all but swallowed by the sound the cold wind made rustling through the river rushes.
After a while the skiff came to a bend in the river. It was the last turn before the Gates of Ice—and Nadia City. Here the wind blew more strongly, and there was a section of rushes which had been cleared, cut probably by an Ice Fields nomad who had used the tall rushes as fuel.
"Look!" Ylia cried suddenly, startled.
Through the gap in the rushes, at a distance of two or three jeks across the flat plain from the river, Bram Forest saw an armed encampment. There were tents with flying standards, tethered stads, pyramids of stacked spears like hayricks, and pacing sentries.
"What can it mean?" Ylia asked. "Those standards are Abarian."
"Retoc," Bram Forest said. He lifted the pole and felt the mud of the river-bottom cling to it before it came clear. He allowed the skiff to drift toward the bank. "Retoc's planning treachery. We'll have to go back and alert the Golden Apes. Bylanus and his Apes can destroy Retoc's legions before they even march on Nadia City."
"But we can't go back, Bram. If Retoc's army is here, ready, then what's happening in Nadia City? Who can say what Retoc is doing? You'll have to go ahead and stop him—or at least delay him. I'll go back for Bylanus."
Bram Forest shook his head. "I can't let you go alone, Ylia. Not with the Abarian legions so close."
"But I must, don't you see?"
Bram Forest frowned. There did not seem any other way, but he was reluctant. "I love you, Ylia. I couldn't let—"
"What happens in Nadia City today is more important than our love, Bram Forest! What would our love mean if Retoc the Abarian ruled all Tarth?"
"Then you take the skiff," Bram Forest said finally. "I can make my way to the city along the bank."
"No. The army is still encamped. They won't do anything for some time yet. See? All their tents are still standing."
That was true enough. "Besides," Ylia went on, "we don't know what Retoc is planning in the city. You can reach it faster by skiff. I'll go back for Bylanus on foot."
The logic of what Ylia said could not be refuted. With sinking heart Bram Forest helped her from the skiff. He kissed her quickly. "I love you, Ylia," he said.
"And I love you, Bram Forest."
"Be careful. Keep hidden in the rushes. Tell Bylanus to use his judgment in attacking or waiting for Retoc's legions to make the first move."
Ylia's pretty head nodded. Then she ducked into the rushes and was gone. Bram Forest looked after her until the rustling in the rushes stopped, then he poled the skiff once more out into the center of the river and sped swiftly toward the Gates of Ice.
No one stopped him. No guards were posted. He beached the skiff and sprinted through the gates and through the city and up its biggest hill toward the amphitheater. Then, only a jek's distance away, he heard the crowd at the funeral games. They roared suddenly in a frenzy of excitement and another part of Portox's poem slipped into place. The crowd watching the games in Nadia City was the raging beast, blood-lusting, expectant, animal-savage, whipped into a fever of goggle-eyed enthusiasm and ready to move, en-masse, in whatever direction a strong leader might push them.
A strong leader....
Retoc? Or Bram Forest? Which one?
* * * *
Pirum the Abarian shifted his weight uncomfortably, leaning down on the haft of his spear. The whole idea of posting pickets along the bank of the river seemed unnecessary to him. They could not actually see the river through the rushes, and they dared not go closer for fear of being spotted by whatever traffic moved on the icy waters. Then what was the point of them standing here, half-frozen with the cold, waiting for an assailant who would never come?
And while he was thinking thus, the girl virtually walked into Pirum's arms. At first he heard a faint rustling in the rushes and, before he could investigate, the tallest of the dry plants had parted and a lovely bronze-skinned girl appeared. She turned to run, but Pirum caught her in his muscular arms and held her despite her struggles.
She bit his arm and, with an oath, he caught her hair and twisted her head back. "Who are you?" he said. "Who are you, eh?"
The girl glowered at him.
Pirum dragged her along. She continued to struggle. Shaking his head, he hit her on the jaw with his fist and caught her before she could fall. Then, swinging her up over his broad shoulder, he stalked through the rushes toward Nadia City.
CHAPTER XVII
The Prison Without Bars
To one tried to stop Bram Forest until he reached the very gates of the amphitheater. But there a guard with drawn whip-sword barred the way and demanded: "You don't look Nadian to me. What delegation are you with, man?"
Bram Forest had no time to parry words with words. He tried to push his way past the guard who, too surprised to thrust with his weapon, used his free hand to grab Bram Forest by the shoulder and spin him around. Bram Forest drove his left fist into the guard's belly and heard the whoosh of air escaping from his lungs.
That was the last thing he heard for some time. A second guard crept up quietly behind him and struck expertly with the hilt of his whip-sword just behind the left ear. Bram Forest fell as if the ground dropped out from under him.
"By all the fiery gods of Tarth, will you look at that!" the first guard exclaimed.
The second guard could only gawk, not comprehending.
The unconscious man was growing tenuous.
The first guard in confused alarm, lashed down with the whip-sword. But its point passed through Bram Forest's now transparent body without meeting any resistance.
"Right through him! Right through him!" cried the guard.
And, by the time he said it, and coiled his sword again, Bram Forest had vanished.
* * * *
When an urgent message had come for Retoc, the Princess Volna, alone in the royal box, had decided to investigate the matter herself. She had to hurry, though. In not many minutes, Retoc and Bontarc would find themselves face to face on the sands of the amphitheater. Wouldn't Bontarc be surprised! Too proud to flee, not swordsman enough to match the mighty Retoc....
"Yes, yes, what is it?" she snapped irritably when she entered the dungeon-like ready-room below the amphitheater sands. She was in a hurry to return to her box, lest she miss the duel between Bontarc and Retoc. Alone in the ready-room was a soldier in the uniform of Abaria.
"Begging your pardon, ma'am," said the soldier. "My message is for Retoc of Abaria."
"And I tell you Retoc of Abaria is not here to receive it." Volna clapped her hands and two of her own guards appeared. "I am the Princess Volna. Well?"
Pirum looked at her, at the armed guards flanking her on either side, at the door through which she had entered, at the ready-room's second door. "Very well," he said at last, and opened the second door, beckoning.
Volna went to the doorway and looked. She gasped involuntarily, hardly able to believe her eyes. There on the stone floor of a smaller ready-room, only now regaining consciousness, was the Virgin Wayfarer of Ofrid, she who had seen Retoc slay Jlomec, she who had been sent by Volna herself to sure death on the Journey of No Return. Terror gripped her.
"What does this mean?" Volna cried. "Where did you find her? Where, man? Speak!"
"On the river, ladyship."
"On the river? Returning from the Place of the Dead?"
"No, ladyship. Heading toward the Place of the Dead."
Volna went to the girl and stood over her. "You! What's your name?"
"Ylia," the girl said.
"What were you trying to do, Ylia?"
The girl said nothing.
Volna called to Pirum, who came at once. "Hit her," Volna said.
Grasping Ylia by her hair, Pirum struck her face with his open hand. Her head snapped back. The mark of his fingers was on her face. She said nothing.
"Hit her again," Volna said.
Pirum struck Ylia a second time. The girl whimpered, but held her tongue. "Where is your friend, that giant of a man?" Volna asked.
Again Pirum hit Ylia when she would say nothing. Finally Volna shrugged. "She'll talk, given enough of that. What's your name, man?"
"Pirum, ladyship."
"Very well, Pirum. My guards and I are returning to our seats. There is a duel I wouldn't want to miss. All Tarth will reap its consequences. Meanwhile, stay with this girl and do what you must do to make her talk. It might be important."
Pirum bowed. "Yes, ladyship," he said, and watched the others depart. Then, when they were alone, Ylia surprised him by flying at him, nails bared, like a wildcat. He fought off her attack and struck her a savage open-handed blow, and she fell back. At least this, Pirum thought advancing on her, might be an interesting assignment.
* * * *
"...hit by that cab, mac."
"You all right?"
"He's getting up, ain't he?"
"Jeez, I swear," the sweating taxi driver said to the crowd which had gathered about the prostrate man, "he popped up outa nowhere. One second I'm driving along, looking for a fare, the next, he's standing right in front of me. I almost pushed the brake through the floor, honest, but—"
"Ylia," the stricken man said.
"Hey now, take it easy."
"What he say, anyhow?"
"...be going to a costume ball or something. Lookit that outfit he's wearing, willya? What's he supposed to be, a man from Mars or something? I read in the papers where Mars was pretty close a while back. My kid thinks there are...."
"Aw, shudap about your kid."
"Need any help, mister?"
"No. No, thank you. I'm all right."
"...got a nasty crack on his head, is all. See? See the blood?"
"He's getting up."
"...a cop. When you don't want 'em, they're around. Now you need them, where in heck are they, that's what I wanna know."
"The bracelet!" the stricken man said in sudden alarm. He stared at his own right arm in confusion, then his left. His arms were bare.
"You wasn't wearing no bracelet, mac," someone said.
"No bracelet," he said. "No bracelet." His eyes looked vague, confused.
After a while a policeman came and took in the situation at a glance. "All right, all right," he bawled. "Step back and givemair, givemair, will you?"
The crowd dispersed slowly, and the policeman talked for a while with the taxi-driver, then with the stricken man.
"My name?" the stricken man said in answer to a question. "Bram Forest. Yes, Bram Forest. But I don't have the bracelet. The bracelet is gone, forever. Without the bracelet I can't...." his voice trailed off.
"He drunk?" the policeman asked the cab driver.
"Search me."
"'A prison without bars,'" the man recited. "Earth is my prison, forever. Ylia. Ylia!"
The driver made a circular motion with his forefinger, in the general vicinity of his temple.
"You both better come down the station house with me," the policeman said.
"Aw, officer, I'll lose some fares."
"Anyhow. The guy talks batty, but he don't look drunk. We got to figure this here out."
"Ylia," the man said, almost as if the sound were a name and he was crying out to the owner of that name across an unthinkable abyss.
* * * *
Bontarc, King of Nadia, felt as good as could be expected under the circumstances. Now that the first shock of bereavement had passed, he knew no mourning would bring back his dead brother Jlomec. And the sun of Tarth was hot on the amphitheater sands as Bontarc stood awaiting his as yet unknown adversary. He flexed and uncoiled his whip-sword, smiling in expectancy. He was a competent swordsman, among the dozen or so best in Nadia. The duel-to-first-blood would be just what he needed. Win or lose, he'd feel a lot better afterwards. And meanwhile, he was a king, wasn't he? The adulation of the crowd swept down all around him, lifting his spirits. The corpse of Prince Jlomec, treacherously slain, seemed very far away—as, indeed, it was....
A roar of expectancy went up from a hundred thousand throats as Bontarc's adversary appeared at the other end of the arena. The sun was dazzling. At first Bontarc saw the swordsman only as a dot across the gleaming sands. But now the roar of expectancy had turned to a groan of dismay, which was followed by a silence, as of death, then an eager whispered buzzing. Why should this be? Why....
The figure came closer on the burning sands. Bontarc squinted. Was it possible? He felt a tremor go through his body.
It was Retoc of Abaria!
"To the death, Bontarc," Retoc said softly, savagely, as they approached.
Bontarc shook his head imperceptibly. He was no coward, but knew he was no match for Retoc and didn't see why he should lay down his life on the amphitheater sands. "I'll not fight you to the death, Retoc of Abaria," he said.
Retoc shrugged as if it weren't very important. "Well," he said slowly, "if you don't want to kill the slayer of your brother...."
Bontarc charged.
Laughing, Retoc was ready for him.
* * * *
"...Please...please...you're just wasting your time. I...won't...tell you."
"No?" Pirum said, panting. He saw the girl through a haze of anger, frustration, and desire. She was naked, her lips were bloody, but her eyes still flashed defiance. Pirum, like most Abarians, was something of a sadist.
"Oh, you'll talk," he said. "You'll talk."
"...never...."
He dug his strong finger cruelly into her tender body.
"Bram Forest...." she cried.
* * * *
The policeman behind the desk was saying things. Bram Forest heard the droning voice, but not the words. Ylia, he thought. Ylia. A moment before, he actually believed he heard her cry out to him in pain. But that couldn't be. Besides, what could he do about it? He was trapped forever on Earth, without the bracelet which could send him, almost on the wings of thought, back to Tarth, to Ylia, to his destiny.
I love you, girl of Tarth, he thought. I love you, Ylia, more than words and more than worlds.
Something whisperingly cold plucked at him, and for an instant his heart was stilled.
Ylia!
Could his love for the girl of Tarth draw him across the unthinkable abyss?
"...immodestly attired and..." the desk sergeant was saying.
Ylia, Ylia, call me! Draw me to you, girl of Tarth.
...bramforesthelp....
Ylia! I hear you! I hear you!
"What the heck's he doing? Praying?" the patrolman asked.
For Bram Forest was staring devoutly at nothing, staring at the air in front of his face there in the mundane precinct room as if it held a radiant vision.
Suddenly the desk sergeant's jaw dropped open. The patrolman said: "Hey, wait a mo...."
Bram Forest was becoming tenuous, vanishing.
* * * *
Insubstantial, transparent, the image of Bram Forest soared past the encampment of the Golden Apes. "Bylanus!" he called, and his voice was not insubstantial. Bylanus came at once.
"If the Abarian legions move, attack them, Bylanus."
"As you will, Bram Forest. But you...."
"Don't worry about me. I can control it, I can control it."
Bylanus passed an enormous hand through Bram Forest's body.
"I'll materialize, when I find Ylia. She draws me...." Already the vision was fading.
"Farewell, Bram Forest."
Farewell....
Was it merely the sound of the wind along the banks of the River of Ice? Bylanus wondered.
* * * *
Something struck Pirum's shoulder. The girl crouched, sobbing, at his feet. Pirum whirled.
His face went white when he saw the man. He swung his fist desperately, and the man blocked it without effort. His arm was caught, as in a vise. He screamed. Something snapped in his arm. Something streaked at his face....
He took the blow from Bram Forest's fist under the point of the jaw. His head snapped back against the dungeon wall and memory and desire and lust and life oozed out through his smashed skull.
"Ylia!"
"You came, Bram Forest."
"I'll never leave you again."
"Yes, now, in the amphitheater. I think...."
Overhead, the crowd roared. Bram Forest listened for a fraction of a second, and raced for the stairs.
When word of the duel between Bontarc and Retoc came by courier to Laugrim, second in command of the Abarian army under the missing Hultax, Laugrim decided it was time to attack. He gave the signal for his army to march on the city, and the signal was passed from signal-fire to signal-fire in the huge encampment. In a very short time, the army's vanguard began to march. There's no force on all Tarth strong enough to stop us now, Laugrim thought exultantly. This day, Retoc would rule Tarth.
He was right. There was no Tarthian army strong enough to stop them. But the Army of the Golden Apes which, after Bram Forest's warning, had deployed itself at the very gates of Nadia City so the people in the amphitheater might witness the battle, was not of Tarth....
* * * *
"Well, Bontarc," cried Retoc, "can't you do better than that? Surely a king...."
For many minutes now Retoc, the finest swordsman on Tarth, had been toying with his adversary. He could have killed Bontarc a dozen times over, but he waited, driving the Nadian ruler back, playing with him, making him do incredible gymnastics in order to survive, three times returning his whip-sword to him when it had been torn from the Nadian's hands.
All Nadia—and all the rulers of Tarth—watched spellbound. It seemed to them that the Nadian ruler had gone into the contest willingly. They made no move, and under the ethics that governed their world, would make no move, to stop the uneven contest.
Retoc's blurring sword-point whipped and flashed, drawing blood from a dozen superficial wounds. The smile never left Retoc's face. Desperately, knowing his life was forfeit whenever Retoc chose, Bontarc parried the whip-lashing blade.
* * * *
Bram Forest emerged into the dazzling sunlight of the arena floor. Squinting, he saw the figures across the sand.
The men before him were Bontarc of Nadia and Retoc, slayer of his mother, destroyer of Ofridia.
Retoc saw him first, and cried out exultantly. His wrist blurred, his whip-sword flashed, the point singing, and Bontarc's sword flew from his fingers. "You!" Retoc cried.
The sword-point had slashed an artery on Bontarc's wrist. The blood spurted out and Bontarc stood there, dazed, holding the wound shut with his left hand.
"Are you all right, sire?" Bram Forest asked.
"I can manage until a doctor binds—"
* * * *
Bram Forest picked up the Nadian ruler's whip-sword and faced his enemy, sword to sword, at last.
Retoc looked at him, and laughed. "I almost killed you once," he said. His hand barely seemed to move, but the point of his blade, whipping, flashing, was everywhere. Bram Forest parried desperately. "I'll finish the job now," Retoc vowed.
Then Bram Forest did an unexpected thing. He used the whip-sword not as a sword: he couldn't hope to match Retoc's skill as a swordsman. He used it as a whip is used, his great arm slicing back and forth through air, up over his head and down, the long length of the uncoiled blading whipping and darting like something alive across the sands.
Retoc retreated two steps, and lunged with what he hoped would be a death blow.
Prokliam the seneschal was trembling so much he could hardly stand. Just outside the amphitheater, in the very shadow of the amphitheater wall, the great Golden Apes of legend had materialized. There were thousands of them, and they were three times the size of men, and methodically and with great ease, they were destroying the Abarian army before it could enter the amphitheater.
Without the Abarian army, Volna and Retoc would never subjugate Nadia, never rule Tarth. But Prokliam the seneschal had committed himself to their cause. Now only death awaited him.
Or, had he committed himself? Couldn't he change sides before it was too late? Couldn't he slay Volna, here in the royal box, for all to see? Couldn't he become a hero of the people? He was confused. He wished he could think clearly, but he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. There was something wrong with his logic. Something.... Well, no matter. Slay Volna first, call her traitor, and then worry about his logic—
He turned away from the wall and marched down the flights of stairs between the citizens of Nadia, flanked in two wildly shouting mobs on either side of the aisle, and plunged a knife into Volna's back, killing her instantly.
The people roared, and rose up. Like a tide they swept toward Prokliam, the seneschal who had wanted to be prime minister.
"No, no!" he cried. "No, please. You don't understand.... I see it now...what was wrong with my thinking...you don't know yet...you don't know...to you she was still the Princess Volna, loyal, true...you don't understand, please."
The wave rolled over Prokliam the seneschal, leaving him battered and bloody and dead in its wake.
* * * *
The strong, whipping motion of Bram Forest's arm made a wall of steel of his whip-sword. Try as he might, with all the skill at his command, Retoc could not dent that wall. But, he thought, there was another way. Slowly, desperately, he maneuvered Bram Forest back toward Bontarc, who was sitting in the sand and using all his remaining energy to hold the life blood in his veins, his fingers clamped, vise-like, about his own arm.
Bram Forest's arm blurred up, down, to either side. He wove a web of death. It was brawn against skill, he knew—and the strength of his arm might win! Retoc was sweating. Retoc was not the cool swordsman he had been moments before. Desperately, Retoc sought an opening, and found none. True, his superior footwork was forcing Bram Forest back across the sand, but what did that matter? Last time they dueled he had made the mistake of meeting Retoc on his own grounds as greatest swordsman of Tarth. This time....
His legs caught against something. He fell heavily.
Retoc's sword-point flashed down.
Bram Forest rolled over, stood up with sand blinding his eyes. For precious moments he could see nothing but could only spin with the whip-sword; slashing air in all directions, hoping Retoc couldn't strike through the wall of steel.
Then, slowly, vision returned to his stinging eyes. Bontarc lay stretched out on the sand now, unconscious, the blood pumping from his severed artery. If he bled like that for more than a few moments, he would die. If he died, and if Nadia rose in its wrath against Abaria, then all that Bram Forest had dreamed of, not revenge against Abaria for a wrong done, but eternal peace on Tarth, would be lost....
He took the offensive, weaving his wall of steel toward Retoc. The Abarian thrust his own sword, and withdrew it, and parried, and lunged and thrust again. The wall of steel which was Bram Forest's singing blade advanced relentlessly.
Round and round his head, Bram Forest whirled the whip-sword. Retoc could—just—block the motion, the death-laden circle, with his own blade. He became accustomed to it. He used all his effort, all his skill to block it.
Then, abruptly, Bram Forest raised his sword-arm and brought it down from high over his head.
Retoc screamed.
And died screaming, his head and torso split from crown to navel.
Bram Forest rushed to Bontarc, stretched out on the sand, and with his own hand stemmed the bleeding.
Bylanus the Golden Ape said: "All Tarth is yours to command if you wish it, Bram Forest."
"No, Bylanus. Take your people back to your world and live in peace. We of Tarth thank you."
Bylanus smiled. "I thought you would say that."
"Portox was a great scientist," Bram Forest said. "But he thought too much of revenge. The ancient wrong is righted."
"Then you'll spare Abaria?" gasped the delegate of the assembled Tarthian nobles, who had come to the meeting called by Bylanus that night.
"My fight was with Retoc and the Abarian army. Retoc is dead, the army decimated and disbanded. My fight with Abaria is over."
"Then what will you do?"
Bram Forest took Ylia's hand. "I'd like to see a great nation rise again on the Plains of Ofrid."
Bontarc, his arm bandaged, said: "My people will help you build. And, with your wayfarers as a nucleus maid Ylia...."
"It will be a small nation at first," Ylia said.
"It will grow, so long as Tarth knows peace," Bontarc told her.
"Tarth will know nothing but peace from now on," Bram Forest promised.
It was a promise which he knew all of them would keep.
A PLACE IN THE SUN
Published under the pseudonym "C. H. Thames"
A "Johnny Mayhem" Adventure
The SOS crackled and hummed through subspace at a speed which left laggard light far behind. Since subspace distances do not coincide with normal space distances, the SOS was first picked up by a Fomalhautian freighter bound for Capella although it had been issued from a point in normal space midway between the orbit of Mercury and the sun's corona in the solar system.
The radioman of the Fomalhautian freighter gave the distress signal to the Deck Officer, who looked at it, blinked, and bolted 'bove decks to the captain's cabin. His face was very white when he reached the door and his heart pounded with excitement. As the Deck Officer crossed an electronic beam before the door a metallic voice said: "The Captain is asleep and will be disturbed for nothing but emergency priority."
Nodding, the Deck officer stuck his thumb in the whorl-lock of the door and entered the cabin. "Begging your pardon, sir," he cried, "but we just received an SOS from—"
* * * *
The Captain stirred groggily, sat up, switched on a green night light and squinted through it at the Deck Officer. "Well, what is it? Isn't the Eye working?"
"Yes, sir. An SOS, sir...."
"If we're close enough to help, subspace or normal space, take the usual steps, lieutenant. Surely you don't need me to—"
"The usual steps can't be taken, sir. Far as I can make out, that ship is doomed. She's bound on collision course for Sol, only twenty million miles out now."
"That's too bad, lieutenant," the Captain said with genuine sympathy in his voice. "I'm sorry to hear that. But what do you want me to do about it?"
"The ship, sir. The ship that sent the SOS—hold on to your hat, sir—"
"Get to the point now, will you, young man?" the Captain growled sleepily.
"The ship which sent the SOS signal, the ship heading on collision course for Sol, is the Glory of the Galaxy!"
For a moment the Captain said nothing. Distantly, you could hear the hum of the subspace drive-unit and the faint whining of the stasis generator. Then the Captain bolted out of bed after unstrapping himself. In his haste he forgot the ship was in weightless deep space and went sailing, arms flailing air, across the room. The lieutenant helped him down and into his magnetic-soled shoes.
"My God," the Captain said finally. "Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen to the Glory of the Galaxy?"
"What are you going to do, sir?"
"I can't do anything. I won't take the responsibility. Have the radioman contact the Hub at once."
"Yes, sir."
The Glory of the Galaxy, the SOS ship heading on collision course with the sun, was making its maiden run from the assembly satellites of Earth across the inner solar system via the perihelion passage which would bring it within twenty-odd million miles of the sun, to Mars which now was on the opposite side of Sol from Earth. Aboard the gleaming new ship was the President of the Galactic Federation and his entire cabinet.
* * * *
The Fomalhautian freighter's emergency message was received at the Hub of the Galaxy within moments after it had been sent, although the normal space distance was in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand light years. The message was bounced—in amazingly quick time—from office to office at the hub, cutting through the usual red tape because of its top priority. And—since none of the normal agencies at the Hub could handle it—the message finally arrived at an office which very rarely received official messages of any kind. This was the one unofficial, extra-legal office at the Hub of the Galaxy. Lacking official function, the office had no technical existence and was not to be found in any Directory of the Hub. At the moment, two young men were seated inside. Their sole job was to maintain liaison with a man whose very existence was doubted by most of the human inhabitants of the Galaxy but whose importance could not be measured by mere human standards in those early days when the Galactic League was becoming the Galactic Federation.
The name of the man with whom they maintained contact was Johnny Mayhem.
"Did you read it?" the blond man asked.
"I read it."
"If it got down here, that means they can't handle it anywhere else."
"Of course they can't. What the hell could normal slobs like them or like us do about it?"
"Nothing, I guess. But wait a minute! You don't mean you're going to send Mayhem, without asking him, without telling—"
"We can't ask him now, can we?"
"Johnny Mayhem's elan is at the moment speeding from Canopus to Deneb, where on the fourth planet of the Denebian system a dead body is waiting for him in cold storage. The turnover from League to Federation status of the Denebian system is causing trouble in Deneb City, so Mayhem—"
"Deneb City will probably survive without Mayhem. Well, won't it?"
"I guess so, but—"
"I know. The deal is we're supposed to tell Mayhem where he's going and what he can expect. The deal also is, every inhabited world has a body waiting for his elan in cold storage. But don't you think if we could talk to Mayhem now—"
"It isn't possible. He's in transit."
"Don't you think if we could talk to him now he would agree to board the Glory of the Galaxy?"
"How should I know? I'm not Johnny Mayhem."
"If he doesn't board her, it's certain death for all of them."
"And if he does board her, what the hell can he do about it? Besides, there isn't any dead body awaiting his elan on that ship or any ship. He wouldn't make a very efficacious ghost."
"But there are live people. Scores of them. Mayhem's elan is quite capable of possessing a living host."
"Sure. Theoretically it is. But damn it all, what would the results be? We've never tried it. It's liable to damage Mayhem. As for the host—"
"The host might die. I know it. But he'll die anyway. The whole shipload of them is heading on collision course for the sun."
"Does the SOS say why?"
"No. Maybe Mayhem can find out and do something about it."
"Yeah, maybe. That's a hell of a way to risk the life of the most important man in the Galaxy. Because if Mayhem boards that ship and can't do anything about it, he'll die with the rest of them."
"Why? We could always pluck his elan out again."
"If he were inhabiting a dead one. In a live body, I don't think so. The attraction would be stronger. There would be forces of cohesion—"
"That's true. Still, Mayhem's our only hope."
"I'll admit it's a job for Mayhem, but he's too important."
"Is he? Don't be a fool. What, actually, is Johnny Mayhem's importance? His importance lies in the very fact that he is expendable. His life—for the furtherance of the new Galactic Federation."
"But—"
"And the President is aboard that ship. Maybe he can't do as much for the Galaxy in the long run as Mayhem can, but don't you see, man, he's a figurehead. Right now he's the most important man in the Galaxy, and if we could talk to him I'm sure Mayhem would agree. Mayhem would want to board that ship."
"It's funny, we've been working with Mayhem all these years and we never even met the guy."
"Would you know him if you saw him?"
"Umm-mm, I guess not. Do you think we really can halt his elan in subspace and divert it over to the Glory of the Galaxy?"
"I take it you're beginning to see things my way. And the answer to your question is yes."
"Poor Mayhem. You know, I actually feel sorry for the guy. He's had more adventures than anyone since Homer wrote the Odyssey and there won't ever be any rest for him."
"Stop feeling sorry for him and start hoping he succeeds."
"Yeah."
"And let's see about getting a bead on his elan."
The two young men walked to a tri-dim chart which took up much of the room. One of them touched a button and blue light glowed within the chart, pulsing brightly and sharply where space-sectors intersected.
"He's in C-17 now," one of the men said as a gleaming whiteness was suddenly superimposed at a single point on the blue.
"Can you bead him?"
"I think so. But I still feel sorry for Mayhem. He's expecting to wake up in a cold-storage corpse on Deneb IV but instead he'll come to in a living body aboard a spaceship on collision course for the sun."
"Just hope he—"
"I know. Succeeds. I don't even want to think of the possibility he might fail."
In seconds, the gleaming white dot crawled across the surface of the tri-dim chart from sector C-17 to sector S-1.
* * * *
The Glory of the Galaxy was now nineteen million miles out from the sun and rushing through space at a hundred miles per second, normal space drive. The Glory of the Galaxy thus moved a million miles closer to fiery destruction every three hours—but since the sun's gravitational force had to be added to that speed, the ship was slated to plunge into the sun's corona in little more than twenty-four hours.
Since the ship's refrigeration units would function perfectly until the outer hull reached a temperature of eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, none of its passengers knew that anything was wrong. Even the members of the crew went through all the normal motions. Only the Glory of the Galaxy's officers in their bright new uniforms and gold braid knew the grim truth of what awaited the gleaming two-thousand ton spaceship less than twenty-four hours away at the exact center of its perihelion passage.
Something—unidentified as yet—in all the thousands of intricate things that could go wrong on a spaceship, particularly a new one making its maiden voyage, had gone wrong. The officers were checking their catalogues and their various areas of watch meticulously—and not because their own lives were at stake. In spaceflight, your own life always is at stake. There are too many imponderables: you are, to a certain degree, expendable. The commissioned contingent aboard the Glory of the Galaxy was a dedicated group, hand-picked from all the officers in the solar system.
* * * *
But they could find nothing. And do nothing.
Within a day, their lives along with the lives of the enlisted men aboard the Glory of the Galaxy and the passengers on its maiden run, would be snuffed out in a brilliant burst of solar heat.
And the President of the Galactic Federation would die because some unknown factor had locked the controls of the spaceship, making it impossible to turn or use forward rockets against the gravitational pull of the sun.
Nineteen million miles. In normal space, a considerable distance. A hundred miles a second—a very considerable normal space speed. Increasing....
* * * *
Ever since they had left Earth's assembly satellites, Sheila Kelly had seen a lot of a Secret Serviceman named Larry Grange, who was a member of the President's corps of bodyguards. She liked Larry, although there was nothing serious in their relationship. He was handsome and charming and she was naturally flattered with his attentions. Still, although he was older than Sheila, she sensed that he was a boy rather than a man and had the odd feeling that, faced with a real crisis, he would confirm this tragically.
It was night aboard the Glory of the Galaxy. Which was to say the blue-green night lights had replaced the white day lights in the companionways and public rooms of the spaceship, since its ports were sealed against the fierce glare of the sun. It was hard to believe, Sheila thought, that they were only nineteen million miles from the sun. Everything was so cool—so comfortably air-conditioned....
She met Larry in the Sunside Lounge, a cabaret as nice as any terran nightclub she had ever seen. There were stylistic Zodiac drawings on the walls and blue-mirrored columns supporting the roof. Like everything else aboard the Glory of the Galaxy, the Sunside Lounge hardly seemed to belong on a spaceship. For Sheila Kelly, though—herself a third secretary with the department of Galactic Economy—it was all very thrilling.
"Hello, Larry," she said as the Secret Serviceman joined her at their table. He was a tall young man in his late twenties with crewcut blond hair; but he sat down heavily now and did not offer Sheila his usual smile.
"Why, what on earth is the matter?" Sheila asked him.
"Nothing. I need a drink, that's all."
The drinks came. Larry gulped his and ordered another. His complete silence baffled Sheila, who finally said:
"Surely it isn't anything I did."
"You? Don't be silly."
"Well! After the way you said that I don't know if I should be glad or not."
"Just forget it. I'm sorry, kid. I—" He reached out and touched her hand. His own hand was damp and cold.
"Going to tell me, Larry?"
"Listen. What's a guy supposed to do if he overhears something he's not supposed to overhear, and—"
"How should I know unless you tell me what you overheard? It is you you're talking about, isn't it?"
"Yeah. I was going off duty, walking by officer quarters and... oh, forget it. I better not tell you."
"I'm a good listener, Larry."
"Look, Irish. You're a good anything—and that's the truth. You have looks and you have brains and I have a hunch through all that Emerald Isle sauciness you have a heart too. But—"
"But you don't want to tell me."
"It isn't I don't want to, but no one's supposed to know, not even the President."
"You sure make it sound mysterious."
"Just the officers. Oh, hell. I don't know. What good would it do if I told you?"
"I guess you'd just get it off your chest, that's all."
"I can't tell anyone official, Sheila. I'd have my head handed to me. But I've got to think and I've got to tell someone. I'll go crazy, just knowing and not doing anything."
"It's important, isn't it?"
Larry downed another drink quickly. It was his fourth and Sheila had never seen him take more than three or four in the course of a whole evening. "You're damned right it's important." Larry leaned forward across the postage-stamp table. A liquor-haze clouded his eyes as he said: "It's so important that unless someone does something about it, we'll all be dead inside of twenty-four hours. Only trouble is, there isn't anything anyone can do about it."
"Larry—you're a little drunk."
"I know it. I know I am. I want to be a lot drunker. What the hell can a guy do?"
"What do you know, Larry? What have you heard?"
"I know they have the President of the Galactic Federation aboard this ship and that he ought to be told the truth."
"No. I mean—"
"They sent out an SOS, kid. Controls are locked. Lifeboats don't have enough power to get us out of the sun's gravitational pull. We're all going to roast, I tell you!"
Sheila felt her heart throb wildly. Even though he was well on the way to being thoroughly drunk, Larry was telling the truth. Instinctively, she knew that—was certain of it. "What are you going to do?" she said.
He shrugged. "I guess because I can't do a damned thing I'm going to get good and drunk. That's what I'm going to do. Or maybe—who the hell knows?—maybe in one minute I'm going to jump up on this table and tell everyone what I overheard. Maybe I ought to do that, huh?"
"Larry, Larry—if it's as bad as you say, maybe you ought to think before you do anything."
"Who am I to think? I'm one of the muscle men. That's what they pay me for, isn't it?"
"Larry. You don't have to shout."
"Well, isn't it?"
"If you don't calm down I'll have to leave."
"You can sit still. You can park here all night. I'm leaving."
"What are you going to do?"
"Oh... that." Larry got up from the table. He looked suddenly green and Sheila thought it was because he had too much to drink. "You don't have to worry about that, Sheila. Not now you don't. I all of a sudden don't feel so good. Headache. Man, I never felt anything like it. Better go to my cabin and lie down. Maybe I'll wake up and find out all this was a dream, huh?"
"Do you need any help?" Sheila demanded, real concern in her voice.
"No. 'Sall right. Man, this headache really snuck up on me. Pow! Without any warning."
"Let me help you."
"No. Just leave me alone, will you?" Larry staggered off across the crowded dance floor. He drew angry glances and muttered comments as he disturbed the dancers waltzing to Carlotti's Danube in Space.
Why don't you admit it, Grange, Larry thought as he staggered through the companionway toward his cabin. That's what you always wanted, isn't it—a place of importance?
A place in the sun, they call it.
"You're going to get a place in the sun, all right," he mumbled aloud. "Right smack in the middle of the sun with everyone else aboard this ship!"
The humor of it amused him perversely. He smiled—but it was closer to a leer—and lunged into his cabin. What he said to Sheila was no joke. He really did have a splitting headache. It had come on suddenly and it was like no headache he had ever known. It pulsed and throbbed and beat against his temples and held red hot needles to the backs of his eyeballs, almost blinding him. It sapped all his strength, leaving him physically weak. He was barely able to close the door behind him and stagger to the shower.
An ice cold shower, he thought would help. He stripped quickly and got under the needle spray. By that time he was so weak he could barely stand.
A place in the sun, he thought....
Something grabbed his mind and wrenched it.
* * * *
Johnny Mayhem awoke.
Awakening came slowly, as it always did. It was a rising through infinite gulfs, a rebirth for a man who had died a hundred times and might die a thousand times more as the years piled up and became centuries. It was a spinning, whirling, flashing ascent from blackness to coruscating colors, brightness, giddiness.
And suddenly, it was over.
A needle spray of ice-cold water beat down upon him. He shuddered and reached for the water-taps, shutting them. Dripping, he climbed from the shower.
And floated up—quite weightless—toward the ceiling.
Frowning with his new and as yet unseen face, Johnny Mayhem propelled himself to the floor. He looked at his arms. He was naked—at least that much was right.
But obviously, since he was weightless, he was not on Deneb IV. During his transmigration he had been briefed for the trouble on Deneb IV. Then had a mistake been made somehow? It was always possible—but it had never happened before.
Too much precision and careful planning was involved.
Every world which had an Earthman population and a Galactic League—now, Galactic Federation—post, must have a body in cold storage, waiting for Johnny Mayhem if his services were required. No one knew when Mayhem's services might be required. No one knew exactly under what circumstances the Galactic Federation Council, operating from the Hub of the Galaxy, might summon Mayhem. And only a very few people, including those at the Hub and the Galactic League Firstmen on civilized worlds and Observers on frontier planets, knew the precise mechanics of Mayhem's coming.
* * * *
Johnny Mayhem, a bodiless sentience. Mayhem—Johnny Marlow then—who had been chased from Earth a pariah and a criminal seven years ago, who had been mortally wounded on a wild planet deep within the Sagittarian Swarm, whose life had been saved—after a fashion—by the white magic of that planet. Mayhem, doomed now to possible immortality as a bodiless sentience, an elan, which could occupy and activate a corpse if it had been preserved properly...an elan doomed to wander eternally because it could not remain in one body for more than a month without body and elan perishing. Mayhem, who had dedicated his strange, lonely life to the services of the Galactic League—now the Galactic Federation—because a normal life and normal social relations were not possible to him....
It did not seem possible, Mayhem thought now, that a mistake could be made. Then—a sudden change in plans?
It had never happened before, but it was entirely possible. Something, Mayhem decided, had come up during transmigration. It was terribly important and the people at the Hub had had no opportunity to brief him on it.
But—what?
* * * *
His first shock came a moment later. He walked to a mirror on the wall and approved of the strong young body which would house his sentience and then scowled. A thought inside his head said:
So this is what it's like to have schizophrenia.
What the hell was that? Mayhem thought.
I said, so this is what it's like to have schizophrenia. First the world's worst headache and then I start thinking like two different people.
Aren't you dead?
Is that supposed to be a joke, alter ego? When do the men in the white suits come?
Good Lord, this was supposed to be a dead body!
At that, the other sentience which shared the body with Mayhem snickered and lapsed into silence. Mayhem, for his part, was astounded.
Don't get ornery now, Mayhem pleaded. I'm Johnny Mayhem. Does that mean anything to you?
Oh, sure. It means I'm dead. You inhabit dead bodies, right?
Usually. Listen—where are we?
Glory of the Galaxy—bound from Earth to Mars on perihelion.
And there's trouble?
How do you know there's trouble?
Otherwise they wouldn't have diverted me here.
We've got the president aboard. We're going to hit the sun. Then, grudgingly, Larry went into the details. When he finished he thought cynically: Now all you have to do is go outside yelling have no fear, Mayhem is here and everything will be all right, I suppose.
Mayhem didn't answer. It would be many moments yet before he could adjust to this new, unexpected situation. But in a way, he thought, it would be a boon. If he were co-inhabiting the body of a living man who belonged on the Glory of the Galaxy, there was no need to reveal his identity as Johnny Mayhem to anyone but his host....
* * * *
"I tell ya," Technician First Class Ackerman Boone shouted, "the refrigeration unit's gone on the blink. You can't feel it yet, but I ought to know. I got the refrigs working full strength and we gained a couple of degrees heat. Either she's on the blink or we're too close to the sun, I tell you!"
Ackerman Boone was a big man, a veteran spacer with a squat, very strong body and arms like an orangutan. Under normal circumstances he was a very fine spacer and a good addition to any crew, but he bore an unreasonable grudge against the officer corps and would go out of his way to make them look bad in the eyes of the other enlisted men. A large crowd had gathered in the hammock-hung crew quarters of the Glory of the Galaxy as Boone went on in his deep, booming voice: "So I asked the skipper of the watch, I did. He got shifty-eyed, like they always do. You know. He wasn't talking, but sure as my name's Ackerman Boone, something's wrong."
"What do you think it is, Acky?" one of the younger men asked.
"Well, I tell ya this: I know what it isn't. I checked out the refrigs three times, see, and came up with nothing. The refrigs are in jig order, and if I know it then you know it. So, if the refrigs are in jig order, there's only one thing it can be: we're getting too near the sun!" Boone clamped his mouth shut and stood with thick, muscular arms crossed over his barrel chest.
* * * *
A young technician third class said in a strident voice, "You mean you think maybe we're plunging into the sun, Acky?"
"Well, now, I didn't say that. Did I, boy? But we are too close and if we are too close there's got to be a reason for it. If we stay too close too long, O.K. Then we're plunging into the sun. Right now, I dunno."
They all asked Ackerman Boone, who was an unofficial leader among them, what he was going to do. He rubbed his big fingers against the thick stubble of beard on his jaw and you could hear the rasping sound it made. Then he said, "Nothing, until we find out for sure. But I got a hunch the officers are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of them politicians we got on board. That's all right with me, men. If they want to, they got their reasons. But I tell ya this: they ain't going to pull any wool over Acky Boone's eyes, and that's a fact."
Just then the squawk box called: "Now hear this! Now hear this! Tech/1 Ackerman Boone to Exec's office. Tech/1 Boone to Exec."
"You see?" Boone said, smiling grimly. As yet, no one saw. His face still set in a grim smile, Ackerman Boone headed above decks.
* * * *
"That, Mr. President," Vice Admiral T. Shawnley Stapleton said gravely, "is the problem. We would have come to you sooner, sir, but frankly—"
"I know it, Admiral," the President said quietly. "I could not have helped you in any way. There was no sense telling me."
"We have one chance, sir, and one only. It's irregular and it will probably knock the hell out of the Glory of the Galaxy, but it may save our lives. If we throw the ship suddenly into subspace we could pass right through the sun's position and—"
"I'm no scientist, Admiral, but wouldn't that put tremendous stress not only on the ship but on all of us aboard?"
"It would, sir. I won't keep anything from you, of course. We'd all be subjected to a force of twenty-some gravities for a period of several seconds. Here aboard the Glory, we don't have adequate G-equipment. It's something like the old days of air flight, sir: as soon as airplanes became reasonably safe, passenger ships didn't bother to carry parachutes. Result over a period of fifty years: thousands of lives lost. We'd all be bruised and battered, sir. Bones would be broken. There might be a few deaths. But I see no other way out, sir."
"Then there was no need to check with me at all, I assure you, Admiral Stapleton. Do whatever you think is best, sir."
The Admiral nodded gravely. "Thank you, Mr. President. I will say this, though: we will wait for a miracle."
"I'm afraid I don't follow you."
"Well, I don't expect a miracle, but the switchover to subspace so suddenly is bound to be dangerous. Therefore, we'll wait until the last possible moment. It will grow uncomfortably warm, let me warn you, but as long as the subspace drive is in good working order—"
"I see what you mean, Admiral. You have a free hand, sir; let me repeat that. I will not interfere in any way and I have the utmost confidence in you." The President mopped his brow with an already damp handkerchief. It was growing warm, come to think of it. Uncomfortably warm.
As if everyone aboard the Glory of the Galaxy was slowly being broiled alive....
* * * *
Ackerman Boone entered the crew quarters with the same smile still on his lips. At first he said nothing, but his silence drew the men like a magnet draws iron filings. When they had all clustered about him he spoke.
"The Exec not only chewed my ears off," he boomed. "He all but spit them in my face! I was right, men. He admitted it to me after he saw how he couldn't get away with anything in front of Ackerman Boone. Men, we're heading on collision course with the sun!"
A shocked silence greeted his words and Ackerman Boone, instinctively a born speaker, paused dramatically to allow each man the private horror of his own thoughts for a few moments. Then he continued: "The Admiral figures we have one chance to get out of this alive, men. He figures—"
"What is it, Acky?"
"What will he do?"
"How will the Admiral get us out of this?"
Ackerman Boone spat on the polished, gleaming floor of the crew quarters. "He'll never get us out alive, let me tell you. He wants to shift us into subspace at the last possible minute. Suddenly. Like this—" and Ackerman Boone snapped his fingers.
"There'd be a ship full of broken bones!" someone protested. "We can't do a thing like that."
"He'll kill us all!" a very young T/3 cried hysterically.
"Not if I can help it, he won't," shouted Ackerman Boone. "Listen, men. This ain't a question of discipline. It's a question of living or dying and I tell you that's more important than doing it like the book says or discipline or anything like that. We got a chance, all right: but it ain't what the Admiral thinks it is. We ought to abandon the Glory to her place in the sun and scram out of here in the lifeboats—every last person aboard ship."
"But will they have enough power to get out of the sun's gravitational pull?" someone asked.
Ackerman Boone shrugged. "Don't look at me," he said mockingly. "I'm only an enlisted man and they don't give enlisted men enough math to answer questions like that. But reckoning by the seat of my pants I would say, yes. Yes, we could get away like that—if we act fast. Because every minute we waste is a minute that brings us closer to the sun and makes it harder to get away in the lifeboats. If we act, men, we got to act fast."
"You're talking mutiny, Boone," a grizzled old space veteran said. "You can count me out."
"What's the matter, McCormick? Yellow?"
"I'm not yellow. I say it takes guts to maintain discipline in a real emergency. I say you're yellow, Boone."
"You better be ready to back that up with your fists, McCormick," Boone said savagely.
"I'm ready any time you're ready, you yellow mutinous bastard!"
* * * *
Ackerman Boone launched himself at the smaller, older man, who stood his ground unflinchingly although he probably knew he would take a sound beating. But four or five crewmen came between them and held them apart, one saying:
"Look who's talking, Boone. You say time's precious but you're all set to start fighting. Every minute—"
"Every second," Boone said grimly, "brings us more than a hundred miles closer to the sun."
"What can we do, Acky?"
Instead of answer, Ackerman Boone dramatically mopped the sweat from his face. All the men were uncomfortably warm now. It was obvious that the temperature within the Glory of the Galaxy had now climbed fifteen or twenty degrees despite the fact that the refrigs were working at full capacity. Even the bulkheads and the metal floor of crew quarters were unpleasantly warm to the touch. The air was hot and suddenly very dry.
"I'll tell you what we ought to do," Ackerman Boone said finally. "Admiral Stapleton or no Admiral Stapleton, President of the Galactic Federation or no President of the Galactic Federation, we ought to take over this ship and man the life boats for everyone's good. If they don't want to save their lives and ours—let's us save our lives and theirs!"
Roars of approval greeted Boone's words, but Spacer McCormick and some of the other veterans stood apart from the loud speech-making which followed. Actually, Boone's wild words—which he gambled with after the first flush of enthusiasm for his plan—began to lose converts. One by one the men drifted toward McCormick's silent group until, finally, Boone had lost almost his entire audience.
Just then a T/2 rushed into crew quarters and shouted: "Hey, is Boone around? Has anyone seen Boone?"
This brought general laughter. Under the circumstances, the question was not without its humorous aspect.
"What'll you have?" Boone demanded.
"The refrigs, Boone! They are on the blink. Overstrained themselves and burned themselves out. Inside of half an hour this ship's going to be an oven hot enough to kill us all!"
"Half an hour, men!" Ackerman Boone cried. "Now, do we take over the ship and man those lifeboats or don't we!"
The roar which followed his words was a decidedly affirmative one.
* * * *
"These are the figures," Admiral Stapleton said. "You can see, Mr. President, that we have absolutely no chance whatever if we man the lifeboats. We would perish as assuredly as we would if we remained with the Glory of the Galaxy in normal space."
"Admiral, I have to hand it to you. I don't know how you can think—in all this heat."
"Have to, sir. Otherwise we all die."
"The air temperature—"
"Is a hundred and thirty degrees and rising. We've passed salt tablets out to everyone, sir, but even then it's only a matter of time before we're all prostrated. If you're sure you give your permission, sir—"
"Admiral Stapleton, you are running this ship, not I."
"Very well, sir. I've sent our subspace officer, Lieutenant Ormundy, to throw in the subspace drive. We should know in a few moments—"
"No crash hammocks or anything?"
"I'm sorry, sir."
"It isn't your fault, Admiral. I was merely pointing out a fact."
The squawk box blared: "Now hear this! Now hear this! T/3 Ackerman Boone to Admiral Stapleton. Are you listening, Admiral?"
Admiral Stapleton's haggard, heat-worn face bore a look of astonishment as he listened. Ackerman said, "We have Lieutenant Ormundy, Admiral. He's not killing us all by putting us into subspace in minutes when it ought to take hours, you understand. We have Ormundy and we have the subspace room. A contingent of our men is getting the lifeboats ready. We're going to abandon ship, Admiral, all of us, including you and the politicians even if we have to drag you aboard the lifeboats at N—gunpoint."
Admiral Stapleton's face went ashen. "Let me at a radio!" he roared. "I want to answer that man and see if he understands exactly what mutiny is!"
While Ackerman Boone was talking over the squawk box, the temperature within the Glory of the Galaxy rose to 145° Fahrenheit.
* * * *
"Fifteen minutes," Larry Grange said. "In fifteen minutes the heat will have us all unconscious." Only it wasn't Larry alone who was talking. It was Larry and Johnny Mayhem. In a surprisingly short time the young Secret Serviceman had come to accept the dual occupation of his own mind. It was there: it was either dual occupation or insanity and if the voice which spoke inside his head said it was Johnny Mayhem, then it was Johnny Mayhem. Besides, Larry felt clear-headed in a way he had never felt before, despite the terrible, sapping heat. It was as if he had matured suddenly—the word matured came to him instinctively—in the space of minutes. Or, as if a maturing influence were at work on his mind.
"What can we do?" Sheila said. "The crew has complete control of the ship."
"Secret Service chief says we're on our own. There's no time for co-ordinated planning, but somehow, within a very few minutes, we've got to get inside the subspace room and throw the ship out of normal space or we'll all be roasted."
"Some of your men are there now, aren't they?"
"In the companionway outside the subspace room, yeah. But they'll never force their way in time. Not with blasters and not with N-guns, either. Not in ten minutes, they won't."
"Larry, all of a sudden I—I'm scared. We're all going to die, Larry. I don't want—Larry, what are you going to do?"
They had been walking in a deserted companionway which brought them to one of the aft escape hatches of the Glory of the Galaxy. Their clothing was plastered to their bodies with sweat and every breath was agonizing, furnace hot.
"I'm going outside," Larry said quietly.
"Outside? What do you mean?"
"Spacesuit, outside. There's a hatch in the subspace room. If their attention is diverted to the companionway door, I may be able to get in. It's our only chance—ours, and everyone's."
"But the spacesuit—"
"I know," Larry said even as he was climbing into the inflatable vacuum garment. It was Larry—and it wasn't Larry. He felt a certain confidence, a certain sense of doing the right thing—a feeling which Larry Grange had never experienced before in his life. It was as if the boy had become a man in the final moments of his life—or, he thought all at once, it was as if Johnny Mayhem who shared his mind and his body with him was somehow transmitting some of his own skills and confidence even as he—Mayhem—had reached the decision to go outside.
"I know," he said. "The spacesuit isn't insulated sufficiently. I'll have about three minutes out there. Three minutes to get inside. Otherwise, I'm finished."
"But Larry—"
"Don't you see, Sheila? What does it matter? Who wants the five or ten extra minutes if we're all going to die anyway? This way, there's a chance."
He buckled the spacesuit and lifted the heavy fishbowl helmet, preparing to set it on his shoulders.
"Wait," Sheila said, and stood on tiptoes to take his face in her hands and kiss him on the lips. "You—you're different," Sheila said. "You're the same guy, a lot of fun, but you're a—man, too. This is for what might have been, Larry," she said, and kissed him again. "This is because I love you."
Before he dropped the helmet in place, Larry said. "It isn't for what might have been, Sheila. It's for what will be."
The helmet snapped shut over the shoulder ridges of the spacesuit. Moments later, he had slipped into the airlock.
* * * *
"I say you're a fool, Ackerman Boone!" one of the enlisted men rasped at the leader of the mutiny. "I say now we've lost our last chance. Now it's too late to get into the lifeboats even if we wanted to. Now all we can do is—die!"
There were still ten conscious men in the subspace room. The others had fallen before heat prostration and lay strewn about the floor, wringing wet and oddly flaccid as if all the moisture had been wrung from their bodies except for the sweat which covered their skins.
"All right," Ackerman Boone admitted. "All right, so none of us knows how to work the subspace mechanism. You think that would have helped? It would have killed us all, I tell you."
"It was a chance, Boone. Our last chance and you—"
"Just shut up!" Boone snarled. "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking we ought to let them officers and Secret Servicemen to ram home the subspace drive. But use your head, man. Probably they'll kill us all, but if they don't—"
"Then you admit there's a chance!"
"Yeah. All right, a chance. But if they don't kill us all, if they save us by ramming home the subspacer, what happens? We're all taken in on a mutiny charge. It's a capital offense, you fool!"
"Well, it's better than sure death," the man said, and moved toward the door.
"Allister, wait!" Boone cried. "Wait, I'm warning you. Any man who tries to open that door—"
Outside, a steady booming of blaster fire could be heard, but the assault-proof door stood fast.
"—is going to get himself killed!" Boone finished.
Grimly, Allister reached the door and got his already blistered fingers on the lock mechanism.
Ackerman Boone shot him in the back with an N-gun.
* * * *
Larry's whole body felt like one raw mass of broken blisters as, flat on his belly, he inched his way along the outside hull of the Glory of the Galaxy. He had no idea what the heat was out here, but it radiated off the hot hull of the Glory in scalding, suffocating waves which swept right through the insulining of the spacesuit. If he didn't find the proper hatch, and in a matter of seconds....
* * * *
"Anyone else?" Ackerman Boone screamed. "Anyone else like Allister?"
But one by one the remaining men were dropping from the heat. Finally—alone—Ackerman Boone faced the door and stared defiantly at the hot metal as if he could see his adversaries through it. On the other side, the firing became more sporadic as the officers and Secret Servicemen collapsed. His mind crazed with the heat and with fear, Ackerman Boone suddenly wished he could see the men through the door, wished he could see them die....
* * * *
It was this hatch or nothing. He thought it was the right one, but couldn't be sure. He could no longer see. His vision had gone completely. The pain was a numb thing now, far away, hardly a part of himself. Maybe Mayhem was absorbing the pain-sensation for him, he thought. Maybe Mayhem took the pain and suffered with it in the shared body so he, Larry, could still think. Maybe—
His blistered fingers were barely able to move within the insulined gloves, Larry fumbled with the hatch.
* * * *
Ackerman Boone whirled suddenly. He had been intent upon the companionway door and the sounds behind him—which he had heard but not registered as dangerous for several seconds—now made him turn.
The man was peeling off a space suit. Literally peeling it off in strips from his lobster-red flesh. He blinked at Boone without seeing him. Dazzle-blinded, Boone thought, then realized his own vision was going.
"I'll kill you if you go near that subspace drive!" Boone screamed.
"It's the only chance for all of us and you know it, Boone," the man said quietly. "Don't try to stop me."
Ackerman Boone lifted his N-gun and squinted through the haze of heat and blinding light. He couldn't see! He couldn't see....
Wildly, he fired the N-gun. Wildly, in all directions, spraying the room with it—
Larry dropped blindly forward. Twice he tripped over unconscious men, but climbed to his feet and went on. He could not see Boone, but he could see—vaguely—the muzzle flash of Boone's N-gun. He staggered across the room toward that muzzle-flash and finally embraced it—
And found himself fighting for his life. Boone was crazed now—with the heat and with his own failure. He bit and tore at Larry with strong claw-like fingers and lashed out with his feet. He balled his fists and hammered air like a windmill, arms flailing, striking flesh often enough to batter Larry toward the floor.
Grimly Larry clung to him, pulled himself upright, ducked his head against his chest and struck out with his own fists, feeling nothing, not knowing when they landed and when they did not, hearing nothing but a far off roaring in his ears, a roaring which told him he was losing consciousness and had to act—soon—if he was going to save anyone....
He stood and pounded with his fists.
Pounded—air.
He did not know that Boone had collapsed until his feet trod on the man's inert body and then, quickly, he rushed toward the control board, rushed blindly in its direction, or in the direction he thought it would be, tripped over something, sprawled on the hot, blistering floor, got himself up somehow, crawled forward, pulled himself upright....
There was no sensation in his fingers. He did not know if he had actually reached the control board but abruptly he realized that he had not felt Mayhem's presence in his mind for several minutes. Was Mayhem conserving his energy for a final try, letting Larry absorb the punishment now so he—
Yes, Larry remembered thinking vaguely. It had to be that. For Mayhem knew how to work the controls, and he did not. Now his mind receded into a fog of semi-consciousness, but he was aware that his blistered fingers were fairly flying across the control board, aware then of an inward sigh—whether of relief or triumph, he was never to know—then aware, abruptly and terribly, of a wrenching pain which seemed to strip his skin from his flesh, his flesh from his bones, the marrow from....
* * * *
"Can you see?" the doctor asked.
"Yes," Larry said as the bandages were removed from his eyes. Three people were in the room with the doctor—Admiral Stapleton, the President—and Sheila. Somehow, Sheila was most important.
"We are now in subspace, thanks to you," the Admiral said. "We all have minor injuries as a result of the transfer, but there were only two fatalities, I'm happy to say. And naturally, the ship is now out of danger."
"What gets me, Grange," the President said, "is how you managed to work those controls. What the devil do you know about sub-space, my boy?"
"The two fatalities," the Admiral said, "were Ackerman Boone and the man he had killed." Then the Admiral grinned. "Can't you see, Mr. President, that he's not paying any attention to us? I think, at the moment, the hero of the hour only has eyes for Miss Kelly here."
"Begging your pardons, sirs, yes," Larry said happily.
Nodding and smiling, the President of the Galactic Federation and Admiral Stapleton left the dispensary room—with the doctor.
"Well, hero," Sheila said, and smiled.
Larry realized—quite suddenly—that, inside himself, he was alone. Mayhem had done his job—and vanished utterly.
"You know," Sheila said, "it's as if you—well, I hope this doesn't get you sore at me—as if you grew up overnight."
Before he kissed her Larry said: "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'll tell you about it someday. But you'd never believe me."
THINK YOURSELF TO DEATH
Published under the pseudonym "C. H. Thames"
A "Johnny Mayhem" Adventure
When he reached Ophiuchus, Johnny Mayhem was wearing the body of an elderly Sirian gentleman.
Nothing could have been more incongruous. The Sirian wore a pince-nez, a dignified two-piece jumper in a charcoal color, sedate two-tone boots and a black string-tie.
The loiterers in the street near the Galactic Observer's building looked, and pointed, and laughed. Using the dignity of the dead Sirian, whose body he wore like other people wear clothing, Johnny Mayhem ignored them. They had a point, of course. It was hot and humid on Ophiuchus IX. The loiterers in the dusty, evil-smelling streets wore nothing but loin cloths.
Mayhem went inside the building, which was air-conditioned. Probably it was the only air-conditioned structure on the entire planet. Mayhem dabbed at his Sirian forehead gratefully, mopping at sweat. As near as he could figure, his life expectancy in this body was down to three days, Earth style. He wondered fleetingly why the Galactic League had sent him here to Ophiuchus. He shrugged, knowing he would find out soon enough.
The Galactic Observer on Ophiuchus IX, a middle-aged Indian from Bombay named Kovandaswamy, wore an immaculate white linen loin cloth on his plump body and a relieved smile on his worried face when Mayhem entered his office. The two men shook hands.
"So you're Mayhem?" Kovandaswamy said in English. "They told me to expect you, sir. Pardon my staring, but I've never been face to face with a legend before. I'm impressed."
Mayhem laughed. "You'll get over it."
"Well, at least as a Sirian gentleman, you're not very prepossessing. That helps."
"It wasn't my idea. It never is."
"I know. I know that, sir." Kovandaswamy got up nervously from his desk and paced across the room. "Do you know anything about Ophiuchus IX, Mayhem?"
"Not much. It's one of the Forgotten Worlds, isn't it?"
"Precisely, sir. Ophiuchus IX is one of scores of interstellar worlds colonized in the first great outflux from Earth."
"You mean during the population pressure of the 24th century?"
"Exactly. Then Ophiuchus IX, like the other Forgotten Worlds, was all but forgotten. As you know, Mayhem, the first flux of colonization receded like a wave, inertia set in, and the so-called Forgotten Worlds became isolated from the rest of the galaxy for generations. Only in the past fifty years are we finding them again, one by one. Ophiuchus IX is typical, isolated from the galaxy at large by a dust cloud that—"
"I know. I came through it."
"It was colonized originally with Indians from southern and eastern India, on Earth. That's why the Galactic League appointed me Observer. I'm an Indian. These people—well, they're what my people might have developed into if they'd lived for hundreds of years in perfect isolation."
"What's the trouble?"
Kovandaswamy answered with a question of his own. "You are aware of the Galactic League's chief aim?"
"Sure. To see that no outworld, however small or distant, is left in isolation. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes," agreed Kovandaswamy. "Their reason is obvious. For almost a thousand years now the human race has outpaced its social and moral development with development in the physical sciences. For almost a thousand years mankind has had the power to destroy itself. In isolation this is possible. With mutual interchange of ideas, it is extremely unlikely. Thus, in the interests of human survival, the Galactic League tries to thwart isolated development. So far, the Forgotten Worlds have cooperated. But Ophiuchus IX is an exception."
"And the League wants me to find out why?"
"Precisely."
"How are they thwarting—"
Kovandaswamy was sweating despite the air-conditioning, despite his almost-naked state. "You have the right to turn this mission down, of course. The League told me that."
"I'm here," Mayhem said simply.
"Very well, sir. Sooner or later, every outworlder who ventures out among the Ophiuchans kills himself."
"I guess I didn't hear you. Did you say kills himself?"
"Suicide, Mayhem. Exactly."
"But how can you blame—"
"Like their ancestors from the Earthian sub-continent of India, Mayhem, the Ophiuchans are mystics. The trance, the holy man who sits in contemplation of his navel, the World Spirit—these are the things of their culture most important to them. Mayhem, did you ever see a hundred holy men of India working together?"
"Usually they don't work together."
"Precisely, sir. Precisely. Here on Ophiuchus, they do. And not merely a hundred. All of them. Virtually all of them. Working together, their minds in trance, unified, seeking their World Spirit, they can do amazing things."
"Like mentally forcing the outworlders to kill themselves?"
"Yes, sir. Legally, they are innocent. Morally, they do not recognize the outworlders as equals of themselves. The League wants to know what they are trying to hide. It could be a threat to peace and—existence."
"You have a body for me?" Johnny would be ready with that provided.
If anyone but Johnny Mayhem had asked that question, Kovandaswamy would not have known what he was talking about, or would have thought him insane, or both. But Johnny Mayhem was, of course, the legandary Man Without a Body. How many corporeal shells had he inhabited in the past half dozen years? He shrugged, not remembering. He couldn't remain in one body more than a month: it would mean the final death of his elan, his bodiless sentience. So far he had avoided that death.
The Galactic League would help him if it could. Every world which had a human population and a Galactic League post, however small, must have a body in cold storage, waiting for Johnny Mayhem if his services were required. But no one knew exactly under what circumstances the Galactic League Council, operating from the hub of the Galaxy, might summon Mayhem. And only a very few people, including those at the Hub and the Galactic League Firstmen on civilized worlds and Observers on primitive worlds, knew the precise mechanism of Mayhem's coming. To others it was a weird mystery.
Johnny Mayhem, bodiless sentience. Mayhem—Johnny Marlow then—who had been chased from Earth, a pariah and a criminal, almost seven years ago, who had been mortally wounded on a wild planet deep within the Saggitarian Swarm, whose life had been saved—after a fashion—by the white magic of the planet. Mayhem, doomed now to possible immortality as a bodiless sentience, an elan, which could occupy and activate a fresh corpse or one which had been frozen properly...an elan doomed to wander eternally because it could not remain in one body for more than a month without body and elan perishing. Mayhem, who had dedicated his strange, lonely life to the service of the Galactic League because a normal life and normal social relations were not possible for him....
"Then you'll do it?" Kovandaswamy asked on Ophiuchus IX. "Even though you realize we can give you no official help not only because the Galactic League approves of your work unofficially but can't sanction it officially, but because an outworlder can't set his foot outside this building for long or off the spacefield without risking death...."
"By suicide?"
"Yes. I'm practically a prisoner in Galactic League Headquarters, as is my staff. You see—"
"What about the body?"
Kovandaswamy looked at him nervously. "A native, Mayhem. A native won't be molested, you see."
"That figures. What kind of native?"
"In top shape, sir. Healthy, young, in the prime of life you might say."
"Then what's bothering you?"
"Nothing. Nothing, sir."
"Your technicians are ready?"
"Yes, sir. And vowed to secrecy."
Mayhem found a tiny capsule in the pocket of his Sirian jumper, and popped it in his mouth.
"What—what's that?" Kovandaswamy asked.
Mayhem swallowed. "Curare," he said.
"Curare! A poison!"
"Paralysis," said Mayhem quickly. "Muscular paralysis. You die because you stop breathing. Painless...and...."
"But—"
"Call your technicians...new body...ready...." Gasping, the Sirian gentleman, hardly Johnny Mayhem now, fell to the floor.
Trembling, Kovandaswamy pressed a button on his desk. A few moments later, two white-coated technicians entered the office.
"Project M," Kovandaswamy said.
Grimly the technicians went to work.
* * * *
Mayhem awoke.
Ordinarily it was his elan alone which journeyed between the worlds, his elan which was fed the information it would need in hypno-sleep while the frozen body was thawed out. Sometimes, however, he came the normal way in a body which still had some of its thirty days left, as he had come to Ophiuchus IX in the Sirian gentleman.
Darkness. The body felt young and healthy. Mayhem wondered vaguely how it had died, then decided it did not really matter. For the next thirty days the body would live again, as Johnny Mayhem.
Recessed lighting glowed at the juncture of walls and ceiling. Mayhem was reclining on a cot. A loin cloth and a large shawl had been laid out for him. On the far wall of the room was a tinted mirror. Mayhem got up and went over there.
What his new body looked like hardly mattered, he told himself. Youth, health, strength—these were important. He could sense them internally. He could....
He stared at the image in the mirror. His face turned beet red. He went for the shawl and the loin cloth and put them on. Cursing, he went to find Kovandaswamy.
"Is this supposed to be a joke?" Mayhem demanded.
"You never asked what the—" Kovandaswamy began.
"How am I supposed to find out anything—like this?"
"It's a young body, a healthy body. It is also the one we were given when the Galactic League first came here. It is the only one we were given."
"Take it or leave it, eh?"
"I'm afraid so, Mayhem."
"All right. All right, I guess I shouldn't complain. It could probably outrun and outfight and outthink the dyspeptic old Sirian gentleman, and things turned out well enough on Sirius III. But it'll probably take most of my time just getting used to it, Kovandaswamy. I'm supposed to be conducting an investigation."
"At least as an Ophiuchan you won't arouse suspicion."
Mayhem nodded slowly, with reluctance. There was nothing else to say. He shook hands with Kovandaswamy and, wearing the loin cloth and the shawl, left the Galactic League building.
With, of course, a completely new identity.
Mayhem walked a mile and a half through hot, arid country. The League building was isolated, as if its inmates might contaminate the native Ophiuchans. Along the dusty road Mayhem passed a guru, the name for a wise man or a holy man first in India and now here on Ophiuchus IX. The guru sat in contemplation of the tip of his nose, legs crossed, soles of feet up, eyes half-closed. The guru remained that way, without moving, until Mayhem was out of sight. Then the guru behaved in a very un-guru-like manner.
The guru got up quite nimbly, joints creaking, skin dry and cracked. Three strides brought him to a tree with a partly hollow trunk. He lifted a radio transmitter and began to talk.
* * * *
In twenty generations, the initially small population of Ophiuchus IX, all colonists from India on Earth, had increased geometrically. The colonized planet, now, was as over-populated as the teeming sub-continent which long ago had sent the colonists seeking a new home. As a result, unemployment was chronic, discontent widespread, and whatever inner serenity mysticism might bring was widely sought after. This did not stop the non-mystics, however, of whom there were many, from seeking jobs that could pay money that could fill empty bellies....
A long line gathered outside the employment office of Denebian Exports the morning after Mayhem had left the League building in his new body. Denebian Exports was the largest outworld company currently on Ophiuchus, a company which had solved the outworlder-suicide problem quite simply by hiring no one but natives. Still, hoots and catcalls surrounded those on the employment line. Other jobless Ophiuchans, apparently preferring near-starvation to working for the outworlders, threatened to make the situation dangerous.
Pandit Gandhi Menon, a lean, handsome Ophiuchan of perhaps thirty years, wished there was some way he could shut his ears to the abuse. He needed work. His father and mother were ill, his child was starving, his wife already dead. The gurus offered their own unique solution, of course. The body is nothing, they said. The mind is everything. But thus had the gurus spoken for four thousand years, on Earth and on Ophiuchus. The great majority of Ophiuchans, Pandit Gandhi Menon included, preferred food for the body to food for mystic thought. Still, the crowds were ugly, threatening to break up the line of job-seekers if Denebian Exports didn't open its doors soon....
An unkempt little man, not old but with a matted growth of beard, an unwashed body which gave the impression of wiry strength, and wild eyes, abruptly flung himself at the young woman in line in front of Pandit.
Shouting, "Not our women, too!" the little man attacked the girl, trying to drag her from the line. "It is bad enough our men, but not our women!"
Pandit caught the fanatic's wiry arm and brought it behind his scrawny back in a hammerlock. "Leave her alone," he said. "If you try that again, I'll break your arm."
The fanatic looked at Pandit with hate in his eyes, but stepped back and stood to one side mouthing invective.
The girl, who was about twenty-five years old, had a livid mark on her arm. She wore loin cloth and shawl, the usual garb. She was, Pandit observed for the first time, quite pretty.
"Thank you," she said. "I—I'm not sure I like working for the outworlders. But I need the money."
"Don't we all," Pandit told her. "But we're not hired yet. I am Pandit Gandhi Menon."
"Sria Krishna," the girl said, smiling at him. "What sort of work is it?"
"Don't you know, Sria Krishna?"
The girl shook her head and Pandit said: "Actually, I guess I don't know, either. But there are rumors the outworlders want jet-pilots. Not for rocketry. For jets. To fly to the Empty Places."
"The Empty Places? Why?"
Pandit shrugged. "Because they are empty, perhaps. Because they are too dry and too arid to support life. Because Denebian Export can claim whatever it found there, for free export. So go the rumors. But surely you can't pilot a jet."
"Can you?"
"Yes," Pandit said promptly with a faint show of pride.
"My father taught me. I want to thank you for what—"
"Nothing. Anyone in my position would have done it. This rabble—"
The rabble was still noisy. Occasionally they hurled offal at the stragglers joining the rear of the long line. But Pandit and Sria Krishna stood in the forefront, and presently the door opened. In a few minutes Pandit watched the girl disappear inside. He waited nervously, licking dry lips with a parched tongue. It was early morning, but already very hot. He needed the work. Any work. He needed the money which outworlders could pay so abundantly for honest work. He wondered if the fanatic gurus ever thought of that. Then the door in front of him opened again and a fat, unctuous-looking Ophiuchan came out. He seemed to be an official of sorts.
"One more!" he said. "Only one! The rest of you begone."
Behind Pandit there was a general press of bodies, but he was first in line and did not surrender his position. The unctuous-looking man admitted him, half-expecting a bribe. Pandit passed him by; he didn't have a single copper.
He approached a desk. The crowd noise outside was loud, those who had not joined the line crowing because most of those on it had been turned away. Behind the desk sat a small Denebian man of middle years. He looked nervous.
"Can you fly?" he asked in a voice almost desperately thin.
"Yes," Pandit said. Then the rumors were right.
"How much experience?"
"Five years on and off."
"You have a license?"
"There are no licenses on Ophiuchus IX," Pandit pointed out.
"Yes, of course. I'm sorry. Habit. You people don't lie."
"We try not to."
"Your name?"
Pandit told him. The Denebian wrote it down on a form and said: "You'll do. Pay is twenty credits a mission." It wasn't much, but it was more than Pandit had expected.
"What do we fly?" he asked. Questions didn't seem welcome, but no harm trying.
The Denebian looked at him and laughed. "You want the job?"
"Yes, I want the job."
"Then don't ask questions."
Pandit nodded.
"Out through that door, then. The other new pilots are assembling."
And Pandit left the small office.
A moment later a buzzer sounded on the Denebian's desk. He spoke into a grid: "Orkap here. Go ahead."
"The guru near the League building reports that a native Ophiuchan left the building heading for the city."
"When was this?"
"Yesterday morning."
"And?"
"Draw your own conclusions. Natives don't go near the League headquarters as a rule, do they?"
"No."
"And the League, of course, will want to know about the suicides?"
"Yes, but—"
"But nothing," said the radio voice, which belonged to the only other Denebian currently on Ophiuchus IX. "We can assume this native is a spy. For the League, Orkap."
"All right. I don't see any need to worry, though."
"Don't you? The gurus, like the other natives, can sham, but they can't lie. Sooner or later a guru will be brought out of trance by the League, questioned, and—"
"Tell them about us?" Orkap asked in a shocked voice.
"It could happen. Maybe it's happened already. There won't be any proof, of course, but the League would send a spy. Suppose I describe this native to you."
Orkap said, "Go ahead," and the radio voice did so.
In a shocked voice Orkap admitted: "I've given that Ophiuchan a pilot's job this morning. There can't be any doubt about it."
"Ah, then you see? You see?"
"I can fix that. I can—"
"Orkap, Orkap. You'll do nothing now. Let the spy alone for now. Then, in the Empty Places, you will merely announce to the pilots that there is a spy among them. Don't reveal who it is." He could not believe his ears.
"But—"
"They want work. They need work. They'll all be afraid the finger of guilt may point at them. They'll work like dogs for you, and I wouldn't be surprised if they uncovered the spy themselves."
"Yes," Orkap said. "Yes, I understand."
"All but one thing, Orkap. There is one thing you don't understand. The spy's identity—"
"You already told me who the spy was."
"Yes. But there is another spy. Working for us, in the League building."
"I never knew," said Orkap.
"The spy among your pilots is more than appearance indicates. Did you ever hear of Johnny Mayhem?"
Orkap's heart jumped into his throat. Who in the galaxy hadn't heard of Mayhem? "But," he gasped, "a—"
"Nevertheless. It is Mayhem."
Orkap was suddenly afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. The ubiquitous Mayhem.
* * * *
The fierce white sun of Ophiuchus IX broiled down on the Empty Places, a featureless desert two-thousand miles across and as lividly white as bleached bone. In all that burning emptiness, the jet cargo craft looked very small and very insignificant, like black midges on the dead white sand.
Midges among midges, the new pilots walked.
One said: "But I see no cargo."
Another: "These outworlders and their mystery...."
All were sweating, all uncomfortable, but all grateful for the twenty credits a flight they would earn, whatever the cargo turned out to be.
"What do you think?" Pandit asked Sria.
"I think I've never been so hot in my life. I feel like I'm being broiled alive."
"Here comes the Denebian now."
They had been driven into the Empty Places in a sand sled. The trip had taken two days but because the sled was air-conditioned no one had objected. When they saw the half dozen jets they knew why a sled had taken them into the wilderness. The jets were small cargo-carriers with room for pilot, co-pilot and perhaps a ton of cargo in each. Whatever it was the Denebians wanted exported, it didn't take up much room.
Orkap of Deneb walked toward them past the first of the jets. He began without preamble: "Your cargo is packed and ready to be moved in an underground vault five hundred yards from here. You will break up into pairs, a pilot and co-pilot for each jet." Sria Krishna and Pandit had already paired themselves together. "You work on your own time, getting the cargo with trundle-sleds, loading it, taking off, delivering it to the Denebian freighter at the spaceport. When you are finished, you collect your pay."
"Where do we sleep?" someone asked.
Orkap smiled. "You didn't come out here to sleep. There is only a limited amount of cargo. The jets are swift. You will be paid according to the amount of work you do. Any other questions?"
"What about food?" a plump young Ophiuchan asked.
"You will be given energy tablets, as many as you wish. Any other questions? No? Good. I have two additional things to say. First, you are not to examine your cargo under any circumstances, either here, or in transit, or on the spacefield. There are televid pick-up units in each jet, so you will be watched at all times. Second—" Orkap paused and let the silence grow and spread across the dazzling white expanse—"there is a spy among you, wearing the body of an Ophiuchan but in reality—well, I don't have to tell you who he is in reality." Orkap smiled grimly. "There is only one body-changer in the galaxy, but one is quite enough."
One of the pilots said, a little breathlessly: "Johnny Mayhem!"
Orkap smiled again. "I am aware of Mayhem's identity," he said, "but I'm not going to do anything about it."
The pilots waited. The sun glared down balefully. "You see," Orkap told them, "we cannot be altogether sure that the rest of you are here simply to earn your twenty credits a flight. Mayhem has unwittingly become our insurance. Find Mayhem! Find the spy among you! A hundred credits bonus to the man who does!"
* * * *
Pandit looked at Sria, who whistled. The girl said: "If they think we can finish the job without sleep, picking up cargo and flying it to the spaceport and returning for more, then a hundred credits is probably more than any of us will earn. They'll all be looking like hawks for this Mayhem."
"And," Pandit agreed, "if there's a native spy among them, he'd be afraid to show himself for fear they'll think he's Mayhem. Very clever of the Denebians."
"...to work at once," Orkap was saying. He wore a blaster on his hip, the only weapon among them. They all trudged behind him through the burning, faceless sands. Soon they reached a depression from which the sand had been cleared, baring the white bedrock of the Empty Places. In the rock a square opening had been cut, shielded on each side from the shifting sands by an up-curving lip. A ramp led down into darkness.
"You will find your cargo down there. Also enough trundle-sleds to go around," Orkap explained. "The cargo is crated. The crates must remain intact. Is that understood?"
It was understood.
Their sudden mutual suspicion a pall worse than the heat, the Ophiuchans descended the ramp. They needed the money or they wouldn't be here. The money meant more to them than anything: this was no time to be far-sighted. Yet one of them was a spy for the Galactic League—Johnny Mayhem.
One of them, but which?
Pandit made a quick estimate of the number of crates. They were stacked neatly against one wall, each about four feet by four by four. And from the size of them, a single crate would fill the cargo bay of each of the jets. Pandit made a rough estimate. Two dozen crates, perhaps. In the dim light it was hard to tell. Two dozen crates, six jets, twelve Ophiuchans. Four trips for each jet. A half hour to load, ten minutes to unload, an hour and a half by jet to the spacefield. Three hours and forty minutes, round trip. Say, four hours. Four times four, sixteen. Sixteen hours of steady work for eighty credits. No time for mystery or suspicion. Barely time for mistrust....
"You, there!" a voice called. "What are you doing?"
It was one of the other Ophiuchans, quite the biggest of the lot. Pandit had seen him outside and remembered his name. He was Raj Shiva, a tall, muscular, swarthy Ophiuchan, with small, alert, suspicious eyes and a livid scar alongside his jaw.
"Nothing," Pandit said. "Nothing."
"No? The others are loading already. I'll be watching you."
For a hundred credits, Pandit thought furiously, but said nothing. Sria touched his shoulder. "I have one of the trundle-sleds," she said. "Let's get about it."
"Right," said Pandit.
Raj Shiva watched them a few moments longer, then drifted away with his own partner. It took Pandit and Sria, sweating copiously in the tremendous heat, a few minutes less than half an hour to load one of the crates aboard their jet. Three of the other ships were already airborne, whining away toward the spacefield.
Pandit looked at the crate. There were no markings on it anywhere. The wood looked new, but that meant absolutely nothing. In the dry heat of the Empty Places, wood would last a century, a millennium. They could not tell how old it was.
* * * *
"Ready?" Sria Krishna called from the controls.
Pandit had secured the crate in the cargo bay. "Ready," he responded.
Moments later acceleration thrust them back in the twin pilot seats.
Sria leveled the jet at twenty thousand and they sped at eight hundred miles an hour toward the city and the spacefield just beyond it.
"Do you wonder about it?" Sria asked after a while.
"About what?"
"The cargo."
"We aren't supposed to."
"I know." Sria laughed. "I'm a woman, you see."
Pandit grinned at her. "Curiosity," he said. "A woman's trait on any world."
Sria got up from the pilot chair but Pandit placed his hand on her shoulder and gently shoved her down again. "They have a televid unit aboard," he said, "remember?"
Sria nodded. The jet sped on.
They landed at the spacefield. They were the fourth jet down and one of the other three had taken off on the return leg of the flight. A Denebian Pandit had never seen before was supervising the loin-cloth garbed laborers loading the crates aboard a Denebian spaceship. With Sria he delivered their crate on the trundle-sled, returned with the sled to their jet, and took off.
* * * *
Just short of four hours from the time they started they returned to the Empty Places. They had gained a little time and were the second team down. From the jet ahead of them, Raj Shiva led a puny, middle-aged co-pilot.
Orkap stood in the underground storage room. Looking at his wrist chrono he said to the four Ophiuchans who came down the ramp: "You made fine time." Raj Shiva's puny companion said something, but Raj Shiva grabbed his arm and they began to load a second crate. Pandit and Sria loaded theirs in silence.
They made their second round trip in four hours exactly. It was completely dark when they returned to the Empty Places. Sria was worried they would overshoot the cargo point, but Pandit brought the little jet down within a few hundred yards of its takeoff point.
They could see nothing when they shut off the jet's running lights, except for the glow which came from the underground room. They reached it and went down the ramp. Pandit judged that half the crates were gone now. He took a quick tour of the dimly-lit room while Sria got the trundle-sled into position against one of the crates.
"Nobody here," Pandit said in a whisper. "The Denebian must be sleeping in the sand-sled."
"Yes," Sria said a little breathlessly.
"I was thinking—"
"What?" Sria said. "Don't stop."
"If we wanted to examine one of the boxes, it would be suicide to open the one we take. But we could open one of them down here, see what it is, take another for ourselves—"
"You would do this?" Sria asked him. "Why?"
Pandit shrugged. "I have eyes," he said. "Our gurus did not broadcast the death-wish to outworlders until the Denebians came. Then they started. Have the Denebians sold them on the idea?"
"I don't know," Sria said.
"Well, let's assume they have. Why? Why would they do such a thing, Sria?"
"Let me get this straight, Pandit. First, you think the gurus actually are making the outworlders kill themselves?"
"Of course," Pandit said. "It's mental suggestion, on a scale only our gurus are capable of. But don't you see, Sria, they wouldn't do it on their own. The gurus are dirty, careless about their bodies—but terribly arrogant. Left alone, they wouldn't think the outworlders important enough to be concerned over one way or another. They certainly wouldn't kill them."
"Go on," Sria urged.
"All right. The gurus have great knowledge of the mystical, but externally they're naive. Let's suppose someone came along—the Denebians in this case—and found something they wanted very badly on Ophiuchus. These crates here, Sria. What would they do? They'd go to the gurus and convince them—it wouldn't be difficult—that any intercourse with outworlders would be harmful to Ophiuchus, that the outworlders want to colonize and exploit our world, that sort of thing. While the gurus are stewing it over, the Denebians could have prepared this shipment here—whatever it is—for departure. But the gurus, too well convinced by them, could have acted sooner than they expected, making it all but impossible for the small handful of outworlders, the Denebians among them, to go abroad without fear of taking their own lives. Perhaps a few, like Orkap and that other Denebian, are not at all suicide-prone. Perhaps a few can withstand it. As for the rest, it's indoors and away from the mental influence of the gurus, or off Ophiuchus entirely. Which would leave the Denebians with a problem they hadn't thought of." His words made sense.
"Yes!" cried Sria excitedly. "Now that they have their valuable cargo ready to go, how can they get it off Ophiuchus without help?"
"We," said Pandit softly, "are that help."
Sria asked: "What are you going to do about it?"
"I don't know. I honestly don't. I never had anything against the outworlders. How could I? We're all progeny of outworlders who came here almost five hundred years ago from a place called India on Earth. But the gurus—"
"—have been deceived. You said so yourself."
Pandit was sweating, and it was more than the heat which made him sweat. He paced up to the crates, then back again, then to the crates. Suddenly he said, "All right. All right, I'll do it. Someone's got to find out what the Denebians want here."
And Pandit began to pry at one of the boxes with a knife he carried in his loin cloth. Sria said, "I'll keep watch. You call me when it's opened."
"Maybe you ought to get out of here. In case anything happens, I don't want to get you involved."
But Sria went up the ramp and crouched there, waiting, watching. The desert was very quiet, entirely windless, and hot even at night. Stars sprinkled the sky overhead and far off she thought she heard the distant whine of a jet. "Hurry," she called. From below she heard the sound of wood being pried away from wood. She heard, or imagined she heard, the jet coming closer. "Hurry!" she called softly.
Finally three words drifted up to her. "Come here, Sria." She felt a little relieved. Now that he'd finished.
* * * *
She listened for the jet. Now she heard nothing. She went swiftly down the ramp.
Pandit stood before one of the crates, perspiring freely. He had pried loose one of the side walls and a smooth metal surface with stenciled lettering on it was exposed.
He said: "I can't read that. It's a language I never saw before."
Sria bent closer and looked at the stenciled lettering. A voice, not Pandit's, said:
"I thought it would be you two.... No, don't move!"
A big muscular figure silhouetted against the starlight, and a smaller, puny, thin-legged figure. Raj Shiva and his co-pilot.
"A hundred credits each, Handus," Raj Shiva said as he ran down the ramp. "Can you keep the girl from getting away?"
Handus rushed down at his heels.
Pandit met Raj Shiva at the foot of the ramp. Pandit was a big man by Ophiuchan standards, but Raj Shiva was bigger. "Run, Sria!" Pandit cried, and met the giant with his knife.
Raj Shiva parried the blow with his forearm, then his big hands moved swiftly and the knife clattered to the floor. Sria ran for the ramp, her bare feet padding swiftly against the stone floor. Handus was waiting for her at the foot of the ramp in an awkward crouch. She had a glimpse of Raj Shiva and Pandit straining together, then Handus struck her with his balled fist. It was a puny blow, but Sria staggered back, her jaw numb. Laughing shrilly, Handus leaped at her. She was shoved back, tripped over something, and fell. For a moment all the lights blinked out inside her head.
Inside—no! Raj Shiva and Pandit stumbled about the room, struck something, there was a loud popping sound, a tinkling, and the lights in the storage room went out.
"Where is she?" Handus called. "I can't find her!"
She heard him groping about, heard the others struggling together. She got to her feet and stood perfectly still, waiting for anything. She wished she had a weapon—something—she was only a woman—
Then a voice whispered: "Hurry, Sria! Hurry!"
"Pandit?"
He took her arm in the darkness. She couldn't see him. They went to the crates and wrestled one on their trundle-sled.
"Not the open one?" Sria gasped.
"No. No."
They heard footsteps.... Saw a figure for a moment silhouetted against starlight. Handus was fleeing, probably for help.
They took their sled out into the night and dragged it across the sand toward their waiting jet. They loaded the crate in the cargo bay. While Pandit was finishing the job in the darkness, Sria sat down at the controls.
"Ready?" she shouted above the whine of the jets.
Pandit said that he was. She hardly heard his voice.
A moment later, she took the small cargo jet up.
* * * *
She heard Pandit moving in the small cabin behind her. She said: "We ought to take it to the League authorities, don't you think?" She had to shout to be heard above the whining roar of the jets.
"Why?"
"I was able to read the writing. It's Procyonian, Pandit. Do you know anything about the Procyonians?"
"Well, a few centuries ago, they were the most warlike people in the galaxy. It was rumored they had a cache of thermonuclear bombs hidden somewhere, after such weapons were outlawed in the twenty-fifth century. The cache was never found, until tonight. We found it, Pandit."
"But Orkap and—"
"That's true. It was found by the Denebians first. Don't you see, Pandit? Orkap and the others, private Denebian traders. It wasn't the government. It never is the government these days. But unscrupulous individuals, Pandit, armed with two dozen hydrogen bombs—why, they could take over their own world on threat of imminent destruction, or some outworld plum they had their eye on, or—"
"I see." Pandit's voice was barely audible above the whine of the jets.
"It's a job the Galactic League can handle," Sria went on. "Now that it's out in the open—or will be as soon as we get to the spacefield. You've done your work, Pandit, and your people won't forget you for it. As for me, my work here is finished too."
"Your work?"
Above the roar of the jet, Sria shouted: "Yes. I am Johnny Mayhem." She smiled in the darkness. Johnny Mayhem, she thought, in a girl's body. Well, he'd been young men and old, weak and strong, sick and healthy, human and alien outworlder—so why not a girl too?
All at once Pandit's hand lay heavily on her shoulder. She turned around and in the darkness but with the lights of the instrument board on it saw the gleam of a knife blade. The face beyond the blade, leering from darkness, was not Pandit's. She hadn't actually known it was Pandit. She hadn't seen him. She'd hardly been able to hear his voice.
It was Raj Shiva.
"Fly us to Denebian Exports," he said, "or I'll kill you and do it myself."
"You're making a mistake. Your people belong with the Galactic League, not with a handful of adventurers who—"
"The Denebians are right," Raj Shiva said fanatically. "My people would be better off left alone."
"I'm flying this jet to the spaceport—and the League."
"I'll kill you. I know all about you, Mayhem. You're not a woman, really. You're not even a native. That's a dead body, isn't it? But if I kill it—again—while you're in it, you die to. You'll do what I say!"
* * * *
This very night, unless something was done about it, the cache of thermonuclear weapons would be space-bound, the first hydrogen bombs loose in the galaxy for almost five hundred years. Wouldn't mankind ever begin to learn? Mayhem-Sria thought wearily. He knew the answer, of course: most men would, but the few who refused could bring destruction to an entire galaxy....
Moments before, apparent success of a mission. Now, failure. Or death. Or both.
Sria's hand flashed out suddenly and struck the instrument board. The jet plummeted earthward with a loud whining sound. Sria felt herself shoved back by the tremendous acceleration into the cushions of the pilot chair. She heard a wild exclamation from Raj Shiva, but couldn't turn around to see what had happened. Grim-lipped, she kept the ship hurtling Earthward. She knew it was dangerous and might even prove disastrous. Her body could take so much, then she would black out. But if she didn't maintain the dive until the last possible instant, Raj Shiva would get control of the ship and its vital cargo. She was only a girl, but she was protected by the crash-padding of the pilot chair. Raj Shiva, unprotected, was behind her somewhere....
Down through the thin upper atmosphere of Ophiuchus IX screamed the small ship, its heat-dial blinking on and off in warning as friction scorched its thin shell. The scream of air became more deep-throated as the atmosphere became thicker....
Ten thousand feet.
Eight thousand.
Six.
Sria's eyes saw black. Her breath was labored. Needles of pain darted in her skull, plucked at her eyes. She opened her mouth to scream but heard nothing. She felt as if she must be forced clear through the protective cushions of the pilot chair.
Five thousand feet.
Four thousand.
Blackness and peace and a settling lassitude....
Three thousand feet.
With hands that would barely function, Sria with supreme effort brought the jet out of its death-dive. She slumped in the pilot chair for a long time, too weak to do anything else.
Then she looked back at Raj Shiva.
Who lay slack and unconscious against the rear bulkhead of the cargo ship.
* * * *
Mayhem-Sria brought the jet down and, middle of the night or no, saw Kovandaswamy. Raj Shiva was taken into custody. A jet was sent out, loaded with Leaguemen who had proved immune to the guru death-wish and all armed to the teeth. It landed at the cache and stood guard over it. Pandit was found, unconscious, one of his arms broken, but otherwise all right. A second jet prevented the Denebian Export ship from blasting off with the hydrogen bombs already loaded. Orkap and his companion were taken into custody.
The rest, of course, is history. The gurus of Ophiuchus IX were shown what had been taking place in the name of friendship between themselves and Deneb and in the name of isolation. Most of the gurus retired entirely from active life. The few who did not spent the rest of their days working for cooperation between Ophiuchus and the rest of the Galactic League. Orkap and his companion were sent back to Deneb for punishment.
* * * *
Two weeks later, Kovandaswamy shook Sria's hand.
"A girl," he said. "You did it as a girl. I still can't believe it. But then, of such stuff is the Mayhem legend made."
Mayhem smiled. Already the Hub had a new assignment for him. He could feel the old excitement, the wonder, stirring him. He smiled again and told Kovandaswamy: "Better not tell that fellow Pandit. I think he had a crush on Sria."
WORLD BEYOND PLUTO
Published under the pseudonym "C. H. Thames"
A "Johnny Mayhem" Adventure
They loaded the over-age spaceship at night because Triton's one spaceport was too busy with the oreships from Neptune during the day to handle it.
"Symphonies!" Pitchblend Hardesty groaned. Pitchblend Hardesty was the stevedore foreman and he had supervised upwards of a thousand loadings on Triton's crowded blastways, everything from the standard mining equipment to the innards of a new tavern for Triton City's so-called Street of Sin to special anti-riot weapons for the Interstellar Penitentiary not 54 miles from Triton City, but never a symphony orchestra. And most assuredly never, never an all-girl symphony orchestra.
"Symphonies!" Pitchblend Hardesty groaned again as several stevedores came out on the blastway lugging a harp, a base fiddle and a kettle drum.
"Come off it, Pitchblend," one of the stevedores said with a grin. "I didn't see you staying away from the music hall."
That was true enough, Pitchblend Hardesty had to admit. He was a small, wiry man with amazing strength in his slim body and the lore of a solar system which had been bypassed by thirtieth century civilization for the lures of interstellar exploration in his brain. While the symphony—the all-girl symphony—had been playing its engagement at Triton's make-shift music hall, Hardesty had visited the place three times.
"Well, it wasn't the music, sure as heck," he told his critic now. "Who ever saw a hundred girls in one place at one time on Triton?"
The stevedore rolled his eyes and offered Pitchblend a suggestive whistle. Hardesty booted him in the rump, and the stevedore had all he could do to stop from falling into the kettle drum.
* * * *
Just then a loud bell set up a lonely tolling and Pitchblend Hardesty exclaimed: "Prison break!"
The bell could be heard all over the two-hundred square miles of inhabitable Triton, under the glassite dome which enclosed the small city, the spaceport, the immigration station for nearby Neptune and the Interstellar Penitentiary. The bell hadn't tolled for ten years; the last time it had tolled, Pitchblend Hardesty had been a newcomer on Neptune's big moon. That wasn't surprising, for Interstellar Penitentiary was as close to escape-proof as a prison could be.
"All right, all right," Pitchblend snapped. "Hurry up and get her loaded."
"What's the rush?" one of the stevedores asked. "The gals ain't even arrived from the hotel yet."
"I'll tell you what the rush is," Pitchblend declared as the bell tolled again. "If you were an escaped prisoner on Triton, just where would you head?"
"Why, I don't know for sure, Pitchblend."
"Then I'll tell you where. You'd head for the spaceport, fast as your legs could carry you. You'd head for an out-going spaceship, because it would be your only hope. And how many out-going spaceships are there tonight?"
"Why, just two or three."
"Because all our business is in the daytime. So if the convict was smart enough to get out, he'll be smart enough to come here."
"We got no weapons," the stevedore said. "We ain't even got a pea-shooter."
"Weapons on Triton? You kidding? A frontier moon like this, the place would be blasted apart every night. Interstelpen couldn't hold all the disturbers of the peace if we had us some guns."
"But the convict—"
"Yeah," Pitchblend said grimly. "He'll be armed, all right."
Pitchblend rushed back to the manifest shed as the bell tolled a third time. He got on the phone and called the desk of the Hotel Triton.
"Hardesty over at the spaceport," he said. "Loading foreman."
"Loading foreman?" The mild, antiseptic voice at the other end of the connection said it as you would say talking dinosaur.
"Yeah, loading foreman. At night I'm in charge here. Listen, you the manager?"
"The manager—" haughtily—"is asleep. I am the night clerk."
"O.K., then. You tell those hundred girls of yours to hurry. Don't scare them, but have you heard about the prison break?"
"Heard about it? It's all I've been hearing. They—they want to stay and see what happens."
"Don't let 'em!" roared Pitchblend. "Use any excuse you have to. Tell 'em we got centrifigal-upigal and perihelion-peritonitus over here at the spaceport, or any darn thing. Tell 'em if they want to blast off tonight, they'll have to get down here quick. You got it?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then do it." Pitchblend hung up.
The escape bell tolled a fourth time.
* * * *
His name was House Bartock, he had killed two guards in his escape, and he was as desperate as a man could be. He had been sentenced to Interstelpen for killing a man on Mars in this enlightened age when capital punishment had been abolished. Recapture thus wouldn't mean death, but the prison authorities at Interstelpen could make their own interpretations of what life-in-prison meant. If House Bartock allowed himself to be retaken, he would probably spend the remaining years of his life in solitary confinement.
He walked quickly now, but he did not run. He had had an impulse to run when the first escape bell had tolled, but that would have been foolish. Already he was on the outskirts of Triton City because they had not discovered his escape for two precious hours. He could hole up in the city, lose himself somewhere. But that would only be temporary.
They would find him eventually.
Or, he could make his way to the spaceport. He had money in his pocket—the dead guard's. He had a guardsman's uniform on, but stripped of its insignia it looked like the jumper and top-boots of any spaceman. He had false identification papers, if needed, which he had worked on for two years in the prison printshop where the prison newspaper was published. He had....
Suddenly he flattened himself on the ground to one side of the road, hugging the gravel and hardly daring to breathe. He'd heard a vehicle coming from the direction of Interstelpen. It roared up, making the ground vibrate; its lights flashed; it streaked by trailing a jet of fire.
House Bartock didn't move until the afterglow had faded. Then he got up and walked steadily along the road which led from Interstelpen to Triton City.
* * * *
"Girls! Hurry with your packing! Girls!"
Sighing, Matilda Moriarity subsided. The girls, obviously, were in no hurry. That would have been out of character.
Matilda Moriarity sighed again. She was short, stocky, fifty-two years old and the widow of a fabulously wealthy interstellar investment broker. She had a passion for classical music and, now that her husband had been dead three years, she had decided to exercise that passion. But for Matilda Moriarity, a very out-going fifty-two, exercising it had meant passing it on. The outworlds, Matilda had told her friends, lacked culture. The highest form of culture, for Matilda, was classical music. Very well. She would bring culture to the outworlds.
* * * *
Triton was her first try and even now sometimes she had to pinch herself so she'd know the initial attempt had been a smashing success. She didn't delude herself completely. It had been a brainstorm selecting only girls—and pretty young things, at that—for the Interstellar Symphony. On a world like Triton, a world which played host to very few women and then usually to the hard types who turned up on any frontier in any century, a symphony of a hundred pretty girls was bound to be a success.
But the music, Matilda Moriarity told herself. They had listened to the music. If they wanted to see the girls in their latest Earth-style evening gowns, they had to listen to the music. And they had listened quietly, earnestly, apparently enjoying it. The symphony had remained on Triton longer than planned, playing every night to a full house. Matilda had had the devil's own time chaperoning her girls, but that was to be expected. It was their first taste of the outworlds; it was the outworlds' first taste of them. The widow Moriarity had had her hands full, all right. But secretly, she had enjoyed every minute of it.
"They say the bell means a prison break!" First Violin squealed excitedly. First Violin was twenty-two, an Earth girl named Jane Cummings and a student at the conservatory on Sirtus Major on Mars, but to the widow Moriarity she was, and would remain, First Violin. That way, calling the girls after their instruments, the widow Moriarity could convince herself that her symphonic music had been of prime importance on Triton, and her lovely young charges of secondary importance.
"How many times do I have to tell you to hurry?"
"But these gowns—"
"Will need a pressing when you return to Mars anyway."
"And a prison break. I never saw a prison break before. It's so exciting."
"You're not going to see it. You're just going to hear about it. Come on, come on, all of you."
At that moment the room phone rang.
"Hello?" the widow Moriarity said.
"This is Jenkins, ma'am, desk. The spaceport called a few minutes ago. I'm not supposed to frighten you, but, well, they're rather worried about the prison break. The escaped convict, they figure, will head for the spaceport. Disguised, he could—"
"Let him try masquerading as a member of my group!" the widow Moriarity said with a smile.
"All the same, if you could hurry—"
"We are hurrying, young man."
"Yes, ma'am."
The widow Moriarity hung up. "Gi-irls!"
The girls squealed and laughed and dawdled.
* * * *
House Bartock felt like laughing.
He'd just had his first big break, and it might turn out to be the only one he needed. On an impulse, he had decided to strike out directly for the spaceport. He had done so, and now stood on the dark tarmac between the manifest shed and the pilot-barracks. And, not ten minutes after he had reached the spacefield a cordon of guards rushed there from Interstelpen had been stationed around the field. Had Bartock arrived just a few minutes later, he would have been too late, his capture only a matter of time. As it was now, though, he had a very good chance of getting away. Circumstances were in his favor.
He could get so far away that they would never find him.
It was simple. Get off Triton on a spaceship. Go anyplace that had a big spaceport, and manage to tranship out in secret. Then all the police would have to search would be a few quadrillion square miles of space!
But first he had to leave Triton.
From the activity at the port, he could see that three ships were being made ready for blastoff. Two of them were purely cargo-carriers, but the third—Bartock could tell because he saw hand-luggage being loaded—would carry passengers. His instinct for survival must have been working overtime: he knew that the third ship would be his best bet, for if he were discovered and pursued, hostages might make the difference between recapture and freedom.
Bartock waited patiently in the darkness outside the pilot-barracks. The only problem was, how to discover which pilot belonged to which ship?
The cordon of police from Interstelpen had set up several score arc-lights on the perimeter of the field. The spaces between the lights were patrolled by guards armed, as Bartock was, with blasters. Bartock could never have made it through that cordon now. But it wasn't necessary. He was already inside.
The barracks door opened, and a pilot came out. Tensing, ready, Bartock watched him.
The three ships were scattered widely on the field, Venus Bell to the north, Star of Hercules to the south, Mozart's Lady to the east. Venus Bell and Star of Hercules were straight cargo carriers. Mozart's Lady—what a queer name for a spaceship, Bartock couldn't help thinking—had taken in hand luggage. So if the pilot who had just left the barracks headed east, Bartock would take him. The pilot paused outside, lit a cigarette, hummed a tune. The scent of tobacco drifted over to Bartock. He waited.
The pilot walked east toward Mozart's Lady.
* * * *
"Ready, girls?"
"Ready, Mrs. Moriarity. But couldn't we—well—sort of hang around until we see what happens?"
"You mean the escaped convict?"
"Yes, ma'am." Hopefully.
"They'll catch him. They always catch them."
"But—"
"Come on."
"Aw, gosh, Mrs. Moriarity."
"I said, come on."
Reluctantly, the hundred girls trooped with their chaperone from the hotel.
* * * *
Bartock struck swiftly and without mercy.
The blaster would make too much noise. He turned it around, held it by the barrel, and broke the pilot's skull with it. In the darkness he changed clothing for the second time that night, quickly, confidently, his hands steady. In the darkness he could barely make out the pilot's manifest. The man's ship was Mozart's Lady, all right. Outbound from Triton City for Mars. Well, Bartock thought, he wouldn't go to Mars. Assuming they learned what ship he had boarded, they would be guarding the inner orbits too closely.
He would take Mozart's Lady daringly outward, beyond Neptune's orbit. Naturally, the ship wouldn't have interstellar drive, but as yet Bartock wasn't going interstellar. You couldn't have everything. You couldn't expect a starship on Triton, could you? So Bartock would take Mozart's Lady outward to Pluto's orbit—and wait. From the amount of hand luggage taken aboard, Mozart's Lady would be carrying quite a number of passengers. If that number were reduced—drastically reduced—the food, water and air aboard would last for many months. Until the fuss died down. Until Bartock could bring Mozart's Lady, long since given up for lost, in for a landing on one of the inner planets....
Now he dragged the dead pilot's body into the complete darkness on the south side of the pilot-barracks, wishing he could hide it better but knowing he didn't have the time or the means.
Then he walked boldly across the tarmac, wearing a pilot's uniform, toward Mozart's Lady.
Fifteen minutes later, House Bartock watched with amazement while a hundred pretty young women boarded the ship. Of all the things that had happened since his escape, this came closest to unnerving him, for it was the totally unexpected. Bartock shrugged, chain-smoked three cigarettes while the women boarded slowly, taking last-minute looks at dark Triton, the spaceport, the cordon of guards, the arc-lights. Bartock cursed impotently. Seconds were precious now. The pilot's body might be found. If it were....
At last the port clanged shut and the ground-crew tromped away. Since even an over-age ship like Mozart's Lady was close to ninety percent automatic, there was no crew. Only the pilot—who was Bartock—and the passengers.
Bartock was about to set the controls for blastoff when he heard footsteps clomp-clomping down the companionway. He toyed with the idea of locking the door, then realized that would arouse suspicion.
A square woman's face over a plump middle-aged figure.
"I'm Mrs. Moriarity, pilot. I have a hundred young girls aboard. We'll have no nonsense."
"No, sir. I mean, no ma'am."
"Well, make sure."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I want an easy trip, without fuss or incidents. For half of our girls it's the second time in space—the first being when they came out here. You understand?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"What happened to the pilot who took us out?"
"Uh, pressed into service last week on a Mercury run. I'm surprised the control board didn't tell you."
"They didn't. It doesn't matter. You do your job, and that's all."
"Yes, ma'am," House Bartock said. "Just my job."
A few moments later, Mozart's Lady blasted off.
* * * *
"Stop! Hey, wait!" Pitchblend Hardesty bawled at the top of his voice. But it didn't do any good. The police rushed up behind Pitchblend, not daring to fire.
Moments before, they had found the dead pilot's body.
They knew at once what it meant, of course. They had been not more than a minute too late.
"Call Central Control on Neptune," a police officer said. "We'll send a cruiser after them."
"Won't do any good," Pitchblend Hardesty groaned.
"What are you talking about, fellow?"
"Unless the cruiser's brand new."
"On Neptune? Don't be silly. Newest one we've got is ten years old."
"Like I said, won't do any good. I worked that ship over, mister. I know what she's like inside. She may look like an over-age tub on the outside, but don't let that fool you. She's got power, mister. She's probably the fastest thing this side of the Jovian moons, except for those experimental one-man rocket-bombs down at Neptune Station. But chasing a big tub in a one-man space-bound coffin—" here Pitchblend used the vernacular for the tiny one-man experimental ships—"ain't going to do anybody any good. Best thing you can do is track Mozart's Lady by radar and hope she'll head sunward. Then they could intercept her closer in."
But Mozart's Lady did not head sunward. Radar tracking confirmed this moments later. Mozart's Lady was outward bound for Pluto's orbit. And, with Pluto and Neptune currently in conjunction, that could even mean a landing, although, the police decided, that wasn't likely. There were no settlements on Pluto. Pluto was too weird. For the strangest reason in a solar system and a galaxy of wonders, Pluto was quite uninhabitable. More likely, Mozart's Lady would follow Pluto's orbit around, then make a dash sunward....
The radar officer threw up his hands. "I give up," he said. "She's heading for Pluto's orb all right. Call Neptune Station."
"Neptune Station, sir?"
"You bet. This job's too big for me. The brass will want to handle it."
Seconds later, sub-space crackled with energy as the call was put through from Triton City to Neptune Station.
* * * *
Whatever else history would write about him, it would certainly call Johnny Mayhem the strangest—and literally most death-defying—test-pilot in history. Of course, testing the sleek experimental beauties out of Neptune Station and elsewhere wasn't Mayhem's chief occupation. He was, in a phrase, a trouble-shooter for the Galactic League. Whenever he had a spare few weeks, having completed an assignment ahead of schedule in his latest of bodies, he was likely to turn up at some testing station or other and volunteer for work. He was never turned down, although the Galactic League didn't approve. Mayhem was probably the galaxy's best pilot, with incredible reflexes and an utter indifference toward death.
For the past two weeks, having completed what turned out to be an easier-than-expected assignment on Neptune, he had been piloting the space-bound coffins out of Neptune Station, and with very satisfactory experimental results.
A few minutes ago he had been called into the station director's office, but when he entered he was surprised to see the Galactic League Firstman of Neptune waiting for him.
"Surprised, eh?" the Firstman demanded.
"I'll bet you want me to quit test-flying," Mayhem said with a smile which, clearer than words, told the Firstman his advice would be rejected.
The Firstman smiled too, "Why, no, Mayhem. As a matter of fact, I want you to take one of the coffins into deep space."
"Maybe something's wrong with my hearing," Mayhem said.
"No. You heard it right. Of course, it's up to you. Everything you do, you volunteer."
"Let's hear it, Firstman."
So the Firstman of Neptune told Johnny Mayhem about Mozart's Lady which, six hours ago, had left Triton for Pluto's orbit with an eccentric wealthy widow, a hundred girls, and a desperate escaped killer.
"The only thing we have out here fast enough to overtake them, Mayhem, is the one-man coffins. The only man we have who can fly them is you. What do you say?"
Mayhem's answer was a question, but the question didn't really require an answer. Mayhem asked: "What are we waiting for?"
The Firstman grinned. He had expected such an answer, of course. The whole galaxy, let alone the solar system, knew the Mayhem legend. Every world which had an Earthman population and a Galactic League post, however small, had a body in cold storage, waiting for Johnny Mayhem if his services were required. But of course no one knew precisely when Mayhem's services might be required. No one knew exactly under what circumstances the Galactic League Council, operating from the hub of the Galaxy, might summon Mayhem. And only a very few people, including those at the Hub and the Galactic League Firstmen on civilized worlds and Observers on primitive worlds, knew the precise mechanics of Mayhem's coming.
Johnny Mayhem, a bodiless sentience. Mayhem—Johnny Marlow, then—who had been chased from Earth, a pariah and a criminal, eight years ago, who had been mortally wounded on a wild planet deep within the Saggitarian Swarm, whose life had been saved—after a fashion—by the white magic of that planet. Mayhem, doomed now to possible immortality as a bodiless sentience, an elan, which could occupy and activate a corpse if it had been frozen properly...an elan doomed to wander eternally because it could not remain in one body for more than a month without body and elan perishing. Mayhem, who had dedicated his strange, lonely life to the service of the Galactic League because a normal life and normal social relations were not possible for him....
"One thing, Mayhem," the Firstman said, now, on Neptune. "How much longer you have in that body of yours?"
"Five days. Possibly six."
"That doesn't give you much time. If you're caught out there when your month is up—"
"I won't be. We're wasting time talking about it."
"—it would mean your death."
"Then let's get started."
* * * *
The Firstman stared at him levelly. "You're a brave man, Mayhem."
"Let's say I'm not afraid to die. I've been a living dead man for eight years. Come on."
One of the so-called coffins, a tiny one-man ship barely big enough for a prone man, food concentrates and water, was already waiting at the station spacefield.
Ten minutes after hearing about Mozart's Lady, without fanfare, Mayhem blasted off in pursuit.
* * * *
Maintaining top speed all the way, House Bartock brought Mozart's Lady across almost two billion miles of space from Neptune's to Pluto's orbit in three days. He was delighted with the speed. It would have taken the average space-tub ten days to two weeks and, since as far as Bartock knew there were nothing but average space-tubs on Neptune, that gave him a considerable head-start.
It was Jane Cummings-First Violin who discovered Bartock's identity. Bartock was studying the star-map at the time and considered himself safe from discovery because he kept the control door of Mozart's Lady locked. However, Jane Cummings had established something of a liaison with the pilot outward bound from Earth and Mars, so she had been given a spare key which she'd kept, secretly, all the time the symphony was on Triton. Now, curious about the new pilot for the same reason that the miners on Triton had been curious about the symphony, Jane made her way forward, inserted her key in the lock, and pushed open the control door.
"Hello there," she said.
House Bartock whirled. The turning of a key in the lock had so unnerved him—it was the last thing he expected—that he forgot to shut off the star-map. Its tell-tale evidence glowed on the wall over his head.
"What do you want?" he managed to ask politely.
"Oh, just to say hello."
"You already said it."
Jane Cummings pouted. "You needn't bite my head off. What's your name? Mine's Jane, and I play the violin. It wouldn't hurt you to be polite."
Bartock nodded, deciding that a little small talk wouldn't hurt if he could keep the girl from becoming suspicious. That was suddenly important. If this girl had a key to the control room, for all he knew there could be others.
"My, you have been hurrying," Jane said. "I could tell by the acceleration. You must be trying to break the speed records or something. I'll bet we're almost to Earth—"
Her voice trailed off and her mouth hung open. At first Bartock didn't know what was the matter. Then he saw where she was staring.
The star-map.
"We're not heading for Earth!" she cried.
Bartock walked toward her. "Give me that key," he said. "You're going to have to stay here with me. Give me that key."
Jane backed away. "You—you couldn't be our pilot. If you were—"
"The key. I don't want to hurt you."
Bartock lunged. Jane turned and ran, slamming the door behind her. It clanged, and echoed. The echo didn't stop. Bartock, on the point of opening the door and sprinting down the companionway after her, stopped.
It wasn't the echo of metal slamming against metal. It was the radar warning.
Either Mozart's Lady was within dangerous proximity of a meteor, or a ship was following them.
Bartock ran to the radar screen.
The pip was unmistakable. A ship was following them.
A ship as fast—or faster—than Mozart's Lady.
Cursing, Bartock did things with the controls. Mozart's Lady, already straining, increased its speed. Acceleration flung Bartock back in the pilot's chair. Pluto loomed dead ahead.
* * * *
Johnny Mayhem knew at what precise moment he had been discovered, for suddenly the speed of Mozart's Lady increased. Since this had occurred an hour and a half after Mayhem had first got a clear pip of the bigger ship on his radar, it meant he'd been spotted.
Prone with his hands stretched forward in the coffin-like experimental ship, Mayhem worked the controls, exactly matching speed with Mozart's Lady.
He tried to put himself in the position of the escaped convict. What would he do? His best bet would be to swing in close around Pluto, as close as he dared. Then, on the dark side of the planet, to change his orbit abruptly and come loose of its gravitational field in a new direction. It was a dangerous maneuver, but since the escaped convict now knew for sure that the tiny ship could match the speed of Mozart's Lady, it was his only hope. The danger was grave: even a first-rate pilot would try it only as a last resort, for the gravitational pull of Pluto might upset Mozart's Lady's orbit. If that happened, the best the convict could hope for was an emergency landing. More likely, a death-crash would result.
Seconds later, Mayhem's thinking was confirmed. Mozart's Lady executed a sharp turn in space and disappeared behind the white bulk of Pluto.
Mayhem swore and followed.
"He's trying to kill us all!"
"He doesn't know how to pilot a ship! We're helpless, helpless!"
"Do something, Mrs. Moriarity!"
"Now girls, whatever happens, you must keep calm. We can only assume that Jane was right about what she saw, but since none of us can pilot a spaceship, we'll have to bide our time...."
"Bide our time!"
"We're all as good as dead!"
One of the girls began screaming.
Mrs. Moriarity slapped her. "I'm sorry, dear. I had to hit you. Your behavior bordered on the hysterical. And if we become hysterical we are lost, lost, do you understand?"
"Yes'm."
"Good. Then we wait and see what happens."
* * * *
What was happening was an attempt at what test-pilots term planet-swinging. Moving in the direction of Pluto's orbit, Mozart's Lady swung in very close behind the planet. Then, as the rotation of Pluto on its axis hurled it forth again, as a sling-shot hurls a pellet, Mozart's Lady's rockets would alter the expected direction of flight. Unless a pursuing ship followed exactly the same maneuver, it would be flung off into space at top-speed in the wrong direction. It might be hours before the first ship's trail could be picked up again—if ever.
House Bartock, aware of all this—and one other factor—sat sweating it out at the controls.
The one other factor was closeness to Pluto. For if you got too close, and the difference was only a matter of miles covered in an elapsed time of mili-seconds, Pluto might drag you into a landing orbit. If that happened, traveling at tremendous speed, there'd be the double danger of overheating in the planet's atmosphere and coming down too hard. Either way the results could be fatal.
His hands sweating, Bartock struggled with the controls. Now already he could see Pluto bulking, its night-side black and mysterious, in the viewport. Now he could hear the faint shrill scream of its atmosphere. Now....
Trying to time it perfectly, he slammed on full power.
A fraction of a mili-second too late.
Mozart's Lady stood for an instant on its tail, shuddering as if it were going to come apart and rain meteoric dust over Pluto's surface. That had happened too in such a maneuver, but it didn't happen now.
Instead, Mozart's Lady went into a landing orbit.
But its speed was still terrific and, lowering, it whizzed twice around Pluto's fifteen thousand mile circumference in twenty minutes. Atmosphere screamed, the heat siren shrilled, and a cursing House Bartock applied the braking rockets as fast as he could.
Pluto's surface blurred in the viewport, coming closer at dizzying speed. Bartock stood Mozart's Lady on its tail a second time, this time on purpose.
The ship shuddered, and struck Pluto.
Bartock blacked out.
* * * *
When Mayhem's radar screen informed him that Mozart's Lady had failed to break free of Pluto's field of gravity, Mayhem immediately went to work. First he allowed the tiny scout-ship to complete its planet-swing successfully, then he slowed down, turned around in deep space, and came back, scanning Pluto with radar scopes and telescope until he located the bigger ship. That might have taken hours or days ordinarily, but having seen Mozart's Lady go in, and having recorded its position via radar, Mayhem had a pretty good idea as to the landing orbit it would follow.
It took him three-quarters of an hour to locate the bigger ship. When he finally had located it, he brought it into close-up with the more powerful of the two telescopes aboard the scout.
Mozart's Lady lay on its side in a snow-tundra. It had been damaged, but not severely. Part of the visible side was caved in, but the ship had not fallen apart. Still, chances were that without extensive repairs it would not be able to leave Pluto.
There was no way, Mayhem knew, of making extensive repairs on Pluto. Mozart's Lady was there to stay.
The safe thing to do would be to inform Neptune and wait in space until the police cruisers came for House Bartock. The alternative was to planetfall near Mozart's Lady, take the convict into custody, and then notify Neptune.
If Bartock were alone the choice would have been an easy one. But Bartock was not alone. He had a hundred girls with him. He was desperate. He might try anything.
Mayhem had to go down after him.
* * * *
The trouble was, though, that of all the worlds in the galaxy—not merely in Sol System—Pluto was the one most dangerous to Johnny Mayhem. He had been pursuing House Bartock for three days. Which meant he had two days left before it was imperative that he leave his current body. This would mean notifying the hub of the Galaxy by sub-space radio to pull out his elan, but Pluto's heavyside layer was the strongest in the solar system, so strong that sub-space radio couldn't penetrate it.
And that was not the only thing wrong with Pluto. It was, in fact, an incredible anomaly of a world. Almost four billion miles from the sun at its widest swing, it still was not too cold to support life. Apparently radioactive heat in its core kept it warm. It even had an Earth-type atmosphere, although the oxygen-content was somewhat too rich and apt to make you giddy. And it was a slow world.
Time moved slowly on Pluto. Too slowly. When you first landed, according to the few explorers who had attempted it, the native fauna seemed like statues. Their movement was too slow for the eye to register. That was lucky, for the fauna tended to be enormous and deadly. But after a while—how long a while Mayhem didn't know—the fauna, subjectively, seemed to speed up. The animals commenced moving slowly, then a bit faster, then normally. That, Mayhem knew, was entirely subjective. The animals of Pluto were not changing their rate of living: the visitor to Pluto was slowing down to match their laggard pace.
* * * *
Two days, thought Mayhem. That was all he had. And, hours after he landed, he'd start to slow down. There was absolutely no way of telling how much time elapsed once that happened, for the only clocks that did not go haywire on Pluto were spring-wind clocks, and there hadn't been a spring-wind clock in the solar system for a hundred and fifty years.
Result? On Pluto Mayhem would slow down. Once he reached Pluto's normal time rate it might take him, say, ten minutes to run—top-speed—from point A to point B, fifteen yards apart. Subjectively, a split-second of time would have gone by in that period.
Two days would seem like less than an hour, and Mayhem would have no way of judging how much less.
If he didn't get off Pluto in two days he would die.
If he didn't land, House Bartock, growing desperate and trying to scare him off or trying to keep control of the hundred girls while he made a desperate and probably futile attempt to repair the damaged Mozart's Lady, might become violent.
Mayhem called Neptune, and said: "Bartock crash-landed on Pluto, geographical coordinates north latitude thirty-three degrees four minutes, west longitude eighteen degrees even. I'm going down. That's all."
He didn't wait for an answer.
He brought the space-bound coffin down a scant three miles from Mozart's Lady. Here, though, the tundra of Pluto was buckled and convoluted, so that two low jagged ranges of snow-clad hills separated the ships.
Again Mayhem didn't wait. He went outside, took a breath of near-freezing air, and stalked up the first range of hills. He carried a blaster buckled to his belt.
* * * *
When he saw the scout-ship come down, Bartock didn't wait either. He might have waited had he known anything about what Pluto did to the time-sense. But he did not know. He only knew, after a quick inspection, that the controls of Mozart's Lady had been so badly damaged that repair was impossible.
He knew too that the scout-ship had reported his whereabouts. He had, on regaining consciousness, been in time to intercept the radio message. True, it would take any other Neptune-stationed ship close to two weeks to reach Pluto, so Bartock had some temporal leeway. But obviously whoever was pursuing him in the one-man ship had not come down just to sit and wait. He was out there in the snow somewhere. Well, Bartock would go out too, would somehow manage to elude his pursuer, to get behind him, reach the scout-ship and blast off in it. And, in the event that anything went wrong, he would have a hostage.
He went arearships to select one.
Went with his desperation shackled by an iron nerve.
And a blaster in his hand.
"...very lucky," Matilda Moriarity was saying, trying to keep the despair from her voice. "We have some cuts and bruises, but no serious casualties. Why, we might have all been killed."
"Lucky, she says! We're marooned here. Marooned—with a killer."
Before the widow Moriarity could defend her choice of words, if she was going to defend them, House Bartock came into the rear lounge, where the entire symphony and its chaperone was located. They would have locked the door, of course; they had locked it ever since they had learned who Bartock was. But the door, buckled and broken, had been one of the casualties of the crash-landing.
"You," Bartock said.
He meant Jane Cummings.
"Me?"
"Yes, you. We're going outside."
"Out—side?"
"That's what I said. Let's get a move on."
Jane Cummings didn't move.
The widow Moriarity came between her and Bartock. "If you must take anyone, take me," she said bravely.
"The girl."
Still the widow Moriarity didn't move.
House Bartock balled his fist and hit her. Three of the girls caught her as she fell. None of them tried to do anything about Bartock, who had levelled his blaster at Jane Cummings.
Trembling, she went down the companionway with him.
A fierce cold wind blew as they opened the airlock door.
* * * *
It looked like a sea-serpent floundering in the snow.
Only, it was caught in the act of floundering, like an excellent candid shot of a sea-serpent floundering in snow.
Its movements were too slow for Mayhem's eyes to register.
Which meant, he realized gratefully, that he hadn't begun to slow down yet.
He had to be careful, though. If he were Bartock he would make immediately for the scout-ship. It would be his only hope.
Realizing this, Mayhem had gone through deep snow for what he judged to be fifteen minutes, until he had reached a spine of rock protruding from the snow. Then he had doubled back, now leaving no footprints, along the spine. He was waiting in the first low range of hills not four hundred yards from the scout-ship, his blaster ready. When Bartock prowled into view, Mayhem would shout a warning. If Bartock didn't heed it, Mayhem would shoot him dead.
It seemed like an airtight plan.
And it would have been, except for two things. First, Bartock had a hostage. And second, Pluto-time was beginning to act on Mayhem.
He realized this when he looked at the sea-serpent again. The long neck moved with agonizing slowness, the great gray green bulk of the monster, sixty feet long, shifted slowly, barely perceptibly, in the snow. Mountains of powdery snow moved and settled. The spade-shaped head pointed at Mayhem. The tongue protruded slowly, hung suspended, forked and hideous, then slowly withdrew.
The neck moved again, ten feet long, sinuous. And faster.
Faster? Not really.
Mayhem was slowing down.
* * * *
Then he saw Bartock and the girl.
They were close together. Bartock held her arm. Walking toward the scout-ship, they were too far away and too close together for Mayhem to fire. Bartock would know this and wouldn't heed any warning.
So Mayhem didn't give any warning. He left the spine of rock and rushed down through the snow toward the space-bound coffin.
A low rumble of sound broke the absolute stillness.
It was the monster, and now that his own hearing had slowed down, Mayhem was able to hear the slower cycles of sound. How much time had really passed? He didn't know. How much time did he have left before death came swiftly and suddenly because he had been too long in his temporary body? He didn't know that either. He sprinted toward the scout-ship. At least it felt like he was sprinting. He didn't know how fast he was really moving. But the sea-serpent creature was coming up behind him, faster. No place near what would have been its normal apparent speed, but faster. Mayhem, his breath coming raggedly through his mouth, ran as fast as was feasible.
So did Bartock and the girl.
It was Bartock, spotting Mayhem on the run, who fired first. Mayhem fell prone as the raw zing of energy ripped past. The sea-serpent-like-creature behind him bellowed.
And reared.
It didn't look like a sea-serpent any longer. It looked like a dinosaur, with huge solid rear limbs, small forelimbs, a great head with an enormous jaw—and speed.
Now it could really move.
Subjectively, time seemed normal to Mayhem. Your only basis was subjective: time always seemed normal. But Mayhem knew, as he got up and ran again, that he was now moving slower than the minute hand on a clock. Slower...as objective time, as measured in the solar system at large, sped by.
He tripped as the creature came behind him. The only thing he could do was prop up an elbow in the snow and fire. Raw energy ripped off the two tiny forelimbs, but the creature didn't falter. It rushed by Mayhem, almost crushing him with the hind limbs, each of which must have weighed a couple of tons. It lumbered toward Bartock and Jane Cummings.
Turning and starting to get up, Mayhem fired again.
His blaster jammed.
Then the bulk of the monster cut off his view of Bartock, the girl and the scout-ship. He heard the girl scream. He ran toward them.
Jane Cummings had never been so close to death. She wanted to scream. She thought all at once, hysterically, she was a little girl again. If she screamed maybe the terrible apparition would go away. But it did not go away. It reared up high, as high as a very tall tree, and its fangs were hideous.
Bartock, who was also frightened, raised his blaster, fired, and missed.
Then, for an instant, Jane thought she saw someone running behind the monster. He had a blaster too, and he lifted it. When he fired, there was only a clicking sound. Then he fired again.
Half the monster's bulk disappeared and it collapsed in the snow.
That was when Bartock shot the other man.
Mayhem felt the stab of raw energy in his shoulder. He spun around and fell down, his senses whirling in a vortex of pain. Dimly he was aware of Bartock's boots crunching on the snow.
They fired simultaneously. Bartock missed.
And collapsed with a searing hole in his chest. He was dead before he hit the snow.
The girl went to Mayhem. "Who—who are you?"
"Got to get you back to the ship. No time to talk. Hurry."
"But you can't walk like that. You're badly hurt. I'll bring help."
"...dangerous. I'll take you."
He'd take her, flirting with death. Because, for all he knew, his time on Pluto, objectively, had already totalled forty-eight hours. If it did, he would never live to get off Pluto. Once his thirty days were up, he would die. Still, there might be danger from other animals between the scout-ship and Mozart's Lady, and he couldn't let the girl go back alone. It was almost ludicrous, since she had to help him to his feet.
He staggered along with her, knowing he would never make it to Mozart's Lady and back in time. But if he left her, she was probably doomed too. He'd sacrifice his life for hers....
They went a hundred yards, Mayhem gripping the blaster and advancing by sheer effort of will. Then he smiled, and began to laugh. Jane thought he was hysterical with pain. But he said: "We're a pair of bright ones. The scout-ship."
Inside, it was very small. They had to lie very close to each other, but they made it. They reached Mozart's Lady.
Mayhem didn't wait to say good-bye. With what strength remained to him, he almost flung the girl from the scout-ship. The pain in his shoulder was very bad, but that wasn't what worried him. What worried him was the roaring in his ears, the vertigo, the mental confusion as his elan drifted, its thirty days up, toward death.
He saw the girl enter Mozart's Lady. He blasted off, and when the space-bound coffin pierced Pluto's heavyside layer, he called the Hub.
The voice answered him as if it were mere miles away, and not halfway across a galaxy: "Good Lord, man. You had us worried! You have about ten seconds. Ten seconds more and you would have been dead."
Mayhem was too tired to care. Then he felt a wrenching pain, and all at once his elan floated, serene, peaceful, in limbo. He had been plucked from the dying body barely in time, to fight mankind's lone battle against the stars again, wherever he was needed...out beyond Pluto.
Forever? It wasn't impossible.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 2,973 |
Lady drivers have raised a staggering £20,000 for The Fire Fighters Charity after taking part in the Ladies' Driving Challenge at Newark Showground at the weekend.
The figure has smashed last year's total of £15,000, giving a welcome boost to the charity which offers rehabilitation treatment and therapy to firefighters, support staff and their families.
Over 100 participants got behind the wheel of a range of exciting and challenging vehicles, including tractors, HGVs, Landrovers, fire engines and a tank. They each raised at least £100 in sponsorship, with many raising considerably more than the minimum requirement.
This was the second time that Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service has hosted the event and organisers say they are amazed at the level of support from local people, including the many businesses who supplied vehicles free of charge. A number of companies also provided sponsorship.
Chief Fire Officer Frank Swann, who is also the Regional Co-ordinator for The Fire Fighters Charity, said: "I am absolutely thrilled with the amount of money raised by this year's Ladies' Driving Challenge and would like to extend my sincere and heartfelt thanks to everyone who took part - the participants themselves, our sponsors and vehicle suppliers and the many members of NFRS staff who volunteered their own time to help out on the day.
"In these difficult times it is encouraging to see the level of dedication and commitment that people are prepared to give for the benefit of the charity. I hope that everyone involved had a fantastic day and we look forward to welcoming even more participants to next year's challenge." | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,026 |
Q: Why is this css gooey not working? I checked out different gooey pens and filtered out the magic property seems like to be the filter on the parent element of the gooey childs.But why isnt my gooey working or did I miss the magic?
http://codepen.io/phng/pen/zNjpbR
scss
.box {
width: 140px;
height: 75px;
border: 1px solid;
margin: auto;
position: relative;
filter: blur(20px) contrast(30);
// animation: gooey 4s infinite;
@keyframes gooey {
50% {
width: 120px;
}
}
.ball {
width: 75px;
height: 75px;
border-radius: 100%;
background-color: #000;
position: absolute;
left: 0;
&:last-child {
right: 0;
left: auto;
}
}
}
A: "Gooey" filters are handled via SVG filters which you can hook into with CSS by referencing their ID as filter: url(#filter-ID);
For your example this can be solved by including the SVG filter reference in the HTML:
<svg>
<defs>
<filter id="goo">
<feGaussianBlur in="SourceGraphic" stdDeviation="10" result="blur" />
<feColorMatrix in="blur" mode="matrix" values="1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 18 -7" result="goo" />
<feBlend in="SourceGraphic" in2="goo" />
</filter>
</defs>
</svg>
For more information on how the color matrices interact with the blur filter there's a brilliant write up on the gooey effect here: https://css-tricks.com/gooey-effect/
Here's a working example based on your own: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/KaeVJM
A: For all who want to check out gooey without svg, here is my late solution. The box layer has a filter.
https://jsfiddle.net/6yr2bxv2/2/
scss
$translateMax: 80;
$animationTime: 1.5s;
.box {
background-color: #fff;
position: r
elative;
width: 400px;
height: 400px;
filter: blur(20px) contrast(30);
}
.circle {
position: absolute;
background-color: #000;
width: 150px;
height: 150px;
border-radius: 50%;
left: 0;
right: 0;
margin: 150px auto;
@for $i from 1 through 2 {
@if $i == 1 {
&:first-child {
animation: move-1 $animationTime infinite;
}
@keyframes move-#{$i} {
50% {
transform: translateX(-$translateMax + px);
}
}
} @else {
&:last-child {
animation: move-2 $animationTime infinite;
}
@keyframes move-#{$i} {
50% {
transform: translateX($translateMax + px);
}
}
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 76 |
Why Believe the Earth Is Flat?
The dark forces of nature have been having a field day with 2018, and after kids swallowed tide pods, participated in the Blue Whale challenge, and questioned whether or not water was wet, one could only assume that they would have had their fill of ill-advised judgement. Unfortunately, any hope for such would only be in vain.
If you ask anyone who claims to believe in the flat-earth, they will most likely site long drawn-out evidence, or direct you to a video of a 30-year old man living in his mother's basement, voicing theories that vaccines are mind control devices and Donald Trump is a lizard.
Maybe some are idiotic or gullible, but there is the rarity of someone who genuinely believes so, despite any and all evidence stacked against them.
An editorial, "Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion," by J. Eric Oliver reads that more than half of total Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory, and when people acknowledge one concept, they are more likely to believe in another.
A quote from Professor Viren Swami states, "Someone who already believes, for example, in the 9/11 conspiracy theory is much more likely to accept the Flat Earth conspiracy theory, because it fits into their world view that there are people who are manipulating and doing bad things."
A widely accepted theory by Swami suggests that people turn to these assumptions so as to gain control over their lives and beliefs.
He concluded that people are "much more likely to accept a conspiracy theory because it gives them a sense of agency."
Yet, where the flat-earth theory contrasts from others, is that there is no apparent trigger. It is reasonable to assume that because lives were lost and permanently altered due to 9/11, that it would produce an outcry of people demanding answers. But there doesn't seem to be any event or societal revelation associated with the topic theory: so what could have brought it about?
Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, political scientists and co-authors of American Conspiracy Theories, performed an experiment where they used tactics to try to make subjects experience anxiety and panic.
In trying to cope, they found that the control group were most likely to believe that large corporations, such as the U.S. government, were plotting against them, and justified these beliefs by citing unexplained inconsistencies, much like the assumptions about the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"I believe that the earth is round, [because] that's what all of the evidence points to," said freshman, Claire Knittel, followed by, "and because NASA said so. But they also said that the moon landing was real… oh my god, I believe in the flat earth."
It stands that due to the popularization of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission theory, that the lunar landing was faked, the population and flat-earth community have developed a mistrust for NASA. And seeing as the majority of the public's knowledge of outer space and space travel comes from that association, contradicting their argument with facts and logic would be a shot in the dark. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,973 |
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Android.App;
using Android.Bluetooth;
using Android.Content;
using Android.OS;
using Android.Runtime;
using Android.Views;
using Android.Widget;
using ReactiveBluetooth.Core;
using ReactiveBluetooth.Core.Extensions;
namespace ReactiveBluetooth.Android.Central
{
public class Descriptor : IDescriptor
{
public BluetoothGattDescriptor NativeDescriptor { get; }
public Descriptor(BluetoothGattDescriptor gattDescriptor)
{
NativeDescriptor = gattDescriptor;
}
public Guid Uuid => NativeDescriptor.Uuid.ToString().ToGuid();
}
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,733 |
With the 4th of July just around the corner, many of you are probably planning on having some friends and family over and participating in the grandest of Independence Day Celebrations: The BBQ.
Now you could just throw some burgers and dogs on the grill, but with just a bit of extra prep you can take your BBQ from "blah" to AMAZING.
While it is OK to include a few items that are specific to your particular family or culture, people coming to a 4th of July BBQ will expect traditional American BBQ food.
This means hamburgers, hot dogs, BBQ ribs, salad, fruit salad, potato salad, chips, soda, water, and beer.
Again, feel free to add things "in addition" to the classics, but make sure the classics are there.
You don't want to miss out on socializing with your guests because you are still in the kitchen making hamburger patties or chopping vegetables. You will probably already be spending a lot of time behind the grill as it is, there is no need to exacerbate the situation by not having condiments ready or having to bake the cookies.
Prepare all your food the night before and leave it in the fridge so that on the big day everything is ready to go before the guests even arrive and then can simply be set out or grilled as required.
This doesn't mean just stocking up on fireworks, that much is a given.
Nothing can ruin a fun day quicker than bored children, but you can avoid this with a bit of pre-planning. Buy some water balloons and let them have a fight, or perhaps rent a clown.
If the kids are happy, everyone is happy.
It is amazing how often how often people end up having to make a run to the grocery store and stand in a LONG line on the 4th because they forgot this simple, but essential piece of BBQ prep.
Even if you have an ice maker in your fridge, if you are having a larger party it is likely it won't be able to keep up with the extra demand for drink ice. Stock up with a couple of extra bags when you are at the store buying supplies to ensure you don't run out, especially if you are storing anything in ice chests due to low freezer space. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,747 |
Lina Gabriella Sundén (født 4. april 1981 i Göteborg) er en svensk skuespillerinde, kendt for sin hovedrolle i dramafilmen Hur man stoppar ett bröllop (2014). Hun har ligeledes haft andre roller i film og tv-serier, blandt andet i Kommissæren og havet, Familien Löwander og Bäckström.
Filmografi (udvalg)
2022 - Bäckström (tv-serie) – Fru Björk
2021 - Support Group Olympus – Kara
2020 - Iris (kortfilm) – Elisa
2019 - Quick – revisorens hustru
2017-2020 - Familien Löwander (tv-serie) – Kerstin
2016 - Wolf (kortfilm) – Elin
2016 - Beck (tv-serie) – lærer
2016 - Kommissæren og havet (tv-serie) – medvirkende
2015 - SAD Lamp (kortfilm) – medvirkende
2014 - Hur man stoppar ett bröllop – Amanda
2014 - Lokalvardaren – Sara Hansson
2012 - 2038 (kortfilm) - storesøster
2012 - Indrivaren – suppepigen
2011 - Suck! (tv-serie) – Ida
Kilder
Eksterne henvisninger
Skuespillere fra Sverige | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 1,731 |
Citation: "Intersections". ISSN 1582 - 3024. 3:1 (2007) 55-65.
Abstract(s): This article presents the modelling procedure of an existent pavement in Portugal, carried out by the author in the frame of "Leonardo da Vinci" Student Mobility Program, Contract RO/2004/PL93209/S, at Universidade do Minho - Center of Civil Engineering. The 6 years old pavement under study exhibited an important extent of cracking and ravelling with high severity level, indicative of premature failure. The assessment of the structural condition of the pavement requires the definition of its model. The adopted model is based on multilayer elastic (MLE) theory as it is one of most used models. The establishment of the model comprised several tasks, such as: i) surface condition assessment, based on visual inspection; ii) coring in and out of the wheel path and over cracks; iii) deflection measurement by means of a falling weight deflectometer; iv) definition of homogeneous subsections; v) back calculation of the stiffness moduli using Bisar 3.0 Program; vi) temperature correction. The back calculation of the stiffness modulus presented some difficulties as far as curve fitting is concerned. This might have been a consequence of using simplified models. Therefore, further research should focus this topic. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,459 |
{"url":"https:\/\/computationalmindset.com\/en\/mathematics\/integral-calculus-in-python.html","text":"$\\newcommand{\\dee}{\\mathop{\\mathrm{d}\\!}}$\n\n# Integral Calculus in Python\n\nThis post shows how to perform integral calculus of continuous and limited real functions of real variables in Python through the use of common Python libraries frequently used in scientific applications. The integral calculation techniques here are both primarily numerical since this site deals with computation, however some analytical techniques are also shown.\nThe post is organized by examples: each paragraph contains an example of an integral to compute and the related Python code snippet that calculates it using an appropriate library.\n\nAll of the various code snippets described in this post require Python version 3 and the NumPy library, while individually they require an additional library (and its dependencies, if any) between SciPy and SymPy.\n\nWe thank Prof. Fausta D'Acunzo of Preparazione 2.0 for theoretical support provided on multi-variable integral calculus.\n\nTo get the code see the Full code download paragraph at the bottom of this post.\n\n## Integration via SciPy\n\n### Integral of function of one variable (with finite extremes)\n\nIn integral calculus, the definite integral is an operator that, given a real-valued function of a real-valued variable and an interval $[a,b]$ (subset of the domain), associates to the function the area subtended by its graph in the interval $[a,b]$.\nThe SciPy library provides several numerical methods for computing the integral of such functions; the purpose of this chapter is to present a series of demos to show \"by examples\" the use of such methods; for complete documentation of these methods, the reader is invited to consult the official documentation of SciPy.\n\nLet the following integral of a function of one variable be given: $$\\int_{1}^{5} 2 x e^{-x} \\,dx$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 1.3907$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with quad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the quad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy quad')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\n\nresult, error = spi.quad(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy quad\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906624006967436 with error 1.54394541673402e-14\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with fixed_quad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the fixed_quad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy fixed_quad')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\n\nresult, none = spi.fixed_quad(integrand, a, b, n=5)\nprint('Result is ', result)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy fixed_quad\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.39066368239563\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with quadrature\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the quadrature function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy quadrature')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\n\nresult, error = spi.quadrature(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy quadrature\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906624007789083 with error 1.225092050027854e-08\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with romberg\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the romberg function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy romberg')\nprint('Example 1-01 romberg')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\n\nresult = spi.romberg(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy romberg\nExample 1-01 romberg\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906624006967394\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with trapezoid\n\nThe trapezoid function is a fixed-sample function integration method, so the code first discretizes the integration interval evenly spaced and for all discrete values of $x$ it computes the corresponding values of $y$ and then passes the two sets of discrete values $x$ and $y$ to the integration method.\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the trapezoid function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy trapezoid')\nprint('Example 1-01 trapezoid')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\nstep = 1e-4\n\nxs = np.arange(a, b, step)\nys = integrand(xs)\n\nresult = spi.trapezoid(ys, xs)\nprint('Result is ', result)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy trapezoid\nExample 1-01 trapezoid\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906556624352673\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with cumulative_trapezoid\n\nThe function cumulative_trapezoid is also a fixed-sample function integration method, and so what was said about trapezoid applies.\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using of the cumulative_trapezoid function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy cumulative_trapezoid')\nprint('Example 1-01 cumulative_trapezoid')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\nstep = 1e-4\n\nxs = np.arange(a, b, step)\nys = integrand(xs)\n\nresult = spi.cumulative_trapezoid(ys, xs)\nresult = result[-1]\nprint('Result is ', result)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy cumulative_trapezoid\nExample 1-01 cumulative_trapezoid\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906556624352677\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with simpson\n\nThe function simpson is also a fixed-sample function integration method, and so what was said about trapezoid applies.\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the simpson function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy simpson')\nprint('Example 1-01 simpson')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\nstep = 1e-4\n\nxs = np.arange(a, b, step)\nys = integrand(xs)\n\nresult = spi.simpson(ys, xs)\nprint('Result is ', result)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy simpson\nExample 1-01 simpson\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.3906556624801614\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Integral of function of one variable with quad (with extreme infinity)\n\nSet the following integral of a function of one variable be given: $$\\int_{1}^{+\\infty} 2 x e^{-x} \\,dx$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 1.4715$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the quad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SciPy quad')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x-->+inf')\n\nintegrand = lambda x : 2 * x * np.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = np.inf\n\nresult, error = spi.quad(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SciPy quad\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x-->+inf\nResult is 1.4715177646857691 with error 3.7568301883294814e-10\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Calculation of the length of a planar curve arc\n\nAs is well known, the integrals of a function of one variable can also be used to calculate the length of an arc of a planar curve. If the curve is expressed in the form $y=f(x)$ and is continuous and derivable the formula for calculating the length of the;arc of the curve between $x=a$ and $x=b$ is as follows: $$\\int_{a}^{b} \\sqrt{1 + \\left(\\frac{\\,dy}{\\,dx}\\right)^2} \\,dx$$\nIf instead curve is expressed in the parametric form $x=f_x(t)$ and $y=f_y(t)$ with both $f_x$ and $f_y$ continuous and derivable, the formula for calculating the length of the arc of the curve between $t=a$ and $t=b$ is as follows: $$\\int_{a}^{b} \\sqrt{\\left(\\frac{\\,dx}{\\,dt}\\right)^2 + \\left(\\frac{\\,dy}{\\,dt}\\right)^2} \\,dt$$\nNote: in the two examples that follow, the prime derivatives are calculated using the AutoGrad library.\n\n#### Calculation of the length of a planar curve arc expressed in explicit form with quad\n\nLet the following planar curve be given in explicit form: $$y=e^{-x^2}$$ by applying the corresponding formula above to calculate the length of the arc between $x=-1$ and $x = 1$, the integral is obtained: $$\\int_{-1}^{1} \\sqrt{1 + \\left(\\frac{\\,d(e^{-x^2})}{\\,dx}\\right)^2} \\,dx$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 2.4089$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\nHere is the example of Python code that calculates length of a planar curve arc expressed in explicit form using the quad function of SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport autograd.numpy as anp # Thinly-wrapped version of Numpy\n\nprint('Compute length of an arc of planar curve by SciPy quad')\nprint('Length of arc of curve y=e^(-x^2) from x=-1 to x=1')\n\ny = lambda x : anp.exp(-x**2)\nintegrand = lambda x : anp.sqrt(1 + dy_dx(x) ** 2)\na = -1.\nb = 1.\n\nresult, error = spi.quad(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nCompute length of an arc of planar curve by SciPy quad\nLength of arc of curve y=e^(-x^2) from x=-1 to x=1\nResult is 2.408882141747104 with error 1.3501578327579367e-12\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculation of the length of a planar curve arc expressed in parametric form with quad\n\nLet the following planar curve be given in parametric form: $$x(t)=cos^3 t$$ $$y(t)=sin^3 t$$ by applying the corresponding formula above to calculate the length of the arc between $t=0$ e $t = 2\\pi$, the integral is obtained: $$\\int_{0}^{2 \\pi} \\sqrt{\\left(\\frac{\\,d (cos^3 t)}{\\,dt}\\right)^2 + \\left(\\frac{\\,d (sin^3 t)}{\\,dt}\\right)^2} \\,dt$$ whose analytical solution is $6$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\nHere is the example of Python code that calculates length of a planar curve arc expressed in parametric form using the quad function of SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport autograd.numpy as anp # Thinly-wrapped version of Numpy\n\nprint('Compute length of an arc of planar parametric curve by SciPy quad')\nprint('Length of arc of parametric curve x(t)=cos^3(t) and y(t)=sin^3(t) from t=0 to t=2pi')\n\nx = lambda t : anp.cos(t) ** 3\ny = lambda t : anp.sin(t) ** 3\n\nintegrand = lambda t : anp.sqrt(dx_dt(t) ** 2 + dy_dt(t) ** 2)\na = 0.\nb = 2 * anp.pi\n\nresult, error = spi.quad(integrand, a, b)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nCompute length of an arc of planar parametric curve by SciPy quad\nLength of arc of parametric curve x(t)=cos^3(t) and y(t)=sin^3(t) from t=0 to t=2pi\nResult is 6.0 with error 6.616929226765933e-14\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Double integral of a function of two variables\n\nIn integral calculus, the definite double integral is an operator that, given a real-valued function of two real-valued variables and a set included in the domain, associates to the function the volume of the solid (called cylindroid) between the surface described by the function and the plane containing the given set.\n\nLet the following double integral of a function of two variables be given: $$\\int_{1}^{5} \\int_{y-1}^{y+1} 2 x y e^{-x y} \\,dx dy$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 1.0273$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with dblquad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the dblquad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Double integral computed by SciPy dblquad')\nprint('Integral of 2xye^-xy from y=1 to y=5 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1')\n\nintegrand = lambda x, y : 2 * x * y * np.exp(-x * y)\nya = 1.\nyb = 5.\n\nresult, error = spi.dblquad(integrand, ya, yb, lambda y: y-1, lambda y: y+1)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nDouble integral computed by SciPy dblquad\nIntegral of xye^-xy from y=1 to y=5 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1\nResult is 1.0273038469260316 with error 1.3420097685964054e-14\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with nquad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the nquad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Double integral computed by SciPy nquad')\nprint('Integral of 2xye^-xy from y=1 to y=5 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1')\n\nintegrand = lambda x, y : 2 * x * y * np.exp(-x * y)\n\nbounds_y = lambda : [1., 5.]\nbounds_x = lambda y : [y-1, y+1]\n\nresult, error = spi.nquad(integrand, [bounds_x, bounds_y])\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nDouble integral computed by SciPy nquad\nIntegral of 2xye^-xy from y=1 to y=5 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1\nResult is 1.0273038469260316 with error 1.3420097685964054e-14\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Double integral of a function of two variables with nquad (other example)\n\nLet the following double integral of a function of two variables be given: $$\\int_{1}^{+\\infty} \\int_{1}^{+\\infty} 2 x y e^{-x y} \\,dx dy$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 1.17453$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the nquad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Double integral computed by SciPy nquad')\nprint('Integral of 2xye^-xy from y=1 to x-->+inf and from x=1 to x-->+inf')\n\nintegrand = lambda x, y : 2 * x * y * np.exp(-x * y)\nya = 1.\nyb = 5.\n\nresult, error = spi.nquad(integrand, [[1, np.inf],[1, np.inf]])\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nDouble integral computed by SciPy nquad\nIntegral of 2xye^-xy from y=1 to y-->+inf and from x=1 to x-->+inf\nResult is 1.1745267511339024 with error 1.6321550842479074e-08\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Triple Integral of a function of three variables\n\nLet the following triple integral of a function of three variables be given: $$\\int_{1}^{2} \\int_{z+1}^{z+2} \\int_{y+z}^{2(y+z)} x + yz^2 \\,dx dy dz$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 65.7194$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with tplquad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the tplquad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Triple integral computed by SciPy tplquad')\nprint('Integral of x + yz^2 from z=1 to z=2, y=z+1 to y=z+2 and from x=y+x to x=2(y+z)')\n\nintegrand = lambda x, y, z : x + y * z ** 2\nza = 1.\nzb = 2.\nya=lambda z: z + 1\nyb=lambda z: z + 2\nxa=lambda z, y : y + z\nxb=lambda z, y : 2 * (y + z)\n\nresult, error = spi.tplquad(integrand, za, zb, ya, yb, xa, xb)\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nTriple integral computed by SciPy tplquad\nIntegral of x + yz^2 from z=1 to z=2, y=z+1 to y=z+2 and from x=y+x to x=2(y+z)\nResult is 65.71944444444445 with error 1.659412309590769e-12\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Calculating the integral with nquad\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the nquad function of the SciPy library:\n\nimport scipy.integrate as spi\nimport numpy as np\n\nprint('Triple integral computed by SciPy nquad')\nprint('Integral of x + yz^2 from z=1 to z=2, y=z+1 to y=z+2 and from x=y+x to x=2(y+z)')\n\nintegrand = lambda x, y, z : x + y * z ** 2\n\nbounds_z = lambda : [1., 2.]\nbounds_y = lambda z : [z+1, z+2]\nbounds_x = lambda z, y : [y+z, 2 * (y+z)]\nya=lambda z: z + 1\nyb=lambda z: z + 2\nxa=lambda z, y : y + z\nxb=lambda z, y : 2 * (y + z)\n\nresult, error = spi.nquad(integrand, [bounds_x, bounds_y, bounds_z])\nprint('Result is ', result, 'with error ', error)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nTriple integral computed by SciPy nquad\nIntegral of x + yz^2 from z=1 to z=2, y=z+1 to y=z+2 and from x=y+x to x=2(y+z)\nResult is 65.71944444444445 with error 1.659412309590769e-12\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n## Integration via SymPy\n\n### Integral of function of one variable (with finite extremes)\n\nIn integral calculus, the definite integral is an operator that, given a real-valued function of a real-valued variable and an interval $[a,b]$ (subset of the domain), associates to the function the area subtended by its graph in the interval $[a,b]$.\nThe SciPy library provides several numerical methods for computing the integral of such functions; the purpose of this chapter is to present a series of demos to show \"by examples\" the use of such methods; for complete documentation of these methods, the reader is invited to consult the official documentation of SciPy.\n\nLet the following integral of a function of one variable be given: $$\\int_{1}^{5} 2 x e^{-x} \\,dx$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 1.3907$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\n#### Integral of a function of one variable with integrate(f, (x, a, b))\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the integrate(f, (x, a, b)) function of the SymPy library:\n\nimport sympy as sp\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SymPy definite integrate')\nprint('Example 1-01 definite')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nx = sp.Symbol('x')\nf = 2 * x * sp.exp(-x)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\nintegral = sp.integrate(f, (x, a, b))\nintegral = integral.evalf()\nprint('Result is ', integral)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SymPy definite integrate\nExample 1-01 definite\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nResult is 1.39066240069674\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n#### Integral of a function of one variable with integrate(f, (x, a, b)) via indefinite integral\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the integrate(f, x) function of the SymPy library:\n\nimport sympy as sp\n\nprint('Single integral computed by SymPy indefinite integrate')\nprint('Example 1-01 indefinite integrate')\nprint('Integral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5')\n\nx = sp.Symbol('x')\nf = 2 * x * sp.exp(-x)\nprimitive = sp.integrate(f, x)\nprint('Primitive is ', primitive)\n\nprimitive_lambda = sp.lambdify(x, primitive)\na = 1.\nb = 5.\nintegral = primitive_lambda(b) - primitive_lambda(a)\nprint('Result is ', integral)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nSingle integral computed by SymPy indefinite integrate\nExample 1-01 indefinite integrate\nIntegral of 2xe^-x from x=1 to x=5\nPrimitive is (-2*x - 2)*exp(-x)\nResult is 1.3906624006967436\n\nThe program first calculates the indefinite integral and then applying the fundamental theorem of integral calculus, calculates the value of the integral.\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.\n\n### Double integral of a function of two variables\n\nIn integral calculus, the definite double integral is an operator that, given a real-valued function of two real-valued variables and a set included in the domain, associates to the function the volume of the solid (called cylindroid) between the surface described by the function and the plane containing the given set.\n\nLet the following double integral of a function of two variables be given: $$\\int_{1}^{4} \\int_{y-1}^{y+2} x y e^{-x} e^{-y} \\,dx dy$$ whose analytical solution is $\\approx 0.396134$ verifiable online via Wolfram Alpha.\n\n#### Double Integral of a function of two variables with integrate(f, (x, xa, xb), (y, ya, yb))\n\nBelow is the example of Python code that calculates the integral using the integrate(f, (x, xa, xb), (y, ya, yb)) of the SymPy library:\n\nimport sympy as sp\n\nprint('Double integral computed by SymPy definite integrate')\nprint('Example 2-03 definite')\nprint('Integral of xye^-xy from y=1 to y=4 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1')\n\nx, y = sp.symbols('x y')\nf = x * y * sp.exp(-x) * sp.exp(-y)\nya = 0.\nyb = 4.\nxa = y-1.\nxb = y+1.\n\nintegral = sp.integrate(f, (x, xa, xb), (y, ya, yb))\nintegral = integral.evalf()\nprint('Result is ', integral)\n\nwhose output is:\n\nDouble integral computed by SymPy definite integrate\nExample 2-03 definite\nIntegral of xye^-xy from y=1 to y=4 and from x=y-1 to x=y+1\nResult is 0.396134380699524\n\nHere is the link to the code on GitHub.","date":"2021-12-04 16:55:59","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8032099604606628, \"perplexity\": 3068.8136807604756}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-49\/segments\/1637964362999.66\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20211204154554-20211204184554-00264.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Happy New Year: How To Watch the 2022 AKC National Championship Dog Show
The largest dog show in North America will feature more than 5,000 entrants competing for the $50,000 Best in Show prize.
By Austin Cannon Updated December 22, 2022
AKC National Championship where a row of dogs are lined up; how to watch the AKC National Championship
Credit: Courtesy of Winter Churchill Photography
Cheers to ringing in 2023 with some beautiful pups on some ridiculously red carpet.
It's time for the 2022 American Kennel Club National Championship presented by Royal Canin. The largest dog show in North America was held earlier in December in Orlando, Fla., but the action will appear on TV come Jan. 1.
Here's all you need to know—how to watch; how the show works—about the AKC National Championship:
How To Watch the 2022 AKC National Championship
The AKC National Championship conformation show was held Dec. 17 and 18 at the Orange County Convention Center. The top dog took home the Best in Show trophy that Sunday evening.
If you missed the live streaming options, ABC will broadcast the group and Best in Show judging on New Year's Day. The three-hour broadcast will begin at 2 p.m. eastern.
(You tell me a better way to nurse a NYE hangover than with dogs on the not-so-loud TV, potato chips, and a lake's worth of water.)
RELATED: The 9 Best Dog Names at the 2022 National Dog Show Feature Rock Stars and Condiments
top breeds run the ring with their handlers at the AKC National Championship; how to watch the AKC National Championship
The weekend included several canine sports—including Fast CAT and junior showmanship—but here we'll focus on the main event: the conformation show to determine who wins Best in Show and the $50,000 prize.
During each round, the dogs are judged on how they best conform to their breed's standards. So golden retrievers are examined against their list of ideal characteristics. Here's how the dogs progress:
Best of breed: All the dogs of the same breed enter the ring, and a judge decides which one of them best fits the breed standard. So one golden retriever will ascend above the rest.
Group winner: The breed winners advance to the group rings. The 200 AKC-recognized breeds are separated into seven groups: Sporting, Hound, Working, Terrier, Toy, Non-Sporting, and Herding. Each dog is again measured against their breed standard, and the one judged to fit their standard best wins the group. In our example, the golden retriever would win the Sporting Group.
Best in Show: Only seven dogs, the group winners, make it to the final ring. This year, Judge Desmond Murphy decided which of the seven dogs fits their breed standard better than all the others. That dog won Best in Show, while the second-place dog took home Reserve Best in Show.
Murphy had the tough job choosing from the best of the best, but spare a thought for the breed judges, too. A record 5,376 dogs entered the conformation show this year. They represent all 200 breeds and come from all 50 states, Washington D.C., and 22 other countries.
The 200 breeds included three newly recognized in 2022: Bracco Italiano, mudi, and Russian toy.
RELATED: Welcome to the Internet's Most Accurate Dog Show Name Generator (Kind Of)
According to the AKC, four breeds had at least 100 entrants: goldens, Labrador retrievers, Australian shepherds, and French bulldogs. Seriously, consider having to judge dozens of picture-perfect golden retrievers—all fluffed and brushed to the max—before deciding which one is the best example of the breed. A pretty unenviable job if you ask me.
Who Won Last Year?
AKC Best in Show winner, Bayou, a black Giant Schnauzer, running the ring with his handler
Credit: Winter Churchill Photography
Bayou the giant schnauzer is your 2021 AKC National Championship winner. Then 3, Bayou—registered name GCHG CH Lagniappe's From The Mountains To The Bayou—beat some 5,000 other dogs to win the title and surprise his owners.
"It was a true shock," Holly Reed, one of his owners, told Daily Paws last year.
RELATED: You Can Turn the Westminster Dog Show Into Fantasy Football—and It Kinda Rules
Who's a smart Best in Show bet this year? Beats me. It's a huge field, and 20 breeds have won Best in Show in the show's previous 21 editions. But if you're looking for favorites, here are the top-ranked show dogs this year.
Maybe Bayou will repeat. Or perhaps Winston the Frenchie closes out his year with yet another victory. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 761 |
The National Grocers Association is looking forward to hosting the 2019 NGA Show next month in San Diego for the first time. San Diego is one of the nation's most vibrant urban cities and the convention center is at the heart of all the action. This annual trade show and conference bring together independent retailers and wholesalers, food retail industry executives, food/CPG manufacturers and service providers for unparalleled opportunities to learn, engage, share, network, and innovate. The trade show and conference will be held at the San Diego Convention Center, the region's premier gathering place, from February 24-27. For more information on The NGA Show, visit www.thengashow.com.
During The NGA Show 2019, attendees will see thousands of new products, attend over 60 educational sessions, participate in several exciting special events and hear from world-renowned speakers. The education program will focus on the big-picture trends impacting independent retailers including competition from niche retail formats; the growth of online shopping; embracing prepared foods; the impact of technology and big data and store checkout strategies.
The event will also feature several special events, including a keynote presentation by renowned political strategist, Donna Brazile and former White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino; seven specialty pavilions in the exhibit hall with a specific focus on meat, produce, specialty foods, coffee, technology, seasonal merchandise and ethnic cuisine; The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART) special three-and-a-half-hour iRetail event; the National Best Bagger Championship; the NGA Creative Choice Awards; the NGA Student Case Study Competition, and much more.
The NGA Showhas been the place where independent grocers gather for over 30 years, connecting supermarket retailers and wholesalers, food manufacturers and service providers from around the world to share innovative solutions and best practices that support and strengthen the independent supermarket channel. The NGA Show is produced and managed by Clarion UX as part of the Food & Beverage Portfolio in partnership with the National Grocers Association (NGA). For more information and to register, visit www.theNGAshow.com.
The National Grocers Association (NGA)is the national trade association representing the retail and wholesale grocers that comprise the independent sector of the food distribution industry. An independent retailer is a privately owned or controlled food retail company operating a variety of formats. The independent grocery sector is accountable for close to one percent of the nation's overall economy and is responsible for generating $131 billion in sales, 944,000 jobs, $30 billion in wages, and $27 billion in taxes. NGA members include retail and wholesale grocers, state grocers' associations, as well as manufacturers and service suppliers. For more information about NGA, visit www.nationalgrocers.org. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,983 |
let DontPanic = {};
DontPanic.currentDistance;
DontPanic.bestDistance = localStorage['bestDistance'] || '0';
DontPanic.improbabilityDriveTriggered = false;
DontPanic.newBestScore = false;
function init() {
const gameWidth = 360;
const gameHeight = 580;
document.getElementById('gameWindow').innerHTML = '';
DontPanic.game = new Phaser.Game(gameWidth, gameHeight, Phaser.AUTO, 'gameWindow', {
preload: preload,
create: create,
update: update
});
}
function preload() {
loadMainImages();
loadUIAssets();
loadAudio();
loadImprobabilityDriveImages();
}
function create() {
DontPanic.game.world.setBounds(0, 0, 360, 580);
DontPanic.cursors = DontPanic.game.input.keyboard.createCursorKeys();
mainMenu();
}
function update() {
if (DontPanic.gameStarted) {
DontPanic.player.handleInput();
handleCollision();
DontPanic.enemy.moveEnemy();
}
}
function startGame() {
if (DontPanic.settingsText) {
DontPanic.settingsText.kill();
}
DontPanic.game.world.removeAll();
DontPanic.game.paused = false;
DontPanic.gameStarted = true;
DontPanic.background = DontPanic.game.add.tileSprite(0, 0, DontPanic.game.width, DontPanic.game.height, 'background1');
DontPanic.background.autoScroll(0, 50);
createEntities();
createUI();
addSound();
}
function handleCollision() {
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.overlap(DontPanic.player.playerSprite, DontPanic.coins.coins, DontPanic.coins.collectCoin, null, this);
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.overlap(DontPanic.player.playerSprite, DontPanic.enemy.enemies, DontPanic.enemy.abductPlayer, null, this);
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.overlap(DontPanic.player.playerSprite, DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles, DontPanic.obstacle.obstacleCollision, null, this);
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.overlap(DontPanic.player.playerSprite, DontPanic.extraLife.extraLives, DontPanic.lives.gainLife, null, this);
}
function gameOver() {
DontPanic.backgroundMusic.fadeOut(1000);
DontPanic.gameOverSound = DontPanic.game.add.audio('gameOver');
DontPanic.gameOverSound.play();
DontPanic.distance.distanceTimer.timer.stop();
DontPanic.distance.checkBestDistance();
DontPanic.game.gameOver = DontPanic.game.add.text(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, DontPanic.game.world.centerY * 0.75, 'GAME OVER', { font: `${config.style.fontSize_title} ${config.style.font}`, fill: config.style.textColour });
DontPanic.game.gameOver.anchor.setTo(0.5);
DontPanic.game.camera.fade(0x0000000, 3000);
DontPanic.game.camera.onFadeComplete.add(playAgainMenu, this);
DontPanic.background.stopScroll();
removeAllEntities();
stopEntityGeneration();
DontPanic.gameStarted = false;
}
function loadMainImages() {
DontPanic.game.load.image('background1', 'assets/img/space_background.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('home_background', 'assets/img/game_screen.jpg');
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('rocket_red', 'assets/img/rocket_spritesheet1.png', 115, 175);
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('rocket_blue', 'assets/img/rocket_spritesheet_blue1.png', 115, 175);
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('enemyShip', 'assets/img/enemy_ship_spritesheet1.png', 440, 1140);
DontPanic.game.load.image('coin', 'assets/img/coin_2.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('extraLife', 'assets/img/extra_life.png');
}
function loadUIAssets() {
DontPanic.game.load.image('startButton', 'assets/img/button_start.png'); // placeholders for now
DontPanic.game.load.image('settingsButton', 'assets/img/button_settings.png'); // placeholders for now
DontPanic.game.load.image('playAgainButton', 'assets/img/button_play-again.png'); // placeholders for now
DontPanic.game.load.image('heart', 'assets/img/life.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('pauseIcon', 'assets/img/pause-button.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('playIcon', 'assets/img/play-button.png');
}
function loadImprobabilityDriveImages() {
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('red_button', 'assets/img/iid/iid-button1.png', 152, 119);
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_background1', 'assets/img/iid/iid_bg.png');
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_enemy1', 'assets/img/iid/iid_enemy1.png', 440, 1140);
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_player1', 'assets/img/iid/iid_player1.png', 115, 175);
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_teacup', 'assets/img/iid/tea.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('whale', 'assets/img/iid/whale.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('petunias', 'assets/img/iid/flowers.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_background2', 'assets/img/iid/iid_bg2.png');
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_enemy2', 'assets/img/iid/iid_enemy3.png', 440, 1140);
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_player2', 'assets/img/iid/iid_player2.png', 115, 175);
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_coin2', 'assets/img/iid/iid_coin1.png');
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_background3', 'assets/img/iid/iid_bg1.png');
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_enemy3', 'assets/img/iid/iid_enemy.png', 440, 1140);
DontPanic.game.load.spritesheet('IID_player3', 'assets/img/iid/iid_player3.png', 115, 175);
DontPanic.game.load.image('IID_coin3', 'assets/img/iid/diamond.png');
}
function loadAudio() {
DontPanic.game.load.audio('coinPing', 'assets/audio/coin_collection.wav');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('backgroundMusic', 'assets/audio/background_music.mp3');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('abduction', 'assets/audio/abduction.wav');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('abductionFail', 'assets/audio/abduction-fail.wav');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('lifePing', 'assets/audio/extra-life.mp3');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('obstacleWhoosh', 'assets/audio/obstacle-fall.mp3');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('obstacleCollision', 'assets/audio/obstacle-collision.wav');
DontPanic.game.load.audio('gameOver', 'assets/audio/game-over.wav');
}
const config = {
currentLevel: 'easy',
playerColour: 'red',
soundOn: true,
easy: {
coinSpawnRate: 0.5,
coinInitialPositions: [[300, 0], [20, 40], [60, 80], [250, 200], [90, 120], [180, 350], [220, 10], [120, 290]],
enemySpawnRate: 4,
enemyTimeBeforeAbduction: 3.5,
enemySpeedHorizontal: 1,
enemySpeedVertical: 1.5,
enemyDifficultyIncrease: 0.15,
enemyDifficultyIncreaseInterval: 100,
lifeSpawnRate: 0.5,
whaleDelay: 50,
petuniaSpeed: 60,
infiniteImprobabilityDelay: 12,
infiniteImprobabilityDuration: 6,
infiniteImprobabilityDifficulty: 0.25,
extraLifeSpawnRate: 4,
},
hard: {
coinSpawnRate: 0.7,
coinInitialPositions: [[300, 0], [110, 80], [180, 100], [200, 200], [800, 120], [240, 300], [50, 10], [150, 20]],
enemySpawnRate: 2,
enemyTimeBeforeAbduction: 3,
enemySpeedHorizontal: 1.5,
enemySpeedVertical: 2,
enemyDifficultyIncrease: 0.2,
enemyDifficultyIncreaseInterval: 75,
whaleDelay: 100,
petuniaSpeed: 120,
lifeSpawnRate: 0.3,
infiniteImprobabilityDelay: 18,
infiniteImprobabilityDuration: 5,
infiniteImprobabilityDifficulty: 0.5,
extraLifeSpawnRate: 5,
},
improbabilityDriveDestruction: 3.5,
enemyAbductDistance: 250,
style: {
textColour: '#fff',
textColour_highlight: '#b8180c',
textColour_highlightOutline: '#f5a62a',
font: 'whoopass',
fontSize_score: '16px',
fontSize_default: '24px',
fontSize_bestDistance: '30px',
fontSize_heading: '36px',
fontSize_title: '48px',
}
}
function createEntities() {
DontPanic.player = new Player();
DontPanic.enemy = new Enemy();
DontPanic.coins = new Coins();
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive = new ImprobabilityDrive();
DontPanic.obstacle = new Obstacle();
DontPanic.extraLife = new ExtraLife();
}
function removeAllEntities() {
DontPanic.player.playerSprite.kill();
DontPanic.enemy.enemies.kill();
DontPanic.coins.coins.kill();
DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.kill();
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.improbabilityDrive.kill();
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLives.kill();
}
function stopEntityGeneration() {
DontPanic.coins.coinTimer.timer.stop();
DontPanic.enemy.enemyTimer.timer.stop();
}
class Enemy {
constructor() {
this.enemies = DontPanic.game.add.group();
this.abductionSound = DontPanic.game.add.audio('abduction');
this.abductionSoundFail = DontPanic.game.add.audio('abductionFail');
var enemySpawnRate = config[config.currentLevel]['enemySpawnRate'];
this.enemyTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * enemySpawnRate, this.createEnemy, this);
this.enemyTimer.timer.start();
this.timeBeforeAbduction = config[config.currentLevel]['enemyTimeBeforeAbduction'];
this.horizontalSpeed = config[config.currentLevel]['enemySpeedHorizontal'];
this.verticalSpeed = config[config.currentLevel]['enemySpeedVertical'];
this.abductDistance = config['enemyAbductDistance'];
this.difficultyIncreaseCount = 0;
}
createEnemy() {
const enemy = this.enemies.create(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, -10, 'enemyShip');
resizeSprite(enemy, 0.2);
enemy.fixedToCamera = true;
enemy.anchor.set(0.5, 0);
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(enemy);
enemy.body.collideWorldBounds = false;
enemy.abductAnimate = enemy.animations.add('abduct');
enemy.beamUpAnimate = enemy.animations.add('beamUp', [3,3,3,3,2,1,0]);
enemy.body.setSize(275, 1140, 80, 0); // collision hit area
enemy.body.immovable = true;
enemy.abductCheck = false;
enemy.abductSuccessful = false;
enemy.positioned = false;
DontPanic.game.time.events.add(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * DontPanic.enemy.timeBeforeAbduction, this.abduct, this, enemy);
this.checkIfImprobabilityDriveSprite(enemy);
}
increaseEnemySpeed() {
DontPanic.enemy.difficultyIncreaseCount++;
if (DontPanic.enemy.timeBeforeAbduction > 1.5) {
DontPanic.enemy.timeBeforeAbduction -= config[config.currentLevel]['enemyDifficultyIncrease'] * 2;
}
if (DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed < 2) {
DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed += config[config.currentLevel]['enemyDifficultyIncrease'];
}
if (DontPanic.enemy.verticalSpeed < 2.4) {
DontPanic.enemy.verticalSpeed += config[config.currentLevel]['enemyDifficultyIncrease'];
}
if (DontPanic.enemy.difficultyIncreaseCount >= 5 && DontPanic.enemy.abductDistance > 220) {
DontPanic.enemy.abductDistance -= config[config.currentLevel]['enemyDifficultyIncrease'] * 2;
}
}
checkIfImprobabilityDriveSprite(enemy) {
if (DontPanic.improbabilityDriveTriggered) {
enemy.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].enemy, 0);
if (DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario == 'reset') {
DontPanic.improbabilityDriveTriggered = false;
}
}
}
moveEnemy() {
this.enemies.forEachExists((sprite) => {
if (!sprite.positioned && !sprite.abductCheck) {
this.descend(sprite);
this.moveToPlayer(sprite);
}
if (sprite.abductCheck) {
this.leaveScreen(sprite);
}
});
}
moveToPlayer(sprite) {
if (sprite.x > DontPanic.player.playerSprite.x + 1) {
sprite.cameraOffset.x -= DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed;
} else if (sprite.x < DontPanic.player.playerSprite.x - 1){
sprite.cameraOffset.x += DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed;
}
}
descend(sprite) {
if (sprite.y < (DontPanic.player.playerSprite.y - DontPanic.enemy.abductDistance)) {
sprite.cameraOffset.y += DontPanic.enemy.verticalSpeed;
}
else {
sprite.positioned = true;
}
}
leaveScreen(sprite) {
if (sprite.x < DontPanic.player.playerSprite.x) {
sprite.cameraOffset.x -= DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed;
} else {
sprite.cameraOffset.x += DontPanic.enemy.horizontalSpeed;
}
}
abduct(sprite) {
console.log('abduct called');
if (!sprite.abductCheck) {
DontPanic.enemy.abductionSoundFail.play();
sprite.animations.play('abduct', 20, false);
sprite.abductAnimate.onComplete.add(() => {sprite.animations.play('beamUp', 20, false);}, this);
sprite.abductCheck = true;
}
}
abductPlayer(playerSprite, enemy) {
if (!enemy.abductSuccessful && enemy.frame == 3) {
DontPanic.enemy.abductionSound.play();
DontPanic.lives.loseLife();
DontPanic.game.camera.shake(0.005, 500);
enemy.abductSuccessful = true;
}
}
}
class Coins {
constructor() {
let coins = DontPanic.game.add.group();
coins.enableBody = true;
coins.collection = DontPanic.game.add.audio('coinPing');
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(coins);
this.coins = coins;
this.initialCoins();
var coinSpawnRate = config[config.currentLevel]['coinSpawnRate'];
this.coinTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * coinSpawnRate, this.createCoin, this);
this.coinTimer.timer.start();
}
initialCoins() {
var initialCoinPositions = config[config.currentLevel]['coinInitialPositions'];
for (var i = 0; i < initialCoinPositions.length; i++) {
this.createCoin(initialCoinPositions[i][0], initialCoinPositions[i][1]);
}
}
createCoin(x, y) {
var x = x || randomInt(320, 5);
var y = y || randomInt(10, -10)
var coin = this.coins.create(x, y, 'coin');
resizeSprite(coin, 0.3);
coin.enableBody = true;
coin.body.velocity.y = 100;
coin.body.collideWorldBounds = false;
if (DontPanic.improbabilityDriveTriggered) {
coin.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].coins, 1);
}
}
collectCoin(player, coin) {
DontPanic.coins.coins.collection.play();
coin.kill();
DontPanic.coinScore.addToCoinScore()
}
}
class Obstacle {
constructor() {
let obstacles = DontPanic.game.add.group();
obstacles.enableBody = true;
obstacles.soundFall = DontPanic.game.add.audio('obstacleWhoosh');
obstacles.soundCollide = DontPanic.game.add.audio('obstacleCollision');
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(obstacles);
this.obstacles = obstacles;
}
whale() {
const whale = DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.create(randomInt(200, 100), -100, 'whale');
resizeSprite(whale, 0.3);
addGenericPropertiesForFallingObjects(whale, 50);
DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.soundFall.play();
}
petunias() {
const petunias = DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.create(randomInt(320, 25), -150, 'petunias');
resizeSprite(petunias, 0.1)
addGenericPropertiesForFallingObjects(petunias, 60);
DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.soundFall.play();
}
obstacleCollision() {
DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.soundFall.stop();
DontPanic.obstacle.obstacles.soundCollide.play();
DontPanic.player.playerSprite.kill();
DontPanic.lives.loseAllLives();
gameOver();
}
}
class ExtraLife {
constructor() {
let extraLives = DontPanic.game.add.group();
extraLives.enableBody = true;
extraLives.collection = DontPanic.game.add.audio('lifePing');
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(extraLives);
this.extraLives = extraLives;
}
triggerExtraLife() {
var extraLifeSpawnRate = config[config.currentLevel]['extraLifeSpawnRate'];
DontPanic.game.time.events.remove(DontPanic.extraLife.extraLifeTimer);
if (DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft < 4 && DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft > 1) {
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLifeTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * extraLifeSpawnRate, DontPanic.extraLife.createExtraLife, this);
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLifeTimer.timer.start();
}
if (DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft <= 1) {
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLifeTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * (extraLifeSpawnRate/2), DontPanic.extraLife.createExtraLife, this);
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLifeTimer.timer.start();
}
}
createExtraLife() {
const life = DontPanic.extraLife.extraLives.create(randomInt(320, 5), -100, 'extraLife');
resizeSprite(life, 0.06);
addGenericPropertiesForFallingObjects(life, 40);
}
}
class Player {
constructor() {
const player = DontPanic.game.add.sprite(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, DontPanic.game.world.height - 100, `rocket_${config.playerColour}`);
resizeSprite(player, 0.5);
player.anchor.set(0.5, 0.5);
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(player);
player.body.bounce.y = 0.2;
player.body.setSize(65, 150, 28, 0);
player.body.immovable = true;
player.body.gravity.y = 0;
player.body.collideWorldBounds = true;
player.frame = 1;
this.playerSprite = player;
}
handleInput() {
this.playerSprite.body.velocity.x = 0;
if ((DontPanic.cursors.left.isDown && !DontPanic.cursors.right.isDown) || (DontPanic.game.input.pointer1.isDown && DontPanic.game.input.pointer1.x < DontPanic.game.world.centerX)) {
this.moveLeft();
}
else if ((DontPanic.cursors.right.isDown && !DontPanic.cursors.left.isDown) || (DontPanic.game.input.pointer1.isDown && DontPanic.game.input.pointer1.x > DontPanic.game.world.centerX)) {
this.moveRight();
}
else {
this.moveUp();
}
}
moveLeft() {
this.playerSprite.body.velocity.x = -50;
if (this.playerSprite.angle > -45) {
this.playerSprite.angle -= 1;
}
this.playerSprite.body.setSize(85, 150, 0, 20);
this.playerSprite.frame = 2;
}
moveRight() {
this.playerSprite.body.velocity.x = 50;
if (this.playerSprite.angle < 45) {
this.playerSprite.angle += 1;
}
this.playerSprite.body.setSize(85, 150, 40, 20);
this.playerSprite.frame = 0;
}
moveUp() {
this.playerSprite.body.velocity.x = 0;
this.playerSprite.body.setSize(65, 150, 28, 0);
if (this.playerSprite.angle > 0 ) {
this.playerSprite.angle -= 1;
}
else if (this.playerSprite.angle < 0) {
this.playerSprite.angle += 1;
}
this.playerSprite.frame = 1;
}
}
class ImprobabilityDrive {
constructor() {
let improbabilityDrive = DontPanic.game.add.group();
improbabilityDrive.enableBody = true;
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(improbabilityDrive);
improbabilityDrive.generated = false;
this.improbabilityDrive = improbabilityDrive;
var improbabilityDriveDelay = config[config.currentLevel]['infiniteImprobabilityDelay'];
this.improbabilityDriveTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * improbabilityDriveDelay, this.improbabilityDriveGenerator, this);
this.improbabilityDriveTimer.timer.start();
this.improbabilityDrive = improbabilityDrive;
this.currentScenario = 'reset';
}
improbabilityDriveGenerator() {
if (DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.generated) {
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.generated = false;
} else {
var button_iid = this.improbabilityDrive.create(0, DontPanic.game.world.height - 75, 'red_button');
resizeSprite(button_iid, 0.5);
button_iid.enableBody = true;
button_iid.body.setSize(70, 60, 0, 0);
button_iid.body.immovable = true;
button_iid.animation = button_iid.animations.add('flash', [0,1,0,1,0,1,0], true);
button_iid.play('flash');
button_iid.inputEnabled = true;
button_iid.input.useHandCursor = true;
button_iid.events.onInputDown.add(this.triggerEvent, this);
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.generated = true;
button_iid.alpha = 0;
DontPanic.game.add.tween(button_iid).to( { alpha: 1 }, 500, Phaser.Easing.Linear.None, true, 0);
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.destructionTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.add(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * config.improbabilityDriveDestruction, this.removeButton, this);
}
}
removeButton() {
eventOnLatestChildAdded(DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.improbabilityDrive.children, DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.fadeOut)
}
fadeOut(sprite) {
var fadeOut = DontPanic.game.add.tween(sprite).to( { alpha: 0 }, 500, Phaser.Easing.Linear.None, true, 0);
fadeOut.onComplete.add((button)=>{button.kill();}, this);
}
triggerEvent(button_iid) {
var eventTriggered = Math.random() >= config[config.currentLevel]['infiniteImprobabilityDifficulty'] ? this.randomAssets : this.randomObstacle;
eventTriggered(button_iid);
button_iid.kill();
}
randomAssets(button_iid) {
var improbabilityDriveDuration = config[config.currentLevel]['infiniteImprobabilityDuration'];
let improbabilityDurationTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.add(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * improbabilityDriveDuration, DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.assetReset, this);
improbabilityDurationTimer.timer.start();
DontPanic.improbabilityDriveTriggered = true;
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario = randomInt(3, 1);
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.regenerateAssets();
}
assetReset() {
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario = 'reset';
DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.regenerateAssets();
}
regenerateAssets() {
DontPanic.background.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].background);
DontPanic.player.playerSprite.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].player, 0);
DontPanic.enemy.enemies.forEachExists((enemy) => {
enemy.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].enemy, 0);
});
DontPanic.coins.coins.forEachExists((coin) => {
coin.loadTexture(improbabilityScenarioAssets[DontPanic.improbabilityDrive.currentScenario].coins);
});
}
randomObstacle() {
var obstacleTriggered = Math.random() <= 0.5 ? DontPanic.obstacle.whale : DontPanic.obstacle.petunias;
obstacleTriggered();
}
}
const improbabilityScenarioAssets = {
reset: {
player: `rocket_${config.playerColour}`, //get the right one from config
enemy: 'enemyShip',
background: 'background1',
coins: 'coin',
},
1 : {
player: 'IID_player1',
enemy: 'IID_enemy1',
background: 'IID_background1',
coins: 'IID_teacup',
},
2 : {
player: 'IID_player2',
enemy: 'IID_enemy2',
background: 'IID_background2',
coins: 'IID_coin2',
},
3 : {
player: 'IID_player3',
enemy: 'IID_enemy3',
background: 'IID_background3',
coins: 'IID_coin3',
}
};
var settingsText;
var settingsText__difficulty;
var settingsText__sound;
var settingsText__colour;
function mainMenu() {
DontPanic.background = DontPanic.game.add.image(0, -40, 'home_background');
DontPanic.startButton = DontPanic.game.add.button(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, DontPanic.game.world.centerY - 120, 'startButton', startGame, this);
DontPanic.startButton.anchor.set(0.5);
DontPanic.settingsButton = DontPanic.game.add.button(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, DontPanic.game.world.centerY - 60, 'settingsButton', settingsMenu, this);
DontPanic.settingsButton.anchor.set(0.5);
}
function settingsMenu() {
DontPanic.game.world.removeAll();
DontPanic.game.add.image(0, 0, 'background1');
DontPanic.settingsText = DontPanic.game.add.group();
const currentSettings = getCurrentSettings();
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 75, "Settings", config.style.fontSize_title, false, "", false);
settingsText__difficulty = DontPanic.game.add.group();
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 175, "Difficulty", config.style.fontSize_heading);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 0.75, 220, "Easy", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "difficulty", currentSettings.easy);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 1.25, 220, "Hard", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "difficulty", !currentSettings.easy);
settingsText__sound = DontPanic.game.add.group();
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 290, "Sound", config.style.fontSize_heading);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 0.75, 335, "On", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "sound", currentSettings.soundOn);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 1.25, 335, "Off", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "sound", !currentSettings.soundOn);
settingsText__colour = DontPanic.game.add.group();
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 405, "Ship Colour", config.style.fontSize_heading);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 0.75, 450, "Red", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "colour", currentSettings.red);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX * 1.25, 450, "Blue", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "colour", !currentSettings.red);
addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 550, "Play", config.style.fontSize_default, true, "play");
DontPanic.settingsText.add(settingsText__difficulty);
DontPanic.settingsText.add(settingsText__sound);
DontPanic.settingsText.add(settingsText__colour);
}
function addText(x, y, string, size, clickevent, category, selected) {
var textOb = DontPanic.game.add.text(x, y, string, {
font: `${size} ${config.style.font}`,
});
textOb.anchor.setTo(0.5);
textOb.align = 'center';
textOb.fill = config.style.textColour;
textOb.fontSize = size;
textOb.padding.set(16, 16);
textOb.inputEnabled = true;
textOb.input.useHandCursor = clickevent;
addCategorySpecifics(textOb, category);
if (selected) {
colourText(textOb);
}
return textOb;
}
function addCategorySpecifics(textOb, category) {
switch (category) {
case "difficulty":
settingsText__difficulty.add(textOb);
textOb.events.onInputDown.add(difficultyListener, this);
break;
case "sound":
settingsText__sound.add(textOb);
textOb.events.onInputDown.add(soundListener, this);
break;
case "colour":
settingsText__colour.add(textOb);
textOb.events.onInputDown.add(colourListener, this);
break;
case "play":
DontPanic.settingsText.add(textOb);
textOb.events.onInputDown.add(startGame, this);
break;
default: ;
}
}
function difficultyListener(input) {
let previousSelection = config.currentLevel;
config.currentLevel = input["_text"].toLowerCase();
if (config.currentLevel != previousSelection) {
for (var i = 0; i < settingsText__difficulty.children.length; i++) {
colourText(settingsText__difficulty.children[i]);
}
}
getCurrentSettings();
}
function soundListener(input) {
let previousSelection = config.soundOn;
config.soundOn = (input["_text"].toLowerCase() == "on") ? true : false;
if (config.soundOn != previousSelection) {
for (var i = 0; i < settingsText__sound.children.length; i++) {
colourText(settingsText__sound.children[i]);
}
}
getCurrentSettings();
}
function colourListener(input) {
let previousSelection = config.playerColour;
config.playerColour = input["_text"].toLowerCase();
if (config.playerColour != previousSelection) {
for (var i = 0; i < settingsText__colour.children.length; i++) {
colourText(settingsText__colour.children[i]);
}
}
getCurrentSettings();
}
function getCurrentSettings() {
const currentSettings = {};
currentSettings["easy"] = (config.currentLevel == "easy") ? true : false;
currentSettings["soundOn"] = config.soundOn;
currentSettings["red"] = (config.playerColour == "red") ? true : false;
return currentSettings;
}
function colourText(text) {
if (text['style']['fill'] == config.style.textColour_highlight) {
text.fill = config.style.textColour;
text.strokeThickness = 0;
} else {
text.fill = config.style.textColour_highlight;
text.stroke = config.style.textColour_highlightOutline;
text.strokeThickness = 3;
}
}
function playAgainMenu() {
DontPanic.game.gameOver.kill();
DontPanic.game.camera.resetFX();
DontPanic.playAgain = DontPanic.game.add.group();
const restartButton = DontPanic.game.add.button(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, DontPanic.game.world.centerY, 'playAgainButton', startGame, this);
restartButton.anchor.set(0.5);
const settingsButton = DontPanic.settingsButton;
settingsButton.y = DontPanic.game.world.centerY + 100;
DontPanic.playAgain.add(restartButton);
DontPanic.playAgain.add(settingsButton);
if (DontPanic.newBestScore) {
const bestDistanceText = addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 190, `New Best Distance!!\n${DontPanic.bestDistance}`, config.style.fontSize_bestDistance);
} else {
const bestDistanceText = addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 190, `Best Distance: ${DontPanic.bestDistance}`, config.style.fontSize_bestDistance);
}
DontPanic.pauseButton.kill();
}
function pauseMenu() {
if (!DontPanic.game.paused) {
DontPanic.game.paused = true;
DontPanic.paused = DontPanic.game.add.group();
const pausedText = addText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, 190, 'Paused', config.style.fontSize_title);
const settingsButton = DontPanic.settingsButton;
settingsButton.y = DontPanic.game.world.centerY;
DontPanic.paused.add(pausedText);
DontPanic.paused.add(settingsButton);
DontPanic.pauseButton.loadTexture('playIcon');
} else {
DontPanic.paused.kill();
DontPanic.game.paused = false;
DontPanic.pauseButton.loadTexture('pauseIcon');
}
}
function randomInt(max, min) {
max = Math.floor(max);
min = Math.ceil(min);
return Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1)) + min;
}
function resizeSprite(sprite, factor) {
sprite.scale.x = factor;
sprite.scale.y = factor;
}
function addGenericPropertiesForFallingObjects(entity, gravity) {
DontPanic.game.physics.arcade.enable(entity);
entity.body.collideWorldBounds = false;
entity.body.gravity.y = gravity;
}
function eventOnLatestChildAdded(children, callback) {
var triggered = false;
for (var i = children.length - 1; i >= 0 ; i--) {
if (children[i].alive && !triggered) {
callback(children[i]);
triggered = true;
}
}
}
function disableButtons(button) {
button.input.stop();
}
function createUI() {
DontPanic.lives = new LivesScore();
DontPanic.coinScore = new CoinScore();
DontPanic.distance = new DistanceScore();
pauseButton();
}
function pauseButton() {
DontPanic.pauseButton = DontPanic.game.add.button(DontPanic.game.world.width - 30, DontPanic.game.world.height - 30, 'pauseIcon', pauseMenu, this);
DontPanic.pauseButton.input.useHandCursor = true;
}
function addSound() {
if (config.soundOn) {
DontPanic.backgroundMusic = backgroundMusic();
} else {
DontPanic.game.sound.mute = true;
}
}
function backgroundMusic() {
let backgroundMusic = DontPanic.game.add.audio('backgroundMusic');
backgroundMusic.loop = true;
backgroundMusic.volume = 0.1;
backgroundMusic.play();
return backgroundMusic;
}
class LivesScore {
constructor() {
let lives = DontPanic.game.add.group();
lives.fixedToCamera = true;
lives.livesLeft = 4;
this.lives = lives;
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
this.createHeart(i)
}
}
createHeart(i) {
var heart = this.lives.create((10+(i*20)), 10, 'heart');
resizeSprite(heart, 0.04);
}
loseLife() {
if (this.lives.livesLeft > 1) {
this.lives.livesLeft -= 1;
DontPanic.extraLife.triggerExtraLife();
eventOnLatestChildAdded(this.lives.children, this.removeLife);
}
else {
gameOver();
}
}
removeLife(heart) {
heart.kill();
}
gainLife(player, life) {
DontPanic.extraLife.extraLives.collection.play();
life.kill();
if (DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft < 4) {
DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft += 1;
DontPanic.lives.createHeart(DontPanic.lives.lives.livesLeft - 2);
}
DontPanic.extraLife.triggerExtraLife();
}
loseAllLives() {
this.lives.forEachExists((sprite) => {
DontPanic.lives.removeLife(sprite);
});
}
}
class CoinScore {
constructor() {
DontPanic.coinTotal = '0';
this.coinTotalText = createScoreText(DontPanic.game.world.centerX, `Total Coins: ${DontPanic.coinTotal}`);
}
addToCoinScore() {
DontPanic.coinTotal++;
this.coinTotalText.setText(`Total Coins: ${DontPanic.coinTotal}`);
}
}
class DistanceScore {
constructor() {
DontPanic.currentDistance = 0;
this.distanceTimer = DontPanic.game.time.events.loop(Phaser.Timer.SECOND * 0.25, this.distanceIncrease, this);
this.distanceTimer.timer.start();
this.distanceReachedText = createScoreText(DontPanic.game.width - 50, `Distance: ${DontPanic.currentDistance}`);
}
distanceIncrease() {
DontPanic.currentDistance++;
this.distanceReachedText.setText(`Distance: ${DontPanic.currentDistance}`);
if (DontPanic.currentDistance % config[config.currentLevel]['enemyDifficultyIncreaseInterval'] == 0) {
DontPanic.enemy.increaseEnemySpeed();
}
}
checkBestDistance() {
if (DontPanic.currentDistance > parseInt(DontPanic.bestDistance)) {
localStorage['bestDistance'] = DontPanic.currentDistance.toString();
DontPanic.bestDistance = localStorage['bestDistance'];
DontPanic.newBestScore = true;
}
}
}
function createScoreText(x, content) {
text = DontPanic.game.add.text(x, 30, content, {
font: `${config.style.fontSize_score} ${config.style.font}`,
});
text.anchor.setTo(0.5);
text.align = 'center';
text.fill = config.style.textColour;
text.padding.set(16, 16);
return text;
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,910 |
Q: Can you check if two classes are the same using Chai? I am working on project using Karma, Mocha, and Chai for unit testing and am running into an issue with matching two classes. Essentially, I have a Root class that creates, stores, and manages items of the Child class. However, this Root class also exposes the Child as a static property for standalone use.
./src/Root.js:
import Child from './Child';
export class Root {
constructor() {
this.children = [];
}
addChild() {
this.children.push(new Child());
}
static Child() {
return Child;
}
}
This part works; from manual testing, it appears that Root.Child is equivalent to Child. However, I'd like to add a unit test to ensure that this is always the case. And this is where I'm stuck.
./test/root.spec.js:
import Root from './src/Root';
import Child from './src/Child';
describe('Root', () => {
it('should be a class', () => {
expect(Root).to.be.a('function'); // Passes
});
it('should expose Child as a static prop', () => {
expect(Root).to.have.property('Child'); // Passes by itself
expect(Root.Child).to.equal(Child); // Fails
});
});
When I run this test, I get a failure stating: expected [Function: Child] to equal [Function: Child]
I understand that the Child imported in Root is "separate" from the one imported in root.spec, so my question is, using Chai (and I suppose this could extend to JavaScript in general) is there a way to check of the two classes match? Or is there I better way I could be doing this?
A: Looks like you're not invoking the static method in your Root class. That means that the test is checking equality between your Child class and the function that returns your Child class.
class MyClass {}
class MyOtherClass {
static MyClass() {
return MyClass
}
}
console.log(MyClass === MyClass) //true
console.log(MyOtherClass.MyClass === MyClass) //false
console.log(MyOtherClass.MyClass() === MyClass) //true
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 6,920 |
Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures
S. Ohara, N. E. Crone, N. Weiss, F. A. Lenz
Imaging studies indicate that experimental pain is processed in multiple cortical areas which are often characterized as a network. However, the functional connectivity within the network and the other properties of the network is poorly understood. Substantial evidence demonstrates that synchronous oscillations between two cortical areas may indicate functional connectivity between those areas. We test the hypothesis that cortical areas with pain-related activity are functionally connected during attention to a painful stimulus. We stimulated with a painful, cutaneous, laser stimulus and recorded the response directly from the cortical surface (electrocorticography - ECoG) over primary somatosensory (SI), parasylvian (PS), and medial frontal (MF) cortex through subdural electrodes implanted for treatment of epilepsy. The results demonstrate synchrony of ECoGs between cortical structures receiving input from nociceptors, as indicated by the occurrence of laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) and/or event-related desynchronization (ERD). Prior to the stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and PS regions, as the subject anticipated the stimulus. After the laser stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and MF cortex, as the subject responded by counting the stimulus. Therefore, attention to painful stimuli always enhanced synchrony between cortical pain-related structures. The pattern of this synchrony changed as the patient switched tasks from anticipation of the stimulus to counting the stimulus. These results are the first compelling evidence of pain networks characterized by rapidly switching, task-specific functional connectivity.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
Electrocorticography
10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
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Pain Medicine & Life Sciences 100%
Frontal Lobe Medicine & Life Sciences 81%
Laser-Evoked Potentials Medicine & Life Sciences 72%
Electrocorticography Medicine & Life Sciences 60%
Implanted Electrodes Medicine & Life Sciences 54%
Nociceptors Medicine & Life Sciences 53%
Somatosensory Cortex Medicine & Life Sciences 49%
Ohara, S., Crone, N. E., Weiss, N., & Lenz, F. A. (2006). Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures. Pain, 123(3), 244-253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures. / Ohara, S.; Crone, N. E.; Weiss, N. et al.
In: Pain, Vol. 123, No. 3, 08.2006, p. 244-253.
Ohara, S, Crone, NE, Weiss, N & Lenz, FA 2006, 'Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures', Pain, vol. 123, no. 3, pp. 244-253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
Ohara S, Crone NE, Weiss N, Lenz FA. Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures. Pain. 2006 Aug;123(3):244-253. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
Ohara, S. ; Crone, N. E. ; Weiss, N. et al. / Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures. In: Pain. 2006 ; Vol. 123, No. 3. pp. 244-253.
@article{89a5a859bf794116be39b0093df55621,
title = "Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures",
abstract = "Imaging studies indicate that experimental pain is processed in multiple cortical areas which are often characterized as a network. However, the functional connectivity within the network and the other properties of the network is poorly understood. Substantial evidence demonstrates that synchronous oscillations between two cortical areas may indicate functional connectivity between those areas. We test the hypothesis that cortical areas with pain-related activity are functionally connected during attention to a painful stimulus. We stimulated with a painful, cutaneous, laser stimulus and recorded the response directly from the cortical surface (electrocorticography - ECoG) over primary somatosensory (SI), parasylvian (PS), and medial frontal (MF) cortex through subdural electrodes implanted for treatment of epilepsy. The results demonstrate synchrony of ECoGs between cortical structures receiving input from nociceptors, as indicated by the occurrence of laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) and/or event-related desynchronization (ERD). Prior to the stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and PS regions, as the subject anticipated the stimulus. After the laser stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and MF cortex, as the subject responded by counting the stimulus. Therefore, attention to painful stimuli always enhanced synchrony between cortical pain-related structures. The pattern of this synchrony changed as the patient switched tasks from anticipation of the stimulus to counting the stimulus. These results are the first compelling evidence of pain networks characterized by rapidly switching, task-specific functional connectivity.",
keywords = "Attention, Cortex, Electrocorticography, Laser, Networks, Pain, Synchrony",
author = "S. Ohara and Crone, {N. E.} and N. Weiss and Lenz, {F. A.}",
note = "Funding Information: This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS38493 and NS40059 to F.A.L., and NS40596 to N.C.). We thank L.H. Rowland and D. Jackson for excellent technical assistance.",
doi = "10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012",
journal = "Pain",
T1 - Analysis of synchrony demonstrates 'pain networks' defined by rapidly switching, task-specific, functional connectivity between pain-related cortical structures
AU - Ohara, S.
AU - Crone, N. E.
AU - Weiss, N.
AU - Lenz, F. A.
N1 - Funding Information: This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS38493 and NS40059 to F.A.L., and NS40596 to N.C.). We thank L.H. Rowland and D. Jackson for excellent technical assistance.
N2 - Imaging studies indicate that experimental pain is processed in multiple cortical areas which are often characterized as a network. However, the functional connectivity within the network and the other properties of the network is poorly understood. Substantial evidence demonstrates that synchronous oscillations between two cortical areas may indicate functional connectivity between those areas. We test the hypothesis that cortical areas with pain-related activity are functionally connected during attention to a painful stimulus. We stimulated with a painful, cutaneous, laser stimulus and recorded the response directly from the cortical surface (electrocorticography - ECoG) over primary somatosensory (SI), parasylvian (PS), and medial frontal (MF) cortex through subdural electrodes implanted for treatment of epilepsy. The results demonstrate synchrony of ECoGs between cortical structures receiving input from nociceptors, as indicated by the occurrence of laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) and/or event-related desynchronization (ERD). Prior to the stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and PS regions, as the subject anticipated the stimulus. After the laser stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and MF cortex, as the subject responded by counting the stimulus. Therefore, attention to painful stimuli always enhanced synchrony between cortical pain-related structures. The pattern of this synchrony changed as the patient switched tasks from anticipation of the stimulus to counting the stimulus. These results are the first compelling evidence of pain networks characterized by rapidly switching, task-specific functional connectivity.
AB - Imaging studies indicate that experimental pain is processed in multiple cortical areas which are often characterized as a network. However, the functional connectivity within the network and the other properties of the network is poorly understood. Substantial evidence demonstrates that synchronous oscillations between two cortical areas may indicate functional connectivity between those areas. We test the hypothesis that cortical areas with pain-related activity are functionally connected during attention to a painful stimulus. We stimulated with a painful, cutaneous, laser stimulus and recorded the response directly from the cortical surface (electrocorticography - ECoG) over primary somatosensory (SI), parasylvian (PS), and medial frontal (MF) cortex through subdural electrodes implanted for treatment of epilepsy. The results demonstrate synchrony of ECoGs between cortical structures receiving input from nociceptors, as indicated by the occurrence of laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) and/or event-related desynchronization (ERD). Prior to the stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and PS regions, as the subject anticipated the stimulus. After the laser stimulus, directed attention to the painful stimulus consistently increased the degree of synchrony between SI and MF cortex, as the subject responded by counting the stimulus. Therefore, attention to painful stimuli always enhanced synchrony between cortical pain-related structures. The pattern of this synchrony changed as the patient switched tasks from anticipation of the stimulus to counting the stimulus. These results are the first compelling evidence of pain networks characterized by rapidly switching, task-specific functional connectivity.
KW - Attention
KW - Cortex
KW - Electrocorticography
KW - Laser
KW - Networks
KW - Synchrony
U2 - 10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
DO - 10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.012
JO - Pain
JF - Pain | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 7,851 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{intro}
Based on the simple but essential idea of diversification and optimal risk-return profile of an investment strategy, the mean-variance model by \citet{Markowitz.1952} still represents the groundwork for portfolio optimization. In its original design, Markowitz portfolio theory assumes perfect knowledge about the expected value and variance of returns. For practical implementations, however, these parameters have to be estimated from historical data. The misspecifications due to error in estimation can lead to strong deviations from optimality and therefore an inferior out-of-sample performance \citep{Jobson.1981, Frost.1986, Michaud.1989, Broadie.1993}. This major drawback has been tackled from different perspectives in the financial literature. Some focus on estimation errors in the portfolio weights directly \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Brodie.2009, DeMiguel.2009b}, whereas others work on the inputs by improving expected returns and the covariance matrix.
In particular, portfolio weights are extremely sensitive to changes in expected returns \citep{Best.1991b, Best.1991}, which in turn are more difficult to estimate than the covariances of returns \citep{Merton.1980}. It is therefore not surprising that a considerable part of recent academic research focuses on the global minimum-variance portfolio (GMV), as this does not depend on expected returns.\footnote{\citet{DeMiguel.2009} additionally show that the mean-variance portfolio is outperformed out-of-sample by the minimum-variance portfolio not only in terms of risk, but as well in respect to the return-risk ratio.} However, even if investors decide to use the global minimum-variance portfolio, the estimation errors associated with the covariances can still lead to significant estimation errors in the portfolio weights, especially in a high-dimensional scenario.
We cover several approaches that have been shown to overcome these estimation issues and perform well in terms of out-of-sample variance. For instance, we discuss the linear shrinkage estimators of \citet{Ledoit.2004, Ledoit.2004b} designed to offer an optimal bias-variance trade-off between the sample covariance matrix and a structured target matrix. Furthermore, we adopt the recent nonlinear shrinkage technique by \citet{Ledoit.2017} that is proven to be optimal under a variety of financially relevant loss functions \citep{Ledoit.2018b}. Since an underlying factor structure is considered a valid assumption for asset returns' covariance estimators, we outline the elaborate principal orthogonal complement thresholding (POET) estimator by \citet{Fan.2013}. In addition, we follow the findings of the recent empirical studies by \citet{Goto.2015} and \citet{Torri.2019} and include a sparse precision matrix estimator, namely the graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (GLASSO), which has so far received little attention in portfolio optimization research. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to compare state-of-the-art covariance estimators such as the nonlinear shrinkage and POET with the GLASSO and to prove its significant outperformance in a high-dimensional scenario.
More importantly, the selected covariance estimation methods share one thing in common: a regularization of the sample covariance is performed to optimize its out-of-sample performance. For example, linear shrinkage methods need an optimal shrinkage intensity to balance the included variance and bias, whereas the performance of the GLASSO depends on the level of sparsity, induced by a penalty parameter. The procedure for optimally identifying those tuning parameters often includes the choice of a specific loss function to be minimized. As often advocated, a loss function or measure of fit in the model estimation is best aligned with the evaluation framework \citep{Christoffersen.2004, Ledoit.2017, Engle.2019}. To exploit those effects in more detail, we apply a nonparametric cross-validation (CV) technique with different selection criteria to determine the optimal parameters, necessary for the calculation of all the considered covariance estimators.
Since we focus on enhancing the risk profile of the GMV portfolios, we choose two relevant risk-related measures for our data-driven estimation methodology and the corresponding out-of-sample performance evaluation, namely the mean squared forecasting error (MSFE), as in \citet{Zakamulin.2015}, and the out-of-sample portfolio variance. We show empirically that in most cases there exists a strong positive relation between the selection criterion within the CV and the respective out-of-sample performance measure. For instance, when the overall goal is to reduce the out-of-sample risk, then using CV with the portfolio variance as a measure of fit leads to lower risk than the original method. Similar results are documented by \citet{Liu.2014}, although he only considers the most straight-forward linear shrinkage as in \citet{Ledoit.2003, Ledoit.2004, Ledoit.2004b}. Here, we examine more recent and efficient estimation methods and identify those that can actually profit from a data-driven methodology. In detail, estimators that depend strongly on the choice of a specific tuning parameter within their derivation are more prone to be positively influenced by replacing the original solution with a data-driven one.
Our contributions to the current literature on the subject of covariance and precision matrix estimation within the portfolio optimization framework can be summarized as follows. First, we show that recent advances in methods for high-dimensional covariance estimation lead to strong improvements in the risk profile of the GMV. In this context, we emphasize the distinct and often significant outperformance of the GLASSO, which estimates sparse precision matrices by identifying pairs of zero partial auto-correlations in asset returns data. In line with the main discussion, we show that a model's outperformance in respect to out-of-sample portfolio variance does coincide with an identical objective within the CV. Although the elaborate method outlined in \citet{Ledoit.2017} is not strongly influenced by applying the CV procedure, all the other considered data-driven estimators perform better than their original counterparts. This advantage becomes even greater as the high-dimensionality of the data
increases. Considering the MSFE, the results are straightforward for all estimation methods. If an investor aims to minimize this measure, the respective data-driven estimation ought to be performed. Nonetheless, we analyze the inefficiency of the MSFE for high-dimensional asset returns' data, in particular, because of a distorted calculation of the realized covariance matrix. Finally, to test the robustness of our results, we examine the effects of the suggested methods on the GMV without short sales. As argued by \citet{Jagannathan.2003}, a constraint imposed on short sales is similar to the linear shrinkage technique since it reduces the impact of estimation errors on optimal portfolio weights. Nevertheless, we show that a CV with the portfolio variance as a selection criterion slightly improves the out-of-sample risk even in this scenario.
The rest of paper is organized as follows: In Section~\ref{sec:cov}, we review the considered covariance estimation methods and their properties. Section~\ref{sec:datadriven} outlines the suggested data-driven methodology in respect to its main characteristics: the cross-validation procedure, the parameter set, and the selection criteria. We describe the empirical study in Section~\ref{sec:empirical} with a strong focus on the chosen dataset, methodology and performance measures. In Section~\ref{sec:results}, we discuss the performance of classical and constrained GMV portfolios and analyze in detail the influence of data-driven estimation among all considered datasets and methods. Section~\ref{sec:conclusion} summarizes the results and concludes.
\section{Overview of the Estimation Methods}\label{sec:cov}
\subsection{Sample Covariance}\label{subsec:covsample}
The standard approach for estimating the covariance matrix of returns among researchers and practitioners is to use the sample estimator, defined as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covsample}
\widehat{{{\Sigma}}}_\mathit{S}=\frac{1}{T-1} \left({R} - \widehat{{\mu}} {1} \right)' \left({R} - \widehat{{\mu}}{1}\right),
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where ${R} \in \mathbb{R}^{T \times n}$ is the matrix of past asset returns with $T$ observations and $n$ number of stocks, $\widehat{{\mu}} \in \mathbb{R}^{n}$ is the vector of expected returns, here estimated with the sample mean, and ${1}$ is an $n$-dimensional vector of ones. As shown by \citet{Merton.1980}, the sample covariance matrix is an asymptotically unbiased and consistent estimator of the true covariance matrix ${\Sigma}$ in terms of the Frobenius norm $||\cdot||_2$ ´when the concentration ratio $q=n/T\rightarrow 0$. For a large number of assets a concentration ratio of such magnitude is practically infeasible due to limited data availability and illiquidity issues. With a high relation of the number of assets to the sample size, also called high-dimensionality, the sample covariance and its inverse exhibit higher amount of estimation error, mainly due to the over- and underestimation of the respective eigenvalues. Moreover, for $q>1$, the sample covariance becomes singular and the inverse cannot be calculated.
The sample estimator's instability and possible singularity in case of high-dimensionality are a problem within the optimization of global minimum-variance portfolios, where the covariance matrix and, specifically, its inverse capture the dependency between asset returns and allow for the effect of diversification as a way of reducing risk. It is then straightforward that the accuracy of optimally estimated portfolio weights is directly related to the estimator's precision. As a solution, several alternative estimators have been proposed in the literature.
\subsection{Linear Shrinkage}\label{subsec:covlin}
To produce more stable estimators of the covariance matrix, a linear shrinking procedure can be applied to the sample estimator towards a more structured target matrix $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{T}$,
\begin{linenomath*}
\[ \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{LS} = s\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{T} + \left(1- s\right)\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}\,,\]
\end{linenomath*}
where the constant $s\in[0,1]$ controls the shrinkage intensity, which is set higher the more ill-conditioned the sample estimator is and vice versa. In contrast to the unbiased, but unstable sample covariance, a structured target matrix has little estimation error but tends to be biased. As a compromise, the convex combination of both uses the bias-variance trade-off by accepting more bias in-sample in exchange for less variance out-of-sample. This idea is central to the shrinkage methodology of \citet{Stein.1956} and \citet{James.1961}. More recently, \citet{Ledoit.2004b} propose a set of asymptotically optimal shrinkage estimators and specify the identity matrix as a generic target matrix if no specific covariance structure is assumed. The respective linear shrinkage estimator is calculated as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covlwident}
\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{LW_\mathit{1}} = \widehat{s} \bar{\sigma} {I}_\mathit{n} + \left(1- \widehat{s}\right)\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}\,,
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $\bar{\sigma} = \frac{1}{n}\sum^{n}_{j=1}\sigma_\mathit{jj}$ is the average of all individual sample variances and $\widehat{s}$ is an optimal shrinkage intensity parameter. However, in the context of financial time series, it is beneficial to consider target matrices with reference to the correlation structure of asset returns.
\citet{Ledoit.2004} consider identical pairwise correlations between all $n$ assets. The target matrix is therefore derived under the constant correlation matrix model of \citet{Elton.1973}, so that $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{T}=\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{CC}$. While the variances are kept as their original sample values, the off-diagonal entries of the target matrix are estimated by assuming a constant average sample correlation $\bar{\rho}$. This results in $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{CC,ij}=\sqrt{\widehat{\sigma}_\mathit{ii}\widehat{\sigma}_\mathit{jj}\bar{\rho}}.$ The corresponding estimator is defined as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covlwcc}
\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{LW_\mathit{CC}} = \widehat{s} \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{CC} + \left(1- \widehat{s}\right)\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}\,.
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
The level of the shrinkage $\widehat{s}$ in Equations~\eqref{eq:covlwident} and \eqref{eq:covlwcc} can be obtained analytically. In particular, as shown by \citet{Ledoit.2004, Ledoit.2004b}, asymptotically consistent estimators for the optimal linear shrinkage intensity are derived under the quadratic loss function
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:frobloss}
\mathcal{L}\left( \widehat{{\Sigma}}, {\Sigma}\right) = \left|\left| \widehat{{\Sigma}} - {\Sigma}\right|\right|^2_\mathit{F},
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
known as the Frobenius loss, where the covariance estimator $\widehat{{\Sigma}}$ is substituted with Equation~\eqref{eq:covlwident} or \eqref{eq:covlwcc}. The finite sample solution is found at the minimum of the expected value of the Frobenius loss, namely the mean squared error (MSE),
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:optlinearshrink}
\widehat{s} = \argmin_{s} E\left[\left|\left| \widehat{{\Sigma}} - {\Sigma}\right|\right|^2_\mathit{F}\right].
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
The methodology behind this derivation can be applied to other shrinkage targets in a convex combination setting after an individually performed analysis and mathematical adaptation. Our data-driven implementation, however, can be implemented for any linear shrinkage without further modifications, since we do not rely on the theoretically derived shrinkage intensity; instead, we search for an optimal value using CV.
\subsection{Nonlinear Shrinkage}\label{subsec:covlwnonlin}
The nonlinear shrinkage method, first proposed by \citet{Ledoit.2012}, shrinks covariance entries by increasing small (underestimated) sample eigenvalues and decreasing large (overestimated) ones in an individual fashion. Without any assumption about the true covariance matrix, the positive-definite rotationally equivariant\footnote{This class of estimators was first introduced by \cite{Stein.1986}.} nonlinear shrinkage is based on the spectral decomposition of the sample covariance matrix and defined as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covlwnonlinear}
\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{LW_\mathit{NL}} = {V}\widehat{{\Lambda}}_\mathit{NL} {V}' \,,
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where ${V} = \left[{v}_\mathit{1}, \hdots, {v}_\mathit{n}\right]$ is the orthogonal matrix with the sample eigenvectors ${v}_\mathit{i}$ as columns and $\widehat{{\Lambda}}_\mathit{NL}$ is the diagonal matrix of the sample eigenvalues $\lambda_i$, shrunk as shown in \citet{Ledoit.2012, Ledoit.2015, Ledoit.2017, Ledoit.2018}. To find the optimal nonlinear shrinkage to the eigenvalues, \cite{Ledoit.2012} originally minimize the MSE in finite samples. Under the considered large-dimensional asymptotics from the field of Random Matrix Theory the Frobenius loss converges almost surely to a nonstochastic limit, guaranteeing the estimator's optimality.
Without going into further details, we examine the practical implementation of the nonlinear shrinkage, as demonstrated by \citet{Ledoit.2018}. The optimal solution is achieved using a nonparametric variable bandwidth kernel estimation of the limiting spectral density of the sample eigenvalues and its Hilbert transform. The speed at which the bandwidth vanishes in the number of assets $n$ can be set to $-0.2$ according to standard kernel density estimation theory \citep{Silverman.1986} or $-0.5$ following the Arrow model of \citet{Ledoit.2018b}. As a compromise between those two approaches, \citet{Ledoit.2018} suggest the value of $-0.35$. Within the suggested data-driven methodology, we aim to verify whether this exact choice of the kernel bandwidth's speed is crucial for the estimator's efficiency and whether applying the suggested CV technique can improve the out-of-sample performance.
\subsection{Approximate Factor Model}\label{subsec:covafm}
The previously outlined methods for improved high-dimensional covariance estimation do not assume any structural knowledge about the covariance matrix and regularize only the sample eigenvalues $\lambda_i$. An underlying structure could be established by regularizing the sample eigenvectors ${v}_i$, for example if the covariance matrix itself is assumed to be sparse \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Bickel.2008, Cai.2011}. Unfortunately, this is not appropriate for financial time series because of the presence of common factors \citep{Fan.2013}. However, if there is only conditional sparsity, the covariance matrix of investment returns can be estimated using factor models given by
\begin{linenomath*}
\[\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{FM} = {B}\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{F}{B}' + \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{u}\,,\]
\end{linenomath*}
where ${\Sigma}_\mathit{F}$ is the sample covariance matrix of the common factors and $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{u}$ is the residuals covariance matrix.\footnote{Following this definition and assuming $K$ common factors with $K<n$, a covariance matrix estimator based on factor models only needs to estimate $K(K+1)/2$ covariance entries and is thus more stable.} One disadvantage of such exact factor models is the strong assumption of no correlation in the error terms across assets; that is, the error covariance matrix $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{u}$ is assumed to contain only the sample variances of the residuals. Therefore, possible cross-sectional correlations are neglected after separating the common present factors \citep{Fan.2013}. Instead, approximate factor models allow for off-diagonal values within the error covariance matrix. The POET estimator is one of the most recent and efficient estimators from this branch of research. Using the close connection between factor models and the principal component analysis, \citet{Fan.2013} infer the necessary factor loadings by running a singular value decomposition on the sample covariance matrix as
\begin{linenomath*}
\[
{\Sigma}_\mathit{S}=\sum^{K}_{i=1}\lambda_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i}' + \sum^{n}_{i=K+1}\lambda_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i}'.
\]
\end{linenomath*}
The covariance, formed by the first $K$ principal components, contains most of the information about the implied structure. The rest is assumed to be an approximately sparse matrix, estimated by applying an adaptive thresholding procedure \citep{Cai.2011} with a threshold parameter $c$.\footnote{For the operational use of POET, the threshold value $c$ needs to be determined, so that the positive-definiteness of $\widehat{{\Sigma}}^{c}_\mathit{u,K}$ is assured in finite samples. The choice of $c$ can therefore occur from a set, for which the respective minimal eigenvalue of the errors' covariance matrix after thresholding is positive. The minimal constant $c$ that guarantees positive-definiteness is then chosen. For more details, see, \citet{Fan.2013}.} As a result, the POET estimator becomes
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covPOET}
{\Sigma}_\mathit{POET}=\sum^{K}_{i=1}\lambda_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i} {v}_\mathit{i}' + \widehat{{\Sigma}}^{c}_\mathit{u,K} \,.
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
As argued by \citet{Fan.2013}, for high-dimensional asset returns with a sufficiently large $n\rightarrow \infty$, the number of factors $K$ can be inferred from the data. A consistent data-driven estimator for $K$ is
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covPOETK}
\widehat{K}= \argmin_{0\leq k \leq k_\textrm{max}} \log\left(\frac{1}{nT}\left|\left| {R} - \frac{1}{T}{R} {F}_\mathit{k} {F}_\mathit{k}' \right|\right|^{2}_\mathit{F}\right) + k g\left(T,n\right),
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $k_\textrm{max}$ is the predefined maximum number of factors, ${R}$ is the matrix of asset returns with a sample covariance matrix ${\Sigma}_\mathit{S}$, ${F}_\mathit{k}$ is a $T\times k$ matrix with columns the eigenvectors, corresponding to the $k$ largest eigenvalues of ${\Sigma}_\mathit{S}$, and $ g\left(T,n\right)$ is a penalty function of the type, introduced by \citet{Bai.2002}. In this study we further examine whether the proposed CV approach can select optimal values for $K$ by considering the out-of-sample performance measure of interest as a selection criterion.
\subsection{Graphical Model}\label{subsec:covglasso}
A proper estimation of the covariance matrix of returns is crucial in a portfolio optimization context, since its inverse ${\Theta}={\Sigma}^{-1}$ is the direct input parameter necessary for exploiting diversification effects upon optimization. Instead of imposing a factor structure on the covariance matrix with a sparse error covariance as in POET, sparsity in the precision matrix can be a valid approach for reducing estimation errors, especially in the case of conditional independence among asset pairs \citep{Fan.2016}. In detail, the entry ${\Theta}_\mathit{i,j}=0$ if and only if asset returns ${r}_i$ and ${r}_j$ are independent, conditional on the other assets in the investment universe. Since graphical models are used to describe both the conditional and unconditional dependence structures of a set of variables, the estimation of ${\Theta}$ is closely related to graphs under a Gaussian model. The identification of zeros in the inverse can be performed with the Gaussian graphical model, since within the Markowitz portfolio optimization framework asset returns are assumed to follow a multivariate normal distribution.\footnote{This idea was first proposed by \cite{Dempster.1972} with the so-called covariance selection model.}
One of the most commonly used methods for inducing sparsity on the precision matrix is by penalizing the maximum-likelihood. For i.i.d. ${R}$ with ${R}\sim\mathcal{N}\left({0}, {\Sigma}\right)$, the Gaussian log-likelihood function is given by
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:loglike}
\mathcal{L}\left({\Theta}\right)= \log\left|{\Theta}\right| - \text{tr}\left( \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}{\Theta}\right),
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $|\cdot|$ denotes the determinant and $\textrm{tr}(.)$ the trace of a matrix. Maximizing Equation~\eqref{eq:loglike} alone yields the known maximum-likelihood estimator for the precision matrix $\widehat{{\Theta}}_\mathit{S}$, which suffers from high estimation error in case of high-dimensionality. To reduce such errors, the maximum log-likelihood function can be penalized by adding a lasso penalty \citep{Tibshirani.1996} on the precision matrix entries as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covglassologlike}
\mathcal{L}\left({\Theta}\right)= \log\left|{\Theta}\right| - \text{tr}\left( \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}{\Theta}\right) - \rho \left|\left|{\Theta}^{-}\right|\right|_1,
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $\left|\left|{\Theta}^{-}\right|\right|_1$ is the $L_1$-norm (the sum of the absolute values) of the matrix ${\Theta}^{-}$, an $n\times n$ matrix with the off-diagonal elements, equal to the corresponding elements of the precision matrix ${\Theta}$ and the diagonal elements equal to zero.\footnote{This insures that no penalty is applied to the asset returns' sample variances.} Furthermore, $\rho$ is a penalty parameter that controls the sparsity level, with higher $\rho$ values leading to a larger number of off-diagonal zero elements within the resulting estimator.
The penalized likelihood framework for a sparse graphical model estimation was first proposed by \citet{Yuan.2007}, who solve Equation~\eqref{eq:covglassologlike} with an interior-point method. \citet{Banerjee.2008} show that the problem is convex and solve it for ${\Sigma}$ with a box-constrained quadratic program. To date, the fastest available solution for the sparse graphical model in Equation~\eqref{eq:covglassologlike} is reached with the GLASSO algorithm, developed by \citet{Friedman.2008} and later improved by \citet{Witten.2011}. They demonstrate that the above formulation is equivalent to an N-coupled lasso problem and solve it using a coordinate descent procedure.
In addition to a well-performing algorithm, the value of $\rho$ is necessary for calculating the optimal GLASSO estimator. For this purpose, \citet{Yuan.2007} suggest using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), defined for each $\rho$ as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:covglassoBIC}
BIC(\rho) = - \log\left|\widehat{{\Theta}}_\mathit{\rho}\right| + \text{tr}\left( \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{S}\widehat{{\Theta}}_\mathit{\rho}\right) + \frac{\log(T)}{2} \sum^{n}_{i=1, i\neq j}\sum^{n}_{j = 1, j \neq i}\mathbbm{1}_{\{\widehat{{\Theta}}_\mathit{\rho,ij}\neq0\}},
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where the indicator function $\mathbbm{1}_{\{\widehat{{\Theta}}_{\rho,ij}\neq0\}}$ counts the number of nonzero off-diagonal elements in the estimated precision matrix. The value of $\rho$, corresponding to the lowest BIC, is chosen as the optimal lasso penalty parameter. The choice of the BIC as a selection criterion for $\rho$ is further justified by the relation between the penalized problem in Equation~\eqref{eq:covglassologlike} and the model selection criteria \citep{Goto.2015}. Although \citet{Yuan.2007} argue that a CV procedure for an optimal lasso penalty can yield better out-of-sample results, the existing financial applications estimate $\rho$ only once in-sample.\footnote{\citet{Goto.2015} induce sparsity to enhance robustness and lower the estimation error within portfolio hedging strategies, \citet{Brownlees.2018} develop a procedure called ``realized network'' by applying GLASSO as a regularization procedure for realized covariance estimators, and \citet{Torri.2019} analyze the out-of-sample performance of a minimum-variance portfolio, estimated with GLASSO.} By contrast, next to such conservative approach, we consider the superiority of data-driven methods in the context of lasso regularization and perform additionally a multi-fold CV with risk-related selection criteria. The exact methodology is described in the next section.
\section{Data-Driven Methodology}\label{sec:datadriven}
Each of the outlined covariance estimators includes an exogenous or data-dependent parameter. The linear shrinkage estimators in Equations~\eqref{eq:covlwident} and \eqref{eq:covlwcc} are calculated with an optimal shrinkage intensity $\widehat{s}$. For the more general nonlinear shrinkage \citet{Ledoit.2017} set the kernel bandwidth's speed at $-0.35$ as the average of two recognized approaches. The approximate factor model, the POET estimator by \citet{Fan.2013}, deals with an unknown number of factors $K$, which are identified by minimizing popular information criteria. Finally, the GLASSO estimator proposed by \citet{Friedman.2008} needs an optimal choice for the penalty parameter $\rho$, often estimated by minimizing the BIC in-sample. To clarify our analysis, we refer to these estimation methods as `original'. In addition, we adopt a nonparametric technique, a multi-fold CV, to identify the necessary parameter for each estimation method in a data-driven way. Instead of relying on pre-specified assumptions and deriving corresponding solutions individually, we perform a grid search over a domain of values and find the best possible parameter for two exemplary out-of-sample statistics.
\subsection{Parameter Set}\label{subsec:param}
To employ a data-driven choice, we first need to specify a domain of possible values for the necessary parameters that should be selected within the CV procedure. For this purpose we create a sequence (or grid) of arbitrary parameters $\delta \in \Delta$ for each covariance model. Depending on the chosen length of the sequence, the CV can be computationally time-consuming. Since the choice of this sequence is crucial for the out-of-sample efficiency of the data-driven methodology, the domain of possible parameters has to be individually evaluated for each estimation method by considering the trade-off between desired precision and computing time. Subsection~\ref{subsec:data} outlines the examined sequences for the considered covariance estimation methods.
\subsection{Cross-Validation Procedure}\label{subsec:cv}
The CV is a model validation technique designed to assess how an estimated model would perform on an unknown dataset. To evaluate the model accuracy, the available dataset is repeatedly split into a training and a testing subset in a rolling-window fashion \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Refaeilzadeh.2009, Arlot.2010}. For instance, in the case of an $m$-fold CV, a dataset with $\tau$ observations is split into $m$ equal parts. The first rolling-window then uses as a training dataset the first fold consisting of the first $\nu < \tau$ observations ordered by time. Upon this, the consecutive $\upsilon$ observations are used to validate the performed estimation as a test dataset. This is iteratively done $m$ times by shifting the training window by $\upsilon$ observations and, therefore, maintaining the chronological order within the data.
In our setting, for each of the pre-defined parameters we successively use the training data to calculate a covariance matrix estimator $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t,\delta}$ for a test dataset $t$ and a specific parameter $\delta$.\footnote{For clarity in the notation, we do not differentiate between covariance estimators. The procedure is applied to all methods equally.} During the following validation stage, we must set selection criteria, also referred to as measures of fit, to identify which parameter performs best. In this study, we investigate two common objectives within the field of portfolio risk minimization.
As often argued, the squared forecasting error (SFE) or, as defined in Section~\ref{sec:cov}, the Frobenius loss, is minimized to find a covariance estimator with the least forecasting error \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Zakamulin.2015}. Specifically, we first calculate a realized covariance matrix for the test dataset with
\begin{linenomath*}\[{\Sigma}_\mathit{t}= \left({R}_\mathit{t}- \widehat{{\mu}}_\mathit{t} {1} \right)' \left({R}_\mathit{t} - \widehat{{\mu}}_\mathit{t} {1} \right),\]\end{linenomath*}
where ${R}_\mathit{t}\in \mathbbm{R}^{\upsilon \times n}$ are the asset returns from the test dataset and $\widehat{\mu}_\mathit{t}$ is the vector of average returns for the testing period consisting of $\upsilon$ observations. Then, we find the corresponding SFE as
\begin{linenomath*}\[\left|\left|\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t,\delta} - {\Sigma}_\mathit{t}\right|\right|^2_\mathit{F}.\]\end{linenomath*}
This procedure is repeated $m$ times, so that we end up with $m$ SFE values for each $\delta$. From the parameter set we then choose this $\delta$ for which the average (over all $m$ iterations) SFE is minimized. In our empirical study, the data-driven estimation method with the SFE as a measure of fit is referred to as CV1.
Instead of the SFE, within a portfolio optimization framework, one is generally more interested in whether a covariance estimator leads to lower out-of-sample risk of the optimal portfolio \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Liu.2014, Ledoit.2017, Engle.2019}. To incorporate and later investigate this concept, as our second scenario (CV2), we minimize the out-of-sample portfolio variance. In detail, with the covariance matrix $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t, \delta}$, previously estimated with the training data, we calculate the optimal weights $\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t,\delta}$ for a portfolio of our choice (e.g., the GMV). This then allows us to calculate the respective portfolio returns throughout the testing period with $\upsilon$ observations as
\begin{linenomath*}\[{r}^p_\mathit{t, \delta}=\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t,\delta}'{R}_\mathit{t}.\]\end{linenomath*}
This procedure is repeated $m$ times, so that we end up with $m$ portfolio return vectors for each $\delta$. From the parameter set, we then choose this $\delta$ for which the empirical variance (over all $m$ iterations) of those portfolio out-of-sample returns is minimized.
By applying different measures of fit within the data-driven methodology we explicitly address the importance of aligned selection criteria for the out-of-sample performance of each covariance estimation method. Moreover, we aim to verify whether the estimation of covariance parameters with a multi-fold CV yields better results out-of-sample than the original models.
\section{Empirical Study}\label{sec:empirical}
To exploit the above considerations, we perform an extensive empirical study of the suggested covariance estimation methods within a high-dimensional portfolio optimization context. For this purpose, we create GMV portfolios with and without short sales and evaluate their out-of-sample performance for a range of commonly used measures. We additionally compare the theoretical covariance parameters with their calibrated equivalents. The exact empirical construct is elaborated on in the following subsections.
\subsection{Model Setup}\label{subsec:model}
For the empirical study, we focus on the GMV portfolio. The optimal weights for an investment period $t$ are determined by minimizing the portfolio variance as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:gmv}
\begin{aligned}
\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t} = \argmin_{{w}} \quad & {w}' \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t} {w}\\
\textrm{s.t.} \quad & {1}_n' {w} = 1\,,
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where ${1}_n$ is an n-dimensional vector of ones and $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t}$ is an arbitrary covariance matrix estimator for the investment period $t$. This formulation has the analytical solution $\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t}=\frac{\widehat{{\Sigma}}^{-1}_\mathit{t}{1}_n}{{1}_n'\widehat{{\Sigma}}^{-1}_\mathit{t}{1}_n}.$
Furthermore, we consider a GMV portfolio with an imposed constraint on the weights (GMV-NOSHORT),
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:gmvnoshort}
\begin{aligned}
\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t} = \argmin_{{w}} \quad & {w}' \widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t} {w}\\
\textrm{s.t.} \quad & {1}_n' {w} = 1 \textrm{ and } {w}\geq {0}\,,
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
which is a quadratic optimization problem with linear constraints that can be solved with every popular quadratic optimization software.\footnote{The measure of fit within CV2, the portfolio variance, depends on the estimated optimal weights. When short sales are allowed, we use the solution of Equation~\eqref{eq:gmv} to calculate the portfolio variance as in Subsection~\ref{subsec:cv}. For the case of GMV-NOSHORT, we solve Equation~\eqref{eq:gmvnoshort} within the CV.} As discussed by recent literature \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Jagannathan.2003, DeMiguel.2009}, the introduction of a short-sale constraint is not only practically relevant because of common fund rules or budget constraints for individual investors. It moreover limits the estimation error in the portfolio weights. As a consequence, we would expect a slightly reduced effect of the estimation methods' efficiency in respect to the out-of-sample performance. The empirical analysis of GMV-NOSHORT portfolios thus aims to complement our study and to ensure the practical reproducibility and relevance of our results.
\subsection{Data and Methodology}\label{subsec:data}
To test the performance of the proposed covariance matrix estimation methods, we utilize four S\&P\,500 related datasets, which differ only in the number of assets used: 50, 100, 200 and 250 stocks. Throughout our study the datasets are referred to as 50SP, 100SP, 200SP and 250SP, respectively. Choosing datasets with different quantities of assets, we aim to study the behavior of covariance estimators when the concentration ratio becomes increasingly large in-sample. As common within the research on such high-dimensional covariance estimation \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Fan.2013, Ledoit.2017, Engle.2019}, we consider daily prices.\footnote{The price history originates from the Thomson Reuters EIKON database.} For our out-of-sample analysis we use daily returns, starting on 01/01/1990 and ending on 12/31/2018. Overall, our data include observations for $T=348$ months (or 7306 days) per asset.
To ensure the stability in our results, we randomly select the necessary number of stocks among all the companies that have survived throughout the investigated period and keep them as the investment universe for our empirical study. Since the chosen datasets consist of individual stocks, the adopted investment strategies can be recreated easily and cost efficiently in practice by simply buying or selling the respective amount of stocks.
To evaluate the out-of-sample performance of the constructed portfolios and, implicitly, the covariance estimation methods, we adopt a rolling-window study with an in-sample period of two years, $\tau=24$ months (or roughly 504 days), and an out-of-sample period from 01/01/1992 to 12/31/2018, resulting in $T-\tau=324$ months (or 6801 days) out-of-sample portfolio returns. Similarly to the original studies on the reviewed covariance estimation methods \citep{Fan.2013, Ledoit.2017, Engle.2019}, we employ a monthly rebalancing strategy, since this is more cost efficient and common in practice. Within each rolling-window step, the covariance matrix of asset returns for the investment month $t$ is estimated at the end of month $t-1$ using approximately the most recent 504 daily in-sample observations.
In our empirical study, the sample covariance estimator serves as a benchmark to the high-dimensional estimation methods and considered data-driven adjustments in terms of out-of-sample risk. For the application of the nonlinear shrinkage, we use the MATLAB-code provided by Ledoit and Wolf.\footnote{\url{https://www.econ.uzh.ch/en/people/faculty/wolf/publications.html}.}. The POET estimator is calculated using the R-package \verb|POET| provided by \citet{Fan.2013}. As suggested by the authors, we adopt a soft-thresholding rule as well as a data-driven derivation of the number of factors and the thresholding constant for the original version of the method. Finally, the GLASSO estimator is calculated with the algorithm provided by \cite{Friedman.2008} within the R-package \verb|glasso| with no penalty on the diagonal elements.
In addition to the models in Section~\ref{sec:cov}, we calculate the data-driven estimators as in Section~\ref{sec:datadriven} by applying an $m$-fold CV. To calculate the selection criteria for the respective CV methods, we choose $m=12$ and therefore divide the in-sample observations into a training sample of 12 months (or 252 days) and a testing sample of one month (or 21 days). With this construction, we replicate the proposed monthly rebalancing strategy inside the performed CV. As introduced in Subsection~\ref{subsec:param}, we additionally need to define a set of parameters for each covariance estimation method.
Since both linear shrinkage methods in Equation~\eqref{eq:covlwident} (LW\textsubscript{1}) and Equation~\eqref{eq:covlwcc} (LW\textsubscript{CC}) represent the weighted average between the sample and a target covariance matrix, we define a parameter set $\Delta$ of G shrinkage intensities, such that $\Delta_\mathit{1}=\Delta_\mathit{CC}=\left(\delta_1, \delta_2, \hdots, \delta_G\right)\in\left[0,1\right]$. Considering the reasoning in Subsection~\ref{subsec:covlwnonlin}, for the nonlinear shrinkage estimator in Equation~\eqref{eq:covlwnonlinear} (LW\textsubscript{NL}), we set the kernel bandwidth's speed to lie between $-0.2$ and $-0.5$ with $\Delta_\mathit{NL}=\left(\delta_1, \delta_2, \hdots, \delta_G\right)\in\left[-0.2,-0.5 \right]$. Since the accuracy of a data-driven estimation depends on the number of examined parameters, with more parameters allowing for finer results, we consider a linear grid of $G=1000$ equidistant values in the above cases. Furthermore, for the POET estimator, we consider $\Delta_\mathit{POET}=\left(\delta_1, \delta_2, \hdots, \delta_G\right)\in \{1,2,\ldots,6\}$. For the GLASSO estimator, we follow \citet{Friedman.2008} and choose a sequence of penalty parameters $\rho$, derived from the training data. Specifically, we define a logarithmic sequence $10^{\log_{10}(k(x, e, u, G))}$ as our $\rho$-generating function, where $k(x, e, u, G)=(x-1)\cdot\frac{e-u}{G-1}+u$ with $G=50$ number of parameters in the sequence, $u$ being the maximal absolute value of the sample covariance matrix, estimated with the training dataset, and $e=0.01u$.
After calculating all the possible combinations of original and data-driven estimators within the validation subset, we choose an optimal parameter for each covariance estimation method, as outlined in Subsection~\ref{subsec:cv}, and use all the in-sample data to estimate the covariance matrix for the next investment month. Since the reviewed estimation methods and our data-driven methodology do not model time-dependency in the covariance matrix, we set $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t}=\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t-1}$. We use $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_\mathit{t}$ to find the optimal weights $\widehat{{w}}_\mathit{t}$, as in Equations~\eqref{eq:gmv} and \eqref{eq:gmvnoshort}. With these weights, we calculate the out-of-sample portfolio returns for each model in $t$. This procedure is repeated multiple times until the end of our investment horizon.
Overall, our study covers 17 different portfolios for each scenario with and without short sales. First, we include the equally-weighted portfolio, hereafter also referred to as the Naive portfolio. This strategy implies an identity covariance matrix and hence, does not include any estimation risk \citep{DeMiguel.2009}. In addition to the Naive strategy, which is a standard benchmark when comparing induced transaction costs, we build a GMV portfolio with the sample covariance matrix estimator, which serves as a benchmark for the out-of-sample risk. For each of the five high-dimensional covariance estimation methods discussed in Section~\ref{sec:cov}, we construct portfolios with the original and calibrated parameters, resulting in three versions for each estimation methodology. All these portfolios are evaluated with the performance measures, presented in the following subsection.
\subsection{Performance Measures}\label{subsec:perf}
To evaluate the out-of-sample performance of each covariance matrix estimation method, we report different performance measures for the estimator's efficiency and the risk profile as well as the allocation properties of the corresponding GMV and GMV-NOSHORT portfolios. First, we calculate the MSFE as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:MSFE}
\text{MSFE}=\frac{1}{T-\tau}\sum^{T-\tau}_{t=\tau}\sum^{n}_{i=1}\sum^{i}_{j=1}\left({\Sigma}_{t, ij} - \widehat{{\Sigma}}_{t, ij}\right)^2,
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $\widehat{{\Sigma}}_{t, ij}$ is the covariance matrix estimator and ${\Sigma}_{t, ij}$ is the realized covariance for month $t$. The MSFE is frequently used to measure the forecasting power of an estimation method. To avoid double accounting for forecasting errors, we exclude the lower triangular part of both matrices from the calculation.
Considering the nature of minimum-variance portfolios as risk-reduction strategies, we are especially interested in the out-of-sample SD as a performance indicator. We calculate the standard deviation (SD) of the 6801 out-of-sample portfolio returns and multiply by $\sqrt{252}$ to annualize it. For a more detailed analysis of the out-of-sample risk of the constructed portfolios and therefore, implicitly, covariance estimation methods, we perform the two-sided Parzen Kernel HAC-test for differences in variances, as described by \citet{Ledoit.2008} and \citet{Ledoit.2011}, and report the corresponding significance levels. Since we utilize daily returns, a sufficient number of observations is available and a bootstrap technique is not essential.\footnote{For the sake of completeness, we have also performed a block bootstrap as in \citet{Ledoit.2011}. The corresponding significant values are comparable to those from the HAC test and are therefore not reported.} Since the MSFE is closely related to the SFE optimality criterion, as within the CV1 method, we expect the respectively optimized covariance estimators to exhibit a lower MSFE than their original versions. Moreover, a data-driven estimation with the CV2 approach, based on minimizing the portfolio variance, is expected to result in a lower out-of-sample SD.
In practice investors need to additionally address the problem of high transaction costs; hence, they prefer a more stable allocation for an optimal portfolio strategy. Therefore, as a proxy for occurring transaction costs, we analyze the average monthly turnover, defined as
\begin{linenomath*}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:turnover}
\textrm{Turnover}=\frac{1}{T-\tau-1}\sum^{T-\tau-1}_{t=\tau}\left|\left|\widehat{{w}}_{t+1}-\widehat{{w}}^{+}_{t}\right|\right|_1,
\end{equation}
\end{linenomath*}
where $||\cdot||_1$ denotes the $\ell_1$-norm of a vector as the sum of its absolute values and $\widehat{{w}}^{+}_{t}$ denotes the portfolio weights at the end of the investment month $t$, scaled back to one. The turnover rate is calculated as the averaged sum of absolute values of the monthly rebalancing trades across all $n$ assets and over all investment dates $T-\tau-1$. The next section reports the detailed out-of-sample performance analysis and empirical results.
\section{Empirical Results}\label{sec:results}
In the empirical part to this paper we compare how the original and data-driven methods for estimating the covariance matrix of returns affect the out-of-sample performance of GMV portfolios with and without short positions. This section examines the out-of-sample properties of the three estimation methodologies (original, CV1 and CV2).
\subsection{Optimal Parameters}
Figure~\ref{fig:covparameterLW1} exemplary displays the selected linear shrinkage intensities for the original as well as CV1- and CV2-based LW\textsubscript{1} estimation methods in the case of 50 stocks.\footnote{Figure~\ref{fig:covparameters} shows the evolution of the selected parameters for the remaining covariance estimation methods in the case of the 50 considered stocks. The other three datasets produce similar results. To our surprise, the code for the POET estimator provided by \citet{Fan.2013} produces a consistent $K=2$ number of factors throughout the observation period and for all four datasets.} The trend of the optimal linear shrinkage intensities shows that the original approach of \citet{Ledoit.2004b} is less reactive to changes in asset returns than our CV methodologies. The strong fluctuation in the selected shrinkage intensity for CV1 and CV2 results from their data-driven nature which implies fast adaptation to potentially changing market conditions. Nevertheless, such volatility in the parameter estimation could have negative effects on the out-of-sample properties of the corresponding estimators and thus, the estimated portfolios (e.g., in terms of turnover or an overall risk level). Therefore, the sole observation of the chosen parameters cannot lead to a clear conclusion on whether the CV technique enhances the covariance matrix estimator and the respective portfolio performance. In the following subsections we examine this behavior for the GMV portfolios with short sales.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
\resizebox*{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{Figure_Parameter_50sp_LW-ONEPARAM.pdf}}
\caption{Optimally selected shrinkage intensity for the original, CV1, and CV2 estimations for LW\textsubscript{1} and the 50SP dataset.}\label{fig:covparameterLW1}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{GMV with short sales}\label{subsec:resultsgmv}
Table~\ref{table:perf} presents the central results of our empirical analysis on the GMV portfolio. The columns show the investment universes with 50, 100, 200 and 250 randomly chosen S\&P 500 stocks as well as the three performance measures MSFE, SD and average monthly turnover rate (TO). The rows indicate the portfolio strategies based on the covariance estimation. While the original estimators are noted only by the respective name of the estimation method, the endings CV1 and CV2 represent the data-driven approaches, as explained in the previous sections.
\begin{sidewaystable}[ph!]
\caption{Performance of GMV portfolios across different estimators and datasets.}\label{table:perf}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{threeparttable}
\begin{tabular}{l*{3}c@{\hskip 0.3in}*3{c}@{\hskip 0.3in}*3{c}@{\hskip 0.3in}*3{c}}\toprule
\multicolumn{3}{r}{50SP} & \multicolumn{3}{r}{100SP} & \multicolumn{3}{r}{200SP} & \multicolumn{3}{r}{250SP} \\ \midrule
& MSFE & SD & TO & MSFE & SD & TO & MSFE & SD & TO & MSFE & SD & TO \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
Naive & & 0.1887 & 0.0596 & & 0.1811 & 0.0587 & & 0.1852 & 0.0601 & & 0.1858 & 0.0592 \\
Sample & 0.0974 & 0.1265 & 0.3426 & 0.3224 & 0.1163 & 0.6578 & 1.3344 & 0.1180 & 1.5118 & 1.9834 & 0.1216 & 2.0891 \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{1} & 0.0970 & 0.1250 & 0.2945 & 0.3211 & 0.1132 & 0.5229 & 1.3297 & 0.1092 & 0.9742 & 1.9768 & 0.1074 & 1.2052 \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV1 & \underline{\textbf{0.0887}} & 0.1263 & 0.2623 & \underline{\textbf{0.2911}} & 0.1145 & 0.4527 & \underline{\textbf{1.1980}} & 0.1112 & 0.8662 & \underline{\textbf{1.7720}} & 0.1120 & 1.3532 \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 & 0.0953 & \textbf{0.1248} & \textbf{0.2236} & 0.3074 & \textbf{0.1112} & \underline{\textbf{0.3017}} & 1.2621 & \textbf{0.1053} & \textbf{0.4229} & 1.8644 & \textbf{0.1019} & \textbf{0.4998} \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{CC} & 0.0972 & 0.1244 & 0.2773 & 0.3218 & 0.1130 & 0.5097 & 1.3336 & 0.1092 & 1.0257 & \textbf{1.9819} & 0.1060 & 1.2435 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV1 & \textbf{0.0967} & 0.1261 & \textbf{0.2469} & \textbf{0.3214} & 0.1146 & 0.4365 & \textbf{1.3333} & 0.1098 & 0.8360 & 1.9825 & 0.1083 & 1.4716 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 & 0.0971 & \textbf{0.1244} & 0.2474 & 0.3218 & \textbf{0.1120} & \textbf{0.3699} & 1.3508 & \textbf{0.1076} & \textbf{0.5502} & 2.0050 & \textbf{0.1025} & \textbf{0.6201} \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{NL} & 0.0974 & 0.1246 & \textbf{0.2753} & 0.3222 & 0.1118 & \textbf{0.4336} & 1.3329 & 0.1053 & \textbf{0.6712} & 1.9811 & 0.1020 & \textbf{0.7307} \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV1 & \textbf{0.0973} & 0.1247 & 0.2817 & \textbf{0.3221} & 0.1118 & 0.4406 & \textbf{1.3322} & \textbf{0.1053} & 0.6798 & \textbf{1.9810} & \textbf{0.1020} & 0.7396 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2 & 0.0974 & \textbf{0.1246} & 0.2817 & 0.3221 & \textbf{0.1118} & 0.4393 & 1.3329 & 0.1053 & 0.6774 & 1.9811 & 0.1021 & 0.7397 \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
POET & 0.0975 & \textbf{0.1238} & \textbf{0.2855} & 0.3225 & 0.1119 & \textbf{0.5233} & 1.3336 & \textbf{0.1070} & \textbf{1.1009} & 1.9843 & \textbf{0.1041} & \textbf{1.4242} \\
POET-CV1 & \textbf{0.0974} & 0.1240 & 0.2974 & \textbf{0.3223} & 0.1115 & 0.5457 & \textbf{1.3333} & 0.1072 & 1.1384 & \textbf{1.9831} & 0.1054 & 1.5588 \\
POET-CV2 & 0.0974 & 0.1239 & 0.3062 & 0.3224 & \textbf{0.1114} & 0.5456 & 1.3343 & 0.1072 & 1.1879 & 1.9836 & 0.1044 & 1.5188 \\
& & & & & & & & & & & & \\
GLASSO & 0.0974 & 0.1242 & 0.4552 & 0.3222 & 0.1105 & 0.5522 & 1.3303 & 0.1054 & 0.5385 & 1.9668 & 0.1017 & 0.6117 \\
GLASSO-CV1 & \textbf{0.0941} & 0.1263 & 0.2299 & \textbf{0.3072} & 0.1147 & \textbf{0.3148} & \textbf{1.2591} & 0.1124 & \underline{\textbf{0.3410}} & \textbf{1.8577} & 0.1099 & \underline{\textbf{0.3603}} \\
GLASSO-CV2 & 0.0967 & \underline{\textbf{0.1221}} & \underline{\textbf{0.2178}} & 0.3180 & \underline{\textbf{0.1088}} & 0.3164 & 1.3159 & \underline{\textbf{0.1046}} & 0.4042 & 1.9579 & \underline{\textbf{0.1008}} & 0.4150 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}
\item This table reports the annualized out-of-sample SD and average monthly turnover (TO) of the GMV portfolios as well as the monthly MSFE of the respective covariance estimators across all the considered datasets with 50, 100, 200 and 250 stocks, respectively. Since the Naive portfolio strategy does not require a covariance estimator per definition, no values are reported for the MSFE. We report the lowest MSFE, SD, and TO for each estimation method in bold. The best results in terms of the MSFE and SD for each dataset are underlined. We additionally underline the lowest TO, excluding the Naive portfolio.
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
}
\end{sidewaystable}
The compact representation of the results allows us to observe that in the case of enhanced covariance estimators the annualized SD declines as more assets are included in the GMV portfolio. This is easily explained by the known power of diversification -- the desirable effect of including more stocks in a portfolio. Not surprisingly however, the estimation error with the sample covariance estimator diminishes the positive diversification effect, as shown by the increase in out-of-sample risk for the scenarios with 200 and 250 stocks. All the efficient covariance estimation methods perform better than the sample estimator in terms of out-of-sample risk for all the datasets, with larger deviations for a higher concentration ratios.\footnote{Figure~\ref{fig:sdcomparison} provides a more visually attractive summary of the results for the GMV portfolios in terms of out-of-sample risk. For those estimation methods more susceptible to the tuning parameter, the differences in SD between the original, CV1, and CV2 methods are more pronounced.}
More importantly, we can clearly detect the positive effect of the appropriate choice of selection criterion for determining the necessary covariance parameters. For all the datasets, minimizing the portfolio variance with the CV2 approach indeed leads to lower out-of-sample SD for the linear shrinkage methods LW\textsubscript{1} and LW\textsubscript{CC} and the GLASSO estimator. Especially noteworthy is the continuous and strong risk-reduction property of the GLASSO model alone and in combination with CV2. First, among the original models, the GLASSO estimation produces the best results for the 100SP and 250SP datasets. Second, when the sparsity parameter for the GLASSO estimation is selected with the CV2 approach, outperformance is superior for all the datasets. Hence, in respect to out-of-sample risk, applying graph models to induce sparsity within the precision matrix seems to be a valid approach, even in comparison to highly sophisticated methods such as the nonlinear shrinkage and approximate factor models. Interestingly, for the latter, the CV2 method does not lead to consistent outperformance in terms of risk. The original version of POET performs better than POET-CV2 in all cases but the 100SP dataset. In the case of GMV portfolios with short sales this result implies that the application of the CV with selection criteria such as SFE (CV1) and out-of-sample portfolio variance (CV2) does not result in a more optimal number of factors than the originally established function in Equation~\eqref{eq:covPOETK}. Moreover, for LW\textsubscript{NL}, there is almost no relevant difference in annualized out-of-sample SD. We can therefore argue that the efficiency of LW\textsubscript{NL} does not strongly depend on the choice of the kernel bandwidth's speed and hence, a data-driven specification cannot lead to an improvement in the performance out-of-sample.
For the CV1 approach, the investigation of the MSFE is mandatory. The values reported in Table~\ref{table:perf} indicate the distinct effect of the CV1 approach on the minimization of the MSFE out-of-sample. For all the estimation methods and datasets, except the isolated case of LW\textsubscript{CC} for 250SP, the MSFE is the lowest for the CV1 version of every estimator. Even robust estimators such as LW\textsubscript{NL} and POET exhibit higher forecasting power, measured by the MSFE, when the corresponding parameters are estimated with the CV1 approach. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the MSFE measure does not seem to proxy for the out-of-sample portfolio risk level. Within the financial literature including \citet{Zakamulin.2015}, the MSFE is studied in reference to datasets with low concentration ratios. Within a high-dimensional setting, however, a lower MSFE does not coincide with lower SD out-of-sample for any of the datasets or estimation methods.\footnote{Only the LW\textsubscript{NL} estimator for the 200SP and 250SP datasets yields the lowest risk levels and lowest MSFE for the CV1 approach. This result is merely based on a negligible difference and can thus be ignored.} Under the CV1 method, the SFE is computed as an estimator's squared distance to the monthly realized covariance matrix, calculated on the basis of daily returns (roughly 21 days) for $n$ assets. The implied concentration ratios, ranging from $50/21=2.38$ for the 50SP dataset to $250/21=11.90$ for the 250SP dataset, lead to ill-conditioned realized covariance matrices and a noisy SFE calculation.\footnote{To solve this problem, recent financial studies have focused on improving the estimation of large realized covariance matrices \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Hautsch.2012, Callot.2017, Bollerslev.2018}.} Therefore, we focus our further analysis on the CV2 approach.
To understand the magnitude of improvements in the CV2-based estimation methods as well as the superiority of the GLASSO method, Table~\ref{table:sign_250sp} presents the differences in annualized SDs and the respective pairwise significance levels across all the original covariance estimators and their CV2-based counterparts for the high-dimensional case of the 250SP dataset.\footnote{Appendix~\ref{app:gmv} compares further datasets. Overall, the results are similar in tendency, but are less pronounced due to a lower dimensionality in the data.} Table~\ref{table:sign_250sp} is to be read column-wise; that is, the difference in SD for the LW\textsubscript{1} and Sample estimator is listed under the second column for the first row. For completeness, we construct the table symmetrically. Still, we focus our attention on the elements above the diagonal only.
\begin{sidewaystable}[pt!]
\centering
\caption{Differences in SD p.a. of GMV-250SP across different estimators.\label{table:sign_250sp}}
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\begin{threeparttable}
\begin{tabular}{l *{11}{d{2.6}}}
\toprule
& \mc{Sample} &\mc{LW\textsubscript{1}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{CC}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{NL}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2} & \mc{POET} & \mc{POET-CV2} & \mc{GLASSO} & \mc{GLASSO-CV2} \\
\midrule
Sample & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.045,0.815,0.193}-0.01420^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01967^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01557^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01903^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01955^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01948^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01746^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01715^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.01988^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.02075^{***} \\
LW\textsubscript{1} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01420 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.394,0.931,0.134}-0.00547^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.557,0.986,0.107}-0.00137^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.419,0.94,0.13}-0.00483^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.398,0.933,0.134}-0.00535^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.401,0.934,0.133}-0.00528^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.482,0.961,0.12}-0.00326^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.494,0.965,0.118}-0.00295^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.385,0.928,0.136}-0.00568^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.35,0.917,0.142}-0.00655^{***} \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01967 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00547 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00410^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.861,1,0.279}0.00064 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.811,1,0.378}0.00012 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.818,1,0.365}0.00019 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.979,0}0.00220^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.908,0}0.00252^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.658,1,0.187}-0.00021 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.569,0.99,0.105}-0.00108 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01557 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.93,1,0.141}0.00137 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.448,0.949,0.125}-0.00410 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.474,0.958,0.121}-0.00346^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.453,0.951,0.125}-0.00398^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.456,0.952,0.124}-0.00391^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.536,0.979,0.111}-0.00189^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.549,0.983,0.109}-0.00158^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.44,0.947,0.127}-0.00431^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.405,0.935,0.133}-0.00518^{***} \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01903 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00483 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.586,0.995,0.102}-0.00064 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.57,0}0.00346 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.591,0.997,0.102}-0.00052 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.594,0.998,0.101}-0.00045 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.948,1,0.104}0.00156 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.978,1,0.044}0.00188 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.578,0.993,0.104}-0.00085 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.543,0.981,0.11}-0.00173 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01955 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00535 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.722,1,0.283}-0.00012 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.309,0}0.00398 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.85,1,0.301}0.00052 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.807,1,0.387}0.00007 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.998,1,0.005}0.00209^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.934,0}0.00240^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.599,1,0.1}-0.00033 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.564,0.988,0.106}-0.00120 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01948 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00528 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.674,1,0.212}-0.00019 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.344,0}0.00391 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.843,1,0.314}0.00045 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.753,1,0.329}-0.00007 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.991,1,0.018}0.00202^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.95,0}0.00233^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.596,0.999,0.101}-0.00040 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.561,0.987,0.106}-0.00127 \\
POET & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01746 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.667,0}0.00326 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.524,0.975,0.113}-0.00220 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.979,1,0.041}0.00189 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.549,0.983,0.108}-0.00156 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.529,0.976,0.112}-0.00209 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.531,0.977,0.111}-0.00202 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.83,1,0.34}0.00032 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.515,0.972,0.114}-0.00242 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.481,0.96,0.12}-0.00329^{**} \\
POET-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01715 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.811,0}0.00295 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.511,0.97,0.115}-0.00252 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.949,1,0.101}0.00158 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.537,0.979,0.111}-0.00188 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.516,0.972,0.114}-0.00240 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.519,0.973,0.114}-0.00233 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.599,1,0.1}-0.00032 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.503,0.968,0.116}-0.00273^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.468,0.956,0.122}-0.00361^{**} \\
GLASSO & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.01988 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00568 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.82,1,0.36}0.00021 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00431 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.881,1,0.239}0.00085 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.831,1,0.338}0.00033 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.838,1,0.325}0.00040 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.931,0}0.00242 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.86,0}0.00273 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.577,0.992,0.104}-0.00087^{**} \\
GLASSO-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.02075 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00655 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.903,1,0.195}0.00108 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00518 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.963,1,0.073}0.00173 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.914,1,0.172}0.00120 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.92,1,0.159}0.00127 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.654,0}0.00329 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.497,0}0.00361 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.883,1,0.235}0.00087 & \\ \midrule
better than \% of models & 0.0 & 0.1 & 0.8 & 0.2 & 0.5 & 0.7 & 0.6 & 0.4 & 0.3 & 0.9 & 1.0 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}
\item This table shows the differences in the annualized out-of-sample SD of the GMV-250SP portfolios across the main covariance estimation methods and their CV2-based counterparts. The table is constructed in a symmetrical way with an applied color scheme from red (higher SD than the other model) to green (lower SD than the other model). In addition, on the elements above the diagonal, the significant pairwise outperformance in terms of variance is denoted by asterisks: *** denotes significance at the 0.001 level; ** denotes significance at the 0.01 level; and * denotes significance at the 0.05 level. Finally, for each model, we report the percentage of the other models that exhibit higher variance as a qualitative measure.
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
}
\vspace{1cm}
\caption{Differences in SD p.a. of GMV-NOSHORT-250SP across different estimators\label{table:sign_250sp_noshort}}
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\begin{threeparttable}
\begin{tabular}{l *{11}{d{2.6}}}
\toprule
& \mc{Sample} &\mc{LW\textsubscript{1}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{CC}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{NL}} & \mc{LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2} & \mc{POET} & \mc{POET-CV2} & \mc{GLASSO} & \mc{GLASSO-CV2} \\
\midrule
Sample & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.85,1,0.299}-0.00001 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.729,1,0.068}-0.00016 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.134,0.845,0.178}-0.00051 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.829,0.971,0.341}0.00005 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00051 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.392,0}0.00047 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.307,0.902,0.149}-0.00040^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.191,0.864,0.168}-0.00047^{***} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.935,0.865,0.129}0.00023 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00060 \\
LW\textsubscript{1} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.805,0.995,0.39}0.00001 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.746,1,0.064}-0.00015 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.148,0.849,0.175}-0.00050 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.834,0.966,0.331}0.00006 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00052^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.367,0}0.00048^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.321,0.907,0.147}-0.00039 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.204,0.868,0.166}-0.00046^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.94,0.86,0.119}0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00059 \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.896,0.904,0.207}0.00016 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.891,0.909,0.217}0.00015 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.401,0.934,0.133}-0.00034 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.926,0.874,0.149}0.00021 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00067^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00063 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.575,0.992,0.104}-0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.458,0.953,0.124}-0.00031^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.636,0}0.00039 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.249,0.883,0.159}-0.00044 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC} & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.28,0}0.00051 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.306,0}0.00050 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.779,0}0.00034 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00055 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00101 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00097 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.862,0.938,0.275}0.00010 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.82,0.98,0.359}0.00003 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00073 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.875,1,0.031}-0.00009 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.965,1,0.009}-0.00005 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.948,1,0.013}-0.00006 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.625,1,0.094}-0.00021 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.052,0.817,0.191}-0.00055 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.42,0}0.00046 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.544,0}0.00042 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.226,0.875,0.162}-0.00045 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.109,0.836,0.182}-0.00052 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.906,0.894,0.188}0.00018 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00065 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.127,0.842,0.179}-0.00051 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.114,0.838,0.181}-0.00052 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00067 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00101 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.209,0.87,0.165}-0.00046 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.984,1,0.004}-0.00004^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00091^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00098^{**} & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.503,0.968,0.116}-0.00028 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00111 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.194,0.865,0.168}-0.00047 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.181,0.86,0.17}-0.00048 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00063 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00097 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.276,0.892,0.154}-0.00042 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.824,0.976,0.352}0.00004 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00087^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00094^* & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.57,0.99,0.105}-0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00107 \\
POET & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.603,0}0.00040 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.628,0}0.00039 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.942,0.858,0.116}0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.849,1,0.038}-0.00010 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.451,0}0.00045 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00091 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00087 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.921,1,0.02}-0.00007 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00063 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.654,1,0.087}-0.00020 \\
POET-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.385,0}0.00047 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.411,0}0.00046 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.984,0.816,0.032}0.00031 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.997,1,0.001}-0.00003 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00052 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00098 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00094 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.842,0.958,0.316}0.00007 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00070 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.803,1,0.049}-0.00013 \\
GLASSO & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.592,0.997,0.101}-0.00023 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.579,0.993,0.104}-0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.325,0.908,0.146}-0.00039 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00073 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.694,1,0.076}-0.00018 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.967,0.833,0.065}0.00028 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.943,0.857,0.113}0.00024 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00063 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00070 & & \cellcolor[rgb]{0,0.8,0.2}-0.00083^{***} \\
GLASSO-CV2 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00060 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00059 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.494,0}0.00044 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.855,0.945,0.29}0.00009 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00065 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00111 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00107 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.917,0.883,0.165}0.00020 & \cellcolor[rgb]{0.875,0.925,0.249}0.00013 & \cellcolor[rgb]{1,0.27,0}0.00083 & \\ \midrule
better than \% of models & 0.4 & 0.5 & 0.6 & 0.9 & 0.3 & 0.0 & 0.1 & 0.7 & 0.8 & 0.2 & 1.0 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}
\item This table shows the differences in the annualized out-of-sample SD of the GMV-NOSHORT-250SP portfolios across the main covariance estimation methods and their CV2-based counterparts. The table is constructed in a symmetrical way with an applied color scheme from red (higher SD than the other model) to green (lower SD than the other model). In addition, on the elements above the diagonal, the significant pairwise outperformance in terms of variance is denoted by asterisks: *** denotes significance at the 0.001 level; ** denotes significance at the 0.01 level; and * denotes significance at the 0.05 level. Finally, for each model, we report the percentage of the other models that exhibit higher variance as a qualitative measure.
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
}
\end{sidewaystable}
At first glance, we can once more distinguish the weak performance of the sample covariance estimator. All the other estimators lead to significantly less out-of-sample risk with a p-value of roughly 0.001 or lower. The second worst estimation method for this asset universe is the original LW\textsubscript{1}, followed by LW\textsubscript{CC}. On the contrary, when the linear shrinkage intensity is optimized for with respect to the out-of-sample portfolio variance with CV2, we observe an astonishing improvement for those estimators. Both LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 and LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 result in a significantly lower out-of-sample SD than their original counterparts. Comparing LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 with LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2, we can conclude that linear shrinkage toward the identity matrix yields more stable and efficient portfolio allocation than the same technique applied to a constant correlation model. It seems, therefore, that within the data-driven approach it is better to assume less than assume the wrong structure. Another surprising insight emerges from the comparison of LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 with LW\textsubscript{NL}. Although especially designed to overcome the high-dimensionality problem, both the original and CV2-based nonlinear shrinkage methods lead to higher out-of-sample risk than the data-driven linear shrinkage estimators. This effect is observable for the 100SP dataset as well (see, for reference, Table~\ref{table:sign_100sp}). As the difference is not statistically significant in any of the cases, we can only draw a qualitative conclusion that a methodologically easy-to-understand and simple-to-implement method can perform as well as a complex state-of-the-art estimator when the necessary tuning parameter (here, the shrinkage intensity) is identified in a data-driven way. With respect to the GLASSO estimation method, we find that GLASSO with CV2 results in a significantly lower out-of-sample SD than the original estimator (p-value of 0.01). This finding reveals that a suitable selection criterion for the sparsity parameter is of utmost importance. Furthermore, GLASSO-CV2 yields significantly lower out-of-sample portfolio variance than the sample, LW\textsubscript{1}, LW\textsubscript{CC}, and POET estimators. LW\textsubscript{NL} is significantly outperformed by GLASSO-CV2 for the 50SP and 100SP datasets with a p-value of 0.001 (see, for reference, the significant levels in Table~\ref{table:sign_50sp} and Table~\ref{table:sign_100sp}). Overall, these results confirm that GLASSO in combination with CV2 is the most efficient covariance estimator among the estimators considered in our study.
Table~\ref{table:perf} additionally reports the average monthly turnover rate as a proxy for the arising transaction costs induced by monthly rebalancing. The Naive portfolio, being long only and equally-weighted by construction, naturally has the lowest turnover (approximately 0.06 on average across all the datasets). As expected, the GMV portfolios estimated with the sample covariance matrix are characterized by extreme exposures for all the datasets. With higher dimensionality the ill-conditioned sample estimator induces even stronger dispersion in the portfolio weights. On the other hand, an estimation with GLASSO or its CV-based equivalents has the most pronounced positive effect on the allocation characteristics of the GMV portfolio. In particular, the GLASSO-CV1 estimation methodology results in GMV portfolios with the lowest turnover for the 200SP and 250SP datasets. For the least high-dimensional dataset, 50SP, GLASSO-CV2 leads to the lowest turnover. An interesting case is the 100SP dataset, where clear outperformance in terms of turnover rate occurs for the estimator LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2, followed closely by GLASSO-CV1. It seems that when the concentration ratio is tolerable, as for the case of 100SP, the linear shrinkage methodology, as a convex combination between the sample covariance and an identity matrix, produces satisfactory results. This can be explained by the fact that the underlying model in LW\textsubscript{1} is equivalent to the introduction of a ridge type penalty in the estimation \citep{Warton.2008}, which has been proven to induce stability. However, when the sample covariance matrix becomes ill-conditioned, as for the 200SP and 250SP datasets, even a sophisticated data-driven choice of the linear shrinkage intensity cannot outperform the GLASSO estimation in terms of turnover. While LW\textsubscript{1} shrinks the sample covariance matrix toward the identity matrix, GLASSO shrinks the precision matrix toward the identity matrix. Since the Naive portfolio corresponds to a GMV portfolio estimated with an identity covariance and hence, precision matrix, one may suggest that both estimation methods result in an implicit shrinkage of the sample GMV portfolio weights toward an equally-weighted portfolio, as in \citet{Tu.2011}, and therefore perform well in terms of turnover. Surprisingly, the estimator LW\textsubscript{NL} is strongly outperformed by all the data-driven estimators except POET with CV1 and CV2. For example, while GLASSO achieves a turnover rate of 0.61 for 250SP, estimation with LW\textsubscript{NL} leads to 0.73 average monthly turnover. The application of CV1 and CV2 for determining the sparsity parameter within the GLASSO model amplifies this result. More importantly, when a covariance estimator is susceptible to an improvement by the data-driven estimation of the necessary parameters, as LW\textsubscript{1}, LW\textsubscript{CC}, and GLASSO are, the implementation of CV leads to a strong positive impact on the stability of optimal weights.
\subsection{GMV without short sales}\label{subsec:resultsgmvnoshort}
Focusing on more practically relevant portfolio strategies, we construct a second set of GMV portfolios that do not exhibit negative weights (GMV-NOSHORT). The exclusion of short sales is a common regulatory constraint that strongly influences the optimal performance in respect to the out-of-sample risk and the allocation of weights. To investigate those, Table~\ref{table:perf_noshort} reports the main out-of-sample measures for GMV-NOSHORT. Since the examined short-sale constraint does not play any role in the CV1-based estimation of the covariance matrix, we do not report the MSFE values. The table is structured similarly to Table~\ref{table:perf} with the columns representing the investment universes (50SP, 100SP, 200SP and 250SP), and performance measures, while the rows indicate the portfolio strategies based on the considered covariance estimation methods.
\begin{table}
\centering
\caption{Performance of GMV-NOSHORT portfolios across different estimators and datasets.\label{table:perf_noshort}}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{threeparttable}
\begin{tabular}{l*{2}c@{\hskip 0.3in}*2{c}@{\hskip 0.3in}*2{c}@{\hskip 0.3in}*2{c}}
\toprule
\multicolumn{2}{r@{\hskip -0.15in}}{50SP} & \multicolumn{2}{r@{\hskip -0.15in}}{100SP} & \multicolumn{2}{r@{\hskip -0.15in}}{200SP} & \multicolumn{2}{r@{\hskip -0.15in}}{250SP} \\
\midrule
& SD & TO & SD & TO & SD & TO & SD & TO \\ \midrule
Naive & 0.1887 & 0.0596 & 0.1811 & 0.0587 & 0.1852 & 0.0601 & 0.1858 & 0.0592 \\
Sample & 0.1295 & 0.1473 & 0.1168 & 0.1810 & 0.1137 & 0.2158 & 0.1105 & 0.2227 \\
& & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{1} & 0.1296 & \textbf{0.1382} & \textbf{0.1167} & \textbf{0.1708} & \textbf{0.1135} & \textbf{0.1974} & 0.1105 & \textbf{0.2055} \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV1 & 0.1308 & 0.1486 & 0.1180 & 0.1712 & 0.1151 & 0.1999 & 0.1122 & 0.2310 \\
LW\textsubscript{1}-CV2 & \textbf{0.1294} & 0.1578 & 0.1169 & 0.1896 & 0.1136 & 0.2287 & \textbf{0.1103} & 0.2640 \\
& & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{CC} & 0.1291 & 0.1347 & \textbf{0.1167} & 0.1655 & \textbf{0.1134} & 0.1941 & \textbf{0.1100} & \textbf{0.2011} \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV1 & 0.1297 & \underline{\textbf{0.1310}} & 0.1179 & \textbf{0.1607} & 0.1145 & \textbf{0.1863} & 0.1110 & 0.2246 \\
LW\textsubscript{CC}-CV2 & \textbf{0.1286} & 0.1484 & 0.1169 & 0.1857 & 0.1134 & 0.2228 & 0.1105 & 0.2749 \\
& & & & & & & & \\
LW\textsubscript{NL} & 0.1296 & \textbf{0.1351} & 0.1166 & \underline{\textbf{0.1589}} & 0.1136 & \textbf{0.1770} & 0.1110 & \textbf{0.1806} \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV1 & 0.1296 & 0.1360 & 0.1166 & 0.1602 & 0.1136 & 0.1779 & 0.1110 & 0.1815 \\
LW\textsubscript{NL}-CV2 & \textbf{0.1295} & 0.1361 & \textbf{0.1166} & 0.1600 & \textbf{0.1135} & 0.1776 & \textbf{0.1110} & 0.1817 \\
& & & & & & & & \\
POET & 0.1291 & \textbf{0.1392} & 0.1165 & \textbf{0.1711} & 0.1135 & \textbf{0.2034} & 0.1101 & \textbf{0.2125} \\
POET-CV1 & \textbf{0.1290} & 0.1418 & 0.1164 & 0.1752 & 0.1134 & 0.2038 & 0.1101 & 0.2167 \\
POET-CV2 & 0.1291 & 0.1452 & \textbf{0.1164} & 0.1759 & \textbf{0.1134} & 0.2069 & \textbf{0.1100} & 0.2283 \\
& & & & & & & & \\
GLASSO & 0.1302 & 0.2828 & 0.1165 & 0.2622 & 0.1134 & 0.2368 & 0.1107 & 0.2704 \\
GLASSO-CV1 & 0.1314 & 0.1468 & 0.1196 & 0.1752 & 0.1182 & 0.1934 & 0.1158 & 0.2000 \\
GLASSO-CV2 & \underline{\textbf{0.1285}} & \textbf{0.1348} & \underline{\textbf{0.1158}} & \textbf{0.1693} & \underline{\textbf{0.1132}} & \underline{\textbf{0.1690}} & \underline{\textbf{0.1099}} & \underline{\textbf{0.1778}} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}
\item This table reports the annualized out-of-sample SD and average monthly turnover rate (TO) of the GMV-NOSHORT portfolios across all the considered datasets with 50, 100, 200 and 250 stocks, respectively. We report the lowest SD and TO for each estimation method in bold. The best results in terms of SD for each dataset are underlined. We additionally underline the lowest TO, excluding the Naive portfolio.
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
}
\end{table}
First, the sample covariance estimator leads to better results in comparison to Table~\ref{table:perf}, verifying the impact of constraints on the minimization of estimation errors in portfolio weights, as shown by \citet{Jagannathan.2003}. In contrast to the previous results, the differences in out-of-sample performance in terms of portfolio risk are generally less distinctive among the estimation methods. While GLASSO-CV2 continues to achieve the lowest out-of-sample annualized SD for all the datasets, a data-driven approach only inconsistently enhances the performance of the other original estimation methods. For instance, both LW\textsubscript{1} and LW\textsubscript{CC} perform better than their CV2-based counterparts for the 100SP and 200SP datasets. Although both the nonlinear shrinkage and POET with CV2-estimated parameters seem to produce lower out-of-sample risk, the effect is negligible.\footnote{The relative differences in SD among all the original and cross-validated estimators are presented in Figure~\ref{fig:sdcomparison_noshort}.} Moreover, Table~\ref{table:sign_250sp_noshort} presents the differences in annualized SDs and the respective pairwise significance levels across all the main covariance estimation methods and their CV2-based counterparts for the high-dimensional case of the 250SP dataset.\footnote{Appendix~\ref{app:gmv_noshort} compares further datasets.} The table is constructed similarly to Table~\ref{table:sign_250sp}.
The first notable consequence of the short-sale constraint is the improvement in portfolio performance for the case of the sample covariance matrix. Table~\ref{table:sign_250sp_noshort} shows that only the POET estimators with and without CV2 yield a statistically lower out-of-sample SD than the sample covariance matrix with a p-value of 0.001. Both the original and the CV2-based POET estimation methods result in a lower out-of-sample portfolio variance than all the other methods except LW\textsubscript{CC} and GLASSO-CV2. However, although GLASSO-CV2 outperforms all the other estimators qualitatively, the results are significant only compared to the original GLASSO estimator with a p-value of 0.001. This once more confirms that, first, the sparsity parameter for GLASSO is best determined with a CV and, second, the selection criterion within the CV should match the performance measure. In general, when no short sales are allowed, POET-CV2 and GLASSO-CV2 consistently outperform the rest of the methods (see, for reference, Tables~\ref{table:sign_100sp_noshort} and \ref{table:sign_200sp_noshort} for the other datasets). For a less high-dimensional dataset, such as 100SP, the out-of-sample SD generated with GLASSO-CV2 is even significantly lower than the out-of-sample SD induced by POET. Although less pronounced, the positive effects of a CV methodology with an adequate selection criterion, namely the variance of a short sales constrained GMV, are noticeable here as well. In particular, the usage of GLASSO-CV2 significantly improves the out-of-sample risk of a GMV without short sales for the 50SP, 100SP, and 250SP datasets.\footnote{For 200SP, GLASSO-CV2 outperforms all the other methods in terms of SD; however, the results are not significant.}
Finally, we examine the average monthly turnover rates, reported in Table~\ref{table:perf_noshort}. Since the portfolios are optimized with the additional no short-sale constraint, we expect the optimal weights to be much less dispersed across the rebalancing periods. Such behavior in turn results in lower turnover rates and transaction costs. In comparison to the GMV portfolios from Subsection~\ref{subsec:resultsgmv}, the turnover reduction is present even for the case of the ill-conditioned sample covariance estimator. The latter still performs worst, compared to the other methods with more dispersion in the weights for high-dimensional datasets such as 200SP and 250SP. In addition, for those datasets, we observe the lowest turnover rates when GLASSO-CV2 is used, followed by LW\textsubscript{NL} with a difference of one percent. We therefore continue to observe the positive effects of a data-driven estimation with the portfolio variance as a measure of fit not only on the out-of-sample risk but as well on the turnover rates.
\section{Conclusion}\label{sec:conclusion}
In this study, we review some of the most recent and efficient estimation methods for high-dimensional minimum-variance portfolios.
We extend the current research by proposing a data-driven methodology to determine the corresponding tuning parameters such as the linear shrinkage intensity and the sparsity penalty term.
In a detailed empirical analysis with four datasets, we identify the characteristics of our data-driven methodology. First, we establish that the selection criterion within the CV should correspond to the performance measure of interest. We show that the lowest overall out-of-sample portfolio risk is indeed generated when we select the optimal tuning parameters by minimizing the portfolio variance with the proposed CV.
In particular, the application of this procedure to each of the considered estimators with the exception of the nonlinear shrinkage leads to superior GMV or GMV-NOSHORT portfolios in terms of out-of-sample SD and average turnover rates. The performance of the nonlinear shrinkage estimator is only slightly affected by the speed of the kernel bandwidth and a data-driven selection of this speed does not lead to a significantly lower risk. Moreover, the POET estimator in combination with a CV technique seems to perform generally better under the scenario of short sales constraints. On the other hand, the GLASSO estimator clearly outperforms the other high-dimensional estimation methods for all data scenarios considered when calibrated accordingly. This not only provides new insights into the application of GLASSO in the portfolio context, but also confirms the relationship between lasso regulation and the power of CV in a covariance estimation context. We additionally demonstrate that a data-driven methodology is beneficial to estimators whose performance depends strongly on the embedded tuning parameters, as is the case with linear shrinkage and GLASSO estimation methods. Even complex and highly efficient estimators can be surpassed by simpler approaches if a sophisticated data-driven technique is used. One of the reasons for this observation is the rapid adaptation of the CV toward ever-changing market situations.
Within our analysis we investigate only high-dimensional covariance estimation methods that assume homoscedasticity in the returns.
Since we observe a time-variable parameter selection with the CV approach and a resulting improvement in the out-of-sample performance, we argue that the combination of data-driven parameter evaluation and time-dependent high-dimensional variance estimators, as recently proposed by \citet{Halbleib.2014} and \citet{Engle.2019}, is an important topic for future research.
\begin{acknowledgements}
This is a pre-print of the article submitted to Financial Markets and Portfolio Management. You can find the accepted version online at: 10.1007/s11408-020-00370-4.
\end{acknowledgements}
\bibliographystyle{spbasic}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,601 |
from utils.codegen import format_type, get_detailed_extern_callinfos
from utils.extern import extern_has_tuple_params
from compiler_common import generate_var_name, get_short_type
from more_itertools import unique_everseen
#[ #include "dpdk_lib.h"
#[ #include "util_debug.h"
#[ #include "dpdkx_gen_extern.h"
detailed_callinfos = get_detailed_extern_callinfos(hlir)
def get_externtype(part, partypeinfolen, partype_suffix, varname):
return f'EXTERNTYPE{partypeinfolen}({part}{partype_suffix})* {varname}'
for partypeinfolen, mname_parts, partype_suffix, params, params_as_buf, ret, mname_postfix, mname_postfix_as_buf, args, args_as_buf, refvars, arginfos, parinfos in sorted(unique_everseen(detailed_callinfos, key=lambda c: c[0:3])):
if len(mname_parts) == 1:
call = f'SHORT_EXTERNCALL{partypeinfolen + len(mname_parts)-1}'
else:
call = f'EXTERNCALL{partypeinfolen + len(mname_parts)-2}'
extern_type_name = f''
varname = generate_var_name('extern')
externtype = get_externtype(mname_parts[0], partypeinfolen, partype_suffix, varname)
params = f'{externtype}, {params}'
args_as_buf = f'{varname}, ' + args_as_buf
return_stmt = 'return ' if not ret.startswith('void') else ''
#{ $ret $call(${",".join(mname_parts)}${partype_suffix})($params) {
#[ ${return_stmt}EXTERNIMPL${partypeinfolen + len(mname_parts)-1}(${",".join(mname_parts)}${mname_postfix_as_buf})(${args_as_buf});
#} }
#[
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,481 |
Q: Highlight the matching characters in a string using RegExp I'm trying to highlight the matching characters of a Regular Expression, currently I have this:
var items = [
'red',
'green',
'yellow',
'blue',
'orange',
];
var term = 're';
var regex_text = '.*';
regex_text += (term).split('').join('.*');
regex_text += '.*';
var regex = new RegExp(regex_text);
for (let i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
var text = items[i];
document.write("<br>Item: " + text);
if (!regex.test(text)) {
document.write(" doesn't match the term: " + term)
} else {
document.write(" matches the term in the characters: ");
var optionText = text;
var item = optionText.replace(regex, '<b>$1</b>');
document.write(item);
}
}
But the result is not what I'm expecting, I'm going for (without the spaces):
r e d
g r e en
yellow
blue
o r ang e
A: One way this can be achieved is by building a replacement string which matches the number of characters in the term variable (and those in between) so it can simultaneously replace all the characters matched by the test regex:
var items = [
'red',
'green',
'grey-green',
'yellow',
'blue',
'orange'
];
var term = 're';
var chars = term.split('');
var regex_text = '(' + chars.join(')(.*?)(') + ')(.*)';
var regex = new RegExp(regex_text);
var replace_string = chars.map((_, i) => '<b>$'+(i*2+1)+'</b>$' + ((i+1)*2)).join('');
for (let i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
var text = items[i];
document.write("<br>Item: " + text);
if (!regex.test(text)) {
document.write(" doesn't match the term: " + term)
} else {
document.write(" matches the term in the characters: ");
var optionText = text;
var item = optionText.replace(regex, replace_string);
document.write(item);
}
}
A: You can use your regex just to test the match. If string matches - replace letters one by one:
let items = [ 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'orange', 'error', 'errorer' ];
let term = 're';
let regex = new RegExp(term.split("").join(".*"));
for (let i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
let str = items[i];
if (!regex.test(str)) {
print("Item: " + items[i] + "; Doesn't match the term: " + term);
continue;
}
let lastIndex = 0;
for (let letter of term) {
str = str.slice(0, lastIndex) + str.slice(lastIndex).replace(letter, fn_wrapper);
}
print("Item: " + items[i] + "; Matches the term in the characters: " + str);
/***/
function fn_wrapper(letter) {
// 1-st argument of replacer-function == full match (each letter, in this case)
let wrap = "<b>" + letter + "</b>";
lastIndex += wrap.length;
return wrap;
}
}
/***/
function print(msg) {
document.body.insertAdjacentHTML("beforeEnd", "<div>" + msg + "</div>");
}
b { color: red; }
A: I think this is what you are trying to achieve. You should use parentheses to capture a group using RegEx. The match function will return an array containing the captured groups.
var items = [
'red',
'green',
'yellow',
'blue',
'orange',
];
var term = 're';
var regex_text = '.*(';
regex_text += (term).split('').join('.*');
regex_text += ').*';
var regex = new RegExp(regex_text);
for (let i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
var text = items[i];
document.write("<br>Item: " + text);
if (!regex.test(text)) {
document.write(" doesn't match the term: " + term)
} else {
document.write(" matches the term in the characters: ");
var optionText = text;
let regexMatch = text.match(regex);
var item = optionText.replace(regexMatch[1], '<b>' + regexMatch[1] +'</b>');
document.write(item);
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,190 |
Q: Changing my website cursor into a coffee icon, pouring coffee whenever the user clicks on something I have a personal website and I want to spice it up a bit while also learning some front-end.
An idea I had was that the cursor of my website would be a coffee instead of the default one, and anytime I click on any content, the coffee pours.
Any idea if this is possible and if so, what I need to do to implement it?
A: You can change the cursor using CSS - see https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_class_cursor.asp and do something like
div {
cursor:url(myCoffeeJug.cur),auto;
}
You could then use Javascript to change the cursor shape (ie URL) when the user clicks in the div. You'd need to think how to change it back again after whatever operation the click triggers is complete.
Note that you can't do animations this way - but given that clicking on a div is likely to be quite a quick action, just switching to and back from a different icon might well be enough for what you want.
However this is perhaps not a great idea from the usability point of view. Web users are used to the basic types of cursor provided by browsers - overriding them may be cute, but it can also be confusing.
If your site is designed for 'ordinary' users looking for information or functionality (rather than for web designers, or as a showcase for your techniques), you're putting a small barrier in their way. Users who are not confident, or are new to all this, or non-neurotypical users may find it off-putting.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,060 |
\section{Introduction}
Restriction of a many body system to low dimension brings
with it simplifications but also a cost - the need to pay much closer
attention to the effects of both thermodynamic fluctuations and
interparticle correlations. One-dimensional models have proved an
extremely rich
field for the exploration of subtle effects of electron-electron
interactions.
They have been found to have quite complex ground states brought about
by the same reduced phase space which makes some of their properties
soluble, and
which causes finite temperature to play so dramatic a role.
A colourful
variety of quasi-one- and
two-dimensional materials is now accessible to experiment,
but this has not produced scientific consensus in all areas.
Nine years of
intensive research on high-temperature superconductors, the best known
examples of quasi-two-dimensional systems, have failed to
yield agreement on even
the symmetry of their respective ground states.
The study of quasi-one-dimensional conductors has been less intense, but
they are interesting for similar reasons. All attempts to model these
materials
must make reference to the fact that they are not truly
one-dimensional, but merely very, very anisotropic. The set of
materials
to which $(TaSe_4)_2I$ belongs have a common structure of an
assembly of weakly coupled conducting chains.
Their behaviour has generally been understood in terms of those
properties of one
(or three) dimensional systems which are held to be relevant to them.
This interplay of dimensionality is not trivial; weak interchain
coupling will
act to stabilise states born of instabilities in the underlying
one-dimensional structure, which would otherwise be destroyed at
finite temperature by large thermodynamic fluctuations. In the limit of
strong coupling both the instability and the fluctuations may be
irrelevant.
Many and diverse experimental techniques have
been brought to bear on quasi-one-dimensional
conductors in pursuit of insight
into their properties and the low dimensional physics which these
betray. The transition-metal tetrachalcogenide $(TaSe_4)_2I$ alone,
in the thirteen years since
its first synthesis \cite{gressier1}, has been probed with
neutron scattering \cite{fujishita1}, X-rays \cite{fujishita2},
low energy electrons \cite{rocau}, ultraviolet photons \cite{sato},
and subjected
to measurements of optical and electrical
conductivity \cite{geserich,berner,wang} and magnetic susceptibility.
\cite{johnston}.
This material is interesting, since on cooling it displays
a second order phase transition at the (relatively high) temperature of
263 K,
from a highly
conductive but extremely anisotropic "metallic" phase into a
semi-conducting
charge density
wave ground state. While angle integrated photoemission
\cite{dardel1,dardel2} and inverse
photoemision
\cite{purdie} experiments have been performed on such materials for some
time,
only very
recently has angle resolved photoemission (ARPES) data become
available. This offers the most direct means yet of understanding the
changes
which take
place in the system's electronic properties.
The instability of one-dimensional metals against an insulating ground
state was described by
Peierls \cite{peierls} in 1953 and the mean field theory
\cite{rice}
can be constructed in close analogy to the BCS theory of
superconductivity.
It is also well known that
the fluctuations forced by the restricted phase space of a truly one-dimensional
system prevent it from undergoing a phase
transition at any finite temperature. The real systems, then, must
exhibit an interplay of dimensional and thermodynamic effects, which
manifest themselves in the strong and unusual temperature
dependence of the "metallic" properties observed above the
transition temperature. Early measurements of the magnetic
susceptibility of
$(TaSe_4)_2I$ \cite{johnston}
suggested that fluctuations of the charge density wave (CDW)
order parameter were present for all temperatures above
263K, up to the limit of the compound's
chemical stability (at about 430K). In order to understand
the phase transition which takes place in this
and other similar materials, it is necessary first to
understand the role of fluctuations in the properties of a
one-dimensional
conductor.
It has also been known for some time that the Landau Fermi liquid state
is
unstable against interparticle interaction in one dimension; the
paradigm
of the the Luttinger liquid has evolved to describe the properties of a
number
of abstract one-dimensional
models (for an overview see \cite{schultz}). Luttinger liquids have
unusual
correlation functions displaying separation of spin and charge degrees
of freedom,
and possess no stable single particle excitations at the Fermi energy
$\epsilon_F$.
This implies that the
customary discontinuity in zero temperature occupation
number $n(k)$ at the Fermi wavevector $k_F$ found in all Fermi liquids
is
absent, and that the electronic density of states will
vanish near $\epsilon_F$, with a power law
behaviour determined by the strength of interparticle interactions. The
decoupling of spin and charge degrees of freedom manifests itself in new
structure in the spectral function of the system.
A topic much discussed in recent years is whether some aspects of this
well-established one-dimensional behavior can survive in higher
dimensionalities.
For example, it has been proposed that the normal state properties of
high-temperature superconductors can be understood on the basis of this
hypothesis
\cite{pwa}, while others believe that any coupling between chains
must destroy the
Luttinger liquid. One approach to this problem is
empirical: if evidence of Luttinger liquid behavior could be found for a
real
weakly-coupled-chain system this would constitute
proof of the possibility of such behavior in higher dimensions. In this
spirit, we ask whether $(TaSe_2)_4 I$ is, experimentally,
a Luttinger liquid, as has sometimes been claimed.
As a first step, we compare ARPES data with a more conventional
interpretation, that of CDW fluctuations.
In a later paper, we shall attempt a more systematic
comparison of strongly correlated electron and CDW theories
for the transport properties and the ARPES and core-level lineshapes
of $(TaSe_2)_4 I$.
In Secs.\ 2 through 4 of this paper
we shall present the model used, its overall properties,
and the comparison of theory and experiment for ARPES lineshapes
in $(TaSe_4)_2I$. The discussion is based on the
premise that fluctuation effects born of the electron-phonon interaction
dominate over those of correlation (interparticle interaction)
for this system. It is found that such a treatment works
well for $(TaSe_2)_4 I$.
A critical comparison of this picture with other candidate
descriptions is given in the conclusions
of Sec.\ 5.
\section{The Model}
The problem of describing the combined effect of correlation and
electron-phonon
interaction in one dimension on an equal footing is an axiomatically
hard one, since correlation in one dimension destroys the Fermi-Liquid
picture on
which the (perturbative) treatment of electron-phonon interaction is
based, whilst the
physics of the Peierls transition is dictated by $2k_f$
'backscattering' events,
which cannot be treated within the usual scheme for electronic
correlations. For a
given real material, in a given temperature range, however, it may not
be necessary
to solve the general problem in order to understand the results of
experiment.
As there is no clear framework for relating the microscopic properties
of materials to the parameters of {\it any} of the phenomenological
models refered
to in this paper, the best that can be done is to develop a model based
on what is
believed to be the relevant subset of physics for each material, and to
test it
against a variety of experiments.
In order to provide a framework for our calculation we briefly review
here
some basic perturbative (mean field) results for electrons in a Peierls
CDW System, and present a succinct derivation of a Green's Function for
electrons
suffering fluctuations of CDW order, in the spirit of the treatment of
Lee, Rice
and Anderson (hereafter referred to as LRA, \cite{lra}).
The starting point for any non-correlated theory of electron phonon
interaction is the Fr\"{o}hlich Hamiltonian
\begin{eqnarray}
H &= & \sum_{k} \epsilon (k) c^{\dagger}_k c_k
+ \sum_{q} \omega (q) b^{\dagger}_q b^{}_q
+ \frac{1}{\sqrt{L}} \sum_{q,k} g(q) c^{\dagger}_{k+q} c^{}_k u_q
\label{eq:froh}
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
u_q &= & \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\omega (q)}} ( b^{\dagger}_q +b_{-q} ),
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
where $c^{\dagger}_{k}$ and $b^{\dagger}_{q}$ are (respectively)
creation
operators for
electrons
and phonons with dispersion $\epsilon (k)$ and $\omega (q)$, $u_q$ is
the
Fourier transform of
the lattice displacement, and $g(q)$ the electron-ion coupling. $L$
is the number of sites. For simplicity
we will not credit the electrons with spin, and will describe the band
by a free
particle
dispersion relation, linearised about $k_f$.
Consideration of the linear response of this system \cite{rice} reveals
that the
phonon frequencies
undergo drastic adjustment if the band is near half filling; the $2k_f$
phonon is softened and its frequency vanishes at a well defined mean
field
transition
temperature $T_c$ given by
\begin{equation}
\label{mftc}
k_B T_c = \frac{2\gamma}{\pi} e^{-\frac{1}{\lambda}} v_f k_f,
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
\lambda = N_0 \frac{|g(2k_F)|^2}{\hbar^2 \omega_{2k_F}^2},
\nonumber
\end{equation}
\noindent
where $N_0$ is the density
of states at the Fermi energy, and $\gamma \approx 0.5772$ is
Euler's constant. The overall picture of the
important quantities in the mean field theory
is presented in
Fig.\ 1, where the gap $\Delta(T)$ and the phonon frequency
$\omega_{2k_F}(T)$ are plotted on a phase diagram.
The
result in Eq.\ \ref{mftc} (the giant Kohn effect) may also
be found in low order perturbation theory, in which case a length
scale
$\xi_0$ emerges naturally from the calculation
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{mfxi}
\xi_0 &= & \frac{ \sqrt{7\zeta(3)} v_F }{4 \pi k_B T_c},
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
$\zeta(3) \approx 1.202$ being the Riemann zeta function, and $v_F$ the
Fermi
velocity.
Condensation of the
softened $2k_F$ phonon leads to a static lattice distortion
$<u_{2k_F}>$, and
the opening of a
gap $\Delta$ in the electronic spectrum. The interaction term in the
Fr\"ohlich
Hamiltonian
(\ref{eq:froh}) may then be approximated by a BCS-like mean field
form
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{bcshamiltonian}
H_{ep}^{(MF)} &= & \sum_{k} [\Delta^* c^{\dagger}_{k-2k_F} c^{}_k
+ \Delta c^{\dagger}_{-k+2k_F} c^{}_{-k}]
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\Delta &= & \frac{1}{\sqrt{L}} g(2_{k_F}) <u_{2k_F}> .
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
Self consistent solutions of $\Delta$ and $<u_{2k_F}>$ as a function of
temperature may now be
found for the Peierls insulator in the same way as for a BCS
superconductor.
Both systems are
dominated by the same square root singularity in the electronic density
of
states at the edges
of the gap.
This picture of a metal-insulator transition in a purely one-dimensional
metal
is clearly not adequate
as we expect fluctuations of the order parameter, when properly
accounted for, to destroy the mean field
solution at {\it any}
finite temperature. Real systems, however, are not truly
one-dimensional.
$(TaSe_4)_2I$
comprises parallel chains of tantalum atoms \cite{gressier2},
surrounded by approximately perpendicular
rectangles of $Se$ (Fig 2.). The
iodine resides between chains. Overlapping $d_z$ orbitals on the
tantalum chains form a band along which conduction occurs. Whilst
electronic transport across the chains is believed to be diffusive at
the temperatures of interest here and thus does not give rise
to coherent dispersion in the perpendicular directions,
interchain interactions can act to stabilise the mean-field
solution at some three-dimensional ordering temperature $T_c^{3D}$
considerably
less than the mean
field temperature $T_c$. This then corresponds to the transition
observed in real
systems. The LRA model of a one-dimensional metal does not explicitly
include
interchain effects, but
their relevance and the three dimensional ordering temperature emerge
very
naturally from their analysis. It is found that $T_c^{3D} \approx
T_c/4$.
The physical content of Lee, Rice and Anderson's extension of the
mean field picture
is the realisation that the $2k_f$ fluctuations of the softened lattice
are slow on
the timescale of electron dynamics and that they may therefore be
approximated by a
static disorder potential, the determination of which is then a separate
(classical) problem.
We start, then, from a natural generalisation of the BCS approximation
to
the electron phonon interaction
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{lrahamiltonian}
\bar{H}_{ep} &= & \sum_{Q, k'>0} [ \Psi^*_{-Q} c^{\dagger}_{k'-Q}
c^{}_{k'} + \Psi_{Q} c^{\dagger}_{-k'+Q}
c^{}_{-k'} ] ,
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{orderparameter}
\Psi_Q &= & \frac{1}{\sqrt{L}} g(Q) u_Q
\end{eqnarray}
are the components of the disorder potential and may be likened to an
order parameter for fluctuations of some portion of the lattice. LRA
then prescribe
an
equation of motion treatment of this hamiltonian, which after certain
approximations
generates the following relation for the electronic Green's Function
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{eqnforgreensfn}
{\cal{G}}(k,k;i\omega_n)^{-1} &= & \epsilon(k) - i\omega_n
- \sum_Q\Psi_{Q} \Psi^*_{-Q} \frac{1}{\epsilon (k-Q) -
i\omega_n} .
\end{eqnarray}
The same relation may be written down immediately by using the analogy with static
disorder simply to calculate the second order self energy correction for
electrons scattered
by the potential $\Psi_{Q}$ \cite{Mahan}. The Feynman diagram
used is shown in Fig.\ 3. The box in the diagram is the phonon
self-energy, or the charge-charge correlation function
at $2k_f$. The deformed
lattice approximation treats the ionic configuration
as rigid (incapable of recoil), with the positions given by a
thermal average. The absence of a
frequency sum in
the elecron self energy expresses the fact that the lattice and CDW
fluctuations have been
decoupled.
We note in passing that it would in principle be possible to substitute a
Luttinger
Liquid Green's Function in the expression for the self energy, and so to
treat the
effects of lattice distortion on a correlated system to a similar level
of
approximation. To obtain and parameterise spectral functions from such
a
calculation would not, however, be trivial. Similarly, refinements may
be made to
allow for lattice recoil. We shall not present these
here, but will limit our discussion to the Green's function previously
found by LRA.
Evaluation of this expression then requires knowledge of the correlation
function
for the lattice fluctuations at a given temperature. A means of finding
this was
supplied by Scalapino, Sears and Ferrell \cite{ssf}. They perform a
functional
minimalisation of a generalised Ginzburg-Landau free energy to obtain
correlation
functions for a fluctuating order parameter
in a one-dimensional system, and obtain the following form
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{correlationfn}
<\Psi(x)\Psi(x')> &= & <\Psi^2(T)> \exp [-|x-x'|\xi^{-1}(T)]
\cos[2k_F(x-x')].
\end{eqnarray}
LRA substitute a free energy with parameters taken from the mean field
(linear
response)
perturbative treatment of the 1D Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian :
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{freeenergy}
F[\Psi_Q] &= & a(T)|\Psi_Q|^2 + b(T)|\Psi_Q|^4 + c(T)(Q -
2k_F)^2|\Psi_Q|^2,
\end{eqnarray}
with
\begin{eqnarray}
a(T) &= & D_0 \frac{T - T_c}{T},
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
b(T) &= & D_0 [b_0 + (b_0 - b_1)\frac{T}{T_c}],
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
c(T) &= & D_0 \xi_0^2(T),
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
where $D_0$ is the (constant) density of states for the band, which is
taken to
have width
$2\epsilon_F$. We fix $b_0$ and $b_1$ to give the correct zero
temperature value
of the gap
$\Delta_0$ in the electronic spectrum:
$b_0 = \frac{1}{2\Delta_0^2}$
and
\begin{eqnarray}
b_1 &= & b_0 \frac{7\zeta(3)}{16 \pi} \frac{(1.76)^2}{0.5} .
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
The problem of determining $<\Psi_Q^2(T)>$ and $\xi(T)$ then reduces to
that of
finding the low lying energy levels of a particle moving in an
anharmonic
potential well, the shape of which is determined by the coefficients of
the free
energy
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{anharmonicosc}
H &= & - \frac{1}{4} \frac{k_B^2 T_c^2}{D_0}
\frac{\partial^2\Psi}{\partial x^2}
+ a(T)|\Psi|^2 + b(T) |\Psi|^4
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
This may solved numerically, or approximately using perturbation theory
and asymptotic analysis.
It is found that the coherence length $\xi$
increases steadily from its mean-field value at $T_c$
with reducing temperature, but increases very rapidly at a
temperature approximately one quarter of $T_c$.
This
implies that long-range order exists for temperatures
below $\frac{1}{4}T_c$, and interchain coupling stabilises
the mean field
solution. We will identify this temperature
with the transition temperature $T_c^{3D}$ of
a three-dimensional system
and not attempt to treat interchain effects explicitly.
The mean square value of the
correlations increses approximately linearly
with decreasing temperature, and takes on the role
of a mean field gap below the three dimensional ordering temperature.
The following parameterisation is accurate in the temperature
range of experimental interest in the next section:
\begin{equation}
\xi^{-1}(T) = \xi_0^{-1}(T) ( \frac{4T}{3T_c} - \frac{1}{3})
\label{xp1}
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
<\Psi^2(T)> = \frac{a'}{b} (1 - \frac{T}{T_c}) - \frac{1}{2} k_B =
\frac{T_c}{a'}
\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{T}{T_c}}},
\label{xp2}
\end{equation}
where $a' = a(T)/T $.
We are now in a position to assemble the Green's Function for the system,
with the
(static) lattice fluctuations parameterised by the "gap" (squared) energy
scale
$<\Psi^2(T)>$ and the "lifetime" energy scale $\xi^{-1}(T)$.
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{nearlygreensfn}
G_R (k,k;\omega)^{-1} &= & \omega - \epsilon (k)
- \int dQ \frac{S(Q)<\Psi^2>}{\omega - \epsilon (k^+_-Q) +
i\delta},
\end{eqnarray}
where S(Q) is a Lorentzian of width $\xi^{-1}$ centered on $Q=2k_F$, the sign in
the denominator
is chosen to give $ \epsilon (k^+_-Q) \sim \epsilon (k) $, and $<\Psi^2>$ is
found from
the results of SSF \cite{ssf}. Evaluating the integral over Q, and dropping the
second
momentum index, we arrive at a result for the Green's function
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{greensfn}
G_R (k, \omega) &=& \frac{\omega + \epsilon (k) + iv_F\xi^{-1} }
{\omega^2 - \epsilon(k)^2 - <\psi^2> + iv_F\xi^{-1}(\omega -
\epsilon(k)) } .
\end{eqnarray}
This will form the basis for most of the subsequent analysis.
\section{Basic Properties of the Model}
Insight into the properties of the model outlined may be obtained by
consideration of the imaginary part of the Green's function
(\ref{greensfn})
derived above:
\begin{eqnarray}
A (k, \omega) &= & \frac{v_F \xi^{-1} <\psi^2>}
{[\omega^2 - \epsilon(k)^2 - <\Psi^2>]^2 + v_F^2 \xi^{-2} [\omega -
\epsilon(k)]^2},
\label{eq:spec}
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
where the parameters $<\Psi^2>$ and $\xi^{-1}$ have scale and
temperature
dependence given above. As observed by LRA, this
may be integrated analytically to give an expression for the density of
states. This is plotted for a system at temperature $T = 300K$=
with $T_c = 892K$, $T_c^{3D} = 263K$ and
$\epsilon_F = 1.2
eV$ in Fig.\ 4; the reason for this choice of parameters will be
discussed in
the light of photoemission data in a later section.
The density of states shows clear evidence of a quasigap
at all temperatures above $T_c^{3D}$ observable for a system such as
$(TaSe_4)_2I$. Spectral
weight {\it is} still present at the Fermi energy ($\omega = 0$) at
room
temperature, but is greatly
reduced. Traces of the square root singularity which will dominate the
mean
field solution
are visible at the edges of the gap for temperatures approaching
$T_c^{3D}$.
Sharp
spikes and edges in the plot are a numerical artifact only.
The LRA Green's function (\ref{greensfn})
above can clearly be seen to reduce to a BCS-type Green's
function
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{bcsG}
G_R (k, \omega) &= & \frac{\omega + \epsilon (k)}
{\omega^2 - \epsilon(k)^2 - <\psi^2> + i\delta },
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
with $<\Psi^2>$ taking on the role of a real gap in the limit where
$\xi \rightarrow \infty$; this mean field solution is in fact the exact
zero
temperature limit
of the LRA theory. At the level of approximation relevant to the
experiments the
model
may be taken to posses a real gap
below $T_c^{3D}$. We shall then proceed to describe the system by an
LRA
Green's
function (\ref{greensfn}) above $T_c^{3D}$ ($263 K$ for $(TaSe_4)_2I$),
and by a
BCS Greens function below $T_c^{3D}$.
It is also possible to integrate the spectral function numerically over
$\omega$
to obtain a
result for $n(k)$. (The integration my be performed analytically
for the BCS-like expression below
$T_c^{3D}$). This is displayed in Fig.\ 5. The occupation number is
clearly
dominated by the
presence of the quasigap, varying over a scale in k-space given by
$\Delta/\hbar v_F$. No
Fermi step is present in the occupation number at an experimentally
observable
temperature, but
the region of k-space over which $n(k)$ undergoes most change becomes
{\it
smaller} with increasing
temperature and decreasing size of the quasigap. Both
the occupation number and the density of states illustrate the fact
that the metallic (fluctuating
CDW) phase of the model does not resemble a conventional Fermi liquid.
Consideration of the denominator of the spectral function at $k_F$ shows
that
spectral
weight is
concentrated in one peak provided that the quantity
$<\psi^2> - v_F^2\xi^{-2}/4$ is
negative. This gap like parameter will change sign at a temperature of
similar
magnitude to,
but in general different from, the mean field
temperature $T_c$. On cooling it becomes positive,
and spectral weight is split into two peaks. Since $T_c$ is
well above room temperature, the
two-peak structure is the only one expected in the
experiments of the following section.
The breadth of the peaks is determined by the
inverse coherence
length $\xi^{-1}$. At $k_F$ the division of spectral weight between
peaks is
even; for
k-vectors deeper in the valence band more weight is found in the lower
peak.
This may be
compared directly with coherence factor effects in the BCS-like phase of
the
model below
$T_c^{3D}$. The opening of the quasigap in the density of states is
visible
then in
$A(k,\omega)$ as a splitting of spectral weight into two broad peaks,
and the
transition from
metal to insulator marked by the progressive narrowing of these peaks
until they
become delta
functions separated by a real gap at $T_c^{3D}$. Tight bunching of peaks
near
the edges of the
gap lead to the pronounced rise in the density of states there; this
will again
resolve into a
square-root divergence below $T_c^{3D}$.
\section{Angle Resolved Photoemission}
Quasi-one-dimensional materials were chosen for
angle-resolved photoemission experiments on
account of the interesting phase transitions which
they undergo, and also because the reduced
dimensional nature of their Brillouin zones simplified the
interpretation of the spectra obtained. The existence of many exactly
soluble
models of one-dimensional systems makes
the exploration of quasi-one-dimensional materials
equally appealing from a theoretical point of view.
The particular hope of finding evidence
for the existence of a Luttinger Liquid has motivated a large number of
photoemission
studies of quasi-one-dimensional conductors. Among these,
the most detailed studies have been performed on $(TaSe_4)_2I$,
\cite{dardel1,dardel2,hwu},
and the discussion of the data on this compound is our object in this
section.
While the authors of the papers on $(TaSe_2)_4I$
often disagree in the detailed interpretation of their data,
the lack of spectral weight at the Fermi energy is a universally
observed trend. As this is one of the signal features
of a Luttinger liquid, several researchers have concluded that
$(TaSe_4)_2I$ and its sister compounds are Luttinger
liquids in their conducting phase. The
nature of the loss of spectral weight may be best probed by angle
resolved
photoemission, since
this offers some hope of establishing whither the missing weight has
moved.
The quantity measured by an ideal angle-resolved photoemission
experiment
at zero temperature is the ground state
electronic spectral function of the material being probed. This is
formally
equivalent to the imaginary part of the system's retarded
Green's function, and so confers complete knowledge of its single
particle properties. Real photoemission experiments suffer limitations
of finite temperature and resolution, and can only probe the properties
of the surface layer of material from which the electron emerges.
Spectra
also contain a substantial systematic background, which is not generally
well
understood, and which must be subtracted according to some prescription
before the data can be fully analysed.
Recent angle-resolved studies of the conduction band in $(TaSe_2)_4I)$
have been performed above and
below its CDW transition temperature, and
the spectra possess a number of interesting features. The one most
stressed in the
literature is the lack of spectral
weight at and near the Fermi energy. Related to this is the
lack of a Fermi step in the background of spectra taken{\it above} the
transition
temperature. These features represent a marked departure from the usual
character of metallic conduction, as observed in similar experiments on
three-dimensional systems.
We shall see below that there are several other characteristics
of the experimental results that are similarly anomalous.
The simplest result (non-interacting electrons) for energy-distribution
curves (EDC's) in ARPES done for initial electron momentum near the
Fermi energy would be a delta-function. Finite experimental resolution
will
of course broaden this
peak.
We have convoluted our results with a Gaussian resolution
function. The width is equal to the
published estimated resolution of 160 meV.
One source of (not very interesting) background is that of
secondary electrons. The intensity of this rises steeply
as the detected energy decreases, starting a few eV below
the Fermi energy.
It was found that, for each spectrum, a Gaussian with width of similar
order to
that of the band and centred at an energy below the band
minimum could be chosen to closely mimic this contribution, and was duly
subtracted.
The overlap of the Gaussian with the interesting structures
near the Fermi energy is small, but due to its width not quite
negligible.
As a rule, however,
the most striking difference between observed EDC's and the ideal
result is the existence of a structure resembling a Fermi edge
in addition to the expected peak. This should be attributed to
the existence of quasi-elastic scattering of electrons on exit from the
sample,
probably arising from disorder near the surface. It is important to
remember that
electrons detected in ARPES originate from near the surface and few
surfaces are
atomically flat. To take this into account, it is most reasonable to
suppose that
some fraction of the electrons have their momenta randomized on exit.
The resulting spectrum is a linear combination of a true
angle-resolved spectrum, (the spectral function),
and an angle-integrated spectrum (the density of states).
In theoretical terms, this means a combination of the
imaginary part of the one-particle Greeen's function
and the imaginary part of its trace.
This picture is confirmed by the observation that ARPES
EDC's and angle-integrated spectra taken on a single sample do
differ only by the peak structure in the former.
The relative weight in the two components must be determined by a fit.
The experiments on $(TaSe_4)_2I$ fit this picture, with
one exception. In contrast to
experiments on three-dimensional metals,
the angle-integrated spectrum near the Fermi energy
does not resemble the
expected Fermi function. Instead, the occupation falls
off smoothly in the neighborhood of the chemical potential.
Qualitatively, this may be the result of Luttinger
liquid behavior. However, it may also result from the
pseudogap in the LRA theory. Only a quantitative comparison can
distinguish these alternatives.
We show the comparison of experiment and theory in Fig.\ 6.
Each plot is taken at a fixed angle of outcoming electron,
and the inferred wavevectors are as shown.
The data are taken from Ref.\ \cite{terrasi}.
The choice of wavevectors shown was dictated by the
availability of experimental data.
The background, fit by a Gaussian as mentioned above,
has already been subtracted from the experimental curves.
The theoretical curves are plotted from Eq.\ \ref{eq:spec},
broadened by convolution
with the Gaussian resolution function. Two free parameters were
retained
for the fit: the mean-field transition
temperature with a best-fit value $T_c = 892 K$ and the Fermi velocity
$v_F = 6.5 \times 10^5 ms^{-1}$, which is fixed by the overall linear
dispersion. The parameter $k_F = 0.27 \AA^{-1}$ is fixed by the
fact that the band is one quarter filled. This gives a zero temperature
gap $\Delta_0 = 0.52 eV $ by extrapolation of the
dispersion to low temperatures. $T_c$ compares well with the
expectation that,
at a temperature around $T_c/4$, the actual transition
should take place and the resistivity should
become activated. In $(TaSe_4)_2I$ this occurs at
$T_c^{3D} = 263 K$.
Each plot shows a peak broader than the experimental
resolution of 160 meV. The fits have been made with the
stated resolution. It is evident that extremely good fits
could be made either by increasing the width of the
convolving function by about 50 meV (30\%),
by assuming some scattering of
the electrons as they exit the material, or by assuming that the
material is impure to begin with, which would give
a momentum-independent additional width to the spectral function.
Since all three of
these alternatives involve the introduction of an
{\it ad hoc} parameter, we have preferred to leave the theoretical
curves as shown and merely note that it would be somewhat
surprising if there was no source of broadening beyond
the instrumental resolution and that in Eq.\ \ref{eq:spec}.
Evaluating the comparisons in Fig.\ 6, we may say that the
peak positions are given very well. The worst case is Fig.\ 6c, where
the
theoretical prediction is too low by perhaps 30 meV, and the
other discrepancies are smaller. The
widths are too large by about 20\% in all cases, suggesting some
relatively minor additional systematic effect.
The momentum-integrated
spectrum in Fig.\ 7 is obtained
by integrating Eq.\ \ref{eq:spec} over $k$. It may be compared
with the results of a angle-integrated experiments \cite{dardel1},
\cite{dardel2}, and is
clearly in good qualitative agreement with these, although the limited
validity
of our linear approximation to the free electron dispersion renders
quantative
comparision away from the Fermi energy impossible.
Most significant is the movement of weight away from the Fermi energy,
signature of
the pseudo gap caused by the charge fluctuations.
\section{Fermi liquid, Luttinger liquid, or LRA liquid ?}
Four features of the LRA theory {\it and} the data are striking. \\
$(1)$ The movement of the peak position as a function of
momentum is very small near $k_F$. In fact, the dispersion
relation, if it is defined as the peak position, apparently nears
a quadratic maximum at $k_F$. \\
$(2)$ The peaks are broad and symmetric. The widths are not very
momentum-dependent,
ranging only from about 400-600 meV in the range under study. \\
$(3)$ There is a strong pseudogap at all momenta, with the
weight of the spectral function at the Fermi energy small. In addition,
there is clear evidence of an energy scale associated with the
gap structure. This is best read off from the peak position in Fig.\ 7
as about 500 meV. This is related to the zero-temperature CDW gap in
the
LRA theory. \\
$(4)$ There are what may be called "shadow bands". These are electronic
states, or rather peaks in the spectral function, where no bands should
be in a free-electron picture. In the data, a clear peak is
seen
even at momenta $|k| > k_F$. These peaks shadow the ordinary band
in the range $|k| < k_F$ - they are translates of the ordinary
peaks through $\pm 2 k_F$.
On all four points the data agree qualitatively, and even
semiquantitatively, with the LRA theory.
Let us first compare these findings with the expectations of Fermi
liquid theory. The spectral function should approach
\begin{equation}
A(k, \omega) \sim \delta(\omega - v_F (k-k_F))
\end{equation}
as $k$ approaches $k_F$. Further from $k_F$, we expect
broadening due to interactions proportional to
$\omega^2$. Specifically: \\
$(1)'$ In a Fermi liquid, the peak should disperse linearly
through the Fermi momentum. \\
$(2)'$ The peak should be symmetric, and the width
should be resolution-limited at $k_F$ and broaden away from
$k_F$. \\
$(3)'$ There is no gap or pseudogap and the only
energy scales are $\epsilon_F > 1 eV$ and
$k_B T \approx 30 meV$. \\
$(4)'$ There are no peaks when $k > k_F$. \\
It is clear, comparing points $(1)'$ to $(4)'$ to
experiment $(1)$ to $(4)$, that this simple Fermi liquid behavior
is not at all consistent with the observations.
In the Luttinger liquid, we have a very different form
for the spectral function at low energies. In the spinless case
\cite{meden1}, the delta function characteristic of
the Fermi liquid is replaced by a power law singularity:
\begin{equation}
A(k, \omega) \sim \Theta( \omega + \tilde{v}_F|(k-k_F)|)
(- \omega + \tilde{v}_F(k-k_F))^{\gamma-1}
(- \omega - \tilde{v}_F(k-k_F))^{\gamma}.
\end{equation}
In this formula, $\Theta$ denotes the step function:
$\Theta(x) = 0$ for $x < 0$, and $\Theta(x) = 1$ for
$x>0$. $\hbar \omega$ is the energy measured relative to the chemical
potential so that $\omega < 0$ for initial electron energies less than
the chemical potential. $\gamma$ is the coupling
strength for the electron-electron interaction. For short (finite)
range
interactions we expect $ 0 < \gamma < 1$, (the Infinite U Hubbard model
has $\gamma = \frac{1}{8}$ \cite{1/8}).
Here $\tilde{v}_F$ is the excitation velocity, which includes
contributions
from the kinetic energy and the interaction. The integrated spectral
function (density of states) has the low-energy form:
\begin{equation}
\int A(k, \omega) dk \sim |\omega|^{2 \gamma}.
\end{equation}
In the case of electrons with spin, there are generally
two singularities \cite{meden2}, one associated with the
charge excitations at $\omega = \tilde{v}_{F,c} (k-k_F)$
and one associated with the spin excitations at
$\omega = \tilde{v}_{F,s} (k-k_F)$. If the velocities of the
two sorts of excitations are very similar, then at finite
resolution it may be difficult to distinguish this case from the
spinless case. We may now compare the Luttinger liquid scenario
to experiment. \\
$(1)''$ In a Luttinger liquid, for $\gamma < 1$ the singularity or
singularities
disperse linearly through the Fermi energy. For $\gamma > 1$, the
dispersing
structure becomes very diffuse near the Fermi energy.\\
$(2)''$ The widths that should be observed in a
real experiment are not universal - they depend on the
details of the interaction \cite{meden3}.
One would expect some asymmetry in the peaks, however. \\
$(3)''$ There is a pseudogap-like feature in the
density of states. However, the exponent needed to
fit experiment is larger than expected \cite{meden3}.
There is no obvious energy scale in the theory
for repulsive interactions, though a peak may be observed in
the density of states for \cite{meden4} attractive interactions. \\
$(4)''$ There can be peaks for $\omega < 0$ and $k > k_F$.
However, they would be expected to be rather insignificant if
$0 < \gamma < 1$. \
Here it appears that $(1)''$, and probably the asymmetry
in $(2)''$ and the exponent in $(3)''$ are serious problems for the
theory.
We conclude that the ARPES data on $(TaSe_4)_2I$ are not consistent
with either a Fermi liquid picture or a Luttinger liquid picture.
The most decisive observation is the failure of the peaks
in the EDC's to disperse through the Fermi energy. The shapes and
the widths of the peaks as a function of momentum are also difficult to
reconcile with these theories. The picture of very strong
charge density fluctuations at $2 k_F$ appears, in contrast,
to offer a consistent interpretation of all the data.We note,
however, that
the value of the CDW gap extracted from photoemission is larger than
that obatined
from optical conductivity or resistivity measurements.
Efforts have been made in the last few years to obtain spectral
predictions
for the Luther-Emery model \cite{voit}. This provides a more
natural framework
for consideration of the materials in question, since CDW fluctuations
are not expected
to coexist with a Luttinger Liquid. There is not yet, however, a
universally agreed
prediction which may be compared with experiment, and the lack of a
simple energy scale
in the model makes it difficult to extract quantitaive information from
the real spectra.
It has also been brought to our attention since completion of this
work, that a
more complete and self-consistent treatment of electron-phonon
interaction has recently been
developed by McKenzie \cite{McK}. A striking feature of his theory is
the asymmetry of
the dispersing peaks in the spectral function, which is almost redolent
of the Luttinger
Liquid, although quite different in its physical origin. We have not
attempted to make a
quantitative comparison of McKenzie's spectral function with the
photoemission data for
$(TaSe_4)_2I$, but note that there is no observable asymmetry in the
data.
It must be stressed that these conclusions apply to this
particular system only; experiments performed on other quasi-one-dimensional
systems suggest that the relative importance of
electron-electron and electron-phonon interaction effects is strongly
dependant on the system in question. Even for $(TaSe_4)_2I$,
correlation effects may be masked by the strong charge fluctuations only within a
particular parameter regime; it is for example possible that the application of
pressure to the chains would relatively strengthen the interaction effects.
In other materials, and particularly in some of the quasi
one-dimensional SDW compounds,
there would appear to be evidence for strongly one-dimensional
correlation effects.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. DMR-9214739. We would like to thank A. Chubukov, J.
Voit, V. Meden, J. Ma, F. Mila, M. Onellion and
C. Quitmann for useful discussions. We are particularly grateful to
the
authors of Ref.\ \cite{terrasi} for discussions of their data
and for supplying it to us in digitized form.
\section*{References}
| {
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} | 7,864 |
{"url":"http:\/\/physics.stackexchange.com\/questions\/75137\/lunar-and-solar-tides","text":"# Lunar and solar tides [closed]\n\nI just read the following statement in a book:\n\nIf the diameter of the earth increased by 20%, both lunar and solar tides would be weakened with lunar tides weakening more than solar tides.\n\nWhat does this mean? I basically don't know about solar tides and how lunar and solar tides are related.\n\n-\n\n## closed as unclear what you're asking by Emilio Pisanty, Dilaton, Qmechanic\u2666Aug 26 '13 at 20:03\n\nPlease clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it\u2019s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.\n\nDoes the book say why they would be weakened? \u2013\u00a0Emilio Pisanty Aug 24 '13 at 14:52\nif the diameter of earth increases by 20%.... \u2013\u00a0Rajath Krishna R Aug 24 '13 at 15:01\n$\\uparrow$ Which book? \u2013\u00a0Qmechanic Aug 26 '13 at 20:03\n\nThe tides happen because the side of the Earth facing the Moon is nearer to the Moon that the other side of the Earth, so the gravitational field of the Moon is stronger on one side of the Earth than the other. The tidal force is derived in the Wikipedia article on tidal force: I'll just quote the result:\n\n$$F \\approx \\frac{G M_{Earth} M_{Moon} }{r^3} d$$\n\nwhere $r$ is the distance from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the Moon, and $d$ is the diameter of the Earth. $F$ is the force stretching the Earth i.e. the difference between the forces on the near and far sides. The approximation assumes that the diameter of the Earth, $d$, is much less than the Earth Moon distance.\n\nSo firstly increasing the diameter of the Earth will increase the tidal force not decrease it, and secondly the tidal force is approximately proportional to the Earth's diameter, so an increase of 20% will increase the solar and luner tides by the same ratio of 20%.\n\n-","date":"2016-05-04 17:36:06","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6644605994224548, \"perplexity\": 390.5651467783901}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 5, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-18\/segments\/1461860123840.94\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20160428161523-00115-ip-10-239-7-51.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: RXJS combine/merge two Observable array by an propety "id" i have two Observable
chat$: Observable<Chat[]>;
users$: Observable<User[]>;
where Chat is:
export interface Chat {
user_id: string;
message: string;
}
and User is:
export interface User {
user_id: string;
username: string;
}
Now i wanto combine the two oservable in a new one, eg.:
threads$: Observable<Thread[]>;
where Threadis:
export interface Chat {
user_id: string;
username: string;
message: string;
}
i have tried with a merge and a spaghetti code into map, eg:
threads$ = Observable.merge(chat$, users$).pipe( map( ??? ) );
but doesn't works... i'm a newbie on rxjs.
How combine the two array using the "user_id" property?
A: Take this answer as pseudocode because i did it on my phone
import {concatMap, toArray} from 'rxjs/operators';
import {map, concat} from 'rxjs';
const fullMessage$ = (message) =>
this.user$.get(message.user_id)
.pipe(
map( user => ({...message, name: user.name}))
)
this.chat$
.pipe(
concatMap( (messages: Chat[]) =>
concat(...messages.map(fullMessage$))
)
toArray()
)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,859 |
#include "QmitkCommonActivator.h"
#include <berryPlatformUI.h>
#include <mitkLogMacros.h>
QmitkCommonActivator* QmitkCommonActivator::m_Instance = 0;
ctkPluginContext* QmitkCommonActivator::m_Context = 0;
ctkPluginContext* QmitkCommonActivator::GetContext()
{
return m_Context;
}
QmitkCommonActivator* QmitkCommonActivator::GetInstance()
{
return m_Instance;
}
berry::IPreferencesService::Pointer QmitkCommonActivator::GetPreferencesService()
{
return berry::IPreferencesService::Pointer(m_PrefServiceTracker->getService());
}
void
QmitkCommonActivator::start(ctkPluginContext* context)
{
this->m_Instance = this;
this->m_Context = context;
this->m_PrefServiceTracker.reset(new ctkServiceTracker<berry::IPreferencesService*>(context));
if(berry::PlatformUI::IsWorkbenchRunning())
{
m_ViewCoordinator = QmitkViewCoordinator::Pointer(new QmitkViewCoordinator);
m_ViewCoordinator->Start();
}
else
{
MITK_ERROR << "BlueBerry Workbench not running!";
}
}
void
QmitkCommonActivator::stop(ctkPluginContext* context)
{
Q_UNUSED(context)
m_ViewCoordinator->Stop();
m_ViewCoordinator = 0;
this->m_PrefServiceTracker.reset();
this->m_Context = 0;
this->m_Instance = 0;
}
Q_EXPORT_PLUGIN2(org_mitk_gui_qt_common, QmitkCommonActivator)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 592 |
Elizabeth Shebek, 67
Elizabeth Ann Shebek, 67, of Phoenix, Arizona passed from this life to the next on Thursday, March 20, 2014.
Elizabeth Shebek, 67 Elizabeth Ann Shebek, 67, of Phoenix, Arizona passed from this life to the next on Thursday, March 20, 2014. Check out this story on press-citizen.com: http://icp-c.com/1hrzKIt
IOW Published 7:16 p.m. CT April 24, 2014 | Updated 7:42 p.m. CT April 25, 2014
Elizabeth Ann Shebek, 67, of Phoenix, Arizona passed from this life to the next on Thursday, March 20, 2014, after a courageous 20 month battle with aggressive lymphoma. She was born July 26, 1946 to John R. and Dorothy Thomann Shebek in Riverside, Iowa. She graduated from Riverside High School in 1964 and from Ottumwa Heights College in 1966. She married Augustin Hernandez in Denver, Colorado in 1967 and they were the parents of four really great children. She married Thomas Haladyna in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona. She had a great sense of humor and enjoyed hiking, cooking, reading, quilting, traveling, and of course spending time with her kids and five grandkids.
She is survived by her husband Tom Haladyna, daughter Denise Hernandez (daughters Cora and Leia), son Christopher (Michelle and son Curtis) Hernandez all of Phoenix, Arizona, son Patrick (Gwen and sons Trace and Jake) Hernandez of Centerville, Virginia, and first husband Gus (Kathy) Hernandez, also a brother John (Linda) Shebek of Prescott, Arizona and a sister Janice (John) Musser of Riverside, Iowa, nieces Tysha (Bill and son Liam) Branigan of Milwaukee, Oregon, and Eryca Duwa, nephews Dustin Duwa and Michael Musser all of Iowa City, Iowa. Her parents and a daughter Yolanda Dune died earlier.
Read or Share this story: http://icp-c.com/1hrzKIt
Evolving world of darts drives new North Liberty store
First-ever Open Garden Weekend a plant lover's dream
Violin and piano performers Katie Wolfe and Ketty Nez captivate
Solon's 'best unpaid city employee' helps keep city streets spotless
Student activists lobby for gun-violence mural
Community wide garden tour planned in Iowa City | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 3,540 |
Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic De La Rochefoucauld De Roye
Get Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic De La Rochefoucauld De Roye essential facts below. View Videos or join the Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic De La Rochefoucauld De Roye discussion. Add Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic De La Rochefoucauld De Roye to your PopFlock.com topic list for future reference or share this resource on social media.
Jean-Baptiste Louis Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld de Roye
Jean-Baptiste Louis Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld
Chibouctou
King of France
Service/branch
French galley corps, French navy
Grand Expedition
son of Louis de La Rochefoucauld, Marquis de Roye, lieutenant-general of the galleys
Jean-Baptiste Louis Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld de Roye (August 17, 1707 - September 16, 1746) was made the Duc d'Anville by King Louis XV of France and pursued a military career in the French galley corps. He is best known for leading the French fleet on the disastrous Duc d'Anville Expedition to Acadia.
D'Anville was born on 17 August 1709, the son of Louis de La Rochefoucauld, Marquis de Roye, a distant cousin of the Dukes of La Rochefoucauld and Marthe Ducasse. He married Marie-Louise-Nicole de La Rochefoucauld, daughter of Alexandre, Duke de La Rochefoucauld. Alexandre had no surviving sons and exceptionally gained the permission of the Pope and the French King to hand the ducal title through the female line, but one of the conditions was that his daughter must marry a La Rochefoucauld. Jean-Baptiste de La Rochfoucauld de Roye was created Duc D'Anville on 15 February 1732, a few days before the marriage. He was an officer in the galley corps (corps des galères), transferring into the French navy in 1734, and he was appointed lieutenant general of in January 1745.[1]
D'Anville and Marie-Louise-Nicole had three daughters and one son, Louis Alexandre, who succeeded to the title Duc D'Anville in 1746 on his father's death. And on his grandfather's death in 1762, he became Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
Duc d'Anville Expedition
Coat of arms of La Rochefoucauld
Although he had been appointed lieutenant general of the French navy in January 1745, the duc d'Anville did not have the proper naval training necessary to command the French fleet, which was to take part in the grand expedition the following year.[1]
In 1746, the grand expedition was organized in France under the command of the duc d'Anville. The expedition was composed 20 warships, 21 frigates, and 32 transport ships, containing 800 cannons, 3,000 soldiers, and 10,000 marines. The expedition was to retake Louisbourg and then Port Royal, then known as Annapolis Royal.[2]
The crossing was very difficult, and it lasted 86 days. Without enough supplies, hundreds of soldiers and sailors died of scurvy and other epidemics. The French fleet was dispersed by a storm between Sable Island off Nova Scotia to as far away as the Caribbean. Some ships returned to France.
Less than half of the total expedition of the duc d'Anville managed to reach Chibouctou Bay. After their arrival, the Acadiens helped take care of the soldiers. However, 1,200 men died during the crossing, and more than 1,000 died of typhoid after their arrival at Chibouctou.[2]
The duc d'Anville was not spared, and died of a terrible epidemic, on 27 September 1746. He was buried on Georges' Island, in the Chibouctou Bay, (in front of Halifax). Two days later, vice-admiral d'Estournelles, who was second in command, committed suicide because of high fever. The corpse of the duc d'Anville was transported to Louisbourg in 1748.[2]
^ a b Taillemite, Étienne (1974). "La Rochefoucauld de Roye, Jean-Baptiste Louis Frédéric de". In Halpenny, Francess G (ed.). Dictionary of Canadian Biography. III (1741-1770) (online ed.). University of Toronto Press.
^ a b c ARSENAULT, Bona, Histoire des Acadiens, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec. 1978. Lemaéac p. 140
North America portal
History portal
Jean-Baptiste_Louis_Frederic_de_La_Rochefoucauld_de_Roye | {
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} | 8,045 |
\section{Introduction}
The existence of an intrinsic spread or dispersion in the galaxy cluster
X-ray luminosity-temperature (L-T) relationship has been noted by several
authors (\cite{edg91}, \cite{fab94}, \cite{ms97} etc.). Fabian et al.
(1994) demonstrated a correlation between the amplitude of the L-T
relationship and the cooling flow mass deposition rate
$\dot{M}$($M_{\odot}$yr$^{-1}$) ($L \propto T^{3.3} \dot{M}^{0.4}$).
Recently Mushotzky \& Scharf (1997) have shown that the intrinsic
dispersion of the L-T relationship does not seem to evolve and remains
constant over a wide range in redshift ($z=0$ to $z=0.4$). Since the
advent of high precision cluster metallicity measurements (Yamashita et al
1992) it is also clear that there is a dispersion of a factor of 2 in
cluster Fe metallicities. This variation also does not evolve with
redshift (\cite{mus97}). As Fabian et al (1994) have pointed out, it is
likely that temperatures, iron abundances and cooling flows are all linked
consequences of cluster histories.
In this paper we show that the variance in the L-T relationship and the
cluster metallicity are correlated and can be explained in a simple model
of hierarchical clustering if the dispersion in the present L-T relation
reflects the {\em range} of cluster formation epochs. We propose that the
range in cluster formation epochs can simultaneously help explain the
correlation between the position of a cluster in the L-T relationship, its
metallicity, and the correlations with cooling flow rates.
\section{The L-T intrinsic dispersion}
Using a large sample (102 total, 39 in the luminosity range $45.2 \leq
\log_{10} L_{bol}\; ($erg s$^{-1}) \leq 45.7 $) of clusters we have
previously demonstrated (\cite{ms97}) that both the mean cluster
temperature and intrinsic temperature dispersion (at a fixed bolometric
luminosity) of the cluster population remains constant over the redshift
range $0.1 \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} z \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} 0.4$. Using likelihood analysis we have
estimated the intrinsic dispersion in the L-T relationship as
$\sigma_{T}\simeq 2$ keV at 7 keV, modeling the dispersion as a gaussian.
We shall show that this intrinsic dispersion can be plausibly explained as
being largely due to a range of formation epochs in the cluster population
and thus the data can place some constraints on these epochs.
Semi-analytic models of the cluster population typically assume that
the redshift of a cluster is approximately the redshift of its formation.
In an $\Omega=1$ universe dominated by cold dark matter this
is a justifiable simplification. It is not clear however that it should
apply to lower density cosmologies or to those with (for example) a
mixture of hot and cold dark matter.
We use the
formalism of Kityama \& Suto (1997) who modify the Press-Schecter theory
to include the epoch of cluster formation as an explicit variable. Kityama
\& Suto suggest that the following is approximately true, assuming a self
similar model where the cluster core radius is proportional to the virial
radius;
\begin{equation}
T\propto M^{2/3} (1+z_{f})^{\xi} \left(\frac{1+z_{f}}{1+z}\right) ^{s}
\end{equation}
\begin{equation} L_{bol} \propto M^{4/3}
(1+z_{f})^{\frac{7\xi}{2}} \left(\frac{1+z_{f}}{1+z}\right) ^{\frac{s}{2}}
\end{equation}
(c.f. \cite{evr91}) and ($z_{f}$) is the cluster
formation epoch and $\xi$ is an effective index that is unity for
$\Omega=1$ and no cosmological constant and varies weakly with $z_{f}$ for
low density cosmologies. A factor $((1+z_f)/(1+z))^s$ relates the
observed cluster temperature at redshift $z$
to the virial temperature at $z_f$. Hydrodynamical simulations indicate
that cluster
temperatures are consistent with $0\lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} s \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} 1$ (e.g. \cite{nav95}).
Thus, at a given mass scale ($M$), clusters which formed at earlier epochs
are expected to be hotter and more luminous, with luminosity increasing
more rapidly than temperature. Since the temperature evolution of
clusters is seen to be zero or small (\cite{ms97}) we expect $s\sim 0$.
Preheating of the intracluster medium has been invoked (e.g.
\cite{kai91}, \cite{evr91}) to reproduce the apparent {\em negative}
evolution seen in the luminosity function of the most
luminous clusters at high redshift (\cite{gio90}, \cite{hen92}), and to
better fit the locally observed L-T relation with semi-analytic models.
The assumptions made in such models (\cite{kai91}) imply that the heated
gas will contract until the gas temperature is roughly equal to the virial
temperature of the dark halo. The gas density profile is then set by the
cluster potential rather than the dark matter density contrast. The
effect on Equations 1 \& 2 is that the overall $z_f$ dependence of the L-T
relation is weakened and therefore, for our purposes, this self-similar
case provides a lower limit in the determination of an effective $z_f$.
Using the measured temperature dispersion at a fixed luminosity
($\sigma_T\simeq 2$ keV at $45.2\leq \log_{10} L_{bol} \leq 45.7$), and
assuming a fixed mass scale, we can then proceed to calculate the
effective era of cluster formation. Combining Equations 1 \& 2 and
assuming that the observed $\sigma_T$ is due to the range of formation
epochs (from $z_{f}^{min}$ to $z_{f}^{max}$) we obtain; $\log_{10}
((1+z_{f}^{max})/(1+z_{f}^{min}))=\frac{4}{3\xi}\log_{10} \sigma_T$, since
$s\sim 0$.
For an $\Omega_0=1$ $(\lambda_o=0)$ universe ($\xi =1$) in which the most
recent cluster formation is at $z\sim 0$ then the earliest epoch of
cluster formation would be at $z\sim 1.5$ (with some at higher z, since we
model the L-T dispersion as a gaussian). Since lower density cosmologies
act to {\em increase} this upper bound we can make the general statement
that, if clusters are still forming at $z\sim 0$, then they must have
begun forming at $z\geq 1.5$. If the cluster population had essentially
finished forming by $z\sim 0.5$ then we would expect the earliest clusters
to have formed at $z\geq 2.5$. Given the lack of observed evolution in the
population of galaxy clusters to at least $z \sim 0.3$ (e.g. \cite{ebe97})
this latter result may be a better fit to observations.
\section{Abundance Data}
We have used a sample of 32 clusters ($0.01\lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} z \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel < \over \sim \;$} 0.5$) with
precise Fe abundance measurements (averaged over the cluster),
temperatures and bolometric luminosities (\cite{mus97}, \cite{yam92} and
additional unpublished results) to determine if the Fe abundance is
correlated with the relative deviation of a cluster from the mean L-T
relationship.
In Figure 1 we have plotted the observed Fe abundance relative to solar
(\cite{and89}) as a function of the amplitude of the L-T loci, hereafter
$A_{LT}$, assuming $L \propto T^3$, which has been determined to be a good
empirical fit (\cite{fab94}) as well as being close to theoretical
expectations (which range from $L\propto T^{2}$ to $L\propto T^{3.5}$).
The point size is proportional to the cluster temperature.
The x-coordinate, $A_{LT}$, is therefore a direct measure of the `sense'
of the dispersion from a single power law fit to the L-T relation. The
larger $A_{LT}$ is, the more luminous a cluster is for a given
temperature. It is clear from Figure 1 that a correlation exists between
iron abundance and $A_{LT}$ such that clusters with higher abundances are
more luminous at fixed temperature. The sole exception to this is the
Centaurus cluster which is the second closest luminous cluster and is
known to have a strong abundance gradient (\cite{fuk94}) and might
therefore be considered anomalous. A Spearman rank-order correlation test
on the data (with the Centaurus metallicity adjusted as indicated in
Figure 1) confirms that Fe and $A_{LT}$ are positively correlated with
98\% confidence and $r_s=0.43$. An unweighted least squares fit (plotted
in Figure 1) yields: $Fe\simeq 2.7\times 10^{-8} A_{LT}^{0.16}$. A maximum
likelihood analysis of the iron abundance residuals to this best fit
allows us to constrain the intrinsic dispersion (independent of $A_{LT}$)
in Fe to be $\leq 0.1$ (90\% confidence). The cluster A2218, with the
lowest abundance in the sample, has been extensively studied (e.g.
\cite{squ96}) and is generally thought to be in an unrelaxed dynamical
state due to a recent large merger. There is no apparent correlation with
cluster temperature in the Fe-$A_{LT}$ plane. In Figure 2 the same data
are plotted, but with point size proportional to redshift, no redshift
correlation is seen in the Fe-$A_{LT}$ plane.
\section{Discussion}
From Equations 1 \& 2 the quantity $A_{LT}$ should increase with earlier
cluster formation epoch and thus we are led to interpret the data in
Figure 1 to mean that higher abundance clusters formed earlier. This has
profound implications for the nature of their formation.
The metallicities observed in clusters are thought to have originated
primarily from SNe type II in an early epoch of star formation
(\cite{loe96}). In this interpretation the intracluster medium will have
undergone a significant 'pre-heating' at $z>1$ due to the energetics
required to match the observed abundances. Pre-heating is also favoured by
recent measurements of negligible, or slightly negative, cluster
luminosity evolution to $z\sim 0.3$ (e.g. \cite{ebe97}, \cite{jon97}) and
by measurements of negligible temperature evolution (e.g. \cite{ms97}).
Recent semi-analytical models of galaxy formation (\cite{kau97}) indicate
that 80\% of the intracluster metals were produced at $z>1$.
The sense of the relationship between $A_{LT}$ and abundance to $z_f$ can
be expressed in terms of a hierarchical `tree' history. In such a theory
there are two extremes. Either clusters have started as a single, dominant
potential well, into which much smaller clumps have fallen, or clusters
have formed by the merger of intermediate sized clumps over their history.
These two routes to a final cluster are, in fact, seen explicitly in halo
merger studies (e.g. \cite{lac93}, \cite{hus97}). We note that, for either
case, the rate of growth of the progenitor mass is generally slower for
low density cosmologies (\cite{hus97}).
In the pre-heating scenario it is expected that low mass sub-clumps will,
because of their smaller potential wells, lose a substantial fraction of
their heated enriched gas during the epoch of metal formation while
massive systems will not. Thus a cluster formed later, whose evolution is
dominated by the merging of smaller sub-clumps, will tend to have a lower
metal abundance and a lower value of $A_{LT}$ than a massive system formed
earlier by the collapse of a single large overdensity. This explanation
does however assume that clusters formed through these two routes have
roughly the same final virial mass. In hierarchical models the most
massive systems are expected to form last so clearly this `direct'
interpretation of the L-T dispersion is a likely oversimplification of the
real play-off between system mass and $z_{f}$ in Equations 1 \& 2.
Observational evidence (e.g. \cite{dav95}) indicates that (where
discernable) the subclumps involved in the formation of luminous clusters
at low redshift are themselves typically low luminosity systems, such as
groups. The abundances measured in groups are indeed often low
(\cite{fuk96}), consistent with our hypothesis.
Our interpretation of the correlation in Figure 1 is also consistent with
the results of Fabian et al (1994) which demonstrated that higher
$\dot{M}$ clusters have larger $A_{LT}$ and that higher $\dot{M}$ clusters
typically have higher abundances. Cooling flows are expected to be
disrupted by major mergers and hence objects which have not experienced
mergers are relatively undisturbed and, in the language used above, are
`truly' old. They would then also be expected to have higher $\dot {M}$'s.
One of the `oldest' objects in our sample would then be 2A0335+096
(Figures 1 \& 2). There is evidence (\cite{irw95}) that this cluster is
indeed at a late stage of cooling, which places its age at $\lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel > \over \sim \;$} 4$Gyr
(\cite{chr96}, and \cite{hu88}), or a $z_{f}$ of $\sim 2$, consistent with
the results in Section 2.
It is important to note that the definitions of formation epochs (in terms
of mass halos) are actually somewhat arbitrary, for example Lacey \& Cole
(1993) propose a criteria that $z_f$ is the epoch at which a halo of mass
$M$ at $z$ had a mass greater than $M/2$ for the first time. Thus, the
above scenario is certainly overly simplistic and it is probably better to
consider cluster formation as a continuous process which, however, for
illustrative purposes can be subdivided into general classes such as the
two (realistic) extremes described above.
Clearly, the range of abundances combined with the L-T dispersion results
shown above, should allow, through careful modeling, new constraints to be
placed on the overall pathways of hierarchical cluster formation.
\section{Conclusion}
We propose that the observed dispersion in the cluster L-T relationship
reflects the range in cluster formation epochs within a hierarchical
universe. The relationship of cooling flow mass deposition with luminosity
and temperature is then qualitatively explained if we assume that cooling
flow clusters are both initially denser and older than non-cooling flow
clusters, which we associate with recent major mergers. The observed
dispersion in cluster iron abundances and its correlation with position in
the L-T diagram ($A_{LT}$) is accounted for (except for a possible
residual intrinsic dispersion of $\Delta Fe\leq 0.1$) if the smaller mass
units that are involved in the mergers can lose metals via an early
cluster wind phase and then merge to form the lower $A_{LT}$ systems. In
this scenario we can constrain the earliest cluster formation to be at
$z_f \lower.5ex\hbox{$\; \buildrel > \over \sim \;$} 2$. While there are clearly other candidate mechanisms for
producing the observed variances in abundances and temperatures (e.g.
inhomogeneity of the intracluster medium (\cite{fab94}), these must
ultimately also be functions of the cluster age and history.
Larger data sets and more detailed cosmological simulations will greatly
improve our understanding of the results presented here and will test our
hypothesis that the measurement of a clusters iron abundance informs us of
its age and formation history. For example, we expect that higher
abundance clusters will typically have higher baryonic fractions. We also
expect that the most massive clusters observed at $z\simeq 1-2$ will
typically have higher abundances than their local counterparts. In future
work we will investigate these predictions.
\clearpage
| {
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De lijst van leden van de Belgische Senaat van 1971 tot 1974. De Senaat telde toen 179 zetels. Bij de verkiezingen van 7 november 1971 werden 106 senatoren rechtstreeks verkozen. Het federale kiesstelsel was toen gebaseerd op algemeen enkelvoudig stemrecht voor alle Belgen van 21 jaar en ouder, volgens een systeem van evenredige vertegenwoordiging op basis van de Methode-D'Hondt, gecombineerd met een districtenstelsel. Er waren daarnaast ook 48 provinciale senatoren, aangeduid door de provincieraden en 24 gecoöpteerde senatoren. Tevens was er een senator van rechtswege.
De legislatuur liep van 25 november 1971 tot 20 december 1973. Tijdens deze legislatuur waren achtereenvolgens de regering-G. Eyskens V (januari 1972 - januari 1973) en de regering-Leburton (januari 1973 - april 1974) in functie. De regering-G. Eyskens V steunde op een meerderheid van christendemocraten (CVP en PSC) en socialisten (BSP en PSB) en de regering-Leburton op een meerderheid van christendemocraten, socialisten en liberalen (PVV en PLP). De oppositie bestond uit PVV (tot januari 1973), PLP (tot januari 1973), Volksunie, RW, FDF, KPB-PCB en later ook PLDP, een afsplitsing van de PLP.
Samenstelling
Wijzigingen in fractiesamenstelling:
In 1973 verlaten de rechtstreeks gekozen senatoren Norbert Hougardy en Albert Demuyter, provinciaal senator Basile-Jean Risopoulos en gecoöpteerd senator Pierre Ansiaux de PLP en gaan in de PLDP-fractie zetelen, die ze zelf hebben opgericht.
In 1973 stapt Pierre Waucquez (gecoöpteerd senator) uit RW en zetelt vanaf dan als onafhankelijke.
Lijst van de senatoren
Zie ook
Senaat (België)
Lijst van voorzitters van de Belgische Senaat
Lijsten van Belgische parlementsleden | {
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Mixed signal on paying for traffic light
JOHN SHARP
A traffic light constructed to help visitors to Illinois Central College's North Campus safely turn onto University Street could spark a government squabble over who should pay for its upkeep.
City officials will approach ICC officials about the community college potentially paying for some of the maintenance on the traffic signal.
On Tuesday, at-large City Councilman Gary Sandberg said ICC, as a tax-exempt entity, is the "sole beneficiary" of the traffic light.
The council voted unanimously to approve a $130,000 reimbursement of state money to ICC for the construction of the traffic light leading into the campus. The city serves as the "pass-through" agency for the grant, which was applied to the college's $305,930 design and construction costs.
The city would typically handle the maintenance costs, but there is no estimate on how much that may be at a time when City Hall battles a $9.6 million budget deficit for next year.
"It's not like (it's a traffic light) we're putting in at an intersection like Glen and University," said Peoria Public Works Director David Barber. "It's a signal for private access."
ICC President John Erwin, though, disagrees that the traffic light benefits only ICC. In fact, he said, the college pursued getting the light to benefit CityLink, which also is funded by tax dollars.
CityLink also may eventually have a larger presence at ICC North.
"We'd like to construct a transit center on the northwest side of Peoria," said John Stokowski, program development director at CityLink. "One of the sites we are looking at is locating the transit site at (ICC North's) property. It's a huge site. They have ample room back there."
He said the traffic light has been a welcome addition for their services.
"From a safety standpoint, we wanted some kind of light there," Stokowski said, noting the difficulty of making a left turn out of the college onto University Street before the light existed. "The University route has become our most heavily traveled route right now."
There are other private businesses that utilize the light.
"I'm lucky I have to make a right turn leaving ICC to go home," said Steve Shook, director of the Software Center of Excellence at Advanced Information Services (AIS), a private business located at ICC North. "I felt sorry for people who live up north and had to go in that direction (left)."
Shook is glad to see the light, saying it's alleviated some of the back-up traffic out of the college.
Other non-ICC entities also use the light. They include the legislative office for state Rep. David Leitch, R-Peoria, the Mental Health Association of Illinois Valley Inc. and the Illinois Department of Human Services. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is moving an office into the college June 1.
Erwin said it's possible the college could help with the maintenance costs, although he said the expense "is not normal for us."
He said money that is due to the college from the state has yet to be received but if it does eventually come in, "I'm sure we'd be pleased to assist the city with that. It can't be hugely expensive."
Barber said other cities in the state charge entities, mostly private businesses, to help maintain a traffic light when it is the sole benefactor. He said he was unfamiliar with any government in the Peoria area that is on the hook to pay for the maintenance or repair costs of traffic lights.
"It's not unusual," Barber said. "It's just not something (that occurs locally)."
John Sharp can be reached at 686-3282 or jsharp@pjstar.com. | {
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Shweta Gopinath,shares her experience on her first attempt at Skydiving,and encourages more and more Indians to try out the thrilling sport,once in a lifetime.
We have next Skydiving camp from Independence day to Eid(16th-22nd) in Dhana,MP.Experience the blue skies.
We now know you totally loved the 3 day ordeal.
Note:The writeup and image are first hand experience on skydiving by Shweta Gopinath .Reproduction of her image or her experience in whole or part on the internet is prohibited.
Have you ever felt like you need to DO something different in life?? Something that gives you immense satisfaction of achievement.That desperate urge to break the chain of mediocrity??Well, I was exactly in that stage of my life when I came to know about the skydiving session to be held in Pondicherry. It felt like the Gods were calling upon me to to go out there and achieve my dreams.
With the help of this blog 'Anki on the move' , I was able to get the full details of the Skydiving Camp and company conducting it , 'Kakini Enterprises'.I finally set out to Pondy , for the biggest adventure of my life ever!!
I had opted for the 'Static Jump' because I wanted to have the experience of jumping and maneuvering the parachute on my own. It was a three day camp, the first two days I was given training on the know- hows of skydiving, parachute training etc. My instructor was very patient and always emphasized on the importance of safety, so much so that, even if woken up from the middle of my sleep, I would be able to tell how to react during an emergency situation!!
It was really interesting and I enjoyed the training a lot. At the end of it all,I was asked to write an exam of 60 questions, to test my understanding of the whole process. (And I managed to pass it, phew!!!) By this time, I had gained a lot of confidence, that YES, I could do it!
Then came the third day of the camp, finally it was my turn to jump!! I was very nervous and even more excited. As I got into the small cessna 4 seater aircraft,I was greeted by the pilot and asked to keep my hands and feet inside the plane at all times. As the plane slowly took off, I gripped the handle of the seat tightly and made a silent prayer to God. By the time we reached the required altitude, I was quivering with anticipation and excitement. When I got the thumbs up sign, I mustered all the courage I had and jumped out of the plane.. I was airborne!!! It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life. After a few hundred feet of free fall, my parachute opened, and wallah , I was skydiving! I couldnt belive my eyes, I was actually doing it! I could see the whole city of Pondicherry and the Bay of Bengal under me! I started navigating the parachute and slowly inched closer to the ground.
The challenge was now to land safely, the hardest part..As I got closer to the ground , I started following the instructions given by the ground instructor. I managed to land in the vicinity of the drop zone, safely ,without any casualties!! I couldn't believe I did it!!!! I am so proud of myself of having actually achieved one of my long term dreams.
So for all those out there with an adventurous streak and an inkling for skydiving, all that I can say is , GO FOR IT!!! In Skydiving, the ground is the limit! | {
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Former Trump Campaign Manager Reacts to Mueller Charges by Attacking 'Clinton Administration'
Corey Lewandowski
Screenshot via TP Clips/YouTube
It seems that another reminder is in order for Fox News, its head–in–the–sand viewers, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski that Hillary Clinton is not the president.
In the biggest news to break so far from the ongoing investigation of current and former members of the Trump administration by special counsel Robert Mueller, CNN reported Friday that a federal grand jury has approved the first charges in the probe. No one yet knows what those charges are or whom they target, because a federal judge has sealed them.
However one looks at this, it can't be good news for the Trump administration.
So what's Lewandowski's take? We should be investigating the "Clinton administration."
"The dam is breaking. We're never going to hold the water back," Lewandowski smugly told Fox & Friends on Saturday morning. "Gimme a break. Look, the speculation is so insane right now, what we should be focusing on are the continued lies of the Clinton administration, the continued fallacies that they perpetuate."
As ThinkProgress' Aaron Rupar pointed out, Lewandowski used the "Clinton administration" phrase again later in the segment to promulgate the right–wing conspiracy theory du jour that as secretary of state, Clinton approved a deal to transfer 20% of U.S. uranium deposits to a Russian company in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
This claim was pushed on several occasions in 2016 by the Trump campaign, including in a TV ad stating that Clinton "gave American uranium rights to the Russians." It also was the subject of several anti–Clinton memes gobbled up by the masses who watch Fox News and follow right–wing blogs.
For those who continue to blindly support Trump, this type of distraction appears to be working, with many Trumpians now calling for Mueller himself to be investigated for trying to cover up "Uranium One."
Of course, there was plenty of prodding by Sean Hannity and others along the way:
Rupar summed up the current mess as follows:
This strategy — distract from Trump's scandals by desperately trying to create new ones surrounding the Clintons — isn't new. But the effort has intensified in recent days. For instance, during an interview on Thursday's edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka went as far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed for her role in the Uranium One deal, despite there being no evidence she actually did anything wrong.
These people are sick.
1st Person (or People) Charged In the Russia Investigation to Be Arrested Monday: Report
Fox News' Favorite Trump-Loving 'Navy SEAL' Turns Out to Be a Total Fraud
Fox News Guest Says Trump's Long History of Alleged Sexual Assault Is 'Child's Play' | {
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