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Who is Kanad? A. Kanad is Tendal 13 and Arvid 6's supervisor at the Ultroom. B. Kanad is Reggie Laughton. C. Kanad is the head of the whole galactic system. D. Kanad is the leader of the Mycenae.	Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE ULTROOM ERROR by JERRY SOHL Smith admitted he had made an error involving a few murders—and a few thousand years. He was entitled to a sense of humor, though, even in the Ultroom! HB73782. Ultroom error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer out of 1609 complete, intact, but too near limit of 1,000 days. Next Kanad transfer ready. 1951. Reginald, son of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Laughton, 3495 Orland Drive, Marionville, Illinois, U. S. A. Arrive his 378th day. TB73782. Nancy Laughton sat on the blanket she had spread on the lawn in her front yard, knitting a pair of booties for the PTA bazaar. Occasionally she glanced at her son in the play pen, who was getting his daily dose of sunshine. He was gurgling happily, examining a ball, a cheese grater and a linen baby book, all with perfunctory interest. When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her. He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a rather amused set to his lips. "Hello, Nancy," he said. "Hello, Joe," she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee. "I'm going to take the baby for a while," he said. "All right, Joe." He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the child. Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his heels. "I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he was," Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. "I don't even have a brother." Martin Laughton sighed. "I can't understand why you believed him. It's just—just plain nuts, Nancy!" "Don't you think I know it?" Nancy said tearfully. "I feel like I'm going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I don't even want to think about it." "We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try to get some rest?" "You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?" When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the table and she sobbed. "Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to think it out, that's all. We should have called the police." Nancy shook her head in her arms. "They'd—never—believe me either," she moaned. "I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right." Martin got up out of his chair and went to the stairs. "I'm going with you," Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to him. "We'll go up and look at him together." They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs. They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife and led her to the door. "As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he tried to get away with the baby." Martin leaned down and patted the dog. "It was Tiger here who scared him off." The police sergeant looked at the father, at Nancy and then at the dog. He scribbled notes in his book. "Are you a rich man, Mr. Laughton?" he asked. "Not at all. The bank still owns most of the house. I have a few hundred dollars, that's all." "What do you do?" "Office work, mostly. I'm a junior executive in an insurance company." "Any enemies?" "No ... Oh, I suppose I have a few people I don't get along with, like anybody else. Nobody who'd do anything like this, though." The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. "You'd better keep your dog inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house. Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way." Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next to the telephone stand. The front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and another man. "I came as soon as I could, Martin," the young doctor said, stepping inside with the other man. "This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins." Martin and Tompkins shook hands. "The baby—?" Dr. Stuart asked. "Upstairs," Martin said. "You'd better get him, Dr. Tompkins, if we're to take him to the hospital. I'll stay here with Mr. Laughton. How've you been, Martin?" "Fine." "How's everything at the office?" "Fine." "And your wife?" "She's fine, too." "Glad to hear it, Martin. Mighty glad. Say, by the way, there's that bill you owe me. I think it's $32, isn't that right?" "Yes, I'd almost forgotten about it." "Why don't you be a good fellow and write a check for it? It's been over a year, you know." "That's right. I'll get right at it." Martin went over to his desk, opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder. "Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go." He went over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the front door. "Good-bye," Martin said, going to the door. Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr. Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr. Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched forward on his face. The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the telephone. "One of them was the same man!" she cried. Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. "I believed them," he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. "They made me believe them!" "Those bodies," the sergeant said. "Would you mind pointing them out to me, please?" "Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?" Mrs. Laughton asked. "There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton." "But there must be! I tell you I shot these men who posed as doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—" "Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that." The sergeant went to the door and opened it. "Say, Homer, take another look around the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with a .30-.30." He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. "Ever shoot a gun before, Mrs. Laughton?" "Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had Reggie." The sergeant nodded. "You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a guy carrying your baby, don't you think?" "I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it." The patrolman pushed the door open. "There's no bodies out here but there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the walk." The policemen went out. "Thank God you woke up, Nancy," Martin said. "I'd have let them have the baby." He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair. Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes. "I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom." "Reggie's pretty cute, though," Martin said. "You will have to admit that." Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking. "Martin!" He sat up quickly. "Where's Tiger?" Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead. If we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a hermit," Martin said at breakfast a month later. "He needs fresh air and sunshine." "I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day." "Still thinking about it? I think we'd have heard from them again if they were coming back. They probably got somebody else's baby by this time." Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. "But for safety's sake I guess you'd better keep that gun handy." The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds moved slowly across the summer sky and a warm breeze rustled the trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this, Nancy thought. So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor. Mrs. MacDougal was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first sign of trouble. With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just gurgled with delight at the change in environment. This peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway, tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms against her cheeks and shrieked. The car came on, crunched over the play pen, killing the child. The mother was hit and instantly killed, force of the blow snapping her spine and tossing her against the house. The car plunged on into a tree, hitting it a terrible blow, crumbling the car's forward end so it looked like an accordion. The men were thrown from the machine. "We'll never be able to prosecute in this case," the states attorney said. "At least not on a drunken driving basis." "I can't get over it," the chief of police said. "I've got at least six men who will swear the man was drunk. He staggered, reeled and gave the usual drunk talk. He reeked of whiskey." The prosecutor handed the report over the desk. "Here's the analysis. Not a trace of alcohol. He couldn't have even had a smell of near beer. Here's another report. This is his physical exam made not long afterwards. The man was in perfect health. Only variations are he had a scar on his leg where something, probably a dog, bit him once. And then a scar on his chest. It looked like an old gunshot wound, they said. Must have happened years ago." "That's odd. The man who accosted Mrs. Laughton in the afternoon was bitten by their dog. Later that night she said she shot the same man in the chest. Since the scars are healed it obviously couldn't be the same man. But there's a real coincidence for you. And speaking of the dogbite, the Laughton dog died that night. His menu evidently didn't agree with him. Never did figure what killed him, actually." "Any record of treatment on the man she shot?" "The men . You'll remember, there were two. No, we never found a trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a gunshot wound that night. No hospital had a case either—at least not within several hundred miles—that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot with .30-.30?" The state attorney shook his head. "I wouldn't be here if I had." "I'll say you wouldn't. The pair must have crawled away to die God knows where." "Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs. Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?" It was the chief's turn to shake his head. "Your guess is as good as mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It looks deliberate, but where's the motive?" "What does the man have to say?" "I was afraid you'd get to him," the chief said, his neck reddening. "It's all been rather embarrassing to the department." He coughed self-consciously. "He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It gives you the creeps." The states attorney leaned back in his chair. "Maybe it's a case for an alienist." "One jump ahead of you. Dr. Stone thinks he's normal, but won't put down any I.Q. Actually, he can't figure him out himself. Smith seems to take delight in answering questions—sort of anticipates them and has the answer ready before you're half through asking." "Well, if Dr. Stone says he's normal, that's enough for me." The prosecutor was silent for a moment. Then, "How about the husband?" "Laughton? We're afraid to let him see him. All broken up. No telling what kind of a rumpus he'd start—especially if Smith started his funny business." "Guess you're right. Well, Mr. Smith won't think it's so funny when we hang criminal negligence or manslaughter on him. By the way, you've checked possible family connections?" "Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in case you're interested." The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile. Arvid 6—for John Smith was Arvid 6—had lain in that position for more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly. Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the building. Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid 6 rose from his cot. "Your lawyer's here to see you," the jailer said, indicating the man with the brief case. "Ring the buzzer when you're through." The jailer let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away. The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring. "Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of it," he declared. "If you carry on any more we'll never get back to the Ultroom!" "I'm sorry, Tendal," the man on the cot said. "I didn't think—" "You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot here." "I'm really sorry about that," Arvid 6 said. You know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—" The older man shook his head. "You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me." Tendal 13 paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked. "It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special brand of humor I have grown to despise." "You didn't have to come along at all, you know," Arvid 6 said. "How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13 reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!" He snorted. "I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only prove it when I pinch myself and here I am. "Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609, when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart piece by piece—" "All right, all right," Arvid 6 said. "I'll admit I've made some mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all." "Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed with them. If that's adventure, you can have it." Tendal 13 sat down wearily and sank his head in his hands. "It was you who conceived the idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words. And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night. "And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,' you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we didn't even come close to getting the child. "Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury, concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw." These twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be," Arvid 6 said. "You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born in." Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. "Do you know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as far as it would go just to see what would happen . That's how simple I think it was." Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor. "What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?" Tendal 13 asked. Arvid 6 sighed. "After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody." "That's right." "Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk, so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I reeked of it." He laughed. "I fancy they're thoroughly confused." "And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?" "At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw." "And you amused yourself with him." "I suppose you'd think so." "Who do you tell them you are?" "John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's license—" "Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self. Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated through a million years." "Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?" Tendal 13 shook his head. "I haven't heard. The transfers are getting more difficult all the time. In 1609, you'll remember, it was a case of pneumonia for the two-year-old. A simple procedure. It wouldn't work here. Medicine's too far along." He produced a notebook. "The last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there, probably." "Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?" "How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes, to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?" "Frankly, I didn't think he'd go back so far." "If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then sending him back beyond his original birth date—" Tendal 13 got up and commenced his pacing again. "Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a thousand or more or until their bones are like paper." "I just wonder how angry Kanad will be," Arvid muttered. HB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267. Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M, Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day. TB92167 Arvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other. "Before we leave, Arvid," Tendal 13 started to say. "I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything." "Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?" "I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do whatever you say." "I hope I can count on that." Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer. The jailer unlocked the cell door. "You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me, Matthews," Tendal 13 told the jailer. "Yes, I remember," the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out of the cell. They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried several with no luck. Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge. "Arvid!" Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the shoulders and shook him. The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of a violent argument.	C. Kanad is the head of the whole galactic system.
Why is the Geig Corps important? A. Val and Ron worked for them before signing up with UranCo B. It is UranCo's method of acquiring manpower for the resource search C. It is how Ledman got involved in the uranium project in the first place D. They funded the dome that Ledman lives in	THE HUNTED HEROES By ROBERT SILVERBERG The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad genius who had a motto: Death to all Terrans! "Let's keep moving," I told Val. "The surest way to die out here on Mars is to give up." I reached over and turned up the pressure on her oxymask to make things a little easier for her. Through the glassite of the mask, I could see her face contorted in an agony of fatigue. And she probably thought the failure of the sandcat was all my fault, too. Val's usually about the best wife a guy could ask for, but when she wants to be she can be a real flying bother. It was beyond her to see that some grease monkey back at the Dome was at fault—whoever it was who had failed to fasten down the engine hood. Nothing but what had stopped us could stop a sandcat: sand in the delicate mechanism of the atomic engine. But no; she blamed it all on me somehow: So we were out walking on the spongy sand of the Martian desert. We'd been walking a good eight hours. "Can't we turn back now, Ron?" Val pleaded. "Maybe there isn't any uranium in this sector at all. I think we're crazy to keep on searching out here!" I started to tell her that the UranCo chief had assured me we'd hit something out this way, but changed my mind. When Val's tired and overwrought there's no sense in arguing with her. I stared ahead at the bleak, desolate wastes of the Martian landscape. Behind us somewhere was the comfort of the Dome, ahead nothing but the mazes and gullies of this dead world. He was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake. "Try to keep going, Val." My gloved hand reached out and clumsily enfolded hers. "Come on, kid. Remember—we're doing this for Earth. We're heroes." She glared at me. "Heroes, hell!" she muttered. "That's the way it looked back home, but, out there it doesn't seem so glorious. And UranCo's pay is stinking." "We didn't come out here for the pay, Val." "I know, I know, but just the same—" It must have been hell for her. We had wandered fruitlessly over the red sands all day, both of us listening for the clicks of the counter. And the geigers had been obstinately hushed all day, except for their constant undercurrent of meaningless noises. Even though the Martian gravity was only a fraction of Earth's, I was starting to tire, and I knew it must have been really rough on Val with her lovely but unrugged legs. "Heroes," she said bitterly. "We're not heroes—we're suckers! Why did I ever let you volunteer for the Geig Corps and drag me along?" Which wasn't anywhere close to the truth. Now I knew she was at the breaking point, because Val didn't lie unless she was so exhausted she didn't know what she was doing. She had been just as much inflamed by the idea of coming to Mars to help in the search for uranium as I was. We knew the pay was poor, but we had felt it a sort of obligation, something we could do as individuals to keep the industries of radioactives-starved Earth going. And we'd always had a roving foot, both of us. No, we had decided together to come to Mars—the way we decided together on everything. Now she was turning against me. I tried to jolly her. "Buck up, kid," I said. I didn't dare turn up her oxy pressure any higher, but it was obvious she couldn't keep going. She was almost sleep-walking now. We pressed on over the barren terrain. The geiger kept up a fairly steady click-pattern, but never broke into that sudden explosive tumult that meant we had found pay-dirt. I started to feel tired myself, terribly tired. I longed to lie down on the soft, spongy Martian sand and bury myself. I looked at Val. She was dragging along with her eyes half-shut. I felt almost guilty for having dragged her out to Mars, until I recalled that I hadn't. In fact, she had come up with the idea before I did. I wished there was some way of turning the weary, bedraggled girl at my side back into the Val who had so enthusiastically suggested we join the Geigs. Twelve steps later, I decided this was about as far as we could go. I stopped, slipped out of the geiger harness, and lowered myself ponderously to the ground. "What'samatter, Ron?" Val asked sleepily. "Something wrong?" "No, baby," I said, putting out a hand and taking hers. "I think we ought to rest a little before we go any further. It's been a long, hard day." It didn't take much to persuade her. She slid down beside me, curled up, and in a moment she was fast asleep, sprawled out on the sands. Poor kid , I thought. Maybe we shouldn't have come to Mars after all. But, I reminded myself, someone had to do the job. A second thought appeared, but I squelched it: Why the hell me? I looked down at Valerie's sleeping form, and thought of our warm, comfortable little home on Earth. It wasn't much, but people in love don't need very fancy surroundings. I watched her, sleeping peacefully, a wayward lock of her soft blonde hair trailing down over one eyebrow, and it seemed hard to believe that we'd exchanged Earth and all it held for us for the raw, untamed struggle that was Mars. But I knew I'd do it again, if I had the chance. It's because we wanted to keep what we had. Heroes? Hell, no. We just liked our comforts, and wanted to keep them. Which took a little work. Time to get moving. But then Val stirred and rolled over in her sleep, and I didn't have the heart to wake her. I sat there, holding her, staring out over the desert, watching the wind whip the sand up into weird shapes. The Geig Corps preferred married couples, working in teams. That's what had finally decided it for us—we were a good team. We had no ties on Earth that couldn't be broken without much difficulty. So we volunteered. And here we are. Heroes. The wind blasted a mass of sand into my face, and I felt it tinkle against the oxymask. I glanced at the suit-chronometer. Getting late. I decided once again to wake Val. But she was tired. And I was tired too, tired from our wearying journey across the empty desert. I started to shake Val. But I never finished. It would be so nice just to lean back and nuzzle up to her, down in the sand. So nice. I yawned, and stretched back. I awoke with a sudden startled shiver, and realized angrily I had let myself doze off. "Come on, Val," I said savagely, and started to rise to my feet. I couldn't. I looked down. I was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is for a trapped fly. It wasn't Martians that had done it. There weren't any Martians, hadn't been for a million years. It was some Earthman who had bound us. I rolled my eyes toward Val, and saw that she was similarly trussed in the sticky stuff. The tangle-cord was still fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant odor like that of drying fish. It had been spun on us only a short time ago, I realized. "Ron—" "Don't try to move, baby. This stuff can break your neck if you twist it wrong." She continued for a moment to struggle futilely, and I had to snap, "Lie still, Val!" "A very wise statement," said a brittle, harsh voice from above me. I looked up and saw a helmeted figure above us. He wasn't wearing the customary skin-tight pliable oxysuits we had. He wore an outmoded, bulky spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet, all but the face area opaque. The oxygen cannisters weren't attached to his back as expected, though. They were strapped to the back of the wheelchair in which he sat. Through the fishbowl I could see hard little eyes, a yellowed, parchment-like face, a grim-set jaw. I didn't recognize him, and this struck me odd. I thought I knew everyone on sparsely-settled Mars. Somehow I'd missed him. What shocked me most was that he had no legs. The spacesuit ended neatly at the thighs. He was holding in his left hand the tanglegun with which he had entrapped us, and a very efficient-looking blaster was in his right. "I didn't want to disturb your sleep," he said coldly. "So I've been waiting here for you to wake up." I could just see it. He might have been sitting there for hours, complacently waiting to see how we'd wake up. That was when I realized he must be totally insane. I could feel my stomach-muscles tighten, my throat constrict painfully. Then anger ripped through me, washing away the terror. "What's going on?" I demanded, staring at the half of a man who confronted us from the wheelchair. "Who are you?" "You'll find out soon enough," he said. "Suppose now you come with me." He reached for the tanglegun, flipped the little switch on its side to MELT, and shot a stream of watery fluid over our legs, keeping the blaster trained on us all the while. Our legs were free. "You may get up now," he said. "Slowly, without trying to make trouble." Val and I helped each other to our feet as best we could, considering our arms were still tightly bound against the sides of our oxysuits. "Walk," the stranger said, waving the tanglegun to indicate the direction. "I'll be right behind you." He holstered the tanglegun. I glimpsed the bulk of an outboard atomic rigging behind him, strapped to the back of the wheelchair. He fingered a knob on the arm of the chair and the two exhaust ducts behind the wheel-housings flamed for a moment, and the chair began to roll. Obediently, we started walking. You don't argue with a blaster, even if the man pointing it is in a wheelchair. "What's going on, Ron?" Val asked in a low voice as we walked. Behind us the wheelchair hissed steadily. "I don't quite know, Val. I've never seen this guy before, and I thought I knew everyone at the Dome." "Quiet up there!" our captor called, and we stopped talking. We trudged along together, with him following behind; I could hear the crunch-crunch of the wheelchair as its wheels chewed into the sand. I wondered where we were going, and why. I wondered why we had ever left Earth. The answer to that came to me quick enough: we had to. Earth needed radioactives, and the only way to get them was to get out and look. The great atomic wars of the late 20th Century had used up much of the supply, but the amount used to blow up half the great cities of the world hardly compared with the amount we needed to put them back together again. In three centuries the shattered world had been completely rebuilt. The wreckage of New York and Shanghai and London and all the other ruined cities had been hidden by a shining new world of gleaming towers and flying roadways. We had profited by our grandparents' mistakes. They had used their atomics to make bombs. We used ours for fuel. It was an atomic world. Everything: power drills, printing presses, typewriters, can openers, ocean liners, powered by the inexhaustible energy of the dividing atom. But though the energy is inexhaustible, the supply of nuclei isn't. After three centuries of heavy consumption, the supply failed. The mighty machine that was Earth's industry had started to slow down. And that started the chain of events that led Val and me to end up as a madman's prisoners, on Mars. With every source of uranium mined dry on Earth, we had tried other possibilities. All sorts of schemes came forth. Project Sea-Dredge was trying to get uranium from the oceans. In forty or fifty years, they'd get some results, we hoped. But there wasn't forty or fifty years' worth of raw stuff to tide us over until then. In a decade or so, our power would be just about gone. I could picture the sort of dog-eat-dog world we'd revert back to. Millions of starving, freezing humans tooth-and-clawing in it in the useless shell of a great atomic civilization. So, Mars. There's not much uranium on Mars, and it's not easy to find or any cinch to mine. But what little is there, helps. It's a stopgap effort, just to keep things moving until Project Sea-Dredge starts functioning. Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers out on the face of Mars, combing for its uranium deposits. And here we are, I thought. After we walked on a while, a Dome became visible up ahead. It slid up over the crest of a hill, set back between two hummocks on the desert. Just out of the way enough to escape observation. For a puzzled moment I thought it was our Dome, the settlement where all of UranCo's Geig Corps were located, but another look told me that this was actually quite near us and fairly small. A one-man Dome, of all things! "Welcome to my home," he said. "The name is Gregory Ledman." He herded us off to one side of the airlock, uttered a few words keyed to his voice, and motioned us inside when the door slid up. When we were inside he reached up, clumsily holding the blaster, and unscrewed the ancient spacesuit fishbowl. His face was a bitter, dried-up mask. He was a man who hated. The place was spartanly furnished. No chairs, no tape-player, no decoration of any sort. Hard bulkhead walls, rivet-studded, glared back at us. He had an automatic chef, a bed, and a writing-desk, and no other furniture. Suddenly he drew the tanglegun and sprayed our legs again. We toppled heavily to the floor. I looked up angrily. "I imagine you want to know the whole story," he said. "The others did, too." Valerie looked at me anxiously. Her pretty face was a dead white behind her oxymask. "What others?" "I never bothered to find out their names," Ledman said casually. "They were other Geigs I caught unawares, like you, out on the desert. That's the only sport I have left—Geig-hunting. Look out there." He gestured through the translucent skin of the Dome, and I felt sick. There was a little heap of bones lying there, looking oddly bright against the redness of the sands. They were the dried, parched skeletons of Earthmen. Bits of cloth and plastic, once oxymasks and suits, still clung to them. Suddenly I remembered. There had been a pattern there all the time. We didn't much talk about it; we chalked it off as occupational hazards. There had been a pattern of disappearances on the desert. I could think of six, eight names now. None of them had been particularly close friends. You don't get time to make close friends out here. But we'd vowed it wouldn't happen to us. It had. "You've been hunting Geigs?" I asked. " Why? What've they ever done to you?" He smiled, as calmly as if I'd just praised his house-keeping. "Because I hate you," he said blandly. "I intend to wipe every last one of you out, one by one." I stared at him. I'd never seen a man like this before; I thought all his kind had died at the time of the atomic wars. I heard Val sob, "He's a madman!" "No," Ledman said evenly. "I'm quite sane, believe me. But I'm determined to drive the Geigs—and UranCo—off Mars. Eventually I'll scare you all away." "Just pick us off in the desert?" "Exactly," replied Ledman. "And I have no fears of an armed attack. This place is well fortified. I've devoted years to building it. And I'm back against those hills. They couldn't pry me out." He let his pale hand run up into his gnarled hair. "I've devoted years to this. Ever since—ever since I landed here on Mars." "What are you going to do with us?" Val finally asked, after a long silence. He didn't smile this time. "Kill you," he told her. "Not your husband. I want him as an envoy, to go back and tell the others to clear off." He rocked back and forth in his wheelchair, toying with the gleaming, deadly blaster in his hand. We stared in horror. It was a nightmare—sitting there, placidly rocking back and forth, a nightmare. I found myself fervently wishing I was back out there on the infinitely safer desert. "Do I shock you?" he asked. "I shouldn't—not when you see my motives." "We don't see them," I snapped. "Well, let me show you. You're on Mars hunting uranium, right? To mine and ship the radioactives back to Earth to keep the atomic engines going. Right?" I nodded over at our geiger counters. "We volunteered to come to Mars," Val said irrelevantly. "Ah—two young heroes," Ledman said acidly. "How sad. I could almost feel sorry for you. Almost." "Just what is it you're after?" I said, stalling, stalling. "Atomics cost me my legs," he said. "You remember the Sadlerville Blast?" he asked. "Of course." And I did, too. I'd never forget it. No one would. How could I forget that great accident—killing hundreds, injuring thousands more, sterilizing forty miles of Mississippi land—when the Sadlerville pile went up? "I was there on business at the time," Ledman said. "I represented Ledman Atomics. I was there to sign a new contract for my company. You know who I am, now?" I nodded. "I was fairly well shielded when it happened. I never got the contract, but I got a good dose of radiation instead. Not enough to kill me," he said. "Just enough to necessitate the removal of—" he indicated the empty space at his thighs. "So I got off lightly." He gestured at the wheelchair blanket. I still didn't understand. "But why kill us Geigs? We had nothing to do with it." "You're just in this by accident," he said. "You see, after the explosion and the amputation, my fellow-members on the board of Ledman Atomics decided that a semi-basket case like myself was a poor risk as Head of the Board, and they took my company away. All quite legal, I assure you. They left me almost a pauper!" Then he snapped the punchline at me. "They renamed Ledman Atomics. Who did you say you worked for?" I began, "Uran—" "Don't bother. A more inventive title than Ledman Atomics, but not quite as much heart, wouldn't you say?" He grinned. "I saved for years; then I came to Mars, lost myself, built this Dome, and swore to get even. There's not a great deal of uranium on this planet, but enough to keep me in a style to which, unfortunately, I'm no longer accustomed." He consulted his wrist watch. "Time for my injection." He pulled out the tanglegun and sprayed us again, just to make doubly certain. "That's another little souvenir of Sadlerville. I'm short on red blood corpuscles." He rolled over to a wall table and fumbled in a container among a pile of hypodermics. "There are other injections, too. Adrenalin, insulin. Others. The Blast turned me into a walking pin-cushion. But I'll pay it all back," he said. He plunged the needle into his arm. My eyes widened. It was too nightmarish to be real. I wasn't seriously worried about his threat to wipe out the entire Geig Corps, since it was unlikely that one man in a wheelchair could pick us all off. No, it wasn't the threat that disturbed me, so much as the whole concept, so strange to me, that the human mind could be as warped and twisted as Ledman's. I saw the horror on Val's face, and I knew she felt the same way I did. "Do you really think you can succeed?" I taunted him. "Really think you can kill every Earthman on Mars? Of all the insane, cockeyed—" Val's quick, worried head-shake cut me off. But Ledman had felt my words, all right. "Yes! I'll get even with every one of you for taking away my legs! If we hadn't meddled with the atom in the first place, I'd be as tall and powerful as you, today—instead of a useless cripple in a wheelchair." "You're sick, Gregory Ledman," Val said quietly. "You've conceived an impossible scheme of revenge and now you're taking it out on innocent people who've done nothing, nothing at all to you. That's not sane!" His eyes blazed. "Who are you to talk of sanity?" Uneasily I caught Val's glance from a corner of my eye. Sweat was rolling down her smooth forehead faster than the auto-wiper could swab it away. "Why don't you do something? What are you waiting for, Ron?" "Easy, baby," I said. I knew what our ace in the hole was. But I had to get Ledman within reach of me first. "Enough," he said. "I'm going to turn you loose outside, right after—" " Get sick! " I hissed to Val, low. She began immediately to cough violently, emitting harsh, choking sobs. "Can't breathe!" She began to yell, writhing in her bonds. That did it. Ledman hadn't much humanity left in him, but there was a little. He lowered the blaster a bit and wheeled one-hand over to see what was wrong with Val. She continued to retch and moan most horribly. It almost convinced me. I saw Val's pale, frightened face turn to me. He approached and peered down at her. He opened his mouth to say something, and at that moment I snapped my leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord with a snicking rasp, and kicked his wheelchair over. The blaster went off, burning a hole through the Dome roof. The automatic sealers glued-in instantly. Ledman went sprawling helplessly out into the middle of the floor, the wheelchair upended next to him, its wheels slowly revolving in the air. The blaster flew from his hands at the impact of landing and spun out near me. In one quick motion I rolled over and covered it with my body. Ledman clawed his way to me with tremendous effort and tried wildly to pry the blaster out from under me, but without success. I twisted a bit, reached out with my free leg, and booted him across the floor. He fetched up against the wall of the Dome and lay there. Val rolled over to me. "Now if I could get free of this stuff," I said, "I could get him covered before he comes to. But how?" "Teamwork," Val said. She swivelled around on the floor until her head was near my boot. "Push my oxymask off with your foot, if you can." I searched for the clamp and tried to flip it. No luck, with my heavy, clumsy boot. I tried again, and this time it snapped open. I got the tip of my boot in and pried upward. The oxymask came off, slowly, scraping a jagged red scratch up the side of Val's neck as it came. "There," she breathed. "That's that." I looked uneasily at Ledman. He was groaning and beginning to stir. Val rolled on the floor and her face lay near my right arm. I saw what she had in mind. She began to nibble the vile-tasting tangle-cord, running her teeth up and down it until it started to give. She continued unfailingly. Finally one strand snapped. Then another. At last I had enough use of my hand to reach out and grasp the blaster. Then I pulled myself across the floor to Ledman, removed the tanglegun, and melted the remaining tangle-cord off. My muscles were stiff and bunched, and rising made me wince. I turned and freed Val. Then I turned and faced Ledman. "I suppose you'll kill me now," he said. "No. That's the difference between sane people and insane," I told him. "I'm not going to kill you at all. I'm going to see to it that you're sent back to Earth." " No! " he shouted. "No! Anything but back there. I don't want to face them again—not after what they did to me—" "Not so loud," I broke in. "They'll help you on Earth. They'll take all the hatred and sickness out of you, and turn you into a useful member of society again." "I hate Earthmen," he spat out. "I hate all of them." "I know," I said sarcastically. "You're just all full of hate. You hated us so much that you couldn't bear to hang around on Earth for as much as a year after the Sadlerville Blast. You had to take right off for Mars without a moment's delay, didn't you? You hated Earth so much you had to leave." "Why are you telling all this to me?" "Because if you'd stayed long enough, you'd have used some of your pension money to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic legs, and then you wouldn't need this wheelchair." Ledman scowled, and then his face went belligerent again. "They told me I was paralyzed below the waist. That I'd never walk again, even with prosthetic legs, because I had no muscles to fit them to." "You left Earth too quickly," Val said. "It was the only way," he protested. "I had to get off—" "She's right," I told him. "The atom can take away, but it can give as well. Soon after you left they developed atomic-powered prosthetics—amazing things, virtually robot legs. All the survivors of the Sadlerville Blast were given the necessary replacement limbs free of charge. All except you. You were so sick you had to get away from the world you despised and come here." "You're lying," he said. "It's not true!" "Oh, but it is," Val smiled. I saw him wilt visibly, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, a pathetic legless figure propped up against the wall of the Dome at blaster-point. But then I remembered he'd killed twelve Geigs—or more—and would have added Val to the number had he had the chance. "You're a very sick man, Ledman," I said. "All this time you could have been happy, useful on Earth, instead of being holed up here nursing your hatred. You might have been useful, on Earth. But you decided to channel everything out as revenge." "I still don't believe it—those legs. I might have walked again. No—no, it's all a lie. They told me I'd never walk," he said, weakly but stubbornly still. I could see his whole structure of hate starting to topple, and I decided to give it the final push. "Haven't you wondered how I managed to break the tangle-cord when I kicked you over?" "Yes—human legs aren't strong enough to break tangle-cord that way." "Of course not," I said. I gave Val the blaster and slipped out of my oxysuit. "Look," I said. I pointed to my smooth, gleaming metal legs. The almost soundless purr of their motors was the only noise in the room. "I was in the Sadlerville Blast, too," I said. "But I didn't go crazy with hate when I lost my legs." Ledman was sobbing. "Okay, Ledman," I said. Val got him into his suit, and brought him the fishbowl helmet. "Get your helmet on and let's go. Between the psychs and the prosthetics men, you'll be a new man inside of a year." "But I'm a murderer!" "That's right. And you'll be sentenced to psych adjustment. When they're finished, Gregory Ledman the killer will be as dead as if they'd electrocuted you, but there'll be a new—and sane—Gregory Ledman." I turned to Val. "Got the geigers, honey?" For the first time since Ledman had caught us, I remembered how tired Val had been out on the desert. I realized now that I had been driving her mercilessly—me, with my chromium legs and atomic-powered muscles. No wonder she was ready to fold! And I'd been too dense to see how unfair I had been. She lifted the geiger harnesses, and I put Ledman back in his wheelchair. Val slipped her oxymask back on and fastened it shut. "Let's get back to the Dome in a hurry," I said. "We'll turn Ledman over to the authorities. Then we can catch the next ship for Earth." "Go back? Go back? If you think I'm backing down now and quitting you can find yourself another wife! After we dump this guy I'm sacking in for twenty hours, and then we're going back out there to finish that search-pattern. Earth needs uranium, honey, and I know you'd never be happy quitting in the middle like that." She smiled. "I can't wait to get out there and start listening for those tell-tale clicks." I gave a joyful whoop and swung her around. When I put her down, she squeezed my hand, hard. "Let's get moving, fellow hero," she said. I pressed the stud for the airlock, smiling. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories September 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.	B. It is UranCo's method of acquiring manpower for the resource search
How was Johnson convinced to buy the case astroid fever medication? A. Proven statistics showing that it was the best antidote B. Joe's acting skills C. He felt feverish and thought he may have contracted the illness D. A price too good that could not be turned down	GRIFTERS' ASTEROID By H. L. GOLD Harvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought! Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them five buckos for a glass of water—and got it! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Characteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently. "We're delirious!" Joe cried. "It's a mirage!" "What is?" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton. Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared, speechless for once. In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "Nonsense," Harvey croaked uncertainly. "We have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "Water—quick!" Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "Strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "Solar salesmen, my colonial friend," Harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "We purvey that renowned Martian remedy, La-anago Yergis , the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "Yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "Where you heading?" "Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" Joe asked. "We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off." "Mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "If you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." Harvey grinned puzzledly. "We didn't take any whiskey." "Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every chaser." Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. "That—that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. The barkeeper shrugged. "When there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. Besides—" "Besides nothing!" Joe roared, finding his voice again. "You dirty crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—" "You dirty crook!" Joe roared. "Robbing honest spacemen!" Harvey nudged him warningly. "Easy, my boy, easy." He turned to the bartender apologetically. "Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?" The round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge because I gotta." "Friend," said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's thirst." The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "And chief of police, no doubt," said Harvey jocosely. "Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will you need?" Joe estimated quickly. "About seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. He waited apprehensively. "Let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "On account of the quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to, that's all." The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "Stop!" when it registered the proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: "But what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. We simply can't afford it." Johnson's response almost floored them. "Who said anything about charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing. It's just the purified stuff that comes so high." After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside. "Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said Harvey as he and Joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "Johnson, as I saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "Just the same," Joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. It was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to investigate. Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "What's this doing here?" Harvey asked, puzzled. "I thought Johnson had to transport water in pails." "Wonder where it leads to," Joe said uneasily. "It leads to the saloon," said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "What I am concerned with is where it leads from ." Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool. Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "I am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "Sweet!" he snarled. They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample. His mouth went wry. "Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. "Joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this point hence." Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "Thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed. Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City." "You don't need any more," said Harvey, dismayed. Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "Pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for.... "Joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "Don't you feel well?" Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "Bring him in here!" Johnson cried. "I mean, get him away! He's coming down with asteroid fever!" "Of course," replied Harvey calmly. "Any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "What do you mean, once ?" demanded Johnson. "I come down with it every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him out of here!" "In good time. He can't be moved immediately." "Then he'll be here for months!" Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "You'll find everything you want in the back room," Johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups—" "Relics of the past," Harvey stated. "One medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "What's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. Joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "Are—are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "Much better," said Joe in a weak voice. "Maybe you need another dose," Harvey suggested. Joe recoiled. "I'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "Well, I'll be hanged!" Johnson ejaculated. " La-anago Yergis never fails, my friend," Harvey explained. "By actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "If you don't charge too much," he said warily, "I might think of buying some." "We do not sell this unbelievable remedy," Harvey replied with dignity. "It sells itself." "'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole case," said Johnson. "That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "How much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "F-four hundred," he offered. "Not a red cent less than four seventy-five," Harvey said flatly. "Make it four fifty," quavered Johnson. "I dislike haggling," said Harvey. The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: "And we will include, gratis , an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian handicraftsmanship." Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "No tricks now. I want a taste of that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me." Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "There ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "Medicine," Harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." To Joe he said: "Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "That was not poison," Harvey contradicted quietly. "It was La-anago Yergis extract, plus." "Plus what—arsenic?" "Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case, mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course." "But why use it on me?" Joe demanded furiously. Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "Did Johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce the same medicine that we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "Okay, okay," Joe said. "But you shoulda charged him more." "Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. We could not be content with less." "Well, we're starting all right," admitted Joe. "How about that thing with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?" Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" Joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "That's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. He counted out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter, and asked: "You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now." Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "It's only water we were short of," Harvey said apprehensively. "We've got rations back at the ship." " H-mph! " the mayor grunted. "Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap. Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome to our hospitality." "Your hospitality," said Harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw none. "Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe," he said guardedly. Johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "Come right in, gents," he invited. "Right into the dining room." He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders. Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "Everything satisfactory, gents?" "Quite," said Harvey. "We shall order." For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian viotars , using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," Harvey whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "He would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire." "Think of a fast one fast," Joe agreed. "You're right." "But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained Harvey. "I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "It's been a great honor, gents," he said. "Ain't often I have visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents." As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "What the devil is this?" he shouted.—"How do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure— three hundred and twenty-eight buckos !" Johnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. The minute note read: "Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80 redsents." "You can go to hell!" Joe growled. "We won't pay it!" Johnson sighed ponderously. "I was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "Afraid I'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." Johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and Johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to remain calm. "My friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from Earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound foolish.'" "I don't get the connection," objected Johnson. "Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the way you have—" "Who said I wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "What were you going to offer, anyhow?" "It doesn't matter any longer," Harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "That's right," Johnson came back emphatically. "But what would your offer have been which I would have turned down?" "Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to sell." "Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "Nope. But how much did you say?" "Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!" "Well, I'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "When you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and—" "This and that," concluded Joe. "We'll give you five hundred buckos." "Now, gents!" Johnson remonstrated. "Why, six hundred would hardly—" "You haven't left us much money," Harvey put in. The mayor frowned. "All right, we'll split the difference. Make it five-fifty." Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to Johnson. "I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "I sure will," Johnson confessed glumly. "I got pretty attached to Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful." Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "My friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "What is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: "You must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. "Aw, Harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were getting the key!" "We must not be selfish, my boy," Harvey said nobly. "We have had our chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here." Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out. On a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba until Joe came in, lugging a radio. "Is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "What makes you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "Do not jump to hasty conclusions," Harvey cautioned. "Another word, and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "I ain't in the market for a radio," Johnson said stubbornly. Harvey nodded in relief. "We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph. He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "Well, that's no plating off our bow," Joe grunted. "I'm glad he did turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "Now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "I ain't saying I'll buy, but what is it I'm turning down?" Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "To make a long story, Mr. Johnson," he said, "Joseph and I were among the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane." He banged his fist on the bar. "I have said it before, and I repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!" "This what?" Johnson blurted out. "In simple terms," clarified Harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up there wouldn't talk our language." Again Harvey smashed his fist down. "Do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" Johnson recoiled. "No—no, of course not . I mean, being up here, I naturally couldn't get all the details." "Naturally," Harvey agreed, mollified. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "Why, I don't know," Johnson said in confusion. "For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." Johnson winced. "Is that what you want to unload on me?" "For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "Yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "I ain't exactly flighty." "Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" Johnson asked skeptically: "How about a sample first?"	B. Joe's acting skills
What the system designs introduced?	### Introduction Amazon Alexa Prize BIBREF0 provides a platform to collect real human-machine conversation data and evaluate performance on speech-based social conversational systems. Our system, Gunrock BIBREF1 addresses several limitations of prior chatbots BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4 including inconsistency and difficulty in complex sentence understanding (e.g., long utterances) and provides several contributions: First, Gunrock's multi-step language understanding modules enable the system to provide more useful information to the dialog manager, including a novel dialog act scheme. Additionally, the natural language understanding (NLU) module can handle more complex sentences, including those with coreference. Second, Gunrock interleaves actions to elicit users' opinions and provide responses to create an in-depth, engaging conversation; while a related strategy to interleave task- and non-task functions in chatbots has been proposed BIBREF5, no chatbots to our knowledge have employed a fact/opinion interleaving strategy. Finally, we use an extensive persona database to provide coherent profile information, a critical challenge in building social chatbots BIBREF3. Compared to previous systems BIBREF4, Gunrock generates more balanced conversations between human and machine by encouraging and understanding more human inputs (see Table TABREF2 for an example). ### System Architecture Figure FIGREF3 provides an overview of Gunrock's architecture. We extend the Amazon Conversational Bot Toolkit (CoBot) BIBREF6 which is a flexible event-driven framework. CoBot provides ASR results and natural language processing pipelines through the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) BIBREF7. Gunrock corrects ASR according to the context (asr) and creates a natural language understanding (NLU) (nlu) module where multiple components analyze the user utterances. A dialog manager (DM) (dm) uses features from NLU to select topic dialog modules and defines an individual dialog flow. Each dialog module leverages several knowledge bases (knowledge). Then a natural language generation (NLG) (nlg) module generates a corresponding response. Finally, we markup the synthesized responses and return to the users through text to speech (TTS) (tts). While we provide an overview of the system in the following sections, for detailed system implementation details, please see the technical report BIBREF1. ### System Architecture ::: Automatic Speech Recognition Gunrock receives ASR results with the raw text and timestep information for each word in the sequence (without case information and punctuation). Keywords, especially named entities such as movie names, are prone to generate ASR errors without contextual information, but are essential for NLU and NLG. Therefore, Gunrock uses domain knowledge to correct these errors by comparing noun phrases to a knowledge base (e.g. a list of the most popular movies names) based on their phonetic information. We extract the primary and secondary code using The Double Metaphone Search Algorithm BIBREF8 for noun phrases (extracted by noun trunks) and the selected knowledge base, and suggest a potential fix by code matching. An example can be seen in User_3 and Gunrock_3 in Table TABREF2. ### System Architecture ::: Natural Language Understanding Gunrock is designed to engage users in deeper conversation; accordingly, a user utterance can consist of multiple units with complete semantic meanings. We first split the corrected raw ASR text into sentences by inserting break tokens. An example is shown in User_3 in Table TABREF2. Meanwhile, we mask named entities before segmentation so that a named entity will not be segmented into multiple parts and an utterance with a complete meaning is maintained (e.g.,“i like the movie a star is born"). We also leverage timestep information to filter out false positive corrections. After segmentation, our coreference implementation leverages entity knowledge (such as person versus event) and replaces nouns with their actual reference by entity ranking. We implement coreference resolution on entities both within segments in a single turn as well as across multiple turns. For instance, “him" in the last segment in User_5 is replaced with “bradley cooper" in Table TABREF2. Next, we use a constituency parser to generate noun phrases from each modified segment. Within the sequence pipeline to generate complete segments, Gunrock detects (1) topic, (2) named entities, and (3) sentiment using ASK in parallel. The NLU module uses knowledge graphs including Google Knowledge Graph to call for a detailed description of each noun phrase for understanding. In order to extract the intent for each segment, we designed MIDAS, a human-machine dialog act scheme with 23 tags and implemented a multi-label dialog act classification model using contextual information BIBREF9. Next, the NLU components analyzed on each segment in a user utterance are sent to the DM and NLG module for state tracking and generation, respectively. ### System Architecture ::: Dialog Manager We implemented a hierarchical dialog manager, consisting of a high level and low level DMs. The former leverages NLU outputs for each segment and selects the most important segment for the system as the central element using heuristics. For example, “i just finished reading harry potter," triggers Sub-DM: Books. Utilizing the central element and features extracted from NLU, input utterances are mapped onto 11 possible topic dialog modules (e.g., movies, books, animals, etc.), including a backup module, retrieval. Low level dialog management is handled by the separate topic dialog modules, which use modular finite state transducers to execute various dialog segments processed by the NLU. Using topic-specific modules enables deeper conversations that maintain the context. We design dialog flows in each of the finite state machines, as well. Dialog flow is determined by rule-based transitions between a specified fixed set of dialog states. To ensure that our states and transitions are effective, we leverage large scale user data to find high probability responses and high priority responses to handle in different contexts. Meanwhile, dialog flow is customized to each user by tracking user attributes as dialog context. In addition, each dialog flow is adaptive to user responses to show acknowledgement and understanding (e.g., talking about pet ownership in the animal module). Based on the user responses, many dialog flow variations exist to provide a fresh experience each time. This reduces the feeling of dialogs being scripted and repetitive. Our dialog flows additionally interleave facts, opinions, experiences, and questions to make the conversation flexible and interesting. In the meantime, we consider feedback signals such as “continue" and “stop" from the current topic dialog module, indicating whether it is able to respond to the following request in the dialog flow, in order to select the best response module. Additionally, in all modules we allow mixed-initiative interactions; users can trigger a new dialog module when they want to switch topics while in any state. For example, users can start a new conversation about movies from any other topic module. ### System Architecture ::: Knowledge Databases All topic dialog modules query knowledge bases to provide information to the user. To respond to general factual questions, Gunrock queries the EVI factual database , as well as other up-to-date scraped information appropriate for the submodule, such as news and current showing movies in a specific location from databases including IMDB. One contribution of Gunrock is the extensive Gunrock Persona Backstory database, consisting of over 1,000 responses to possible questions for Gunrock as well as reasoning for her responses for roughly 250 questions (see Table 2). We designed the system responses to elicit a consistent personality within and across modules, modeled as a female individual who is positive, outgoing, and is interested in science and technology. ### System Architecture ::: Natural Language Generation In order to avoid repetitive and non-specific responses commonly seen in dialog systems BIBREF10, Gunrock uses a template manager to select from a handcrafted response templates based on the dialog state. One dialog state can map to multiple response templates with similar semantic or functional content but differing surface forms. Among these response templates for the same dialog state, one is randomly selected without repetition to provide variety unless all have been exhausted. When a response template is selected, any slots are substituted with actual contents, including queried information for news and specific data for weather. For example, to ground a movie name due to ASR errors or multiple versions, one template is “Are you talking about {movie_title} released in {release_year} starring {actor_name} as {actor_role}?". Module-specific templates were generated for each topic (e.g., animals), but some of the templates are generalizable across different modules (e.g., “What’s your favorite [movie $\|$ book $\|$ place to visit]?") In many cases, response templates corresponding to different dialog acts are dynamically composed to give the final response. For example, an appropriate acknowledgement for the user’s response can be combined with a predetermined follow-up question. ### System Architecture ::: Text To Speech After NLG, we adjust the TTS of the system to improve the expressiveness of the voice to convey that the system is an engaged and active participant in the conversation. We use a rule-based system to systematically add interjections, specifically Alexa Speechcons, and fillers to approximate human-like cognitive-emotional expression BIBREF11. For more on the framework and analysis of the TTS modifications, see BIBREF12. ### Analysis From January 5, 2019 to March 5, 2019, we collected conversational data for Gunrock. During this time, no other code updates occurred. We analyzed conversations for Gunrock with at least 3 user turns to avoid conversations triggered by accident. Overall, this resulted in a total of 34,432 user conversations. Together, these users gave Gunrock an average rating of 3.65 (median: 4.0), which was elicited at the end of the conversation (“On a scale from 1 to 5 stars, how do you feel about talking to this socialbot again?"). Users engaged with Gunrock for an average of 20.92 overall turns (median 13.0), with an average of 6.98 words per utterance, and had an average conversation time of 7.33 minutes (median: 2.87 min.). We conducted three principal analyses: users' response depth (wordcount), backstory queries (backstorypersona), and interleaving of personal and factual responses (pets). ### Analysis ::: Response Depth: Mean Word Count Two unique features of Gunrock are its ability to dissect longer, complex sentences, and its methods to encourage users to be active conversationalists, elaborating on their responses. In prior work, even if users are able to drive the conversation, often bots use simple yes/no questions to control the conversational flow to improve understanding; as a result, users are more passive interlocutors in the conversation. We aimed to improve user engagement by designing the conversation to have more open-ended opinion/personal questions, and show that the system can understand the users' complex utterances (See nlu for details on NLU). Accordingly, we ask if users' speech behavior will reflect Gunrock's technical capability and conversational strategy, producing longer sentences. We assessed the degree of conversational depth by measuring users' mean word count. Prior work has found that an increase in word count has been linked to improved user engagement (e.g., in a social dialog system BIBREF13). For each user conversation, we extracted the overall rating, the number of turns of the interaction, and the user's per-utterance word count (averaged across all utterances). We modeled the relationship between word count and the two metrics of user engagement (overall rating, mean number of turns) in separate linear regressions. Results showed that users who, on average, produced utterances with more words gave significantly higher ratings ($\beta $=0.01, SE=0.002, t=4.79, p$<$0.001)(see Figure 2) and engaged with Gunrock for significantly greater number of turns ($\beta $=1.85, SE=0.05, t=35.58, p$<$0.001) (see Figure 2). These results can be interpreted as evidence for Gunrock's ability to handle complex sentences, where users are not constrained to simple responses to be understood and feel engaged in the conversation – and evidence that individuals are more satisfied with the conversation when they take a more active role, rather than the system dominating the dialog. On the other hand, another interpretation is that users who are more talkative may enjoy talking to the bot in general, and thus give higher ratings in tandem with higher average word counts. ### Analysis ::: Gunrock's Backstory and Persona We assessed the user's interest in Gunrock by tagging instances where the user triggered Gunrock's backstory (e.g., “What's your favorite color?"). For users with at least one backstory question, we modeled overall (log) Rating with a linear regression by the (log) `Number of Backstory Questions Asked' (log transformed due to the variables' nonlinear relationship). We hypothesized that users who show greater curiosity about Gunrock will display higher overall ratings for the conversation based on her responses. Overall, the number of times users queried Gunrock's backstory was strongly related to the rating they gave at the end of the interaction (log:$\beta $=0.10, SE=0.002, t=58.4, p$<$0.001)(see Figure 3). This suggests that maintaining a consistent personality — and having enough responses to questions the users are interested in — may improve user satisfaction. ### Analysis ::: Interleaving Personal and Factual Information: Animal Module Gunrock includes a specific topic module on animals, which includes a factual component where the system provides animal facts, as well as a more personalized component about pets. Our system is designed to engage users about animals in a more casual conversational style BIBREF14, eliciting follow-up questions if the user indicates they have a pet; if we are able to extract the pet's name, we refer to it in the conversation (e.g., “Oliver is a great name for a cat!", “How long have you had Oliver?"). In cases where the user does not indicate that they have a pet, the system solely provides animal facts. Therefore, the animal module can serve as a test of our interleaving strategy: we hypothesized that combining facts and personal questions — in this case about the user's pet — would lead to greater user satisfaction overall. We extracted conversations where Gunrock asked the user if they had ever had a pet and categorized responses as “Yes", “No", or “NA" (if users did not respond with an affirmative or negative response). We modeled user rating with a linear regression model, with predictor of “Has Pet' (2 levels: Yes, No). We found that users who talked to Gunrock about their pet showed significantly higher overall ratings of the conversation ($\beta $=0.15, SE=0.06, t=2.53, p$=$0.016) (see Figure 4). One interpretation is that interleaving factual information with more in-depth questions about their pet result in improved user experience. Yet, another interpretation is that pet owners may be more friendly and amenable to a socialbot; for example, prior research has linked differences in personality to pet ownership BIBREF15. ### Conclusion Gunrock is a social chatbot that focuses on having long and engaging speech-based conversations with thousands of real users. Accordingly, our architecture employs specific modules to handle longer and complex utterances and encourages users to be more active in a conversation. Analysis shows that users' speech behavior reflects these capabilities. Longer sentences and more questions about Gunrocks's backstory positively correlate with user experience. Additionally, we find evidence for interleaved dialog flow, where combining factual information with personal opinions and stories improve user satisfaction. Overall, this work has practical applications, in applying these design principles to other social chatbots, as well as theoretical implications, in terms of the nature of human-computer interaction (cf. 'Computers are Social Actors' BIBREF16). Our results suggest that users are engaging with Gunrock in similar ways to other humans: in chitchat about general topics (e.g., animals, movies, etc.), taking interest in Gunrock's backstory and persona, and even producing more information about themselves in return. ### Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the help from Amazon in terms of financial and technical support. Figure 1: Gunrock system architecture Figure 2: Mean user rating by mean number of words. Error bars show standard error. Figure 3: Mean user rating based on number of queries to Gunrock’s backstory. Error bars show standard error. Figure 4: Mean user rating based ’Has Pet’. Error bars show standard error.	Amazon Conversational Bot Toolkit, natural language understanding (NLU) (nlu) module, dialog manager, knowledge bases, natural language generation (NLG) (nlg) module, text to speech (TTS) (tts)
Why did the recruiter offer Lawrence $50 Galactic a week? A. That was what was promised to all travelers to Earth for display. B. He was able to offer him less, knowing he would still accept and be grateful. C. He could be paid less because he was smaller and less of an attraction. D. He would be paid less because he would also be reimbursed for expenses and have free travel.	Birds of a Feather By ROBERT SILVERBERG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine November 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Getting specimens for the interstellar zoo was no problem—they battled for the honor—but now I had to fight like a wildcat to keep a display from making a monkey of me! It was our first day of recruiting on the planet, and the alien life-forms had lined up for hundreds of feet back from my rented office. As I came down the block from the hotel, I could hear and see and smell them with ease. My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins and Ludlow, walked shieldwise in front of me. I peered between them to size the crop up. The aliens came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures—and all of them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre beings, but there's barely a species anywhere that can resist the old exhibitionist urge. "Send them in one at a time," I told Stebbins. I ducked into the office, took my place back of the desk and waited for the procession to begin. The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. I believe in keeping the locals happy wherever I go. Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding arrival. Stuff like this: Want to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial, there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F. Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until 2937, so don't miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches can be yours! Broadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It's the best of its kind, the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the other species of the universe. The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, "The first applicant is ready to see you, sir." "Send him, her or it in." The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body. There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones, one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth. His voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. "You are Mr. Corrigan?" "That's right." I reached for a data blank. "Before we begin, I'll need certain information about—" "I am a being of Regulus II," came the grave, booming reply, even before I had picked up the blank. "I need no special care and I am not a fugitive from the law of any world." "Your name?" "Lawrence R. Fitzgerald." I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick cough. "Let me have that again, please?" "Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for Raymond." "Of course, that's not the name you were born with." The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation, remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of an apologetic smile. "My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see." The little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained. "You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?" "I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day." "And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and transportation." The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping on one side, two on the other. "Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I accept the terms!" I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into the other office to sign him up. I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show; the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get to Earth. My conscience won't let me really exploit a being, but I don't believe in throwing money away, either. The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet, four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at anything short of top rate. Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging. The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right. It was the isolationism of the late 29th century that turned me into the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for non-terrestrial beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement. Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down, a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo. That's what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is, of course. A zoo. But we don't go out and hunt for our specimens; we advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it. We don't keep too big an inventory. At last count, we had 690 specimens before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life-forms. My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I reach that, I'll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can. After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed eleven new specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids, fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks. It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan. "One more specimen before lunch," I told Stebbins, "to make it an even dozen." He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman. He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look about him. He said, in level Terran accents, "I'm looking for a job with your outfit, Corrigan." "There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only." "I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz XIII." I don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line at getting bilked myself. "Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known for my sense of humor. Or my generosity." "I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job." "Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as Earthborn as I am." "I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth," he said smoothly. "I happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your circus?" "No. And it's not a circus. It's—" "A scientific institute. I stand corrected." There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on his ear without another word. Instead I played along. "If you're from such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?" "I'm not speaking. I'm a telepath—not the kind that reads minds, just the kind that projects. I communicate in symbols that you translate back to colloquial speech." "Very clever, Mr. Gorb." I grinned at him and shook my head. "You spin a good yarn—but for my money, you're really Sam Jones or Phil Smith from Earth, stranded here and out of cash. You want a free trip back to Earth. No deal. The demand for beings from Wazzenazz XIII is pretty low these days. Zero, in fact. Good-by, Mr. Gorb." He pointed a finger squarely at me and said, "You're making a big mistake. I'm just what your outfit needs. A representative of a hitherto utterly unknown race identical to humanity in every respect! Look here, examine my teeth. Absolutely like human teeth! And—" I pulled away from his yawning mouth. "Good-by, Mr. Gorb," I repeated. "All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn't much. I'll be a big attraction. I'll—" " Good-by, Mr. Gorb! " He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up and sauntered to the door. "I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think it over. Maybe you'll regret your hastiness. I'll be back to give you another chance." He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile. This was the best con switch yet—an Earthman posing as an alien to get a job! But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket home. I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands. The first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan, and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds. Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him officially. He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high, and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture, and growled, "I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me immediately to a contract." "Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks." "You will grant me a contract!" "Will you please sit down?" He said sulkily, "I will remain standing." "As you prefer." My desk has a few concealed features which are sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of trouble. The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his warlike race. I said, "You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males, because—" "You will hire me or trouble I will make!" I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty. The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. "Yes, you have four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn! For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to the noble Clan Gursdrinn!" At the key-word avenge , I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he didn't move. He bellowed, "I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!" I'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and one of the most important of those principles is that I never let myself be bullied by anyone. "I deeply regret having unintentionally insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?" He glared at me in silence. I went on, "Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon as a vacancy—" "No. You will hire me now." "It can't be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to it." "You will rue! I will take drastic measures!" "Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—" You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting all the others. I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left. They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw, but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was out in the hall. I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins. "Come here, you!" "Stebbins?" I said gently. "I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he came running in—" "Please, please," squeaked the little alien pitifully. "I must see you, honored sir!" "It isn't his turn in line," Stebbins protested. "There are at least fifty ahead of him." "All right," I said tiredly. "As long as he's in here already, I might as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins." Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out. The alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at full volume. "Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with yourself." I said, "I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a female now and—" "This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?" I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian entry. "Yes, that's her name." The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. "It is she! It is she!" "I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—" "You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress, she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life and my love." "Funny," I said. "When we signed her three years ago, she said she was single. It's right here on the chart." "She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry, languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You must take me to Earth!" "But—" "I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner flame? I must bring her back! " My face was expressionless. "You don't really intend to join our organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?" "Yes, yes!" wailed the Stortulian. "Find some other member of my race, if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead lump of stone?" It isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel happy—not to mention footing the transportation. I said, "I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience lie for you, can I?" "Well—" "Of course not." I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right along. "Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up, I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your heart to me." "I thought the truth would move you." "It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to me," I said piously. "Then you will refuse me?" "My heart melts to nothingness for you. But I can't take you to Earth." "Perhaps you will send my wife to me here?" There's a clause in every contract that allows me to jettison an unwanted specimen. All I have to do is declare it no longer of scientific interest, and the World Government will deport the undesirable alien back to its home world. But I wouldn't pull a low trick like that on our female Stortulian. I said, "I'll ask her about coming home. But I won't ship her back against her will. And maybe she's happier where she is." The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, "There is no hope then. All is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman." He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping. I watched him shuffle out. I do have some conscience, and I had the uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to commit suicide on my account. About fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life started to get complicated again. Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract. I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII stepped in. "How did you get in here?" I demanded. "Your man happened to be looking the wrong way," he said cheerily. "Change your mind about me yet?" "Get out before I have you thrown out." Gorb shrugged. "I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I tell you that I am Earthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your staff." "I don't care what your story is! Get out or—" "—you'll have me thrown out. Okay, okay. Just give me half a second. Corrigan, you're no fool, and neither am I—but that fellow of yours outside is . He doesn't know how to handle alien beings. How many times today has a life-form come in here unexpectedly?" I scowled at him. "Too damn many." "You see? He's incompetent. Suppose you fire him, take me on instead. I've been living in the outworlds half my life; I know all there is to know about alien life-forms. You can use me, Corrigan." I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of the office before I spoke. "Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is, I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me. I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is that I'm not looking for any of those either. Now will you scram or—" The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian, came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt. "Sorry, Chief," Stebbins gasped. "I tried to keep him out, but—" Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out with a roar. "Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!" Sitting with my hands poised near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to let him have it at the first sight of actual violence. Heraal boomed, "You are responsible for what is to happen now. I have notified the authorities and you prosecuted will be for causing the death of a life-form! Suffer, Earthborn ape! Suffer!" "Watch it, Chief," Stebbins yelled. "He's going to—" An instant before my numb fingers could tighten on the meshgun trigger, Heraal swung that huge sword through the air and plunged it savagely through his body. He toppled forward onto the carpet with the sword projecting a couple of feet out of his back. A few driblets of bluish-purple blood spread from beneath him. Before I could react to the big life-form's hara-kiri, the office door flew open again and three sleek reptilian beings entered, garbed in the green sashes of the local police force. Their golden eyes goggled down at the figure on the floor, then came to rest on me. "You are J. F. Corrigan?" the leader asked. "Y-yes." "We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint being—" "—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the untimely death of an intelligent life-form," filled in the second of the Ghrynian policemen. "The evidence lies before us," intoned the leader, "in the cadaver of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several minutes ago." "And therefore," said the third lizard, "it is our duty to arrest you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison." "Hold on!" I stormed. "You mean that any being from anywhere in the Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and I'm responsible?" "This is the law. Do you deny that your stubborn refusal to yield to this late life-form's request lies at the root of his sad demise?" "Well, no, but—" "Failure to deny is admission of guilt. You are guilty, Earthman." Closing my eyes wearily, I tried to wish the whole babbling lot of them away. If I had to, I could pony up the hundred-grand fine, but it was going to put an awful dent in this year's take. And I shuddered when I remembered that any minute that scrawny little Stortulian was likely to come bursting in here to kill himself too. Was it a fine of $100,000 per suicide? At that rate, I could be out of business by nightfall. I was spared further such morbid thoughts by yet another unannounced arrival. The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a moment and turned to eye the newcomer. I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I did come, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against crackpots. In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, "Life is no longer worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me to do." I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers going down the drain. "Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself! He's—" Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on. Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting himself off. He helped me up. "Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get you." I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh. "Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian psychology, Corrigan," Gorb said lightly. "Suicide is completely abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who caused their trouble. In this case, you." I began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a full-bodied laugh. "Funny," I said. "What is?" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian. "These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and killed himself , and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and pathetic damn near blew my head off." I shuddered. "Thanks for the tackle job." "Don't mention it," Gorb said. I glared at the Ghrynian police. "Well? What are you waiting for? Take that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the local laws?" "The Stortulian will be duly punished," replied the leader of the Ghrynian cops calmly. "But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian and the fine of—" "—one hundred thousand dollars. I know." I groaned and turned to Stebbins. "Get the Terran Consulate on the phone, Stebbins. Have them send down a legal adviser. Find out if there's any way we can get out of this mess with our skins intact." "Right, Chief." Stebbins moved toward the visiphone. Gorb stepped forward and put a hand on his chest. "Hold it," the Wazzenazzian said crisply. "The Consulate can't help you. I can." "You?" I said. "I can get you out of this cheap." " How cheap?" Gorb grinned rakishly. "Five thousand in cash plus a contract as a specimen with your outfit. In advance, of course. That's a heck of a lot better than forking over a hundred grand, isn't it?" I eyed Gorb uncertainly. The Terran Consulate people probably wouldn't be much help; they tried to keep out of local squabbles unless they were really serious, and I knew from past experiences that no officials ever worried much about the state of my pocketbook. On the other hand, giving this slyster a contract might be a risky proposition. "Tell you what," I said finally. "You've got yourself a deal—but on a contingency basis. Get me out of this and you'll have five grand and the contract. Otherwise, nothing." Gorb shrugged. "What have I to lose?"	B. He was able to offer him less, knowing he would still accept and be grateful.
How does the method measure the impact of the event on market prices?	### Introduction The financial performance of a corporation is correlated with its social responsibility such as whether their products are environmentally friendly, manufacturing safety procedures protect against accidents, or they use child labors in its third world country factories. Consumers care about these factors when making purchasing decisions in the supermarkets and investors integrate environmental, social and governance factors, known as ESG, in their investment decision-making. It has been shown that corporations financial results have a positive correlation with their sustainability business model and the ESG investment methodology can help reduce portfolio risk and generate competitive returns. However, one barrier for ESG evaluation is the lack of relatively complete and centralized information source. Currently, ESG analysts leverage financial reports to collect the the necessary data for proper evaluation such as greenhouse gas emissions or discrimination lawsuits, but this data is inconsistent and latent. In this study, we consider social media a crowdsourcing data feed to be a new data source for this task. Social media applications such as Twitter offer users a platform to share and disseminate almost any content about various events such as sports, music, and controversial events as well. The content produced through these platforms not only facilitates the spread of information but can also provides meaningful signals about the influence of the events. A large number of responses to an issue on Twitter could inform the public about the significance of an event, widen the scope of the event, and bring more public attention inside and outside the social media circle. We define a controversial event for a business entity as a credible and newsworthy incident that has the potential to impact an entity in its financial performance and operation, for example, an incident caused by an employee or a representative of the entity that has the potential to hurt the trust of the public to its brand. Such an incident can demonstrate a potential gap in its risk management framework and policy execution, and eventually hurt the interest and trust of its stakeholders'. Controversial events trigger a large cascade of discussion on social media platforms. The broad connectivity between people propagates their opinions into trending topics that could effect the company financially and operationally. In certain cases, the responsible entity can be forced to take actions, e.g., to recall its product, which can impose a large financial burden on the entity. For instance, in the Takata air bag scandal, the event was discussed widely on Twitter after the New York Times published a comprehensive article on its defective air bag products in 2014. Takata was forced to recall nearly 50 million air bag and filed bankruptcy in June 2017. To this end, we propose a controversial event detection system utilizing Twitter data. We focus on controversial events which are credible and newsworthy. Twitter data were collected on a given company and various attributes of each tweet were extracted. We verify the credibility of the event by validating the URLs appearing in tweets come from credible news sources. We utilize tweets attributes to detect events specific to the given company and the sentiment of the event to measure the controversy. Relationship between a burst of an entity controversial event and the entity market performance data was qualitatively assessed in our case study, where we found its potential impact on the equity value. ### Related Work There have been a few studies on assessing sustainability of entities. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) published a list of about 140 indicators on various dimensions of sustainability BIBREF0 . In BIBREF1 , Singh et al. reviewed various methodologies, indicators, and indices on sustainability assessment, which includes environmental and social domains. All the data, on which the assessments were conducted, mentioned in their works are processed datasets, and some of them are collected from company annual reports and publications, newspaper clips, and management interviews. They stated that the large number of indicators or indices raises the need of data collection. Our work uses the social media data as a new alternative data source to complement the traditional data collection. Event detection on social media has been a popular research topic for years. Reuters Tracer BIBREF2 is reported as an application built for the journalists to detect news leads in Twitter before the news becomes known to the public. Petrovic et al. BIBREF3 presented a locality-sensitive hashing based first story detection algorithm with a new variance reduction strategy to improve the performance. In BIBREF4 , the signal of a tweet word is built with wavelet analysis and a event is detected by clustering words with similar signal patterns of burst. BIBREF5 describes a detection and analysis system named TEDAS which concentrates on Crime and Disaster related Events (CDE). TEDAS classifies if a tweet is a CDE tweet, predicts its geo-location if missing, and ranks and returns important tweets when user queries in the system. TEDAS treats a tweet as an event if the tweet qualifies, while our definition of an event is different, where an event is a group of tweets discussing a same theme. ### Controversy Detection in Social Media In this section, we describe the main components of our controversy detection system. ### Data collection The system uses Twitter's filtered streaming API to collect relevant tweets data. The data collection pipeline accepts a comma-separated list of phrases as filtering parameters, that the API uses to determine which tweets will be retained from the stream. Once the system receives data from the API, it then separates postings by companies and runs the downstream process on the separated data streams individually. ### Feature engineering The data collection pipeline collects tweet postings for a given entity. For each incoming posting, the system also stores the following attributes: posting_id, creation_time, text, language, source, URLs, and hashtags. The system parses the text attribute of each tweet. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER) algorithm are applied to each tweet and terms that are tagged as proper nouns, verbs, and entities are stored. If two proper nouns are next to each other, the system merges them as one proper noun phrase. Entities such as person names, organizations, locations from tweets are the key elements in describing an event and distinguishing it from other events, and are often used by news professionals to describe the complete story of an event. The verbs from POS tagging mainly represent what and why information, while NER helps to identify where, when, and who information. They capture the major aspects of an event, named who, what, where, when, and why (5W). Besides that, the sentiment of each tweet is assessed too. The system crawls the URLs in a posting and verifies whether the link comes from one or more credible news sources. More specifically, the system may consider the following to be examples of credible news sources: 1) a news outlet that has, and consistently applies, journalistic standards in its reporting or 2) an authoritative government agency not acting in a political capacity. Determining whether a source is a credible news source depends on the context of the event. Based on all the extracted features, the system can build a tweet vector, which includes the following features: tweet id, creation time, source, hashtags, entity/proper nouns, verbs, sentiment, and news links. ### Event detection When a new tweet is received in the data pipeline, it either forms a new cluster or it will be added to an existing cluster. A new tweet will be added to an existing cluster if it is sufficiently similar to one of the existing clusters based on its distance to the cluster average vector. If more than one cluster is applicable, the cluster that has the highest similarity to the new tweet is picked. If a new tweet is not added to any existing clusters, it would form a new cluster. A candidate event is a cluster that has at least five tweets. Algorithm SECREF6 summarizes our event detection method and the following controversy identification method. ### Controversy identification An event can be controversial if the public expresses dissenting opinions, usually associated with negative sentiments to it. The system filters out irrelevant events and noise from the established controversial events using the following metrics: The burstiness of an event: To detect the burstiness of an event, the system detects the volume of tweets per time period, e.g., per day, for the entity in question. An event is flagged when the velocity of the volume increase exceeds a threshold. Newsworthiness detection: The system counts the total number of unique verified news links in each cluster and log that count as a newsworthiness metric. Sentiment: For each cluster, its overall sentiment score is quantified by the mean of the sentiment scores among all tweets. Candidate events are ranked based on these metrics, and high ranked events are considered controversial events. Outline of the controversy detection algorithm [1] INLINEFORM0 is a stream of tweets about company INLINEFORM1 Controversy INLINEFORM0 INLINEFORM0 (event detection) INLINEFORM1 TweetFeature INLINEFORM2 INLINEFORM0 INLINEFORM1 INLINEFORM2 current event clusters INLINEFORM3 ClusterFeature INLINEFORM4 INLINEFORM5 Distance INLINEFORM6 compute distance INLINEFORM7 INLINEFORM0 find the closet cluster INLINEFORM1 INLINEFORM2 INLINEFORM3 is merge threshold merge INLINEFORM4 in INLINEFORM5 INLINEFORM6 INLINEFORM7 is singleton cluster INLINEFORM0 INLINEFORM1 is min cluster size as event INLINEFORM0 (controversy identification) INLINEFORM1 Bustiness INLINEFORM2 INLINEFORM3 Newsworthiness INLINEFORM4 INLINEFORM5 INLINEFORM6 SentimentClassify INLINEFORM7 INLINEFORM0 AVG INLINEFORM1 compute event level sentiment INLINEFORM2 combined controversy score INLINEFORM0 INLINEFORM1 is controversial events set ### Case Study - Starbucks Controversy In this section, we provide a case study of our model on a Starbucks controversial event captured in the system. We validated the event with the Wikipedia page of Starbucks and the major new agencies reports. After the event was detected, its impact was further assessed by linking to the market equity data. On April 12th, 2018, an incident occurred in a Starbucks in Philadelphia, PA. Two African-American men were arrested by the police officials inside that Starbucks. It was reported that the two were denied to access the restroom by the store staff because they did not make any purchase. While waiting at the table, they were told by the staff to leave as they were not making any purchase. They did not comply and thus the store manager called the police and reported that they are trespassing. The two were arrested by the officials but released afterwards without any pressed charges. The scene of the arresting was posted on Twitter and quickly garnered public attention. The video had been viewed more than three millions times in a couple of days and the major local and national news agencies like CNN, NPR, and NYTIMES followed the development of the story. The public outrage originating from the social media universe swiftly triggered a series of chain reaction in the physical world. Protesters gathered together inside and outside the Starbucks store to demand the manager be fired. Several days later, the CEO of the Starbucks issued a public apology for the incident on an ABC's program and stated that he would like to meet the men to show them compassion. To remedy the bad outcome of the event, Starbucks closed its 8,000 stores in the U.S. on May 29th for racial-bias training for its 175K employees. A financial settlement was also established between the two men and Starbucks corporation. This event garnered a serious public relations crisis for Starbucks. Figure FIGREF10 shows the event clusters for six days sampled between April 10th and April 20th. Given the difficulty in showing all of the tweets that were clustered, we use the volume of key POS tagged words (5Ws) detected in the cluster of tweets to approximate the event content. The keywords on the top of each bar reveal aspects of the event cluster. This controversial Starbucks event was captured in our system on April 13th, one day after the event occurred. Prior to the event, the discussion themes about Starbucks (clusters) on Twitter were more random and included topics such as Starbucks gift card, barista, coffee as shown on 04/11/2018. The size of the clusters and the total volume of the tweets per day is comparably small. The first event cluster the system detected associates with the keyword `black', where twitter users mentioned `[...] arrested for being Black'. After the event, the volume of the tweets per day surged multiple times more than before and kept climbing for about a week as the event was developing. The system clearly uncovers the events by being able to pinpoint the clustering keywords `black men', `philly', `CEO', `close', etc. The sentiment scores of the discussion in the clusters for each day are shown on the top part of Figure FIGREF10 . The sentiment score is in a range of -2 to +2, -2 standing for very negative, 0 for neutral, and +2 for very positive. As the figure shows, twitter users' attitude turned from neutral to negative post the Starbucks event occurrence. The quick turn of sentiment polarity serves as an measurement of the event being controversy. Through the validation of the domain of the URLs quoted in the clustered tweets, the authentication of the event is verified. All of the elements of this event indicate that a controversy, specifically, a social related controversy, has occurred. We also did a qualitative study on the Starbucks (SBUX) stock movement during this event. Figure FIGREF12 is the daily percentage change of SBUX and NASDAQ index between April 11th and April 20th. SBUX did not follow the upward trend of the whole market before April 17th, and then its change on April 20th, INLINEFORM0 , is quite significant from historical norms. We collected the historical 52 week stock prices prior to this event and calculated the daily stock price change. The distribution of the daily price change of the previous 52 weeks is Figure FIGREF13 with a mean INLINEFORM1 and standard deviation INLINEFORM2 . The INLINEFORM3 down almost equals to two standard deviations below the mean. Our observation is that plausibly, there was a negative aftereffect from the event of the notable decline in Starbucks stock price due to the major public relations crisis. ### Conclusions We present the use of Twitter as a new data source to detect controversial events for business entities. Each tweet is represented by a vector comprising name entities and verbs mentioned in the raw tweet text. Events can be identified by grouping similar tweets in the vector space, the size and burstiness of the event, and the sentiment polarities. This system is a data-driven controversy monitoring tool that sifts through large volumes of Twitter data. It provides investors with data on key insights on social consciousness, which allows investors to make more informed investment decisions. The direction of our future work is to: 1) develop a quantitative measure on the event impact on the equity market; 2) identify the relevance of the events to entities' operations; 3) extract post-event mitigation actions from the entities. Figure 1: Event clusters and the sentiment polarity score along the timeline. Figure 3: Histogram of Starbucks stock price daily changes Figure 2: Starbucks stock price and NASDAQ index between April 11th 2018 and April 20th 2018.	We collected the historical 52 week stock prices prior to this event and calculated the daily stock price change. The distribution of the daily price change of the previous 52 weeks is Figure FIGREF13 with a mean INLINEFORM1 and standard deviation INLINEFORM2 .
Regarding Mr. Chapman, what was the finding in the CT Head on 04/21/2017? Choose the correct answer from the following options: A. Ischemic stroke B. Brain tumor C. Malresorptive hydrocephalus D. Cerebral abscess E. Normal study	### Patient Report 0 Dear colleague, We are reporting on our shared patient, Mr. John Chapman, born on 11/16/1994, who received emergency treatment at our clinic on 04/03/2017. Diagnoses: - Severe open traumatic brain injury with fractures of the cranial vault, mastoid, and skull base - Dissection of the distal internal carotid artery on both sides - Subarachnoid hemorrhage involving both hemispheres and extending into the basal cisterns - Aspiration pneumonia Other Diagnoses: - Status post rib fracture 2005 - Status post appendectomy 2006 - Status post distal radius fracture 2008 - Status post elbow fracture 20010 Procedure: External ventricular drain (EVD) placement. Medical History: Admission through the emergency department as a polytrauma alert. The patient was involved in a motocross accident, where he jumped, fell, and landed face-first. He was intubated at the scene, and either during or before intubation, aspiration occurred. No issues with airway, breathing, or circulation (A, B, or C problems) were noted. A CT scan performed in the emergency department revealed an open traumatic brain injury with fractures of the cranial vault, mastoid, and skull base, as well as dissection of both carotid arteries. Upon admission, we encountered an intubated and sedated patient with a Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) score of -4. He was hemodynamically stable at all times. Current Recommendations: - Regular checks of vigilance, laboratory values and microbiological findings. - Careful balancing ### Patient Report 1 Dear colleague, We report on Mr. John Chapman, born on 11/16/1994, who was admitted to our Intensive Care Unit from 04/03/2017 to 05/01/2017. Diagnoses: - Open severe traumatic brain injury with fractures of the skull vault, mastoid, and skull base - Dissection of the distal ACI on both sides - Subarachnoid hemorrhage involving both hemispheres and extending into basal cisterns - Infarct areas in the border zone between MCA-ACA on the right frontal and left parietal sides - Malresorptive hydrocephalus <!-- --> - Rhabdomyolysis - Aspiration pneumonia Other Diagnoses: - Status post rib fracture in 2005 - Status post appendectomy in 2006 - Status post distal radius fracture in 2008 - Status post elbow fracture in 20010 Surgical Procedures: - 04/03/2017: Placement of external ventricular drain - 04/08/2017: Placement of an intracranial pressure monitoring catheter - 04/13/2017: Surgical tracheostomy - 05/01/2017: Left ventriculoperitoneal shunt placement Medical History: The patient was admitted through the emergency department as a polytrauma alert. The patient had fallen while riding a motocross bike, landing face-first after jumping. He was intubated at the scene. Aspiration occurred either during or before intubation. No problems with breathing or circulation were noted. The CT performed in the emergency department showed an open traumatic brain injury with fractures of the skull vault, mastoid, and skull base, as well as dissection of the carotid arteries on both sides and bilateral subarachnoid hemorrhage. Upon admission, the patient was sedated and intubated, with a Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) score of -4, and was hemodynamically stable under controlled ventilation. Therapy and Progression: [Neurology]{.underline}: Following the patient\'s admission, an external ventricular drain was placed. Reduction of sedation had to be discontinued due to increased intracranial pressure. A right pupil size greater than the left showed no intracranial correlate. With persistently elevated intracranial pressure, intensive intracranial pressure therapy was initiated using deeper sedation, administration of hyperosmolar sodium, and cerebrospinal fluid drainage, which normalized intracranial pressure. Intermittently, there were recurrent intracranial pressure peaks, which could be treated conservatively. Transcranial Doppler examinations showed normal flow velocities. Microbiological samples from cerebrospinal fluid were obtained when the patient had elevated temperatures, but no bacterial growth was observed. Due to the inability to adequately monitor intracranial pressure via the external ventricular drain, an intracranial pressure monitoring catheter was placed to facilitate adequate intracranial pressure monitoring. In the perfusion computed tomography, progressive edema with increasingly obstructed external ventricular spaces and previously known infarcts in the border zone area were observed. To ensure appropriate intracranial pressure monitoring, a Tuohy drain was inserted due to cerebrospinal fluid buildup on 04/21/2017. After the initiation of antibiotic therapy for suspected ventriculitis, the intracranial pressure monitoring catheter was removed on 04/20/2017. Subsequently, a liquorrhea developed, leading to the placement of a Tuohy drain. After successful antibiotic treatment of ventriculitis, a ventriculoperitoneal shunt was placed on 05/01/2017 without complications, and the Tuohy drain was removed. Radiological control confirmed the correct positioning. The patient gradually became more alert. Both pupils were isochoric and reacted to light. All extremities showed movement, although the patient only intermittently responded to commands. On 05/01/2017, a VP shunt was placed on the left side without complications. Currently, the patient is sedated with continuous clonidine at 60µg/h. Hemodynamics: To maintain cerebral perfusion pressure in the presence of increased intracranial pressure, circulatory support with vasopressors was necessary. Echocardiography revealed preserved cardiac function without wall motion abnormalities or right heart strain, despite the increasing need for noradrenaline support. As the patient had bilateral carotid dissection, a therapy with Aspirin 100mg was initiated. On 04/16/2017, clinical examination revealed right\>left leg circumference difference and redness of the right leg. Utrasound revealed a long-segment deep vein thrombosis in the right leg, extending from the pelvis (proximal end of the thrombus not clearly delineated) to the lower leg. Therefore, Heparin was increased to a therapeutic dose. Heparin therapy was paused on postoperative day 1, and prophylactic anticoagulation started, followed by therapeutic anticoagulation on postoperative day 2. The patient was switched to subcutaneous Lovenox. Pulmonary: Due to the history of aspiration in the prehospital setting, a bronchoscopy was performed, revealing a moderately obstructed bronchial system with several clots. As prolonged sedation was necessary, a surgical tracheostomy was performed without complications on 04/13/2017. Subsequently, we initiated weaning from mechanical ventilation. The current weaning strategy includes 12 hours of synchronized intermittent mandatory ventilation (SIMV) during the night, with nighttime pressure support ventilation (DuoPAP: Ti high 1.3s, respiratory rate 11/min, Phigh 11 mbar, PEEP 5 mbar, Psupport 5 mbar, trigger 4l, ramp 50 ms, expiratory trigger sensitivity 25%). Abdomen: FAST examinations did not reveal any signs of intra-abdominal trauma. Enteral feeding was initiated via a gastric tube, along with supportive parenteral nutrition. With forced bowel movement measures, the patient had regular bowel movements. On 04/17/2017, a complication-free PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy) placement was performed due to the potential long-term need for enteral nutrition. The PEG tube is currently being fed with tube feed nutrition, with no bowel movement for the past four days. Additionally, supportive parenteral nutrition is being provided. Kidney: Initially, the patient had polyuria without confirming diabetes insipidus, and subsequently, adequate diuresis developed. Retention parameters were within the normal range. As crush parameters increased, a therapy involving forced diuresis was initiated, resulting in a significant reduction of crush parameters. Infection Course: Upon admission, with elevated infection parameters and intermittently febrile temperatures, empirical antibiotic therapy was initiated for suspected pneumonia using Piperacillin/Tazobactam. Staphylococcus capitis was identified in blood cultures, and Staphylococcus aureus was found in bronchial lavage. Both microbes were sensitive to the current antibiotic therapy, so treatment with Piperacillin/Tazobactam continued. Additionally, Enterobacter cloacae was identified in tracheobronchial secretions during the course, also sensitive to the ongoing antibiotic therapy. On 05/17, the patient experienced another fever episode with elevated infection parameters and right lower lobe infiltrates in the chest X-ray. After obtaining microbiological samples, antibiotic therapy was switched to Meropenem for suspected pneumonia. Microbiological findings from cerebrospinal fluid indicated gram-negative rods. Therefore, antibiotic therapy was adjusted to Ciprofloxacin in accordance with susceptibility testing due to suspected ventriculitis, and the Meropenem dose was increased. This led to a reduction in infection parameters. Finally, microbiological examination of cerebrospinal fluid, blood cultures, and urine revealed no pathological findings. Infection parameters decreased. We recommend continuing antibiotic therapy until 05/02/2017. Anti-Infective Course: - Piperacillin/Tazobactam 04/03/2017-04/16/2017: Staph. Capitis in Blood Culture Staph. Aureus in Bronchial Lavage - Meropenem 04/16/2017-present (increased dose since 04/18) CSF: gram-negative rods in Blood Culture: Pseudomonas aeruginosa Acinetobacter radioresistens - Ciprofloxacin 04/18/2017-present CSF: gram-negative rods in Blood Culture: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter radioresistens Weaning Settings: Weaning Stage 6: 12-hour synchronized intermittent mandatory ventilation (SIMV) with DuoPAP during the night (Thigh 1.3s, respiratory rate 11/min, Phigh 11 mbar, PEEP 5 mbar, Psupport 5 mbar, trigger 4l, ramp 50 ms, expiratory trigger sensitivity 25%). Status at transfer: Currently, Mr. Chapman is monosedated with Clonidine. He spontaneously opens both eyes and spontaneously moves all four extremities. Pupils are bilaterally moderately dilated, round and sensitive to light. There is bulbar divergence. Circulation is stable without catecholamine therapy. He is in the process of weaning, currently spontaneous breathing with intermittent CPAP. Renal function is sufficient, enteral nutrition via PEG with supportive parenteral nutrition is successful. Current Medication: Medication Dosage Frequency ------------------------------------ ---------------- --------------- Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 2.5 mg 1-0-0 Ciprofloxacin (Cipro) 400 mg 1-1-1 Meropenem (Merrem) 4 g Every 4 hours Morphine Hydrochloride (MS Contin) 10 mg 1-1-1-1-1-1 Polyethylene Glycol 3350 (MiraLAX) 13.1 g 1-1-1 Acetaminophen (Tylenol) 1000 mg 1-1-1-1 Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0 Enoxaparin (Lovenox) 30 mg (0.3 mL) 0-0-1 Enoxaparin (Lovenox) 70 mg (0.7 mL) 1-0-1 Lab results: Parameter Results Reference Range -------------------- ------------- --------------------- Creatinine (Jaffé) 0.42 mg/dL 0.70-1.20 mg/dL Urea 31 mg/dL 17-48 mg/dL Total Bilirubin 0.35 mg/dL \< 1.20 mg/dL Hemoglobin 7.6 g/dL 13.5-17.0 g/dL Hematocrit 28% 39.5-50.5% Red Blood Cells 3.5 M/uL 4.3-5.8 M/uL White Blood Cells 10.35 K/uL 3.90-10.50 K/uL Platelets 379 K/uL 150-370 K/uL MCV 77.2 fL 80.0-99.0 fL MCH 24.1 pg 27.0-33.5 pg MCHC 32.5 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL MPV 11.3 fL 7.0-12.0 fL RDW-CV 17.7% 11.5-15.0% Quick 54% 78-123% INR 1.36 0.90-1.25 aPTT 32.8 sec 25.0-38.0 sec Addition: Radiological Findings [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT) on the right leg. [Special Notes:]{.underline} Examination at the bedside in the intensive care unit, no digital image archiving available. [Findings]{.underline}: Confirmation of a long-segment deep venous thrombosis in the right leg, starting in the pelvis (proximal end not clearly delineated) and extending to the lower leg. Visible Inferior Vena Cava without evidence of thrombosis. The findings were communicated to the treating physician. Full-Body Trauma CT on 04/03/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Motocross accident. Polytrauma alert. Consequences of trauma? Informed consent: Emergency indication. Recommended monitoring of kidney and thyroid laboratory parameters. Findings: CCT: Dissection of the distal internal carotid artery on both sides (left 2-fold). Signs of generalized elevated intracranial pressure. Open skull-brain trauma with intracranial air inclusions and skull base fracture at the level of the roof of the ethmoidal/sphenoidal sinuses and clivus (in a close relationship to the bilateral internal carotid arteries) and the temporal CT Head on 04/16/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} History of skull fracture, removal of EVD (External Ventricular Drain). Inquiry about the course. [Findings]{.underline}: Regression of ventricular system width (distance of SVVH currently 41 mm, previously 46 mm) with residual liquor caps, indicative of regressed hydrocephalus. Interhemispheric fissure in the midline. No herniation. Complete regression of subdural hematoma on the left, tentorial region. Known defect areas on the right frontal lobe where previous catheters were inserted. Progression of a newly hypodense demarcated cortical infarct on the left, postcentral. Known bilateral skull base fractures involving the petrous bone, with secretion retention in the mastoid air cells bilaterally. Minimal secretion also in the sphenoid sinuses. Postoperative bone fragments dislocated intracranially after right frontal trepanation. Chest X-ray on 04/24/2017. [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Mechanically ventilated patient. Suspected pneumonia. Question about infiltrates. [Findings]{.underline}: Several previous images for comparison, last one from 08/20/2021. Persistence of infiltrates in the right lower lobe. No evidence of new infiltrates. Removal of the tracheal tube and central venous catheter with a newly inserted tracheal cannula. No evidence of pleural effusion or pneumothorax. CT Head on 04/25/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Severe traumatic brain injury with brain edema, one External Ventricular Drain removed, one parenchymal catheter removed; Follow-up. [Findings]{.underline}: Previous images available, CT last performed on 04/09/17, and MRI on 04/16/17. Massive cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) stasis supra- and infratentorially with CSF pressure caps at the ventricular and cisternal levels with completely depleted external CSF spaces, differential diagnosis: malresorptive hydrocephalus. The EVD and parenchymal catheter have been completely removed. No evidence of fresh intracranial hemorrhage. Residual subdural hematoma on the left, tentorial. Slight regression of the cerebellar tonsils. Increasing hypodensity of the known defect zone on the right frontal region, differential diagnosis: CSF diapedesis. Otherwise, the status is the same as for the other defects. Secretion in the sphenoid sinus and mastoid cells bilaterally, known bilateral skull base fractures. Bedside Chest X-ray on 04/262017: [Clinical Information and Justification]{.underline}: Respiratory insufficiency. Inquiry about cardiorespiratory status. [Findings]{.underline}: Previous image from 08/17/2021. Left Central Venous Catheter and gastric tube in unchanged position. Persistent consolidation in the right para-hilar region, differential diagnosis: contusion or partial atelectasis. No evidence of new pulmonary infiltrates. No pleural effusion. No pneumothorax. No pulmonary congestion. Brain MRI on 04/26/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Severe skull-brain trauma with skull calvarium, mastoid, and skull base fractures. Assessment of infarct areas/edema for rehabilitation planning. [Findings:]{.underline} Several previous examinations available. Persistent small sulcal hemorrhages in both hemispheres (left \> right) and parenchymal hemorrhage on the left frontal with minimal perifocal edema. Narrow subdural hematoma on the left occipital extending tentorially (up to 2 mm). No current signs of hypoxic brain damage. No evidence of fresh ischemia. Slightly regressed ventricular size. No herniation. Unchanged placement of catheters on the right frontal side. Mastoid air cells blocked bilaterally due to known bilateral skull base fractures, mucosal swelling in the sphenoid and ethmoid sinuses. Polypous mucosal swelling in the left maxillary sinus. Other involved paranasal sinuses and mastoids are clear. Bedside Chest X-ray on 04/27/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Tracheal cannula placement. Inquiry about the position. [Findings]{.underline}: Images from 04/03/2017 for comparison. Tracheal cannula with tip projecting onto the trachea. No pneumothorax. Regressing infiltrate in the right lower lung field. No leaking pleural effusions. Left ubclavian central venous catheter with tip projecting onto the superior vena cava. Gastric tube in situ. CT Head on 04/28/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Open head injury, bilateral subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), EVD placement. Inquiry about herniation. [Findings]{.underline}: Comparison with the last prior examination from the previous day. Generalized signs of cerebral edema remain constant, slightly progressing with a somewhat increasing blurred cortical border, particularly high frontal. Essentially constant transtentorial herniation of the midbrain and low position of the cerebellar tonsils. Marked reduction of inner CSF spaces and depleted external CSF spaces, unchanged position of the ventricular drainage catheter with the tip in the left lateral ventricle. Constant small parenchymal hemorrhage on the left frontal and constant SDH at the tentorial edge on both sides. No evidence of new intracranial space-occupying hemorrhage. Slightly less distinct demarcation of the demarcated infarcts/defect zones, e.g., on the right frontal region, differential diagnosis: fogging. CT Head Angiography with Perfusion on 04/28/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification]{.underline}: Post-traumatic head injury, rising intracranial pressure, bilateral internal carotid artery dissection. Inquiry about intracranial bleeding, edema course, herniation, brain perfusion. [Emergency indication:]{.underline} Vital indication. Recommended monitoring of kidney and thyroid laboratory parameters. Consultation with the attending physician from and the neuroradiology service was conducted. [Technique]{.underline}: Native moderately of the neurocranium. CT angiography of brain-supplying cervical intracranial vessels during arterial contrast agent phase and perfusion imaging of the neurocranium after intravenous injection of a total of 140 ml of Xenetix-350. DLP Head 502.4 mGycm. DLP Body 597.4 mGycm. [Findings]{.underline}: Previous images from 08/11/2021 and the last CTA of the head/neck from 04/03/2017 for comparison. [Brain]{.underline}: Constant bihemispheric and cerebellar brain edema with a slit-like appearance of the internal and completely compressed external ventricular spaces. Constant compression of the midbrain with transtentorial herniation and a constant tonsillar descent. Increasing demarcation of infarct areas in the border zone of MCA-ACA on the right frontal, possibly also on the left frontal. Predominantly preserved cortex-gray matter contrast, sometimes discontinuous on both frontal sides, differential diagnosis: artifact-related, differential diagnosis: disseminated infarct demarcations/contusions. Unchanged placement of the ventricular drainage from the right frontal with the catheter tip in the left lateral ventricle anterior horn. Constant subdural hematoma tentorial and posterior falx. Increasingly vague delineation of the small frontal parenchymal hemorrhage. No new space-occupying intracranial bleeding. No evidence of secondary dislocation of the skull base fracture with constant fluid collections in the paranasal sinuses and mastoid air cells. Hematoma possible, cerebrospinal fluid leakage possible. [CT Angiography Head/Neck]{.underline}: Constant presentation of bilateral internal carotid artery dissection. No evidence of higher-grade vessel stenosis or occlusion of the brain-supplying intracranial arteries. Moderately dilated venous collateral circuits in the cranial soft tissues on both sides, right \> left. Moderately dilated ophthalmic veins on both sides, right \> left. No evidence of sinus or cerebral venous thrombosis. Slight perfusion deficits in the area of the described infarct areas and contusions. No evidence of perfusion mismatches in the perfusion imaging. Unchanged presentation of the other documented skeletal segments. Additional Note: Discussion of findings with the responsible medical colleagues on-site and by telephone, as well as with the neuroradiology service by telephone, was conducted. CT Head on 04/30/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification]{.underline}: Open head injury following a motorcycle accident.. Inquiry about rebleeding, edema, EVD displacement. [Findings and Assessment:]{.underline} CT last performed on 04/05/2017 for comparison. Constant narrow subdural hematoma on both sides, tentorial and posterior parasagittal. Constant small parenchymal hemorrhage on the left frontal. No new intracranial bleeding. Progressively demarcated infarcts on the right frontal and left parietal. Slightly progressive compression of the narrow ventricles as an indication of progressive edema. Completely depleted external CSF spaces with the ventricular drain catheter in the left lateral ventricle. Increasing compression of the midbrain due to transtentorial herniation, progressive tonsillar descent of 6 mm. Fracture of the skull base and the petrous part of the temporal bone on both sides without significant displacement. Hematoma in the mastoid and sphenoid sinuses and the maxillary sinus. CT Head on 05/01/2017: [Clinical Information and Justification:]{.underline} Open skull-brain trauma. Inquiry about CSF stasis, bleeding, edema. [Findings]{.underline}: CT last performed on 04/05/17 for comparison. Completely regressed subarachnoid hemorrhages on both sides. Minimal SDH components on the tentorial edges bilaterally (left more than right, with a 3 mm margin width). No new intracranial bleeding. Continuously narrow inner ventricular system and narrow basal cisterns. The fourth ventricle is unfolded. Narrow external CSF spaces and consistently swollen gyration with global cerebral edema. Better demarcated circumscribed hypodensity in the centrum semiovale on the right (Series 3, Image 176) and left (Series 3, Image 203); Differential diagnosis: fresh infarcts due to distal ACI dissections. Consider repeat vascular imaging. No midline shift. No herniation. Regressing intracranial air inclusions. Fracture of the skull base and the petrous part of the temporal bone on both sides without significant displacement. Hematoma in the maxillary, sphenoidal, and ethmoidal sinuses. Consultation Reports: 1) Consultation with Ophthalmology on 04/03/2017 [Patient Information:]{.underline} - Motorbike accident, heavily contaminated eyes. - Request for assessment. Diagnosis: Motorbike accident Findings: Patient intubated, unresponsive. In cranial CT, the eyeball appears intact, no retrobulbar hematoma. Intraocular pressure: Right/left within the normal range. Eyelid margins of both eyes crusty with sand, inferiorly in the lower lid sac, and on the upper lid with sand. Lower lid somewhat chemotic. Slight temporal hyperemia in the left eyelid angle. Both eyes have erosions, small, multiple, superficial. Lower conjunctival sac clean. Round pupils, anisocoria right larger than left. Left iris hyperemia, no iris defects in the direct light. Lens unremarkable. Reduced view of the optic nerve head due to miosis, somewhat pale, rather sharp-edged, central neuroretinal rim present, central vessels normal. Left eye, due to narrow pupil, limited view, optic nerve head not visible, central vessels normal, no retinal hemorrhages. Assessment: Eyelid and conjunctival foreign bodies removed. Mild erosions in the lower conjunctival sac. Right optic nerve head somewhat pale, rather sharp-edged. Current Recommendations: - Antibiotic eye drops three times a day for both eyes. - Ensure complete eyelid closure. 2) Consultation with Craniomaxillofacial (CMF) Surgery on 04/05/2017 Patient Information: - Motorbike accident with severe open traumatic brain injury with fractures of the cranial vault, mastoid, and skull base <!-- --> - Request for assessment. - Patient with maxillary fracture. Findings: According to the responsible attending physician, \"minimal handling in case of decompensating intracranial pressure\" is indicated. Therefore, currently, a cautious approach is suggested regarding surgical intervention for the radiologically hardly displaced maxillary fracture. Re-consultation is possible if there are changes in the clinical outcome. Assessment: Awaiting developments. 3) Consultation with Neurology on 04/06/2017 Patient Information: - Brain edema following a severe open traumatic brain injury with fractures of the cranial vault, mastoid, and skull base <!-- --> - Request for assessment. - Traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage, intracranial artery dissection, and various other injuries. Findings: Patient comatose, intubated, sedated. Isocoric pupils. No light reaction in either eye. No reaction to pain stimuli for vestibulo-ocular reflex and oculomotor responses. Babinski reflex negative. Assessment: Long-term ventilation due to a history of intracerebral bleeding and skull base fracture. No response to pain stimuli or light reactions in the eyes. Procedure/Therapy Suggestion: Monitoring of patient condition. 4) Consultation with ENT on 04/16/2017 Patient Information: Tracheostomy tube change. Findings: Tracheostomy tube change performed. Stoma unremarkable. Trachea clear up to the bifurcation. Sutures in place. Assessment: Re-consultation on 08/27/2021 for suture removal. 5) Consultation with Neurology on 04/22/2017 Patient Information: Adduction deficit., Request for assessment. Findings: Long-term ventilation due to a history of intracerebral bleeding and skull base fracture. Adduction deficit in the right eye and horizontal nystagmus. Assessment: Suspected mesencephalic lesion due to horizontal nystagmus, but no diagnostic or therapeutic action required. 6) Consultation with ENT on 04/23/2017 Patient Information: Suture removal. Request for assessment. Findings: Tracheostomy site unremarkable. Sutures trimmed, and skin sutures removed. Assessment: Procedure completed successfully. Please note that some information is clinical and may not include specific dates or recommendations for further treatment. Antibiogram: Antibiotic Organism 1 (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) Organism 2 (Acinetobacter radioresistens) ------------------------- ----------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- Aztreonam I (4.0) \- Cefepime I (2.0) \- Cefotaxime \- \- Amikacin S (\<=2.0) S (4.0) Ampicillin \- \- Piperacillin I (\<=4.0) \- Piperacillin/Tazobactam I (8.0) \- Imipenem I (2.0) S (\<=0.25) Meropenem S (\<=0.25) S (\<=0.25) Ceftriaxone \- \- Ceftazidime I (4.0) \- Gentamicin . (\<=1.0) S (\<=1.0) Tobramycin S (\<=1.0) S (\<=1.0) Cotrimoxazole \- S (\<=20.0) Ciprofloxacin I (\<=0.25) I (0.5) Moxifloxacin \- \- Fosfomycin \- \- Tigecyclin \- \- \"S\" means Susceptible \"I\" means Intermediate \".\" indicates not specified \"-\" means Resistant ### Patient Report 2 Dear colleague, We are reporting on our mutual patient, Mr. John Chapman, born on 11/16/1994, who presented himself to our Outpatient Clinic from 08/08/2018. Diagnoses: - Right abducens Nerve Palsy and Facial Nerve Palsy - Lagophthalmos with corneal opacities due to eyelid closure deficit - Left Abducens Nerve Palsy with slight compensatory head leftward rotation and preferred leftward gaze - Bilateral disc swelling - Suspected left cavernous internal carotid artery aneurysm following traumatic ICA dissection - History of shunt explantation due to dysfunction and right-sided re-implantation (Codman, current pressure setting 12 cm H2O) - History of left VP shunt placement (programmable ventriculoperitoneal shunt, initial pressure setting 5/25 cm H2O, adjusted to 3 cm H2O before discharge) - Malresorptive hydrocephalus - History of severe open head injury in a motocross accident with multiple skull fractures and distal dissection Procedure: We conducted the following preoperative assessment: - Visual acuity: Distant vision: Right eye: 0.5, Left eye: 0.8p - Eye position: Fusion/Normal with significant esotropia in the right eye; no fusion reflex observed - Ocular deviation: After CT, at distance, esodeviation simulating alternating 100 prism diopters (overcorrection); at near, esodeviation simulating alternating 90 prism diopters - Head posture: Fusion/Normal with leftward head turn of 5-10 degrees - Correspondence: Bagolini test shows suppression at both distance and near fixation - Motility: Right eye abduction limited to 25 degrees from the midline, abduction in up and down gaze limited to 30 degrees from midline; left eye abduction limited to 30 degrees - Binocular functions: Bagolini test shows suppression in the right eye at both distance and near fixation; Lang I negative Current Presentation: Mr. Chapman presented himself today in our neurovascular clinic, providing an MRI of the head. Medical History: The patient is known to have a pseudoaneurysm of the cavernous left internal carotid artery following traumatic carotid dissection in 04/2017, along with ipsilateral abducens nerve palsy. Physical Examination: Patient in good general condition. Oriented in all aspects. No cyanosis. No edema. Warm and dry skin. Normal nasal and pharyngeal findings. Pupils round, equal, and react promptly to light bilaterally. Moist tongue. Pharynx and buccal mucosa unremarkable. No jugular vein distension. No carotid bruits heard. Palpation of lymph nodes unremarkable. Palpation of the thyroid gland unremarkable, freely movable. Lungs: Normal chest shape, moderately mobile, vesicular breath sounds. Heart: Regular heart action, normal rate; heart sounds clear, no pathological sounds. Abdomen: Peristalsis and bowel sounds normal in all quadrants; soft abdomen, no tenderness, no palpable masses, liver and spleen not palpable due to limited access, non-tender kidneys. Normal peripheral pulses; joints freely movable. Strength, motor function, and sensation are unremarkable. Therapy and Progression: The pseudoaneurysm has shown slight enlargement in the recent follow-up imaging and remains partially thrombosed. The findings were discussed on during a neurovascular board meeting, where a recommendation for endovascular treatment was made, which the patient has not yet pursued. Since Mr. Chapman has not been able to decide on treatment thus far, it is advisable to further evaluate this still asymptomatic condition through a diagnostic angiography. This examination would also help in better planning any potential intervention. Mr. Chapman agreed to this course of action, and we will provide him with a timely appointment for the angiography. Lab results upon Discharge: Parameter Results Reference Range -------------------- ------------- --------------------- Creatinine (Jaffé) 0.44 mg/dL 0.70-1.20 mg/dL Urea 31 mg/dL 17-48 mg/dL Total Bilirubin 0.35 mg/dL \< 1.20 mg/dL Hemoglobin 7.8 g/dL 13.5-17.0 g/dL Hematocrit 28% 39.5-50.5% Red Blood Cells 3.5 M/uL 4.3-5.8 M/uL White Blood Cells 10.35 K/uL 3.90-10.50 K/uL Platelets 379 K/uL 150-370 K/uL MCV 77.2 fL 80.0-99.0 fL MCH 24.1 pg 27.0-33.5 pg MCHC 32.5 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL MPV 11.3 fL 7.0-12.0 fL RDW-CV 17.7% 11.5-15.0% Quick 54% 78-123% INR 1.36 0.90-1.25 aPTT 32.8 sec 25.0-38.0 sec ### Patient Report 3 Dear colleague, We are reporting on our patient, Mr. John Chapman, born on 11/16/1994, who was under our inpatient care from 05/25/2019 to 05/26/2019. Diagnoses: - Pseudoaneurysm of the cavernous left internal carotid artery following traumatic carotid dissection - Abducens nerve palsy. - History of severe open head trauma with fractures of the cranial vault, mastoid, and skull base. Distal ICA dissection bilaterally. Bilateral hemispheric subarachnoid hemorrhage extending into the basal cisterns.mInfarct areas in the MCA-ACA border zones, right frontal, and left parietal. Malresorptive hydrocephalus. <!-- --> - Rhabdomyolysis. - History of aspiration pneumonia. - Suspected Propofol infusion syndrome. Current Presentation: For cerebral digital subtraction angiography of the intracranial vessels. The patient presented with stable cardiopulmonary conditions. Medical History: The patient was admitted for the evaluation of a pseudoaneurysm of the supra-aortic vessels. Further medical history can be assumed to be known. Physical Examination: Patient in good general condition. Oriented in all aspects. No cyanosis. No edema. Warm and dry skin. Normal nasal and pharyngeal findings. Pupils round, equal, and react promptly to light bilaterally. Moist tongue. Pharynx and buccal mucosa unremarkable. No jugular vein distension. No carotid bruits heard. Palpation of lymph nodes unremarkable. Palpation of the thyroid gland unremarkable, freely movable. Lungs: Normal chest shape, moderately mobile, vesicular breath sounds. Heart: Regular heart action, normal rate; heart sounds clear, no pathological sounds. Abdomen: Peristalsis and bowel sounds normal in all quadrants; soft abdomen, no tenderness, no palpable masses, liver and spleen not palpable due to limited access, non-tender kidneys. Normal peripheral pulses; joints freely movable. Strength, motor function, and sensation are unremarkable. Supra-aortic angiography on 05/25/2019: [Clinical context, question, justifying indication:]{.underline} Pseudoaneurysm of the left ICA. Written consent was obtained for the procedure. Anesthesia, Medications: Procedure performed under local anesthesia. Medications: 500 IU Heparin in 500 mL NaCl for flushing. [Methodology]{.underline}: Puncture of the right common femoral artery under local anesthesia. 4F sheath, 4F vertebral catheter. Serial angiographies after selective catheterization of the internal carotid arteries. Uncomplicated manual intra-arterial contrast medium injection with a total of 50 mL of Iomeron 300. Post-interventional closure of the puncture site by manual compression. Subsequent application of a circular pressure bandage. [Technique]{.underline}: Biplanar imaging technique, area dose product 1330 cGy x cm², fluoroscopy time 3:43 minutes. [Findings]{.underline}: The perfused portion of the partially thrombosed cavernous aneurysm of the left internal carotid artery measures 4 x 2 mm. No evidence of other vascular pathologies in the anterior circulation. [Recommendation]{.underline}: In case of post-procedural bleeding, immediate manual compression of the puncture site and notification of the on-call neuroradiologist are advised. - Pressure bandage to be kept until 2:30 PM. Bed rest until 6:30 PM. - Follow-up in our Neurovascular Clinic Addition: Doppler ultrasound of the right groin on 05/26/2019: [Clinical context, question, justifying indication:]{.underline} Free fluid? Hematoma? [Findings]{.underline}: A CT scan from 04/05/2017 is available for comparison. No evidence of a significant hematoma or an aneurysm in the right groin puncture site. No evidence of an arteriovenous fistula. Normal flow profiles of the femoral artery and vein. No evidence of thrombosis. Treatment and Progression: Pre-admission occurred on 05/24/2019 due to a medically justified increase in risk for DSA of intracranial vessels. After appropriate preparation, the angiography was performed on 05/25/2019. The puncture site was managed with a pressure bandage. In the color Doppler sonographic control the following day, neither a puncture aneurysm nor an arteriovenous fistula was detected. On 05/25/2019, we discharged the patient in good subjective condition for your outpatient follow-up care. Current Recommendations: Outpatient follow-up Lab results: Parameter Reference Range Result ----------------------- --------------------- ------------- Sodium 136-145 mEq/L 141 mEq/L Potassium 3.5-4.5 mEq/L 4.9 mEq/L Chloride 98-107 mEq/L 100 mEq/L Osmolality 280-300 mOsm/kg 290 mOsm/kg Glucose in Fluoride 60-110 mg/dL 76 mg/dL Creatinine (Jaffé) 0.70-1.20 mg/dL 0.98 mg/dL CRP \< 5.0 mg/L 4.5 mg/L Triglycerides \< 150 mg/dL 119 mg/dL Creatine Kinase \< 190 U/L 142 U/L Free Triiodothyronine 2.00-4.40 ng/L 3.25 ng/L Free Thyroxine 9.30-17.00 ng/L 14.12 ng/L TSH Basal 0.27-4.20 mU/L 1.65 mU/L Hemoglobin 13.5-17.0 g/dL 14.3 g/dL Hematocrit 39.5-50.5% 43.4% Erythrocytes 4.3-5.8 M/uL 5.6 M/uL Leukocytes 3.90-10.50 K/uL 10.25 K/uL Platelets 150-370 K/uL 198 K/uL MCV 80.0-99.0 fL 83.2 fL MCH 27.0-33.5 pg 28.1 pg MCHC 31.5-36.0 g/dL 33.4 g/dL MPV 7.0-12.0 fL 11.6 fL RDW-CV 11.5-15.0% 13.5% Quick \> 78% 90% INR \< 1.25 1.07 aPTT 25.0-38.0 sec 36.1 sec	Malresorptive hydrocephalus
The Pequod, Nimitz, and Triton are all references to? A. crewmen aboard the Charles Partlow Sale B. seafaring men or ships from literature C. names of scientists who invented food recycling techniques D. the most palatable strains of algae	GOURMET By ALLEN KIM LANG [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine April 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This was the endless problem of all spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men tomorrow on what they had eaten today! Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls, men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers, celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the Chlorella and Scenedesmus algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the road to the larger Space without. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space. The Pequod's crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won their war on canned pork and beans. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the skies, a decline set in. The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount. Slimeheads remember the H. M. S. Ajax fiasco, for example, in which a galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think of the Benjo Maru incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing Saccharomycodes yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent bite he ate to a superior grade of sake . And for a third footnote to the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks," Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the Charles Partlow Sale . The Sale blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted in the maria to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann, the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was Robert Bailey. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a statement of the least fuel a man can run on. Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat, protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the algae fed us. All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in essential amino acids. The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of squeamishness. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer, guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain. If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social hemorrhoid. The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook. It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey, Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed haut cuisine and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any other name than The Kitchen Cabinet. Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink, textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat. For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not. "Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea, "you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun in my home country: Mensch ist was er isst. It means, you are what you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this Schweinerei you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the ladder from the dining-cubby. "Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me. "Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship." "I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!" "His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none." Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies, we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings." "You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat." Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about tomorrow's menu." The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The pièce de résistance was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really steak." Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed. "Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and cycler-salt." "You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding. "Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and grasshoppers, to stay alive." "Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded. "Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me, Belly-Robber?" Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really don't know what I can do to please you." "You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban Hausfrau with the vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will keep my belly content and my brain alive." "Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British term Dumb Insolence. Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard. You're asking him to make bricks without straw." Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor, that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged man?" "Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said. "You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw," Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment, to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks." "You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack." "Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova." "Crew morale on the ship...." I began. "That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated. Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius acidly called in question again. I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an ersatz hot turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said. "We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics student. That will be all, Bailey." The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed, seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside, and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook. Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice, and a dozen others. Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram. To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come aboard their ship mother-naked. But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet on the mysterious box as he sat to eat. "What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today, Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook. Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir," he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?" "I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?" "Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out. Voila! I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine meat." "Remarkable, Bailey," I said. "It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils the meal." Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates. "Try it," he urged the Captain. Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something," Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella. "Aha! I have it!" "Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked. "This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks." Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth, Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled. "Damn you!" Bailey shouted. Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook. "... Sir," Bailey added. "That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber." "But, Sir...." Bailey began. "You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded. "I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed, slave-driving...." "Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous." "Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion. "Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said. "Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers and the men have been more than satisfied with his work." "That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said. "Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added. Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said. "No, dammit!" he shouted. "Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it. After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said. "You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to be ashamed of." "He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut and Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art out of an algae tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet of the Friends of Escoffier!" "Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman." "I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be an apt confederate of vis medicatrix naturae , the healing power of nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed. For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in horribleness, a pottage or boiled Chlorella vulgaris that looked and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey, red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're improving a little at last." Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said. I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I thought. Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates. There being only three seats in the Sale's mess compartment, we ate our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier, of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!" "Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said. "The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman said. I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey," I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is actually good ." "Thanks, Doc," Bailey said. I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph; you couldn't have done it without him." "You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?" Bailey asked. "He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum performance out of his Ship's Cook." Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked. I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job. He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked, spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll have to admit that I do." Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my plate. "Then have another piece," he said.	B. seafaring men or ships from literature
Referring to the passage’s title, who was the “Monster Maker”? A. Click B. Human imagination C. Gunther D. Irish	The Monster Maker By RAY BRADBURY "Get Gunther," the official orders read. It was to laugh! For Click and Irish were marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a damned sweet picture of everything that was happening. The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console, wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this meteor coming like blazing fury. Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round. There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now. It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs. Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of metal death. What a fade-out! "Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?" "Is this what ?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet. "Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?" Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!" They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones. The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst, air and energy flung out. Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like this one! His brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his camera. Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it. Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the wreckage into that silence. He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there, thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—" A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck. "Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!" "From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin' that film-contraption!" Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that. Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down, pale. "Where are we?" "A million miles from nobody." They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars. Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look sick. "If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd capture that Gunther lad!" His voice stopped and the silence spoke. Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left." The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or was suffocation a better death...? Sixty minutes. They stood and looked at one another. "Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly. Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out: "Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot. Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've got it here, on film." Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need now, Click. Oxygen. And then food . And then some way back to Earth." Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us. Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice." They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting. Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order." Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish. It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and the crash this way." Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far down, and the green eyes blazed. They stopped, together. "Oops!" Click said. "Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel that ?" Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!" They ran back. "Let's try it again." They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened. "Gravity should not act this way, Click." "Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up! Gunther'd do anything to—did I say anything ?" Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them. Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt the creatures at all. "Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!" Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out, as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him. Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a scene!" "Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!" "Use your gun." "They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase, eh, Click?" "Yeah. Sure. You enjoyed it, every moment of it." "I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?" "Let me think—" "Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact." They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters and Gunther and— "Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a blue one?" Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God, now you've got me doing it. Joking in the face of death." "Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck." That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed out. Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take me a profile shot of the beasties and myself." Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it." "Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our rescue!" Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry." Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped, my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace negotiations betwixt me and these pixies." Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals. Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts. When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him: "Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So, what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men? Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around. It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces." Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!" "He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation, then." "I don't see no Base around." Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical, leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the impressions. Quick stuff. Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base, Click handed the whole thing over. "Look." Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah, Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented." "Huh?" "It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid monsters complete." "What!" Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again: Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally with nothing ; Marnagan shooting his gun at nothing ; Marnagan pretending to be happy in front of nothing . Then, closeup—of—NOTHING! The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it. Maybe— Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this mess! Here—" He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film, the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the monsters weren't there, they weren't there. "Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—" "If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click. Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or infra-red or something that won't come out on film?" "Nuts! Any color we see, the camera sees. We've been fooled." "Hey, where you going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man tried pushing past him. "Get out of the way," said Hathaway. Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere, it'll be me does the going." "I can't let you do that, Irish." "Why not?" "You'd be going on my say-so." "Ain't your say-so good enough for me?" "Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—" "If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The Lion's Den." "Irish, I—" "Shut up and load up." Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it. "Ready, Click?" "I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish. Think it hard. There aren't any animals—" "Keep me in focus, lad." "All the way, Irish." "What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!" Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one, two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking. Right out into the middle of them.... That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the monsters! Only now it was only Marnagan. No more monsters. Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and ran away!" "Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative figments!" "And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you coward!" "Smile when you say that, Irish." "Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in your sweet grey eyes?" "Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put window-wipers in these helmets?" "I'll take it up with the Board, lad." "Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals kill them." "Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill." "Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If that isn't being dangerous—" The Irishman whistled. "But, we've got to move , Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen. In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source, Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never had a chance to disbelieve them." "If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—" "Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours. This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick." Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach." "Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come back!" "Come back? How?" "They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we believe in them again, they'll return." Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if we believe in 'em?" Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe in them to a certain point . Psychologically they can both be seen and felt. We only want to see them coming at us again." " Do we, now?" "With twenty minutes left, maybe less—" "All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?" Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them. Think it over and over." Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember all that? What if I get excited...?" Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at Irish. Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!" The monsters returned. A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming in malevolent anticipation about the two men. "This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!" Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them. Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here! It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense frame slammed against rock, noiselessly. Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the helmet glass with his hands, shouting: "Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into your mind! It's not real, I tell you!" "Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass. "Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled. "It—it's only a shanty fake!" "Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up." Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then, irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!" Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish, you forget the monsters. Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might forget." Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty." The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on. Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily. "We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead, draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then, you show up with your gun...." "I haven't got one." "We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They probably got scanners out. Let them see me—" And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved up, and there was a door opening in the rock. His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!" Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring. Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast. "All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different radio. One of Gunther's guards. Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed. The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off. How'd you get past the animals?" Click started running. He switched off his sending audio, kept his receiving on. Marnagan, weaponless. One guard. Click gasped. Things were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running and listening to Marnagan's lying voice: "I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you, they killed my partner before he had a chance!" The guard laughed. The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn! A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked, air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther wanted, anway. A nice sordid death." Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him. "Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind you! Freeze!" The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped his gun to the floor. "Get his gun, Irish." Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward. Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid acting." "What!" "Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door leading into the Base?" The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder. Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air. "Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double time! Double!" Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard, hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish tersely. They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged. Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't wanted. They were scared off. The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius. "So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?" "What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool the engineers who created them, you nut." Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come riding over the hill—" "Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S. Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me. We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century." Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?" "There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an actor are you?" "That's a silly question." "You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?" "Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...." An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets, lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a wide, green-lawned Plaza. Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters. He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back. He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and pushed him into a room where Gunther sat. Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken, questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he could speak, Hathaway said: "Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men against your eighty-five." Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed." "Both. The other guy went after the Patrol." "Impossible!" "I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther." A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side of his office. He stared, hard. The Patrol was coming! Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol. Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis guns with them in their tight hands. Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air. "Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!" Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway had to credit them on that. They took it, standing. Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was. His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state. Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and twitch. God, what photography! Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight. Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos taking place immediately outside his window. The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!"	B. Human imagination
What effect do the bombs have on the war? A. They end the war but turn the world into a zombie landscape. B. They end he war and restore peace and harmony, even though there are still some stragglers wandering home from the war. C. They end the war, but turn it into a semi-apocalyptic landscape. D. They end the war, but turn the world into tribal groups with strict borders.	HOMECOMING BY MIGUEL HIDALGO What lasts forever? Does love? Does death?... Nothing lasts forever.... Not even forever [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The large horse plodded slowly over the shifting sand. The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what they sought. The horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse, and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water, and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep. When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night. In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but ashes. Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood. He slept. His brain slept. But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone; all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future.... It was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her. "I've got something to tell you, and something to show you." He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry of surprised joy. "Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!" she cried in her rich, happy voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body. "It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the dead, if need be. Read the inscription." She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, "It is forever." Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him. He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where he had been many times before but each time found something new and unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain. "Wait!" she cried. "I've something for you, too." She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end. The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet, sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the blood in his veins. Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard, littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been great. Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great. He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer. Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It grew louder and louder until he knew what it was. "Heavy bombers!" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for their foxholes. But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies, reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then.... Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die. The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell, victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked across the sky which none could escape. But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where they had crawled. The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few, if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands. Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins. The war had ended. To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people. They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world. Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him. They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea. After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore, and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned, and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into "El Mundo gris de Noviembre"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned. In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In the November world. It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died, leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad, temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them, and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what might have been dead leaves, but wasn't. He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn, straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and seemed to say: "Follow me." And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again started the long journey home. The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen no human beings. But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land. How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away. Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over. The images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and mind slept into the shadows of the dawn. He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso, separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast. He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home. Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with streaming hair called stars. In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness, slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths. He turned quickly away and did not look back. Night paled into day; day burned into night. There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible through the moonlight, he saw it. Home. Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even better than it had been before. Then he saw her. She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of light around her. His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken, mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were empty of life. "No, no!" he cried soundlessly. This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching. He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if trying to decipher some inscription inside it. He knew then. He had come home. Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed, shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a kind of fear he had never known. He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob of darkness. "Nothing is forever!" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him. He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum. "Forever—forever. Only death is forever." He could have sworn he heard the words. He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his chest. Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the vast emptiness.	C. They end the war, but turn it into a semi-apocalyptic landscape.
Generally, which of the following best describes Crystal's character? A. Kind, quiet, and persistent B. Naive, fun, and brave C. Focused, bold, and charismatic D. Focused, meek, and understanding	MONOPOLY By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts Sheer efficiency and good management can make a monopoly grow into being. And once it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is going to try to use it as a weapon if he can— [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction April 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "That all, chief? Gonna quit now?" Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant. That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day. "I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we can get at that vitamin count early in the morning." "Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax. Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle." Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock. "Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning. Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard the remarks that followed him. "One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with him." "Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted. Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing, then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building. He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here, alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others, pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors of revolution among the disgruntled older families. He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth. He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not directly influence his own department. He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of irradiated water. He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up. "What do you want?" There was no answer; the hammering continued. "All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of ducks on parade. Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open. "What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's uniform. "Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments." "Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here." The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly. "Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you. Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left. Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now. Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his regular routine. "Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk. "Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him. Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd soon fix that. "All right, joke's over, you can beat it now." "Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way round." Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs. "Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted. The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe austerely around him. "Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly. "Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed back into the bath. The door opened a little. "Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police force." "Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in complete relaxation. A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan. "Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him away from the door. "Say! What the—" "Where is she?" the sergeant demanded. "Wherethehell's who?" "Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here." "Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you say rebel?" "Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?" "She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was going to have women running around in here, do you?" "She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards contributed. "But she ain't there now." "You don't think that I—" "Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along and see the chief." Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody. Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me." Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly bewildered Pete Brent. "What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble already?" "Me? For gosh sakes, chief—" "Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me arrested is your idea of a joke—" "But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke. That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter. They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl as good-looking as they say she is?" "Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—" "Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away." "There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—" "Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can pass the word along." "Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant. "Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly. Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in frustrated fury. For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and rattled the bars. "Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't hold me here indefinitely." "Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if you are—" Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar. "Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed. He knew that voice! "What the devil are you doing here?" "Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out." "Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!" "Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?" "Sure I do. Guards! Guards!" Someone came running. "Guards are coming," a voice warned. He could hear the girl struggling with the lock. "Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they find us trying to get you out of here." Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away. "Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it. He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the jail corridor. The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage. "This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best jail. They burst around a corner onto a startled guard. "They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!" "Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner. "Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily barred side door. The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock jammed immovably behind them. Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and Crystal James pushed past him. "We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt. Two guards barred the street ahead of them. Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were shooting to kill. He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been. "We've got to run!" the girl shouted. He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in the orderly rush of Venus City traffic. The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond. "What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get away." "That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out." The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into the garage's repair pit. She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a steep, steel stairway. "Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely. "Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of the air shafts leading down to the old mines." "Old mines? What old mines?" "That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet. These old tunnels run all under the city." They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a level tunnel. "What do we do? Hide here?" "I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City." "Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague keeps up to scare people with." "That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right off the planet." "Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully. "I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting before he died," she said grimly. Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice. Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the rebels had cleared away the debris of years. Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction. Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were going. The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons. "These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness. Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other. "Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded. "Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly. "You're crazy, you can't get through there." "Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off. "We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!" The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through the opening it was stood vertically on edge. Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back into some semblance of order. "That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak. Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly almost as soon as we can walk." "Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station. An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian got up off the floor. "You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't trying to hit us." "That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play for peanuts." "But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got any authority to shoot anyone." "Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you think this revolution is about?" "You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close astern. "I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls. Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers, slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship slipped frantically away and fell into a spin. "That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others doing?" "Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick. The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into the mist-shrouded depths of the valley. "The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of outrage. "They didn't have a chance!" "Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory once in a while, you'd have heard of these things." "But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged through the fuselage. "They're after us now!" Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them. "Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly. She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading, could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them, talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the ship out of its dive. " Phew! " Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder can you do it?" "Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not." For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and coughed and died. "That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We can glide in from here." "Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed it up and up— "Look! Police ships. They've seen us!" "Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land." The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall! "Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!" "You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped. She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship. "Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside." A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse, rushed up to Crystal. "What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands. "They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot." The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got to get out of here." "Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone, running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern. "Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded. "That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be spotted for sure, now." The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of an explosion. "They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!" "Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there any other way of getting out of this place?" "Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us." "We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog." "It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as well as we do." "How come?" "The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague." "Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's leaving." "We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow." "We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern," Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily. "You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway." They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon. Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the two ships. Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame. They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as shrieking, living torches down the mountainside. Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she climbed blindly from her ship. "Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered her face with her hands. Brian grabbed her and shook her. "Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here." "Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!" "You don't have to. Wait here." He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter, verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a subtle, intangible thunder of vibration. Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the entrance." Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed to the floor. "It's time to check out," Brian shouted. Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound in the cavern behind them. They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and heaved beneath them. "The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed. "Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle of jungle away from the slide. Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them. Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn vegetation. The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were gone and the primeval silence settled back into place. Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside. "How did you do it?" "It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?" "Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside. "Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along. "The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our side. They've helped us before."	C. Focused, bold, and charismatic
What is Lockheed Martin's 2 year total revenue CAGR from FY2020 to FY2022 (in units of percents and round to one decimal place)? Provide a response to the question by primarily using the statement of income.	Evidence 0: Lockheed Martin Corporation Consolidated Statements of Earnings (in millions, except per share data) Years Ended December 31, 2022 2021 2020 Net sales Products $ 55,466 $ 56,435 $ 54,928 Services 10,518 10,609 10,470 Total net sales 65,984 67,044 65,398 Cost of sales Products (49,577) (50,273) (48,996) Services (9,280) (9,463) (9,371) Severance and other charges (100) (36) (27) Other unallocated, net 1,260 1,789 1,650 Total cost of sales (57,697) (57,983) (56,744) Gross profit 8,287 9,061 8,654 Other income (expense), net 61 62 (10) Operating profit 8,348 9,123 8,644 Interest expense (623) (569) (591) Non-service FAS pension (expense) income (971) (1,292) 219 Other non-operating (expense) income, net (74) 288 (37) Earnings from continuing operations before income taxes 6,680 7,550 8,235 Income tax expense (948) (1,235) (1,347) Net earnings from continuing operations 5,732 6,315 6,888 Net loss from discontinued operations (55) Net earnings $ 5,732 $ 6,315 $ 6,833 Earnings (loss) per common share Basic Continuing operations $ 21.74 $ 22.85 $ 24.60 Discontinued operations (0.20) Basic earnings per common share $ 21.74 $ 22.85 $ 24.40 Diluted Continuing operations $ 21.66 $ 22.76 $ 24.50 Discontinued operations (0.20) Diluted earnings per common share $ 21.66 $ 22.76 $ 24.30 The accompanying notes are an integral part of these consolidated financial statements. Table of Contents 63	0.4%
What gave Starre the right to claim the asteroid as her own when Parker and Queazy arrived? A. She had made a deal with the Interplanetary Commission. B. Her grandfather had purchased the asteroid for her. C. By common law, asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them. D. She had signed an interplanetary lease agreement.	COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!	C. By common law, asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them.
All of the following motivate Prantera to accept the proposal from Brett-James and Reston-Ferrell EXCEPT: A. He does not need to worry about Temple-Tracy's followers seeking revenge B. He does not have to fear being arrested by the police C. He is unlikely to encounter someone with weapons during the job D. He does not have a chance of being sent back to 1960	Illustrated by van Dongen A gun is an interesting weapon; it can be hired, of course, and naturally doesn't care who hires it. Something much the same can be said of the gunman, too.... GUN FOR HIRE By MACK REYNOLDS Joe Prantera called softly, "Al." The pleasurable, comfortable, warm feeling began spreading over him, the way it always did. The older man stopped and squinted, but not suspiciously, even now. The evening was dark, it was unlikely that the other even saw the circle of steel that was the mouth of the shotgun barrel, now resting on the car's window ledge. "Who's it?" he growled. Joe Prantera said softly, "Big Louis sent me, Al." And he pressed the trigger. And at that moment, the universe caved inward upon Joseph Marie Prantera. There was nausea and nausea upon nausea. There was a falling through all space and through all time. There was doubling and twisting and twitching of every muscle and nerve. There was pain, horror and tumultuous fear. And he came out of it as quickly and completely as he'd gone in. He was in, he thought, a hospital and his first reaction was to think, This here California. Everything different. Then his second thought was Something went wrong. Big Louis, he ain't going to like this. He brought his thinking to the present. So far as he could remember, he hadn't completely pulled the trigger. That at least meant that whatever the rap was it wouldn't be too tough. With luck, the syndicate would get him off with a couple of years at Quentin. A door slid open in the wall in a way that Joe had never seen a door operate before. This here California. The clothes on the newcomer were wrong, too. For the first time, Joe Prantera began to sense an alienness—a something that was awfully wrong. The other spoke precisely and slowly, the way a highly educated man speaks a language which he reads and writes fluently but has little occasion to practice vocally. "You have recovered?" Joe Prantera looked at the other expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck was one of these foreign doctors, like. The newcomer said, "You have undoubtedly been through a most harrowing experience. If you have any untoward symptoms, possibly I could be of assistance." Joe couldn't figure out how he stood. For one thing, there should have been some kind of police guard. The other said, "Perhaps a bit of stimulant?" Joe said flatly, "I wanta lawyer." The newcomer frowned at him. "A lawyer?" "I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I get a mouthpiece." The newcomer started off on another tack. "My name is Lawrence Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken, you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera." Salviati happened to be Joe's mother's maiden name. But it was unlikely this character could have known that. Joe had been born in Naples and his mother had died in childbirth. His father hadn't brought him to the States until the age of five and by that time he had a stepmother. "I wanta mouthpiece," Joe said flatly, "or let me outta here." Lawrence Reston-Farrell said, "You are not being constrained. There are clothes for you in the closet there." Joe gingerly tried swinging his feet to the floor and sitting up, while the other stood watching him, strangely. He came to his feet. With the exception of a faint nausea, which brought back memories of that extreme condition he'd suffered during ... during what? He hadn't the vaguest idea of what had happened. He was dressed in a hospital-type nightgown. He looked down at it and snorted and made his way over to the closet. It opened on his approach, the door sliding back into the wall in much the same manner as the room's door had opened for Reston-Farrell. Joe Prantera scowled and said, "These ain't my clothes." "No, I am afraid not." "You think I'd be seen dead wearing this stuff? What is this, some religious crackpot hospital?" Reston-Farrell said, "I am afraid, Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are the only garments available. I suggest you look out the window there." Joe gave him a long, chill look and then stepped to the window. He couldn't figure the other. Unless he was a fruitcake. Maybe he was in some kind of pressure cooker and this was one of the fruitcakes. He looked out, however, not on the lawns and walks of a sanitarium but upon a wide boulevard of what was obviously a populous city. And for a moment again, Joe Prantera felt the depths of nausea. This was not his world. He stared for a long, long moment. The cars didn't even have wheels, he noted dully. He turned slowly and faced the older man. Reston-Farrell said compassionately, "Try this, it's excellent cognac." Joe Prantera stared at him, said finally, flatly, "What's it all about?" The other put down the unaccepted glass. "We were afraid first realization would be a shock to you," he said. "My colleague is in the adjoining room. We will be glad to explain to you if you will join us there." "I wanta get out of here," Joe said. "Where would you go?" The fear of police, of Al Rossi's vengeance, of the measures that might be taken by Big Louis on his failure, were now far away. Reston-Farrell had approached the door by which he had entered and it reopened for him. He went through it without looking back. There was nothing else to do. Joe dressed, then followed him. In the adjoining room was a circular table that would have accommodated a dozen persons. Two were seated there now, papers, books and soiled coffee cups before them. There had evidently been a long wait. Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already met, was tall and drawn of face and with a chainsmoker's nervousness. The other was heavier and more at ease. They were both, Joe estimated, somewhere in their middle fifties. They both looked like docs. He wondered, all over again, if this was some kind of pressure cooker. But that didn't explain the view from the window. Reston-Farrell said, "May I present my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James? Warren, this is our guest from ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera." Brett-James nodded to him, friendly, so far as Joe could see. He said gently, "I think it would be Mr. Joseph Prantera, wouldn't it? The maternal linage was almost universally ignored." His voice too gave the impression he was speaking a language not usually on his tongue. Joe took an empty chair, hardly bothering to note its alien qualities. His body seemed to fit into the piece of furniture, as though it had been molded to his order. Joe said, "I think maybe I'll take that there drink, Doc." Reston-Farrell said, "Of course," and then something else Joe didn't get. Whatever the something else was, a slot opened in the middle of the table and a glass, so clear of texture as to be all but invisible, was elevated. It contained possibly three ounces of golden fluid. Joe didn't allow himself to think of its means of delivery. He took up the drink and bolted it. He put the glass down and said carefully, "What's it all about, huh?" Warren Brett-James said soothingly, "Prepare yourself for somewhat of a shock, Mr. Prantera. You are no longer in Los Angeles—" "Ya think I'm stupid? I can see that." "I was about to say, Los Angeles of 1960. Mr. Prantera, we welcome you to Nuevo Los Angeles." "Ta where?" "To Nuevo Los Angeles and to the year—" Brett-James looked at his companion. "What is the date, Old Calendar?" "2133," Reston-Farrell said. "2133 A.D. they would say." Joe Prantera looked from one of them to the other, scowling. "What are you guys talking about?" Warren Brett-James said softly, "Mr. Prantera, you are no longer in the year 1960, you are now in the year 2133." He said, uncomprehendingly, "You mean I been, like, unconscious for—" He let the sentence fall away as he realized the impossibility. Brett-James said gently, "Hardly for one hundred and seventy years, Mr. Prantera." Reston-Farrell said, "I am afraid we are confusing you. Briefly, we have transported you, I suppose one might say, from your own era to ours." Joe Prantera had never been exposed to the concept of time travel. He had simply never associated with anyone who had ever even remotely considered such an idea. Now he said, "You mean, like, I been asleep all that time?" "Not exactly," Brett-James said, frowning. Reston-Farrell said, "Suffice to say, you are now one hundred and seventy-three years after the last memory you have." Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted to those last memories and his eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt suddenly at bay. He said, "Maybe you guys better let me in on what's this all about." Reston-Farrell said, "Mr. Prantera, we have brought you from your era to perform a task for us." Joe stared at him, and then at the other. He couldn't believe he was getting through to them. Or, at least, that they were to him. Finally he said, "If I get this, you want me to do a job for you." "That is correct." Joe said, "You guys know the kind of jobs I do?" "That is correct." "Like hell you do. You think I'm stupid? I never even seen you before." Joe Prantera came abruptly to his feet. "I'm gettin' outta here." For the second time, Reston-Farrell said, "Where would you go, Mr. Prantera?" Joe glared at him. Then sat down again, as abruptly as he'd arisen. "Let's start all over again. I got this straight, you brought me, some screwy way, all the way ... here. O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks like out that window—" The real comprehension was seeping through to him even as he talked. "Everybody I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even Big Louis." "Yes," Brett-James said, his voice soft. "They are all dead, Mr. Prantera. Their children are all dead, and their grandchildren." The two men of the future said nothing more for long minutes while Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion. Finally he said, "What's this bit about you wanting me to give it to some guy." "That is why we brought you here, Mr. Prantera. You were ... you are, a professional assassin." "Hey, wait a minute, now." Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring the interruption. "There is small point in denying your calling. Pray remember that at the point when we ... transported you, you were about to dispose of a contemporary named Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen, I might say, whose demise would probably have caused small dismay to society." They had him pegged all right. Joe said, "But why me? Why don't you get some heavy from now? Somebody knows the ropes these days." Brett-James said, "Mr. Prantera, there are no professional assassins in this age, nor have there been for over a century and a half." "Well, then do it yourself." Joe Prantera's irritation over this whole complicated mess was growing. And already he was beginning to long for the things he knew—for Jessie and Tony and the others, for his favorite bar, for the lasagne down at Papa Giovanni's. Right now he could have welcomed a calling down at the hands of Big Louis. Reston-Farrell had come to his feet and walked to one of the large room's windows. He looked out, as though unseeing. Then, his back turned, he said, "We have tried, but it is simply not in us, Mr. Prantera." "You mean you're yella?" "No, if by that you mean afraid. It is simply not within us to take the life of a fellow creature—not to speak of a fellow man." Joe snapped: "Everything you guys say sounds crazy. Let's start all over again." Brett-James said, "Let me do it, Lawrence." He turned his eyes to Joe. "Mr. Prantera, in your own era, did you ever consider the future?" Joe looked at him blankly. "In your day you were confronted with national and international, problems. Just as we are today and just as nations were a century or a millennium ago." "Sure, O.K., so we had problems. I know whatcha mean—like wars, and depressions and dictators and like that." "Yes, like that," Brett-James nodded. The heavy-set man paused a moment. "Yes, like that," he repeated. "That we confront you now indicates that the problems of your day were solved. Hadn't they been, the world most surely would have destroyed itself. Wars? Our pedagogues are hard put to convince their students that such ever existed. More than a century and a half ago our society eliminated the reasons for international conflict. For that matter," he added musingly, "we eliminated most international boundaries. Depressions? Shortly after your own period, man awoke to the fact that he had achieved to the point where it was possible to produce an abundance for all with a minimum of toil. Overnight, for all practical purposes, the whole world was industrialized, automated. The second industrial revolution was accompanied by revolutionary changes in almost every field, certainly in every science. Dictators? Your ancestors found, Mr. Prantera, that it is difficult for a man to be free so long as others are still enslaved. Today the democratic ethic has reached a pinnacle never dreamed of in your own era." "O.K., O.K.," Joe Prantera growled. "So everybody's got it made. What I wanta know is what's all this about me giving it ta somebody? If everything's so great, how come you want me to knock this guy off?" Reston-Farrell bent forward and thumped his right index finger twice on the table. "The bacterium of hate—a new strain—has found the human race unprotected from its disease. We had thought our vaccines immunized us." "What's that suppose to mean?" Brett-James took up the ball again. "Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander, Caesar?" Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily. "Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin?" "Sure I heard of Hitler and Stalin," Joe growled. "I ain't stupid." The other nodded. "Such men are unique. They have a drive ... a drive to power which exceeds by far the ambitions of the average man. They are genii in their way, Mr. Prantera, genii of evil. Such a genius of evil has appeared on the current scene." "Now we're getting somewheres," Joe snorted. "So you got a guy what's a little ambitious, like, eh? And you guys ain't got the guts to give it to him. O.K. What's in it for me?" The two of them frowned, exchanged glances. Reston-Farrell said, "You know, that is one aspect we had not considered." Brett-James said to Joe Prantera, "Had we not, ah, taken you at the time we did, do you realize what would have happened?" "Sure," Joe grunted. "I woulda let old Al Rossi have it right in the guts, five times. Then I woulda took the plane back to Chi." Brett-James was shaking his head. "No. You see, by coincidence, a police squad car was coming down the street just at that moment to arrest Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended. As I understand Californian law of the period, your life would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera." Joe winced. It didn't occur to him to doubt their word. Reston-Farrell said, "As to reward, Mr. Prantera, we have already told you there is ultra-abundance in this age. Once this task has been performed, we will sponsor your entry into present day society. Competent psychiatric therapy will soon remove your present—" "Waita minute, now. You figure on gettin' me candled by some head shrinker, eh? No thanks, Buster. I'm going back to my own—" Brett-James was shaking his head again. "I am afraid there is no return, Mr. Prantera. Time travel works but in one direction, with the flow of the time stream. There can be no return to your own era." Joe Prantera had been rocking with the mental blows he had been assimilating, but this was the final haymaker. He was stuck in this squaresville of a world. Joe Prantera on a job was thorough. Careful, painstaking, competent. He spent the first three days of his life in the year 2133 getting the feel of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell had been appointed to work with him. Joe didn't meet any of the others who belonged to the group which had taken the measures to bring him from the past. He didn't want to meet them. The fewer persons involved, the better. He stayed in the apartment of Reston-Farrell. Joe had been right, Reston-Farrell was a medical doctor. Brett-James evidently had something to do with the process that had enabled them to bring Joe from the past. Joe didn't know how they'd done it, and he didn't care. Joe was a realist. He was here. The thing was to adapt. There didn't seem to be any hurry. Once the deal was made, they left it up to him to make the decisions. They drove him around the town, when he wished to check the traffic arteries. They flew him about the whole vicinity. From the air, Southern California looked much the same as it had in his own time. Oceans, mountains, and to a lesser extent, deserts, are fairly permanent even against man's corroding efforts. It was while he was flying with Brett-James on the second day that Joe said, "How about Mexico? Could I make the get to Mexico?" The physicist looked at him questioningly. "Get?" he said. Joe Prantera said impatiently, "The getaway. After I give it to this Howard Temple-Tracy guy, I gotta go on the run, don't I?" "I see." Brett-James cleared his throat. "Mexico is no longer a separate nation, Mr. Prantera. All North America has been united into one unit. Today, there are only eight nations in the world." "Where's the nearest?" "South America." "That's a helluva long way to go on a get." "We hadn't thought of the matter being handled in that manner." Joe eyed him in scorn. "Oh, you didn't, huh? What happens after I give it to this guy? I just sit around and wait for the cops to put the arm on me?" Brett-James grimaced in amusement. "Mr. Prantera, this will probably be difficult for you to comprehend, but there are no police in this era." Joe gaped at him. "No police! What happens if you gotta throw some guy in stir?" "If I understand your idiom correctly, you mean prison. There are no prisons in this era, Mr. Prantera." Joe stared. "No cops, no jails. What stops anybody? What stops anybody from just going into some bank, like, and collecting up all the bread?" Brett-James cleared his throat. "Mr. Prantera, there are no banks." "No banks! You gotta have banks!" "And no money to put in them. We found it a rather antiquated method of distribution well over a century ago." Joe had given up. Now he merely stared. Brett-James said reasonably, "We found we were devoting as much time to financial matters in all their endless ramifications—including bank robberies—as we were to productive efforts. So we turned to more efficient methods of distribution." On the fourth day, Joe said, "O.K., let's get down to facts. Summa the things you guys say don't stick together so good. Now, first place, where's this guy Temple-Tracy you want knocked off?" Reston-Farrell and Brett-James were both present. The three of them sat in the living room of the latter's apartment, sipping a sparkling wine which seemed to be the prevailing beverage of the day. For Joe's taste it was insipid stuff. Happily, rye was available to those who wanted it. Reston-Farrell said, "You mean, where does he reside? Why, here in this city." "Well, that's handy, eh?" Joe scratched himself thoughtfully. "You got somebody can finger him for me?" "Finger him?" "Look, before I can give it to this guy I gotta know some place where he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's house, see? He lets me know every Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al leaves the house all by hisself. O.K., so I can make plans, like, to give it to him." Joe Prantera wound it up reasonably. "You gotta have a finger." Brett-James said, "Why not just go to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah, dispose of him?" "Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm stupid? How do I know how many witnesses hangin' around? How do I know if the guy's carryin' heat?" "Heat?" "A gun, a gun. Ya think I'm stupid? I come to give it to him and he gives it to me instead." Dr. Reston-Farrell said, "Howard Temple-Tracy lives alone. He customarily receives visitors every afternoon, largely potential followers. He is attempting to recruit members to an organization he is forming. It would be quite simple for you to enter his establishment and dispose of him. I assure you, he does not possess weapons." Joe was indignant. "Just like that, eh?" he said sarcastically. "Then what happens? How do I get out of the building? Where's my get car parked? Where do I hide out? Where do I dump the heat?" "Dump the heat?" "Get rid of the gun. You want I should get caught with the gun on me? I'd wind up in the gas chamber so quick—" "See here, Mr. Prantera," Brett-James said softly. "We no longer have capital punishment, you must realize." "O.K. I still don't wanta get caught. What is the rap these days, huh?" Joe scowled. "You said they didn't have no jails any more." "This is difficult for you to understand, I imagine," Reston-Farrell told him, "but, you see, we no longer punish people in this era." That took a long, unbelieving moment to sink in. "You mean, like, no matter what they do? That's crazy. Everybody'd be running around giving it to everybody else." "The motivation for crime has been removed, Mr. Prantera," Reston-Farrell attempted to explain. "A person who commits a violence against another is obviously in need of medical care. And, consequently, receives it." "You mean, like, if I steal a car or something, they just take me to a doctor?" Joe Prantera was unbelieving. "Why would anybody wish to steal a car?" Reston-Farrell said easily. "But if I give it to somebody?" "You will be turned over to a medical institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy is the last man you will ever kill, Mr. Prantera." A chillness was in the belly of Joe Prantera. He said very slowly, very dangerously, "You guys figure on me getting caught, don't you?" "Yes," Brett-James said evenly. "Well then, figure something else. You think I'm stupid?" "Mr. Prantera," Dr. Reston-Farrell said, "there has been as much progress in the field of psychiatry in the past two centuries as there has in any other. Your treatment would be brief and painless, believe me." Joe said coldly, "And what happens to you guys? How do you know I won't rat on you?" Brett-James said gently, "The moment after you have accomplished your mission, we plan to turn ourselves over to the nearest institution to have determined whether or not we also need therapy." "Now I'm beginning to wonder about you guys," Joe said. "Look, all over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to this guy for?" The doctor said, "We explained the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous, atavistic, evil genius. We are afraid for our institutions if his plans are allowed to mature." "Well if you got things so good, everybody's got it made, like, who'd listen to him?" The doctor nodded at the validity of the question. "Mr. Prantera, Homo sapiens is a unique animal. Physically he matures at approximately the age of thirteen. However, mental maturity and adjustment is often not fully realized until thirty or even more. Indeed, it is sometimes never achieved. Before such maturity is reached, our youth are susceptible to romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism, racism, the supposed glory of the military, all seem romantic to the immature. They rebel at the orderliness of present society. They seek entertainment in excitement. Citizen Temple-Tracy is aware of this and finds his recruits among the young." "O.K., so this guy is dangerous. You want him knocked off before he screws everything up. But the way things are, there's no way of making a get. So you'll have to get some other patsy. Not me." "I am afraid you have no alternative," Brett-James said gently. "Without us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera, you do not even speak the language." "What'd'ya mean? I don't understand summa the big words you eggheads use, but I get by O.K." Brett-James said, "Amer-English is no longer the language spoken by the man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only students of such subjects any longer speak such tongues as Amer-English, French, Russian or the many others that once confused the race with their limitations as a means of communication." "You mean there's no place in the whole world where they talk American?" Joe demanded, aghast. Dr. Reston-Farrell controlled the car. Joe Prantera sat in the seat next to him and Warren Brett-James sat in the back. Joe had, tucked in his belt, a .45 caliber automatic, once displayed in a museum. It had been more easily procured than the ammunition to fit it, but that problem too had been solved. The others were nervous, obviously repelled by the very conception of what they had planned. Inwardly, Joe was amused. Now that they had got in the clutch, the others were on the verge of chickening out. He knew it wouldn't have taken much for them to cancel the project. It wasn't any answer though. If they allowed him to call it off today, they'd talk themselves into it again before the week was through. Besides, already Joe was beginning to feel the comfortable, pleasurable, warm feeling that came to him on occasions like this. He said, "You're sure this guy talks American, eh?" Warren Brett-James said, "Quite sure. He is a student of history." "And he won't think it's funny I talk American to him, eh?" "He'll undoubtedly be intrigued." They pulled up before a large apartment building that overlooked the area once known as Wilmington. Joe was coolly efficient now. He pulled out the automatic, held it down below his knees and threw a shell into the barrel. He eased the hammer down, thumbed on the safety, stuck the weapon back in his belt and beneath the jacketlike garment he wore. He said, "O.K. See you guys later." He left them and entered the building. An elevator—he still wasn't used to their speed in this era—whooshed him to the penthouse duplex occupied by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy. There were two persons in the reception room but they left on Joe's arrival, without bothering to look at him more than glancingly. He spotted the screen immediately and went over and stood before it. The screen lit and revealed a heavy-set, dour of countenance man seated at a desk. He looked into Joe Prantera's face, scowled and said something. Joe said, "Joseph Salviati-Prantera to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy." The other's shaggy eyebrows rose. "Indeed," he said. "In Amer-English?" Joe nodded. "Enter," the other said. A door had slid open on the other side of the room. Joe walked through it and into what was obviously an office. Citizen Temple-Tracy sat at a desk. There was only one other chair in the room. Joe Prantera ignored it and remained standing. Citizen Temple-Tracy said, "What can I do for you?" Joe looked at him for a long, long moment. Then he reached down to his belt and brought forth the .45 automatic. He moistened his lips. Joe said softly, "You know what this here is?" Temple-Tracy stared at the weapon. "It's a handgun, circa, I would say, about 1925 Old Calendar. What in the world are you doing with it?" Joe said, very slowly, "Chief, in the line you're in these days you needa heavy around with wunna these. Otherwise, Chief, you're gunna wind up in some gutter with a lotta holes in you. What I'm doin', I'm askin' for a job. You need a good man knows how to handle wunna these, Chief." Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy eyed him appraisingly. "Perhaps," he said, "you are right at that. In the near future, I may well need an assistant knowledgeable in the field of violence. Tell me more about yourself. You surprise me considerably." "Sure, Chief. It's kinda a long story, though. First off, I better tell you you got some bad enemies, Chief. Two guys special, named Brett-James and Doc Reston-Farrell. I think one of the first jobs I'm gunna hafta do for you, Chief, is to give it to those two." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.	A. He does not need to worry about Temple-Tracy's followers seeking revenge
What languages are were included in the dataset of hateful content?	### Introduction Social media are sometimes used to disseminate hateful messages. In Europe, the current surge in hate speech has been linked to the ongoing refugee crisis. Lawmakers and social media sites are increasingly aware of the problem and are developing approaches to deal with it, for example promising to remove illegal messages within 24 hours after they are reported BIBREF0 . This raises the question of how hate speech can be detected automatically. Such an automatic detection method could be used to scan the large amount of text generated on the internet for hateful content and report it to the relevant authorities. It would also make it easier for researchers to examine the diffusion of hateful content through social media on a large scale. From a natural language processing perspective, hate speech detection can be considered a classification task: given an utterance, determine whether or not it contains hate speech. Training a classifier requires a large amount of data that is unambiguously hate speech. This data is typically obtained by manually annotating a set of texts based on whether a certain element contains hate speech. The reliability of the human annotations is essential, both to ensure that the algorithm can accurately learn the characteristics of hate speech, and as an upper bound on the expected performance BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . As a preliminary step, six annotators rated 469 tweets. We found that agreement was very low (see Section 3). We then carried out group discussions to find possible reasons. They revealed that there is considerable ambiguity in existing definitions. A given statement may be considered hate speech or not depending on someone's cultural background and personal sensibilities. The wording of the question may also play a role. We decided to investigate the issue of reliability further by conducting a more comprehensive study across a large number of annotators, which we present in this paper. Our contribution in this paper is threefold: ### Hate Speech For the purpose of building a classifier, warner2012 define hate speech as “abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnic origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation”. More recent approaches rely on lists of guidelines such as a tweet being hate speech if it “uses a sexist or racial slur” BIBREF2 . These approaches are similar in that they leave plenty of room for personal interpretation, since there may be differences in what is considered offensive. For instance, while the utterance “the refugees will live off our money” is clearly generalising and maybe unfair, it is unclear if this is already hate speech. More precise definitions from law are specific to certain jurisdictions and therefore do not capture all forms of offensive, hateful speech, see e.g. matsuda1993. In practice, social media services are using their own definitions which have been subject to adjustments over the years BIBREF3 . As of June 2016, Twitter bans hateful conduct. With the rise in popularity of social media, the presence of hate speech has grown on the internet. Posting a tweet takes little more than a working internet connection but may be seen by users all over the world. Along with the presence of hate speech, its real-life consequences are also growing. It can be a precursor and incentive for hate crimes, and it can be so severe that it can even be a health issue BIBREF4 . It is also known that hate speech does not only mirror existing opinions in the reader but can also induce new negative feelings towards its targets BIBREF5 . Hate speech has recently gained some interest as a research topic on the one hand – e.g. BIBREF6 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF7 – but also as a problem to deal with in politics such as the No Hate Speech Movement by the Council of Europe. The current refugee crisis has made it evident that governments, organisations and the public share an interest in controlling hate speech in social media. However, there seems to be little consensus on what hate speech actually is. ### Compiling A Hate Speech Corpus As previously mentioned, there is no German hate speech corpus available for our needs, especially not for the very recent topic of the refugee crisis in Europe. We therefore had to compile our own corpus. We used Twitter as a source as it offers recent comments on current events. In our study we only considered the textual content of tweets that contain certain keywords, ignoring those that contain pictures or links. This section provides a detailed description of the approach we used to select the tweets and subsequently annotate them. To find a large amount of hate speech on the refugee crisis, we used 10 hashtags that can be used in an insulting or offensive way. Using these hashtags we gathered 13 766 tweets in total, roughly dating from February to March 2016. However, these tweets contained a lot of non-textual content which we filtered out automatically by removing tweets consisting solely of links or images. We also only considered original tweets, as retweets or replies to other tweets might only be clearly understandable when reading both tweets together. In addition, we removed duplicates and near-duplicates by discarding tweets that had a normalised Levenshtein edit distance smaller than .85 to an aforementioned tweet. A first inspection of the remaining tweets indicated that not all search terms were equally suited for our needs. The search term #Pack (vermin or lowlife) found a potentially large amount of hate speech not directly linked to the refugee crisis. It was therefore discarded. As a last step, the remaining tweets were manually read to eliminate those which were difficult to understand or incomprehensible. After these filtering steps, our corpus consists of 541 tweets, none of which are duplicates, contain links or pictures, or are retweets or replies. As a first measurement of the frequency of hate speech in our corpus, we personally annotated them based on our previous expertise. The 541 tweets were split into six parts and each part was annotated by two out of six annotators in order to determine if hate speech was present or not. The annotators were rotated so that each pair of annotators only evaluated one part. Additionally the offensiveness of a tweet was rated on a 6-point Likert scale, the same scale used later in the study. Even among researchers familiar with the definitions outlined above, there was still a low level of agreement (Krippendorff's INLINEFORM0 ). This supports our claim that a clearer definition is necessary in order to be able to train a reliable classifier. The low reliability could of course be explained by varying personal attitudes or backgrounds, but clearly needs more consideration. ### Methods In order to assess the reliability of the hate speech definitions on social media more comprehensively, we developed two online surveys in a between-subjects design. They were completed by 56 participants in total (see Table TABREF7 ). The main goal was to examine the extent to which non-experts agree upon their understanding of hate speech given a diversity of social media content. We used the Twitter definition of hateful conduct in the first survey. This definition was presented at the beginning, and again above every tweet. The second survey did not contain any definition. Participants were randomly assigned one of the two surveys. The surveys consisted of 20 tweets presented in a random order. For each tweet, each participant was asked three questions. Depending on the survey, participants were asked (1) to answer (yes/no) if they considered the tweet hate speech, either based on the definition or based on their personal opinion. Afterwards they were asked (2) to answer (yes/no) if the tweet should be banned from Twitter. Participants were finally asked (3) to answer how offensive they thought the tweet was on a 6-point Likert scale from 1 (Not offensive at all) to 6 (Very offensive). If they answered 4 or higher, the participants had the option to state which particular words they found offensive. After the annotation of the 20 tweets, participants were asked to voluntarily answer an open question regarding the definition of hate speech. In the survey with the definition, they were asked if the definition of Twitter was sufficient. In the survey without the definition, the participants were asked to suggest a definition themselves. Finally, sociodemographic data were collected, including age, gender and more specific information regarding the participant's political orientation, migration background, and personal position regarding the refugee situation in Europe. The surveys were approved by the ethical committee of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen. ### Preliminary Results and Discussion Since the surveys were completed by 56 participants, they resulted in 1120 annotations. Table TABREF7 shows some summary statistics. To assess whether the definition had any effect, we calculated, for each participant, the percentage of tweets they considered hate speech or suggested to ban and their mean offensiveness rating. This allowed us to compare the two samples for each of the three questions. Preliminary Shapiro-Wilk tests indicated that some of the data were not normally distributed. We therefore used the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) test to compare the three pairs of series. The results are reported in Table TABREF7 . Participants who were shown the definition were more likely to suggest to ban the tweet. In fact, participants in group one very rarely gave different answers to questions one and two (18 of 500 instances or 3.6%). This suggests that participants in that group aligned their own opinion with the definition. We chose Krippendorff's INLINEFORM0 to assess reliability, a measure from content analysis, where human coders are required to be interchangeable. Therefore, it measures agreement instead of association, which leaves no room for the individual predilections of coders. It can be applied to any number of coders and to interval as well as nominal data. BIBREF8 This allowed us to compare agreement between both groups for all three questions. Figure FIGREF8 visualises the results. Overall, agreement was very low, ranging from INLINEFORM0 to INLINEFORM1 . In contrast, for the purpose of content analysis, Krippendorff recommends a minimum of INLINEFORM2 , or a minimum of INLINEFORM3 for applications where some uncertainty is unproblematic BIBREF8 . Reliability did not consistently increase when participants were shown a definition. To measure the extent to which the annotations using the Twitter definition (question one in group one) were in accordance with participants' opinions (question one in group two), we calculated, for each tweet, the percentage of participants in each group who considered it hate speech, and then calculated Pearson's correlation coefficient. The two series correlate strongly ( INLINEFORM0 ), indicating that they measure the same underlying construct. ### Conclusion and Future Work This paper describes the creation of our hate speech corpus and offers first insights into the low agreement among users when it comes to identifying hateful messages. Our results imply that hate speech is a vague concept that requires significantly better definitions and guidelines in order to be annotated reliably. Based on the present findings, we are planning to develop a new coding scheme which includes clear-cut criteria that let people distinguish hate speech from other content. Researchers who are building a hate speech detection system might want to collect multiple labels for each tweet and average the results. Of course this approach does not make the original data any more reliable BIBREF8 . Yet, collecting the opinions of more users gives a more detailed picture of objective (or intersubjective) hatefulness. For the same reason, researchers might want to consider hate speech detection a regression problem, predicting, for example, the degree of hatefulness of a message, instead of a binary yes-or-no classification task. In the future, finding the characteristics that make users consider content hateful will be useful for building a model that automatically detects hate speech and users who spread hateful content, and for determining what makes users disseminate hateful content. ### Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant No. GRK 2167, Research Training Group ”User-Centred Social Media”. Table 1: Summary statistics with p values and effect size estimates from WMW tests. Not all participants chose to report their age or gender. Figure 1: Reliability (Krippendorff’s a) for the different groups and questions	German
Why does the narrator lie to his son? A. Even though his son is a young man sooner than already, he is still too young to learn the full scope of the truth. B. A joke stops working when someone attempts to explain it. C. For his joke to have its desired effect, no one can know the full extent of his experiment. D. He is an eccentric and must abide by his personal eccentricities.	Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The only kind of gag worth pulling, I always maintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humor! There were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. But there were three of them . My heart took a great bound. I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying to hit a combination that would work. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her tolerantly. "Can't adjust your skates?" I asked again. "Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight enough." I continued to look down on her. "Well, Dad-dee, I can't!" "Tightly enough." "What?" "You can't turn this old key tightly enough." "That's what I say -yud." "All right, wench. Sit on this chair." I got down and shoved one saddle shoe into a skate. It fitted perfectly. I strapped her ankle and pretended to use the key to tighten the clamp. Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant. When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage. I turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate. "Daddy?" "Yes?" "Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?" "I'll speak to her about it." "Don't you know ?" "Do you understand the word?" "No." I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. I say she is beautiful." She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and waved. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. "Lunch, dear." "Be right there." She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view when I slipped out. "Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace." "Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out." "From me, of course." "But you love me just the same." "I adore you." She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my shoulders and kissed me. My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, "Hello, baby." My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. "What on Earth's got into you?" The maid beat it into the house. I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up the ketchup and said, "I've reached the dangerous age." "Oh, good heavens!" I dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it. I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the Pacific shimmered. I thought, "All this and three volplas, too." I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, "Yes, sir, the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun." My wife sighed patiently. I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and said, "But you're the only one I'm dangerous about." I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. "You have lovely lips," I whispered. "Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too." Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his fourteenth birthday and yelled down, "Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or I'll give you lead poisoning." I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture. I thought, "By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!" The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. "Mom, I'd like a swim before I eat." He started undressing. "You look as though a little water might help," she agreed, sitting down next to me with her plate. The girl was yanking off her skates. "And I want one." "All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit." "Oh, Mother . Why?" "Because, dear, I said so." The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit. I looked at my wife. "What's the idea?" "She's going to be a young woman soon." "Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young man sooner than already." "Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start wearing clothes." I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer. "This place is going to hell," I complained. "The old man isn't allowed to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked." I leaned toward her and smacked her cheek. "But the food and the old woman are still the best." "Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever since you came out of the lab." "I told you—" "Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age." I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. "Just the same, I'm going to have a new kind of fun." She reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock grimness on her lips. "It's a joke," I assured her. "I'm going to play a tremendous joke on the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way, but I've always...." She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. "Like?" "Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out. The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that you have prepared for them." She let go of my ear. "Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?" "Yep." She shook her head. "Did I say you are eccentric ?" I grinned. "Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab can't wait." The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But my first volplas were shockingly humanoid. They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to stand. He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink. On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human. When the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened. The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it anchored at the little toe. This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now. It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a thrill run along my back. By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and decidedly amorous. Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this portended was brought home to me with a shock. I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, "Hello, pretty one. Hello." The male watched me, grinning. He said, "'Ello, 'ello." As I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife said, "Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate." I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. "Oh, great! Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's wonderful. Success on success!" I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn. The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place. My wife just stared at me. "Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?" "I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus." She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. "Wouldn't you just settle for a worldly martini?" "I will, yes. But first a divine kiss." I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would have their own crafts and live in small tree houses. I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills. When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers would laugh. Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He would conclude, "I am convinced that they have a language and speak it intelligently." The government would issue denials. Reporters would "expose the truth" and ask, "Where have these aliens come from?" The government would reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends. Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I think, are the funniest. "Darling, are you listening to me?" my wife asked with impatient patience. "What? Sure. Certainly." "You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space." She got up and poured me another martini. "Here, maybe this will sober you up." I pointed. "That's probably Guy and Em." A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down to meet them. I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, "Do you have your TV set on?" "No," I answered. "Should I?" "It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it." "What broadcast?" "From the rocket." "Rocket?" "For heaven's sake, darling," my wife complained, "I told you about Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the broadcasts." As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. "He's out of contact today. Thinks he's Zeus." I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in. Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage rocket. After a bit, I got up and said, "I have something out in the lab I want to check on." "Hey, wait a minute," Guy objected. "They're about to show the shots of the launching." My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat down again. The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself. Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close. "You look real good," I said. "A regular Space Ranger. What are you shooting at?" "Darling, will you please—be— quiet ?" "Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around." On the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there. Well, now—say, that would be something! I began to feel a little ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about my volplas. But only for a moment. A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a flaming pillar, then was gone. The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the rocket's third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south shore of Mare Serenitatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar map behind him. "From this position, the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie's only general broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie." A chronometer appeared on the screen and, for several seconds, there was silence. I heard my boy whisper, "Uncle Guy, this is the biggest!" My wife said, "Em, I think I'll just faint." Suddenly there was a lunar landscape on the screen, looking just as it's always been pictured. A mechanical voice cut in. "This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Hello, Earth,' from my position in Mare Serenitatis. First I will pan the Menelaus Mountains for fifteen seconds. Then I will focus my camera on Earth for five seconds." The camera began to move and the mountains marched by, stark and awesomely wild. Toward the end of the movement, the shadow of the upright third stage appeared in the foreground. Abruptly the camera made a giddy swing, focused a moment, and we were looking at Earth. At that time, there was no Moon over California. It was Africa and Europe we were looking at. "This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Good-by, Earth.'" Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes. The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at once. I used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month. I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early infants were females, which sped things up considerably. By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own way. I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model, and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their little skulls a bit. My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out of the lab. I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley about a mile back in the ranch. They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously. They kept me busy relating their words for "tree," "rock," "sky" to the objects. They had a little trouble with "sky." Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes. Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll. He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and up until he hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground. He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass. The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little whoop. After that, it was a carnival. They learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking, turning and spiraling to a gentle halt. I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the Chronicle motored out into the hills to witness this! Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool. They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes stretched to dry. I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little actual surviving. I called the male over to me. He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first. "Before the red men came, did we live here?" "You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors." "We can learn again. We want to stay here." His little face was so solemn and thoughtful that I reached out and stroked the fur on his head reassuringly. We both heard the whir of wings overhead. Two mourning doves flew across the stream and landed in an oak on the opposite hillside. I pointed. "There's your food, if you can kill it." He looked at me. "How?" "I don't think you can get at them in the tree. You'll have to soar up above and catch one of them on the wing when they fly away. Think you can get up that high?" He looked around slowly at the breeze playing in the branches and dancing along the hillside grass. It was as if he had been flying a thousand years and was bringing antique wisdom to bear. "I can get up there. I can stay for a while. How long will they be in the tree?" "Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case they leave while you are climbing." He ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us. The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly. He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near. I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I did so. "He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here." I got up and found a stick. "Can you do this?" I threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She threw it better than I had expected. "Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and throw a stick into it." She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed neatly in the tree where the doves rested. The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful strokes. I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash across the sky. The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a molten arrow. The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did something I would not have anticipated—he opened his planes and shot lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the bird's crossward flight. I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and stood looking back at us. The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to us, yammering like a bluejay. It was a hero's welcome. He had to walk back, of course—he had no way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he strutted in like every human hunter. They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But presently the male turned to me. "We eat this?" I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their fire. Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal. When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached. The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire. I said again, "Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you ready for it." "We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?" "Yes. I will bring many more of you, if you promise to keep them all here in this woods until they're ready to leave." "I promise." He looked up at the night sky and, in the firelight, I saw his wonder. "You say we came from there?" "The old ones of your kind told me so. Didn't they tell you?" "I can't remember any old ones. You tell me." "The old ones told me you came long before the red men in a ship from the stars." Standing there in the dark, I had to grin, visioning the Sunday supplements that would be written in about a year, maybe even less. He looked into the sky for a long time. "Those little lights are the stars?" "That's right." "Which star?" I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. "From Venus." Then I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. "In your language, Pohtah." He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, "Venus. Pohtah." That next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods. There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to actual parenthood. By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy, sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through midday and midnight. The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my ranch and the fun would be on. My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying about the disemboweled buildings and she said, "What on Earth is going on here?" "I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going to write a paper about my results." My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. "I thought you meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first." My son asked, "What happened to the animals?" "Turned them over to the university for further study," I lied. "Well," he said to her, "you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision." Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation on the ranch. Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.	C. For his joke to have its desired effect, no one can know the full extent of his experiment.
Which region had the worst topline performance for MGM during FY2022?	Evidence 0: Las Vegas Strip Resorts Net revenues of $8.4 billion in the current year compared to $4.7 billion in the prior year, an increase of 77%; Evidence 1: Regional Operations Net revenues of $3.8 billion in the current year compared to $3.4 billion in the prior year, an increase of 12%; Evidence 2: MGM China Net revenues of $674 million in the current year compared to $1.2 billion in the prior year, a decrease of 44%;	MGM China experienced the worst topline performance amongst the other regions presented. Its revenue declined 44% in FY2022 whereas the other regions presented increased their revenues.
What was Captain Walsh's main motive behind putting the narrator on the mission? A. Walsh sought revenge against the narrator. B. Walsh wanted to test the narrator's intelligence. C. Walsh wanted the narrator fired from his position. D. Walsh wanted to test the narrator's competency.	A PLANET NAMED JOE By S. A. LOMBINO There were more Joes on Venus than you could shake a ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel Walsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major Polk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Colonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor. For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus. He might even have picked a Captain. But he liked me about as much as I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. At least, that's what he told me. I stood at attention before his desk in the Patrol Station. We were somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in Space II. The duty was fine, and I liked it a lot. Come to think of it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get by with gravy. "It will be a simple assignment, Major," he said to me, peering over his fingers. He held them up in front of him like a cathedral. "Yes, sir," I said. "It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native." I wanted to say, "Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on the job? Why me?" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his fingers. "The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent." He paused, then added, "For a native, that is." I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there. Which brought to mind an important point. "I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I thought our activities were confined to Mars." He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk as if he were waiting for me to cut. "Mmmm," he said, "yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just what's happening on Mars." I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very far. "He's had many dealings with the natives there," Walsh explained. "If anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can." If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called it "revolt." It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt. "And this man is on Venus now?" I asked for confirmation. I'd never been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place. "Yes, Major," he said. "This man is on Venus." At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night. He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in any military organization, he outranked me. "And the man's name, sir?" "Joe." A tight smile played on his face. "Joe what?" I asked. "Just Joe." "Just Joe?" "Yes," Walsh said. "A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like Joe. Among the natives, I mean." "I don't know, sir." "A relatively simple assignment," Walsh said. "Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance? Personal habits? Anything?" Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. "Well, physically he's like any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He does have a peculiar habit, though." "What's that?" "He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes." I sighed. "Well, it's not very much to go on." "You'll find him," Walsh said, grinning. "I'm sure of it." The trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took over. Swell guy, Walsh. Venus was hotter than I'd expected it to be. Much too hot for the tunic I was wearing. It smelled, too. A funny smell I couldn't place. Like a mixture of old shoe and after-shave. There were plants everywhere I looked. Big plants and small ones, some blooming with flowers I'd never seen before, and some as bare as cactus. I recognized a blue figure as one of the natives the pilot had told me about. He was tall, looking almost human except that everything about him was elongated. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have been stretched like a rubber band. I kept expecting him to pop back to normal. Instead, he flashed a double row of brilliant teeth at me. I wondered if he spoke English. "Hey, boy," I called. He ambled over with long-legged strides that closed the distance between us in seconds. "Call me Joe," he said. I dropped my bags and stared at him. Maybe this was going to be a simple assignment after all. "I sure am glad to see you, Joe," I said. "Same here, Toots," he answered. "The guys back in Space II are searching high and low for you," I told him. "You've got the wrong number," he said, and I was a little surprised at his use of Terran idiom. "You are Joe, aren't you? Joe the trader?" "I'm Joe, all right," he said. "Only thing I ever traded, though, was a pocketknife. Got a set of keys for it." "Oh," I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a drink first. "Where's the Officer's Club?" I asked the Venusian. "Are you buying information or are you just curious?" "Can you take me there?" I asked. "Sure thing, Toots." He picked up my bags and started walking up a heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when he dropped my bags and said, "There it is." The Officer's Club was a plasteel hut with window shields that protected it from the heat of the sun. It didn't look too comfortable but I really wanted that drink. I reached into my tunic and slipped the native thirty solars. He stared at the credits curiously and then shrugged his shoulders. "Oh well, you're new here. We'll let it go." He took off then, while I stared after him, wondering just what he'd meant. Had I tipped him too little? I shrugged and looked over at the Officer's Club. From the outside it looked as hot as hell. On the inside it was about two degrees short of that mark. I began to curse Walsh for taking me away from my nice soft job in Space II. There wasn't much inside the club. A few tables and chairs, a dart game and a bar. Behind the bar a tall Venusian lounged. I walked over and asked, "What are you serving, pal?" "Call me Joe," he answered. He caught me off balance. "What?" "Joe," he said again. A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull. "You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about Mars, would you?" "I never left home," he said simply. "What are you drinking?" That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled.... But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like Joe. Among the natives, I mean. Sure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most contemptible.... "What are you drinking, pal?" the Venusian asked again. "Skip it," I said. "How do I get to the captain's shack?" "Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it." I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at the bartender. "Hello, Joe," he said. "How's it going?" "Not so hot, Joe," the bartender replied. I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a great gag. Very funny. Very.... "You Major Polk, sweetheart?" the Venusian who'd just come in asked. "Yes," I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh. "You better get your butt over to the captain's shack," he said. "He's about ready to post you as overdue." "Sure," I said wearily. "Will you take my bags, please?" "Roger," he answered. He picked up the bags and nodded at the bar. "So long, Joe," he said to the bartender. "See you, Joe," the bartender called back. Captain Bransten was a mousey, unimpressive sort of man. He was wearing a tropical tunic, but he still resembled a wilted lily more than he did an officer. "Have a seat, Major," he offered. He reached for a cigarette box on the desk and extended it to me. He coughed in embarrassment when he saw it was empty. Quickly, he pressed a button on his desk and the door popped open. A tall, blue Venusian stepped lithely into the room. "Sir?" the Venusian asked. "We're out of cigarettes, Joe," the Captain said. "Will you get us some, please?" "Sure thing," the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the door behind him. Another Joe , I thought. Another damned Joe. "They steal them," Captain Bransten said abruptly. "Steal what?" I asked. "Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things they like about Terran culture." So Walsh had taken care of that angle too. He does have a peculiar habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes. Cigarettes was the tip I should have given; not solars. "All right," I said, "suppose we start at the beginning." Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. "Sir?" he asked. "What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but I think its popularity here is a little outstanding." Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and waited for his explanation. "I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus," he said. "Is there a local hero named Joe?" I asked. "No, no, nothing like that," he assured me. "It's a simple culture, you know. Not nearly as developed as Mars." "I can see that," I said bitingly. "And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture. Lots of enlisted men, you know." I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful ancestry more keenly. "It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course," Bransten was saying. I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth. "Get to the point, Captain!" I barked. "Easy, sir," Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain wasn't used to entertaining Majors. "The enlisted men. You know how they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?" "I follow, all right," I said bitterly. "Well," Bransten went on, "that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the cigarettes." He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first place. "Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all." Just a case of extended idiot , I thought. An idiot on a wild goose chase a hell of a long way from home. "I understand perfectly," I snapped. "Where are my quarters?" Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered. I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical tunic. I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose. Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat pussy cat. "What is it, Major?" he asked. "This man Joe," I said. "Can you give me any more on him?" Walsh's grin grew wider. "Why, Major," he said, "you're not having any difficulties, are you?" "None at all," I snapped back. "I just thought I'd be able to find him a lot sooner if...." "Take your time, Major," Walsh beamed. "There's no rush at all." "I thought...." "I'm sure you can do the job," Walsh cut in. "I wouldn't have sent you otherwise." Hell, I was through kidding around. "Look...." "He's somewhere in the jungle, you know," Walsh said. I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles away. He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on him. "Polk!" he shouted, "can you hear me?" I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen on my end went blank, too. He's somewhere in the jungle, you know. I thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my quarters. As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow. One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping the next ship back to Earth. It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer. It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the Service altogether. Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might really find a guy who was trader Joe. I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though. I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed. A tall Venusian stepped into the room. "Joe?" I asked, just to be sure. "Who else, boss?" he answered. "I'm trying to locate someone," I said. "I'll need a guide to take me into the jungle. Can you get me one?" "It'll cost you, boss," the Venusian said. "How much?" "Two cartons of cigarettes at least." "Who's the guide?" I asked. "How's the price sound?" "Fine, fine," I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were almost a childish people! "His name is Joe," the Venusian told me. "Best damn guide on the planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do. Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to...." "Skip it," I said, cutting the promotion short. "Tell him to show up around fifteen hundred with a complete list of what we'll need." The Venusian started to leave. "And Joe," I said, stopping him at the door, "I hope you're not overlooking your commission on the deal." His face broke into a wide grin. "No danger of that, boss," he said. When he was gone I began figuring out a plan of action. Obviously, I'd just have to traipse through the jungle looking for a guy named Joe on a planet where everyone was named Joe. Everybody, at least, but the Captain, the small garrison attached to the Station, and me. I began wondering why Walsh had gone to so much trouble to get rid of me. The job, as I saw it, would take a hell of a long time. It seemed like a silly thing to do, just to get even with a guy for something that had happened years ago. He surely must have realized that I'd be back again, sooner or later. Maybe he had another little junket all set for me. Or maybe he didn't expect me to come back. The thought hadn't occurred to me before this, and I began to consider it seriously. Walsh was no good, rotten clear through. He was failing at the job of keeping Mars in hand, and he probably realized that a few more mistakes on his part would mean the end of his career with Space II. I chuckled as I thought of him isolated in some God-forsaken place like Space V or Space VII. This probably bothered him a lot, too. But what probably bothered him more was the fact that I was next in command. If he were transferred, I'd be in charge of Space II, and I could understand how much that would appeal to Walsh. I tried to figure the thing out sensibly, tried to weigh his good points against his bad. But it all came back to the same thing. A guy who would deliberately go to sleep on Boiler Watch with a ton of uranium ready to blast a barracks to smithereens if it wasn't watched, would deliberately do just about anything. Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in. The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall, elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far. "I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir," he said. "Are you familiar with the jungle?" I asked him. "Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand." "Has Joe told you what the payment will be?" "Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes." I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled. "When can we leave?" "Right away, sir. We won't need much really. I've made a list of supplies and I can get them in less than an hour. I suggest you wear light clothing, boots, and a hat." "Will I need a weapon?" He looked at me, his eyes faintly amused. "Why, what for, sir?" "Never mind," I said. "What's your name, by the way?" He lifted his eyebrows, and his eyes widened in his narrow face. He was definitely surprised. "Joe," he said. "Didn't you know?" When we'd been out for a while I discovered why Joe had suggested the boots and the hat. The undergrowth was often sharp and jagged and it would have sliced my legs to ribbons were they not protected by the high boots. The hat kept the strong sun off my head. Joe was an excellent guide and a pleasant companion. He seemed to be enjoying a great romp, seemed to love the jungle and take a secret pleasure in the work he was doing. There were times when I couldn't see three feet ahead of me. He'd stand stock still for a few minutes, his head barely moving, his eyes darting from one plant to another. Then he'd say, "This way," and take off into what looked like more impenetrable jungle invariably to find a little path leading directly to another village. Each village was the same. The natives would come running out of their huts, tall and blue, shouting, "Cigarettes, Joe? Cigarettes?" It took me a while to realize they were addressing me and not my guide. Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low about the whole affair. Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again. His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle. "I like Venus," he said once. "I would never leave it." "Have you ever been to Earth?" I asked. "No," Joe replied. "I like Terrans too, you understand. They are good for Venus. And they are fun." "Fun?" I asked, thinking of a particular species of Terran: species Leonard Walsh. "Yes, yes," he said wholeheartedly. "They joke and they laugh and ... well, you know." "I suppose so," I admitted. Joe smiled secretly, and we pushed on. I began to find, more and more, that I had started to talk freely to Joe. In the beginning he had been just my guide. There had been the strained relationship of employer and employee. But as the days lengthened into weeks, the formal atmosphere began to crumble. I found myself telling him all about Earth, about the people there, about my decision to attend the Academy, the rigid tests, the grind, even the Moon run. Joe was a good listener, nodding sympathetically, finding experiences in his own life to parallel my own. And as our relationship progressed from a casual one to a definitely friendly one, Joe seemed more enthusiastic than ever to keep up our grinding pace to find what we were looking for. Once we stopped in a clearing to rest. Joe lounged on the matted greenery, his long body stretched out in front of him, the knife gleaming in his belt. I'd seen him slash his way through thick, tangled vines with that knife, his long, muscular arms powerfully slicing through them like strips of silk. "How far are we from the Station?" I asked. "Three or four Earth weeks," he replied. I sighed wearily. "Where do we go from here?" "There are more villages," he said. "We'll never find him." "Possibly," Joe mused, the smile creeping over his face again. "A wild goose chase. A fool's errand." "We'd better get started," Joe said simply. I got to my feet and we started the march again. Joe was still fresh, a brilliant contrast to me, weary and dejected. Somehow, I had the same feeling I'd had a long time ago on my sixteenth birthday. One of my friends had taken me all over the city, finally dropping me off at my own house where the whole gang was gathered for a surprise party. Joe reminded me of that friend. "There's a village ahead," he said, and the grin on his face was large now, his eyes shining. Something was missing here. Natives. There were no natives rushing out to greet us. No cries of "Cigarettes? Cigarettes?" I caught up with Joe. "What's the story?" I whispered. He shrugged knowingly and continued walking. And then I saw the ship, nose pointing into space, catching the rays of the sun like a great silver bullet. "What...?" I started. "It's all right," Joe said, smiling. The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand. "Hello, Major," he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head. "Fancy meeting you here, Colonel," I said, trying to match his joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off. Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with happiness. "I see you found your man," Walsh said. I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game. I faced Walsh again. "Okay, what's it all about, pal?" "Colonel," Walsh corrected me. "You mustn't forget to say Colonel, Major ." He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless finality. I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh pointing the stun gun at my middle. "We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?" "If you mean in miles," I said, looking around at the plants, "we sure have." Walsh grinned a little. "Always the wit," he said drily. And then the smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. "I'm going to kill you, you know." He said it as if he were saying, "I think it'll rain tomorrow." Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying this. Another of those funny Terran games. "You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome," Walsh said. "I suppose I should thank you, really." "You're welcome," I said. "It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me." "It was your own damn fault," I said. "You knew what you were doing when you decided to cork off." Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely. "You didn't have to report me," Walsh said. "No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!" Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small, unimportant drama. I could hear Joe breathing beside me. "I'm on my way out," Walsh rasped. "Finished, do you understand?" "Good," I said. And I meant it. "This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible." Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the game, the fun? "You brought the Mars business on yourself," I told Walsh. "There was never any trouble before you took command." "The natives," he practically shouted. "They ... they...." Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native. Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it. "What about the natives?" I asked. "Nothing," Walsh said. "Nothing." He was silent for a while. "A man of my calibre," he said then, his face grim. "Dealing with savages." He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe. The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the colonel in puzzlement.	A. Walsh sought revenge against the narrator.
How does their perturbation algorihm work?	### Introduction At the core of Natural Language Processing (NLP) neural models are pre-trained word embeddings like Word2Vec BIBREF0, GloVe BIBREF1 and ELMo BIBREF2. They help initialize the neural models, lead to faster convergence and have improved performance for numerous application such as Question Answering BIBREF3, Summarization BIBREF4, Sentiment Analysis BIBREF5. While word embeddings are powerful in unlimited constraints such as computation power and compute resources, it becomes challenging to deploy them to on-device due to their huge size. This led to interesting research by BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, who showed that actually word embedding can be replaced with lightweight binary LSH projections learned on-the-fly. The projection approach BIBREF9, BIBREF10 surmounts the need to store any embedding matrices, since the projections are dynamically computed. This further enables user privacy by performing inference directly on device without sending user data (e.g., personal information) to the server. The computation of the representation is linear in the number of inputs in the sentence surmounting the need to maintain and lookup global vocabulary, and reducing the memory size to $O(\|T \cdot d\|)$. The projection representations can operate on word and character level, and can be used to represent a sentence or a word depending on the NLP application. BIBREF6 have shown that on-device LSH projections lead to state-of-the-art results in dialog act classification and reach significant improvement upon prior LSTM and CNN neural models. Despite being so successful, yet there are no studies showing the properties and power of LSH projections. In this paper, we address that by studying What makes projection models effective? and Are these projection models resistant to perturbations and misspellings in input text? To answer these questions, we conduct a series of experimental studies and analysis. For instance, by studying the collision of the learned projection representations, we verify the effectiveness of the produced representations. Our study showed that LSH projections have low collision, meaning that the representations are good allowing the model to capture the meaning of words, instead of colliding everything into one meaning. Next, by analyzing the different character perturbations, we show the robustness of LSH projections when modeling word or sentence level representations. The intuition is that the projection should be able to capture word misspellings as similar, and yet it should be robust to semantically dissimilar terms. We show that Self-Governing Neural Networks (SGNN) models BIBREF6 evaluated with perturbed LSH projections are resistant to misspellings and transformation attacks, while LSTMs with increased perturbations dropped in performance. Overall, the studies are very interesting showcasing the robustness of LSH projection representations, their resistance to misspellings and transformations, and also explains why they lead to better performance. ### Background: LSH projections for text representations The Projection function, $\mathbb {P}$ (Figure FIGREF1), BIBREF9 used in SGNN models BIBREF6 extracts token (or character) n-gram & skip-gram features from a raw input text, $\textbf {x}$ and dynamically generates a binary projection representation, $\mathbb {P}(\mathbf {x}) \in [0,1]^{T.d}$ after a Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) based transformation, $\mathbb {L}$ as in where $\mathbb {F}$ extracts n-grams(or skip-grams), $[f_1, \cdots , f_n]$ from the input text. Here, $[f_1, \cdots , f_n]$ could refer to either character level or token level n-grams(or skip-grams) features. ### Collision Study Before diving into the actual collision studies, it is important to understand what the properties of good projections are. For instance, good projections should be as separate as possible, while still capturing the inherent n-gram features. Words with similar character n-gram feature vectors should be closer to each other i.e. cat and cats, but yet separate from each other so that the network can learn that cat and cats are related, but yet different. Such observations are not evident from the projections. One way to understand them is by looking at the collision rates. For instance, if there are too many projection collisions, this means that the network is fundamentally incapable of learning and it will not be able to generalize. For the purpose, we test how spread out the projections are for word and sentence representations. We take a large corpus enwik9 and analyze the average hamming distance of the words and sentences in the corpus. Intuitively, good projections should have less collisions. Our study shows that there is almost no collision. On an average the Hamming distances between words are 557 bits, which is around 50% of the projection dimension. Standard deviations are one order of magnitude lower compared to the average Hamming distances between words which means that on average projections are more or less spread out. For high deviation, it means too many words are either too close to each other or too far away from other other. To understand the properties of word and sentence projections, we conduct two experiments, one in which we compute the word projections and another one in which we compute the sentence projections. For our experiments, we fix the projection dimension, $dim(\mathbb {P}(w)) = 1120$ ($T=80, \, d=14$) following BIBREF6. Results are shown in Table TABREF3 and Table TABREF4 respectively. Table TABREF3 shows the collision results of the word level projections. On the left we list different projection configurations by varying the number of projection functions $T$, the dimensionality $d$, turning on or off character level projections, including varying size of n-gram and skip-gram features. For each projection configuration, we show the average Hamming distance and the standard deviation. As it can be seen, by increasing the number of n-gram and skip-gram features, the words become more spread out with lesser standard deviation. We recommend using higher number of n-gram and skip-gram features for better model performance. Table TABREF4 shows the collision results of the sentence level projections. Similarly to Table TABREF3 the left side shows the different projection configurations. For each configuration, we show the average Hamming distance and standard deviation. In the sentence level projection study, we observe that when we consider only word level features, the projections are insensitive to sentence length. But with the character projections on, they are sensitive to the sentence length. This happens because the character projection space is smaller than the words space, as we see only fewer variations for the sentence projections with n-gram and skip-gram compared to word level. In sentence level projection with word level features, the dimensionality of the spacer vector is high, hence applying projections on this leads to discriminative representations. More concretely, this means that projections with large feature spaces are able to capture the distinctions between any two observed pairs and adding more words to the sentence is not going to change that. On the other hand for short sentences with character level features, the number of possible observed unique char ngrams vs those observed in longer sentences can differ. ### Perturbation Study To further test the robustness of the projections, we conduct perturbation study. A good projection should separate out perturbed word like baank from cats. Meaning that the average Hamming distance from the collision study should be greater than the Hamming distance with and without perturbations. ### Perturbation Study ::: Character & Word Perturbations In this section, we analyze the Hamming distance between the projections of the sentences from the enwik9 dataset and the corresponding projections of the same sentences after applying character level perturbations. We experiment with three types of character level perturbation BIBREF11 and two types of word level perturbation operations. ### Perturbation Study ::: Character Level Perturbation Operations insert(word, n) : We randomly choose n characters from the character vocabulary and insert them at random locations into the input word. We however retain the first and last characters of the word as is. Ex. transformation: $sample \rightarrow samnple$. swap(word, n): We randomly swap the location of two characters in the word n times. As with the insert operation, we retain the first and last characters of the word as is and only apply the swap operation to the remaining characters. Ex. transformation: $sample \rightarrow sapmle$. duplicate(word, n): We randomly duplicate a character in the word by n times. Ex. transformation: $sample \rightarrow saample$. ### Perturbation Study ::: Character Level Perturbation Operations ::: Word Level Perturbation Operations drop(sentence, n): We randomly drop n words from the sentence. Ex. transformation: This is a big cat. $\rightarrow $ This is a cat. duplicate(sentence, n): Similar to duplicate(word, n) above, we randomly duplicate a word in the sentence n times. Ex. transformation: This is a big cat. $\rightarrow $ This is a big big cat. swap(sentence, n): Similar to swap(word, n), we randomly swap the location of two words in the sentence n times. Ex. transformation: This is a big cat. $\rightarrow $ This cat is big. For both character and word level perturbations, we decide whether or not to perturb each word in a sentence with a fixed probability. For the character level perturbations, once a word is chosen for perturbation, we randomly pick one of the perturbation operations from {insert, swap, duplicate} and randomly pick the number of characters to transform $n \in \lbrace 1,\;3\rbrace $. For the word level perturbations, we randomly apply one of the operations from {drop, duplicate, swap}. We consider perturbation probabilities of $0.05$ and $0.1$ for our experiments. ### Perturbation Study ::: Discussion We show results on multiple perturbation studies. For instance, sentence has word and character level perturbations, while word has character only perturbation. We evaluate the impact of the word and character projections for sentence and word level projections on the enwik9 dataset. Table TABREF13 shows the character and word perturbation with sentence level projections. Table TABREF14 shows the character perturbation for word level projections. We observe that the hamming distances between the projections of the perturbed versions of the same words are significantly smaller than the average distance of the word projections measured in the collision study in Section SECREF3. This shows that the words are well separated in the projection space and could potentially be less susceptible to misspellings and omissions. Based on the results in all Tables 1 to 4, we found a nice linear relationship between the hamming distance, the projection dimension and the amount of perturbation. As it can be seen in the results, the hamming distance between the projections before and after perturbation is directly proportional to the product of the projection dimension and percentage of perturbation as follows: $ \Delta _{\mathbb {P}_{m}} = K_{m}\, \cdot T \, \cdot \, d \cdot P_{perturb} \; , m \in \lbrace word, \,character\rbrace , \; K_{m} > 0$ where $\Delta _{\mathbb {P}_{m}}$ refers to the hamming distance between the projections before and after perturbations and $m$ refers to the mode of projection - {word, character}. $T \cdot d$ refers to the projection space dimension and $P_{perturb}$ refers to the probability of perturbation. $K_{m} > 0$ is a proportionality constant which depends on the projection mode. We observe that $K_{word} > K_{char}$ from our experiments. Character mode projections are relatively more robust to perturbations, however we would also want to include word level n-gram and skipgram features to generate a holistic representation. This establishes a tradeoff between choosing word and character level features. Ideally, one would like to reserve some bits for word and some bits for character level features. We leave the design of the right bit division to future work. ### Effect of Perturbation on Classification We evaluate LSH projections with text transformations to test whether the projections are robust to input perturbations by nature. We use the character level operations from Section SECREF4. ### Effect of Perturbation on Classification ::: Evaluation Setup For evaluation, we used the widely popular dialog act and intent prediction datasets. MRDA BIBREF12 is a dialog corpus of multi-party meetings with 6 classes, 78K training and 15K test data; ATIS BIBREF13 is intent prediction dataset for flight reservations with 21 classes, 4.4K training and 893 test examples; and SWDA BIBREF14, BIBREF15 is an open domain dialog corpus between two speakers with 42 classes, 193K training and 5K test examples. For fair comparison, we train LSTM baseline with sub-words and 240 vocabulary size on MRDA, ATIS and SWDA. We uniformly randomly initialized the input word embeddings. We also trained the on-device SGNN model BIBREF6. Then, we created test sets with varying levels of perturbation operations - $\lbrace 20\%,40\%,60\%\rbrace $. ### Effect of Perturbation on Classification ::: Results Table TABREF15 shows the accuracy results of LSTM and on-device SGNN models. Overall, SGNN models are consistently more robust to perturbations across all three datasets and tasks. One of the reasons is that SGNN relies on word and character level n-gram features, while for LSTMs, the character perturbations result in sub-words being mapped to unknown embedding. This leads LSTM to learn to map inputs with many unknown words to the majority class. We observed the same when we perturbed $100\%$ of the words in the input. As shown in Table TABREF18, the standard deviations of the accuracy with LSTMs are much higher compared to SGNN. This further reinforces the fact that SGNNs are fundamentally more robust to both word misspellings and black box attacks. In the future, we are plan to benchmark SGNN with more aggressive and exploitative black box based attacks. ### Conclusion In this work, we perform a detailed study analyzing why recent LSH-based projection neural networks are effective for language classification tasks. Through extensive analyses including perturbation studies and experiments on multiple tasks, we show that projection-based neural models are resistant to text transformations compared to widely-used approaches like LSTMs with embeddings. Figure 1: Binary Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) projection representation for text used in SGNN models (Ravi and Kozareva, 2018) Table 1: Collision results: Word level projections Table 2: Collision results: Sentence level projections Table 3: Perturbations with Sentence Projections Table 4: Char. Perturbation with Word Projections Table 5: Comparison of SGNN vs LSTM (using sub-words) after character level perturbations. Table 6: MRDA Accuracy Std. Dev with perturbations	same sentences after applying character level perturbations
Why is Henry referred to as the First One A. He was the first man to make it back from a Mars mission. B. Was the first person pieced back together after death. C. He was the first American to walk on the surface of Mars. D. He was the first one to make it back alive from the type of trip that he went on.	THE FIRST ONE By HERBERT D. KASTLE Illustrated by von Dongen [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog July 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The first man to return from beyond the Great Frontier may be welcomed ... but will it be as a curiosity, rather than as a hero...? There was the usual welcoming crowd for a celebrity, and the usual speeches by the usual politicians who met him at the airport which had once been twenty miles outside of Croton, but which the growing city had since engulfed and placed well within its boundaries. But everything wasn't usual. The crowd was quiet, and the mayor didn't seem quite as at-ease as he'd been on his last big welcoming—for Corporal Berringer, one of the crew of the spaceship Washington , first to set Americans upon Mars. His Honor's handclasp was somewhat moist and cold. His Honor's eyes held a trace of remoteness. Still, he was the honored home-comer, the successful returnee, the hometown boy who had made good in a big way, and they took the triumphal tour up Main Street to the new square and the grandstand. There he sat between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen, and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their parishioners to treat him. But they had all come around. The tremendous national interest, the fact that he was the First One, had made them come around. It was obvious by now that they would have to adjust as they'd adjusted to all the other firsts taking place in these—as the newspapers had dubbed the start of the Twenty-first Century—the Galloping Twenties. He was glad when the official greeting was over. He was a very tired man and he had come farther, traveled longer and over darker country, than any man who'd ever lived before. He wanted a meal at his own table, a kiss from his wife, a word from his son, and later to see some old friends and a relative or two. He didn't want to talk about the journey. He wanted to forget the immediacy, the urgency, the terror; then perhaps he would talk. Or would he? For he had very little to tell. He had traveled and he had returned and his voyage was very much like the voyages of the great mariners, from Columbus onward—long, dull periods of time passing, passing, and then the arrival. The house had changed. He saw that as soon as the official car let him off at 45 Roosevelt Street. The change was, he knew, for the better. They had put a porch in front. They had rehabilitated, spruced up, almost rebuilt the entire outside and grounds. But he was sorry. He had wanted it to be as before. The head of the American Legion and the chief of police, who had escorted him on this trip from the square, didn't ask to go in with him. He was glad. He'd had enough of strangers. Not that he was through with strangers. There were dozens of them up and down the street, standing beside parked cars, looking at him. But when he looked back at them, their eyes dropped, they turned away, they began moving off. He was still too much the First One to have his gaze met. He walked up what had once been a concrete path and was now an ornate flagstone path. He climbed the new porch and raised the ornamental knocker on the new door and heard the soft music sound within. He was surprised that he'd had to do this. He'd thought Edith would be watching at a window. And perhaps she had been watching ... but she hadn't opened the door. The door opened; he looked at her. It hadn't been too long and she hadn't changed at all. She was still the small, slender girl he'd loved in high school, the small, slender woman he'd married twelve years ago. Ralphie was with her. They held onto each other as if seeking mutual support, the thirty-three-year old woman and ten-year-old boy. They looked at him, and then both moved forward, still together. He said, "It's good to be home!" Edith nodded and, still holding to Ralphie with one hand, put the other arm around him. He kissed her—her neck, her cheek—and all the old jokes came to mind, the jokes of travel-weary, battle-weary men, the and- then -I'll-put-my-pack-aside jokes that spoke of terrible hunger. She was trembling, and even as her lips came up to touch his he felt the difference, and because of this difference he turned with urgency to Ralphie and picked him up and hugged him and said, because he could think of nothing else to say, "What a big fella, what a big fella." Ralphie stood in his arms as if his feet were still planted on the floor, and he didn't look at his father but somewhere beyond him. "I didn't grow much while you were gone, Dad, Mom says I don't eat enough." So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left Washington. "Give it some time," Carlisle had said. "You need the time; they need the time. And for the love of heaven, don't be sensitive." Edith was leading him into the living room, her hand lying still in his, a cool, dead bird lying still in his. He sat down on the couch, she sat down beside him—but she had hesitated. He wasn't being sensitive; she had hesitated. His wife had hesitated before sitting down beside him. Carlisle had said his position was analogous to Columbus', to Vasco De Gama's, to Preshoff's when the Russian returned from the Moon—but more so. Carlisle had said lots of things, but even Carlisle who had worked with him all the way, who had engineered the entire fantastic journey—even Carlisle the Nobel prize winner, the multi-degreed genius in uniform, had not actually spoken to him as one man to another. The eyes. It always showed in their eyes. He looked across the room at Ralphie, standing in the doorway, a boy already tall, already widening in the shoulders, already large of feature. It was like looking into the mirror and seeing himself twenty-five years ago. But Ralphie's face was drawn, was worried in a way that few ten-year-old faces are. "How's it going in school?" he asked. "Gee, Dad, it's the second month of summer vacation." "Well, then, before summer vacation?" "Pretty good." Edith said, "He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank." He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in continent-to-continent experimental flight. They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up. But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, "I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word." Without waiting for an answer, he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and ran from the room and from the house. He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. "I'm very tired. I'd like to lie down a while." Which wasn't true, because he'd been lying down all the months of the way back. She said, "Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and make small talk and pick up just where you left off." He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him; they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much. She led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire fence around the experimental station. "Which one is mine," he asked, and tried to smile. She also tried to smile. "The one near the window. You always liked the fresh air, the sunshine in the morning. You always said it helped you to get up on time when you were stationed at the base outside of town. You always said it reminded you—being able to see the sky—that you were going to go up in it, and that you were going to come down from it to this bed again." "Not this bed," he murmured, and was a little sorry afterward. "No, not this bed," she said quickly. "Your lodge donated the bedroom set and I really didn't know—" She waved her hand, her face white. He was sure then that she had known, and that the beds and the barrier between them were her own choice, if only an unconscious choice. He went to the bed near the window, stripped off his Air Force blue jacket, began to take off his shirt, but then remembered that some arm scars still showed. He waited for her to leave the room. She said, "Well then, rest up, dear," and went out. He took off his shirt and saw himself in the mirror on the opposite wall; and then took off his under-shirt. The body scars were faint, the scars running in long lines, one dissecting his chest, the other slicing diagonally across his upper abdomen to disappear under his trousers. There were several more on his back, and one on his right thigh. They'd been treated properly and would soon disappear. But she had never seen them. Perhaps she never would. Perhaps pajamas and robes and dark rooms would keep them from her until they were gone. Which was not what he'd considered at all important on leaving Walter Reed Hospital early this morning; which was something he found distasteful, something he felt beneath them both. And, at the same time, he began to understand that there would be many things, previously beneath them both, which would have to be considered. She had changed; Ralphie had changed; all the people he knew had probably changed—because they thought he had changed. He was tired of thinking. He lay down and closed his eyes. He let himself taste bitterness, unhappiness, a loneliness he had never known before. But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be granted to him. He slept. Dinner was at seven p.m. His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate in the dining room at the big table. Before he'd become the First One, it would have been a noisy affair. His family had never been noted for a lack of ebullience, a lack of talkativeness, and Ralphie had always chosen mealtimes—especially with company present—to describe everything and anything that had happened to him during the day. And Edith herself had always chatted, especially with his mother, though they didn't agree about much. Still, it had been good-natured; the general tone of their lives had been good-natured. This wasn't good-natured. Exactly what it was he wasn't sure. "Stiff" was perhaps the word. They began with grapefruit, Edith and Mother serving quickly, efficiently from the kitchen, then sitting down at the table. He looked at Mother as he raised his first spoonful of chilled fruit, and said, "Younger than ever." It was nothing new; he'd said it many many times before, but his mother had always reacted with a bright smile and a quip something like, "Young for the Golden Age Center, you mean." This time she burst into tears. It shocked him. But what shocked him even more was the fact that no one looked up, commented, made any attempt to comfort her; no one indicated in any way that a woman was sobbing at the table. He was sitting directly across from Mother, and reached out and touched her left hand which lay limply beside the silverware. She didn't move it—she hadn't touched him once beyond that first, quick, strangely-cool embrace at the door—then a few seconds later she withdrew it and let it drop out of sight. So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was, the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being. The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe began to talk. "The greatest little development of circular uniform houses you ever did see," he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice. "Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—" At that point he looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate, mumbled, "Soup's getting cold," and began to eat. His hand shook a little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it. Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt alone—and said, "I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or trowel." Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him, and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, "I have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a while." She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely touched his shoulder and fled. So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie and said, "Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard." Ralphie said, "Yeah, Dad." Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going into the living room for a while. "She'll be back for dessert, of course," he said, his laugh sounding forced. Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room. He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear of, that he could have smashed more than a table. Edith said, "Hank!" He said, voice hoarse, "Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of the lot of you." Mother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food down his throat. Mother said, "Henry dear—" He didn't answer. She began to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about getting together again soon and "drop out and see the new development" and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him. He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle. She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said, "Hey, I promised—" "You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or something; anything to get away from your father." Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, "Aw, no, Dad." Edith said, "He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly." Ralphie said, "Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to." Hank stood up. "The question is not whether I want to. You both know I want to. The question is whether you want to." They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that they shouldn't count on him for normal social life. He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes. But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a lighted room. "Phil and Rhona are here." He blinked at her. She smiled, and it seemed her old smile. "They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will." He sat up. "Phil," he muttered. "Phil and Rhona." They'd had wonderful times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming. Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down! It didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer. They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana. There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world. At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he said, "I haven't danced with my girl Rhona." His tongue was thick, his mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going to be sick. "So let's rock," he said and stood up. They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted. And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied, mechanical dancing doll. The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said, "Beddy-bye time." Hank said, "First one dance with my loving wife." He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't. Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when the music ended, he was ready to go home. They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much, Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with the First One. They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence paralleling the road. "Hey," he said, pointing, "do you know why that's the most popular place on earth?" Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a while longer, not yet aware of his supposed faux pas . "You know why?" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter rumbling up from his chest. "You know why, folks?" Rhona said, "Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—" Hank said, "No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?" Phil said, "Because people are—" And then he caught himself and waved his hand and muttered, "I forgot the punch line." "Because people are dying to get in," Hank said, and looked through the window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting tombstones. The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. "Maybe you should let me out right here," Hank said. "I'm home—or that's what everyone seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or another monster from the movies." Edith said, "Oh, Hank, don't, don't!" The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path and entered the house. "Hank," Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, "I'm so sorry—" "There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll all work out in time." "Yes," she said quickly, "that's it. I need a little time. We all need a little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening. I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're frightened." "I'm going to stay in the guest room," he said, "for as long as necessary. For good if need be." "How could it be for good? How, Hank?" That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him, even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did. "There are others coming, Edith. Eight that I know of in the tanks right now. My superior, Captain Davidson, who died at the same moment I did—seven months ago next Wednesday—he's going to be next. He was smashed up worse than I was, so it took a little longer, but he's almost ready. And there'll be many more, Edith. The government is going to save all they possibly can from now on. Every time a young and healthy man loses his life by accident, by violence, and his body can be recovered, he'll go into the tanks and they'll start the regenerative brain and organ process—the process that made it all possible. So people have to get used to us. And the old stories, the old terrors, the ugly old superstitions have to die, because in time each place will have some of us; because in time it'll be an ordinary thing." Edith said, "Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—" She paused. "There's one question." He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by everyone from the president of the United States on down. "I saw nothing," he said. "It was as if I slept those six and a half months—slept without dreaming." She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was satisfied. Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own home. THE END	B. Was the first person pieced back together after death.
During which period did the Paul Doe undergo radiotherapy? Choose the correct answer from the following options: A. 07/14/2014 - 09/06/2014 B. 05/14/2014 - 07/06/2014 C. 07/27/2014 - 09/06/2014 D. 05/14/2014 - 06/30/2014 E. 07/27/2014 - 08/30/2014	### Patient Report 0 Dear colleague, Dear colleague, We are writing to provide an update regarding Mr. Paul Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who was treated in our clinic from 05/28/14 to 06/20/14. Diagnoses: - pT1, pN0 (0/21, ECE negative), cM0, Pn0, G2, RX, L0, V0, left midline tongue carcinoma - Arterial hypertension - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Idiopathic thrombocytopenia - Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus type II - Hypothyroidism - Nicotine abuse <!-- --> - Panendoscopy with sampling on 04/14/2014 and 04/26/2014 Current Presentation: With histologically confirmed carcinoma in the region of the base of the tongue on the left side, Mr. Doe presents for surgical treatment of the findings. In accordance with the tumor board decision, resection is performed via a lateral pharyngotomy and neck dissection on both sides. Physical Examination: Patient in stable general condition (85 kg, 188 cm). MUST score: 0, pain NRS 8/10 intermittent (adjusted with Acetaminophen) \\| fatigue I°, dysphagia I° \\| aspiration 0°, ulcer 0°, trismus 0°, taste disturbance I°, xerostomia I°, osteonecrosis 0°, hypothyroidism I° (L-thyroxine increased to 150 μg 1-0-0), hoarseness 0°, hearing loss 0° (subjectively reduced), dyspnea: 0°, pneumonitis 0°, nausea/vomiting 0°. No suspicious lymph nodes palpable \\| movement restrictions 0°, subcutaneous fibrosis: I°, hyperpigmentation: I° cervical, mucositis 0°, lymphedema I° (lymphatic drainage prescribed), telangiectasia 0°. A tumorous mass can be inspected at the base of the left tongue. Tongue mobility is unremarkable. CT chest, abdomen, pelvis on 05/28/14: Emphasized mediastinal as well as abdominal lymph nodes. Vasosclerosis. Otherwise, there is no evidence for the presence of distant metastases with a suspected base of tongue carcinoma. Liver cirrhosis. CT neck on 06/11/14: Suspected left tongue base carcinoma crossing midline with extension into the left vallecula and compression of the left piriform sinus with suspected lymph node metastases in levels I-III ipsilateral. Contralateral prominent but not certainly suspicious lymph nodes. The prominent structure on the left supraclavicular side can also be interpreted as circumscribed cystiform ectasia of the thoracic duct. Ultrasound abdomen on 06/15/14: Image of liver cirrhosis status post cholecystectomy. Hepatosplenomegaly. Moderate aortic sclerosis. X-ray pap swallow on 06/17/14: Clear tracheal aspiration in the absence of epiglottis envelope. The cough reflex is preserved. Otherwise, essentially unremarkable swallowing act. Histology: Invasive, moderately differentiated, squamous cell carcinoma with keratinization of the medial left base of the tongue, maximum extent 1.0 cm. Carcinoma- and dysplasia-free biopsies of the left tonsil, the oropharyngeal tumor/tongue base on the left, deep resection of the tumor, lower tonsillar pole transition on the left tongue base, tongue base on the left and medial left tongue base, as well as median tongue base. Metastasis-free lymph nodes in Neck-dissection Level IIa to IV on the left (0/16), Neck-dissection Level IIb on the left (0/1), and Neck-dissection Level II to IV on the right (0/3), occasionally with lymphofollicular hyperplasia. Carcinoma-free bone of the left lateral thigh of the hyoid. Final UICC classification: pT1. pN0 (0/21). L0. V0. Pn0. G2. RX. Therapy and Progression: After the usual clinical and laboratory preparations, we performed the above-mentioned therapy on 05/29/14 in intubation anesthesia without complications. For perioperative infection prophylaxis, the patient received intravenous antibiotic therapy with Ampicillin and Sulbactam 3g three times daily for the duration of his hospital stay. During this procedure, the left lingual artery was interrupted prophylactically. No postoperative bleeding and no wound healing disturbances occurred. A porridge swallow examination showed no evidence of a fistula. On the following day, the patient was decannulated in consultation with the colleagues of the speech therapy. After this, a food build-up was carried out in cooperation with speech therapists. At the time of discharge, the patient was receiving regular oral nutrition. The stoma continued to shrink. The patient was monitored, and if necessary, the tracheostoma was closed with local anesthesia. Histological findings were pT1. Due to an RX status, adjuvant radiotherapy will be performed as decided by the tumor board. A prophylactic presentation at the colleagues of the MKG as a preparatory measure for the upcoming radiotherapy. We asked for a control re-presentation in our outpatient clinic on 06/26/14 at 3:00 PM. Further controls take place at the half and at the end of the radiotherapy and further in 4-6 weeks rhythm. In case of acute complaints, an immediate re-presentation is possible at any time. Type of surgery: Lateral pharyngotomy with resection of the base of the tongue on the left as well as selective neck dissection on both sides level II-IV with ligature of the lingual artery on the left side, creation of a stable tracheostoma and tonsillectomy on the left side. Surgery report: First, tracheotomy in a typical manner. A horizontal incision was made on the skin, positioned approximately two transverse finger widths above the jugulum. Subsequently, the subcutaneous tissue and the platysma colli were incised. To facilitate access to the trachea, the laryngeal muscles were carefully displaced to the side. The thyroid isthmus was undermined and clamped bilaterally. A precise transection of the thyroid isthmus followed, with both halves of the thyroid gland being meticulously sutured using 0- Vicryl. The thyroid halves were repositioned to expose the trachea. A visceral tracheotomy was performed, and re-intubation was achieved utilizing a U-tube. The surgical procedure then transitioned to a neck dissection on the left side. This phase began with an incision along the anterior edge of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. The subcutaneous tissue and platysma colli were carefully cut, with due respect to the auricularis magnus nerve. Dissection continued dorsally along the sternocleidomastoid muscle to reach the anterior border of the trapezius muscle. Further exposure involved the accessorius nerve in a cranialward direction, with preservation of this neural structure. Dissection proceeded along the cervical vascular sheath, revealing the common carotid artery, internal jugular vein, and vagus nerve up to the digastric muscle. Below this level, exposure of the hypoglossal nerve was achieved. Successive dissection involved the lymph node fat package, progressing from level II to level IV in a cranial to caudal and ventral to dorsal direction. Throughout this process, careful attention was paid to sparing the aforementioned neural and vascular structures. Subsequently, access to the lateral pharyngectomy area was gained, allowing visualization of the external carotid artery along with its branches, including the superior thyroid artery, superior laryngeal artery, and lingual artery. Notably, the lingual artery was interrupted during this stage. Further exploration revealed the superior laryngeal nerve and hypoglossal nerve intersecting in a loop above the internal carotid artery and externally below the external jugular vein. Additional dissection in a ventral direction followed. The hypoglossal nerve was prepared meticulously. Exposure of the hyoid bone was achieved, with a posterior resection of half of the hyoid bone. Importantly, the hypoglossal nerve was spared during this procedure. Subsequent to these steps, the lateral pharynx wall was opened, exposing the base of the hyoid. The next phase of the procedure involved enoral tumor tonsillectomy on the left side. Starting from the left side, the surgical team identified the tonsil capsule at the anterior palatal arch using a Henke spatula. The upper tonsillar pole was then dislodged and dissected with the Rosenblatt instrument, proceeding from cranial to caudal. Hemostasis was meticulously achieved through swab pressure and electrocautery. The excised tonsil tissue was sent for frozen section examination for further analysis. Frozen Section Report: No evidence of malignancy was found. The resection was carried out at the junction of the caudal tonsillar pole and the base of the tongue. At this location, tissue from the base of the tongue was resected and sent for a frozen section examination, which revealed no indication of malignancy. Subsequently, a medial resection of the base of the tongue was performed, confirming the presence of squamous cell carcinoma in the frozen section analysis. Mucosal suturing with inverting sutures was then conducted. On the left side, a neck dissection procedure was performed. The dissection extended along the sternocleidomastoid muscle, reaching dorsally to the anterior border of the trapezius muscle. This approach allowed for cranial exposure of the accessorius nerve while sparing the same. Dissection continued along the cervical vascular sheath, exposing the common carotid artery, internal jugular vein, and the vagus nerve up to the digastric muscle. Below this, the hypoglossal nerve was exposed. Subsequently, the lymph node fat package was dissected systematically from level II to level IV, progressing from cranial to caudal and ventral to dorsal, while carefully preserving the mentioned structures. The surgical procedure concluded with the placement of a drain, subcutaneous suturing, and skin suturing. Frozen section report: Invasive squamous cell carcinoma. Microscopy: Even after paraffin embedding, mucosal cross-sections show a covering of stratified, non-keratinizing squamous epithelium with occasional significant stratification disturbances extending into superficial cell layers. This transitions into invasive growth with solid clusters of polygonal tumor cells, some of which exhibit identifiable intercellular bridges. The cell nuclei are enlarged, round to oval, with occasional small nucleoli and mild to moderate nuclear pleomorphism. Dyskeratosis is observed in some areas. Lab results upon Discharge: Parameter Result Reference Range -------------------- ----------------------- ----------------------- Sodium 141 mEq/L 135 - 145 mEq/L Potassium 4.7 mEq/L 3.5 - 5.0 mEq/L Creatinine 1.0 mg/dL 0.7 - 1.3 mg/dL Calcium 9.04 mg/dL 8.8 - 10.6 mg/dL GFR (MDRD) \> 60 mL/min/1.73m\^2 \> 60 mL/min/1.73m\^2 GFR (CKD-EPI,CREA) 80 mL/min/1.73m\^2 \> 90 mL/min/1.73m\^2 C-reactive protein 1.0 mg/dL \< 0.5 mg/dL ### Patient Report 1 Dear colleague, We are writing to provide an update regarding Mr. Paul Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who presented to our outpatient clinic on 09/14/2014. Diagnosis: Tongue base Carcinoma ICD-10: C01, stage: pT1 pN0 (0/21) L0 V0 Pn0 G2 RX Other Diagnoses: - Arterial hypertension - Diabetes mellitus type II - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis - Since 03/2014: Odynophagia <!-- --> - 05/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy, and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III Histology: Invasive, moderately differentiated, squamous cell carcinoma with keratinization of the medial left base of the tongue, maximum extent 1.0 cm. Carcinoma- and dysplasia-free biopsies of the left tonsil, the oropharyngeal tumor/tongue base on the left, deep resection of the tumor, lower tonsillar pole transition on the left tongue base, tongue base on the left and medial left tongue base, as well as median tongue base. Metastasis-free lymph nodes in Neck-dissection Level IIa to IV on the left (0/16), Neck-dissection Level IIb on the left (0/1), and Neck-dissection Level II to IV on the right (0/3), occasionally with lymphofollicular hyperplasia. Carcinoma-free bone of the left lateral thigh of the hyoid. Final UICC classification: min pT1, pN0 (0/21). L0. V0. Pn0. G2. RX. Current Radiotherapy: Indication: According to the decision made by the interdisciplinary tumor board for head and neck tumors, it was determined by our medical team that, in the postoperative condition following the resection of a tongue base carcinoma with an unclear resection status, there is an indication for radiation therapy of the former tumor site. Technique: Percutaneous radiotherapy of the former primary tumor region with 6-MeVPhotons, in Rapid-Arc technique, with a single dose of 2 Gy up to a total dose of 60 Gy. Radiotherapy 07/27/2014 - 09/06/2014: During the course of radiotherapy, the patient experienced enoral mucositis (grade II according to CTCAE) leading to subsequent odynophagia and dysphagia. We managed these symptoms with oral rinses and initiated pain management using Acetaminophen, resulting in an acceptable reduction of pain over time. At the end of the therapy, the patient\'s general condition remained stable (ECOG performance status: 70%). Second-degree mucositis enoral persisted, causing ongoing dysphagia and odynophagia. Additionally, the patient exhibited localized radiodermatitis (grade II according to CTCAE) within the radiation field. The patient did not report xerostomia or dysgeusia. Current Recommendations: The patient received comprehensive instructions on continued skincare and side-effect management. An initial follow-up appointment with the radio-oncology team has been scheduled in our outpatient clinic. We kindly request the patient to provide a renewed referral for radiotherapy on the day of the appointment. The ongoing oncological treatment plan will be determined by the patient\'s Ear, Nose, and Throat specialists. Regular follow-up examinations are strongly recommended. Additionally, for patients who have completed radiation therapy in the ENT region, we advise lifelong adherence to fluoride prophylaxis and antibiotic therapy during any dental procedures. ### Patient Report 2 Dear colleague, We report about our patient, Mr. Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who presented to our outpatient clinic for phoniatrics and pedaudiology on 10/10/2014. Diagnoses: - Tongue base carcinoma ICD-10: C01, stage: pT1 pN0 (0/21) L0 V0 Pn0 G2 RX - Since 03/2014: Odynophagia - 05/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy, and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III Other Diagnoses: - Arterial hypertension - Diabetes mellitus type II - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Medical History: We may kindly assume the detailed history as known. Phoniatrics: Fiberoptic endoscopic swallow examination: Tongue motor function is well preserved, sensitivity of lip and tongue laterally equal, Mucous membranes non-irritant on all sides. Tracheal mucosa non-irritant, no evidence of saliva intratracheal. Neopharynx inconspicuous, air bubbles visible above Provox outlet on pressing attempt. Tongue retraction slightly limited. Velopharyngeal closure good. Therapy and Course: After completion of the adjuvant radiotherapy approximately 6 weeks ago, phonation via the Provox voice prosthesis was no longer possible after this had initially worked after the operation. Additionally, there were issues with regurgitation of ingested substances, regardless of their consistency. In some cases, nasal penetration with fluids occurred. There were no indications of aspiration. A self-assessment, involving the use of blue-colored liquid, revealed no signs of leakage from the Provox device. Current Recommendations: Oncological follow-up in 12 months. ### Patient Report 3 Dear colleague, We report about our patient, Mr. Doe, born on 08/08/1965 who presented at our outpatient clinic for radio-oncological follow-up on 10/09/2020. Diagnoses: - Tongue base Carcinoma ICD-10: C01, stage: pT1 pN0 (0/21) L0 V0 Pn0 G2 RX - Since 03/2014: Odynophagia - 05/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy, and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III Other Diagnoses: - Arterial hypertension - Diabetes mellitus type II - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Current Presentation: The patient presented to our general outpatient clinic for a radio-oncological follow-up on 10/09/2020 in the presence of his wife. Physical Examination: Patient in stable general condition (85 kg,188 cm). MUST score: 0, pain NRS 8/10 intermittent (adjusted with Acetaminophen) \\| fatigue I°, dysphagia I° \\| aspiration 0°, ulcer 0°, trismus 0°, taste disturbance I°, xerostomia I°, osteonecrosis 0°, hypothyroidism I°, hoarseness 0°, hearing loss 0° (subjectively reduced), dyspnea: 0°, pneumonitis 0°, nausea/vomiting 0°. No suspicious lymph nodes palpable \\| movement restrictions 0°, subcutaneous fibrosis: I°, hyperpigmentation: I° cervical, mucositis 0°, lymphedema I° (lymphatic drainage prescribed), telangiectasia 0°. MRI scan of the neck from 10/09/2020: Clear post-therapeutic changes in the resection and radiation area after adjuvant RTx following tumor resection with laryngectomy for extensive recurrence of oropharyngeal cancer. Size constant, but still clearly accentuated lymph nodes in level Ib/IIa on the left. Regredience of seroma formation under the left sternocleidomastoid muscle. Current Recommendations: Primary oncological care and follow-up, including imaging, will be provided by the ENT clinic according to the guidelines. A re-appointment for a further radio-oncological follow-up at the follow-up appointment at the Radiation Therapy Tumor Therapy Center has been scheduled. After head and neck radiation therapy, regular fluoridation of the teeth and guideline-based antibiotic prophylaxis is required prior to major dental procedures. We also recommend temporomandibular joint opening exercises to prevent temporomandibular joint fibrosis and consecutive temporomandibular joint opening obstruction. We also refer to regular control of thyroid function parameters and, if necessary, initiation of substitution therapy after radiotherapy to the neck. ### Patient Report 4 Dear colleague, We hereby report on our patient Mr. Paul Doe, born 08/08/1965 for radio-oncological follow-up on 09/24/2021. Diagnoses: - Tongue base carcinoma ICD-10: C01, stage: pT1 pN0 (0/21) L0 V0 Pn0 G2 RX - Since 03/2014: Odynophagia - 05/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy, and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III Other Diagnoses: - Arterial hypertension - Diabetes mellitus type II - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Current Presentation: The patient presented to our general outpatient clinic for radio-oncological follow-up on 09/24/2021. Physical Examination: Patient in reduced general condition (KPS 60%, 86 kg,188 cm). Weight loss 0°, MUST score: 0, pain VAS 1-2/10, fatigue I°, dysphagia I° with solid food (liquids occasionally flow out of the nose again when swallowing), aspiration 0°, ulcer 0°, trismus 0°, taste disorder I° (present in approx. 80%), xerostomia I°, osteonecrosis 0°, hypothyroidism II°, hoarseness II°, hearing loss, I°, dyspnea: 0°, pneumonitis 0°, nausea/vomiting 0°. No suspicious lymph nodes palpable, movement restrictions I° head reclination restricted with tension and pain, subcutaneous fibrosis: I°, hyperpigmentation: I°, mucositis 0°, lymphedema I° (lymphatic drainage), telangiectasia 0°. MR neck plain + contrast agent on 09/24/2021: [Technique]{.underline}: STIR triplanar, T1 ax -/+ contrast agent, T1 mDixon cor after contrast agent. [Findings]{.underline}: Known status post tumor resection with laryngectomy for extensive recurrence of oropharyngeal Carcinoma; Follow-up after RTx. Somewhat increasing swelling of nasopharynx to oropharynx. From the uvula the swelling is stable. As far as can be assessed, no clear recurrence-specific tissue proliferation or contrast uptake. Unchanged accentuated lymph nodes in level Ib/IIa on the left (one exemplary measured lymph node borderline large, idem to preliminary examination). Mastoid cells minimally displaced on the left. Moderate degenerative changes of the cervical spine. Assessment. Increasing swelling of the naso- to oropharynx. Neopharynx unchanged swollen. No evidence of malignancy-suspicious lymph nodes. CT scan of the thorax on 09/24/2021: Size-constant visualization of interlobar oval compaction in the left upper lobe corresponding to an interlobar lymph node. New to the previous examination, two small nodular condensations appear, basal in the right and in the left lower lobe, differentially inflammatory; follow-up is recommended. Unchanged the prominent mediastinal lymph nodes, constant in size and number. Current Recommendations: Primary oncologic care and follow-up including imaging will take place via the ENT clinic on 01/14/22 at 11:00 AM. A re-appointment for the next radio-oncological follow-up has been arranged for 01/14/2022 at 1:00 PM in our radiotherapy outpatient clinic in the Tumor Therapy Center. Lab results upon Discharge: Hematology Parameter Result Reference ---------------- ------------- ----------------------- WBC 6,900 /μL 4,500 - 11,000 /μL RBC 2.7M /μL 4.5M - 5.9M /μL Hemoglobin 8.2 g/dL 14 - 18 g/dL Hematocrit 25.1 % 40 - 48 % MCH 31.27 pg 27 - 33 pg MCV 94 fL 82 - 92 fL MCHC 32.7 g/dL 32 - 36 g/dL Platelets 638,000 /μL 150,000 - 450,000 /μL Serum chemistry Parameter Result Reference ---------------- ------------ ----------------- Sodium 144 mEq/L 135 - 145 mEq/L Potassium 4.8 mEq/L 3.5 - 5.0 mEq/L Creatinine 1.3 mg/dL 0.7 - 1.3 mg/dL ALT 21 U/L 10 - 50 U/L eGFR 55 mL/min \> 90 mL/min CRP 2.9 mg/dL \< 0.5 mg/dL Coagulation Parameter Result Reference ---------------- ------------ --------------- PT 93 % 70 - 120 % INR 1.1 0.8 - 1.2 aPTT 31 sec 26 - 37 sec Thyroid hormones Parameter Result Reference ---------------- ------------- ------------------ TSH 1.16 μIU/mL 0.4 - 4.2 μIU/mL fT3 2.38 pg/mL 2.3 - 4.2 pg/mL fT4 1.70 ng/dL 0.9 - 1.7 ng/dL ### Patient Report 5 Dear colleague, We are reporting on Mr. Paul Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who was admitted to our hospital from 01/10/2022 to 01/27/2022. Diagnosis: Metachronous pulmonary metastatic squamous cell carcinoma Diagnoses: - Tongue base Carcinoma ICD-10: C01, stage: pT1 pN0 (0/21) L0 V0 Pn0 G2 RX - Since 03/2014 Odynophagia - 05/14/2014 Panendoscopy, biopsy, and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014 Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III Other Diagnoses: - Arterial hypertension - Diabetes mellitus type II - Status post liver surgery 2013 - Status post endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Planned Surgical Procedure: - Perioperative bronchoscopy - Left-sided video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery - Pleurolysis - Anatomical upper lobe resection - Systematic mediastinal, hilar, and interlobar lymph node dissection - Placement of double chest drains Medical History: Mr. Paul Doe initially presented with a diagnosis of pT1, pN0 (0/21, ECE negative), cM0, Pn0, G2, RX, L0, V0, left midline tongue carcinoma. Panendoscopy with specimen collection on 04/14/2014 and 04/26/2014 confirmed carcinoma. Surgical resection was performed via lateral pharyngotomy and neck dissection. Histology confirmed squamous cell carcinoma. He subsequently received radiotherapy. During a follow-up CT examination, a suspicious lesion was identified in the lung, which raised concerns regarding the possibility of metastasis originating from the previously diagnosed left midline tongue carcinoma (pT1, pN0, G2, RX). Current Presentation: Mr. Doe was admitted for further examination and treatment to assess the behavior and extent of the lesion. Clinically, Mr. Doe was in stable general condition and had no symptoms suggestive of B symptoms. Therapy and Progression: The above-mentioned procedure was performed without complications on 01/10/2022. Histologically, the final resection specimen confirmed the presence of a 2.9 cm squamous cell carcinoma, consistent with a metastatic recurrence of the previously known hypopharyngeal carcinoma. The dissected lymph nodes were free of tumor. The postoperative course was uneventful. In the absence of any complications, surgical sutures were removed on day 10 after surgery. A current chest X-ray showed a regular postoperative outcome with sufficient expansion of the left lobe. Further monitoring is recommended by the treating colleagues in this regard. Mr. Doe is also connected to the radiation therapy team for ongoing follow-up. If there are any complications or questions, please contact the relevant ward or reach out to our Central Patient Management. Outside regular working hours, you can contact the on-call colleague in the Abdominal Surgery department for assistance. For further information on the patient\'s discharge management, treating providers are available for inquiries from Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 7 PM, as well as on weekends and holidays from 10 AM to 2 PM. Mr. Doe was discharged from the hospital on 01/27/2022. Addition: Histology Report: Resected left upper lobe specimen with a 2.9 cm solid carcinoma. The histological picture is consistent with a metastasis from the previously diagnosed non-keratinizing squamous cell carcinoma. There were focal vascular invasions. No pleural invasion was observed. The resection was complete, with all dissected lymph nodes showing no tumor involvement. Chest X-ray, anterior-posterior view from 01/21/2022: [Clinical Information:]{.underline} History of VATS with wedge resection, yesterday\'s drain removal [Question:]{.underline} Follow-up, pneumothorax after drain removal? Infiltrates? Atelectasis? [Findings:]{.underline} Left chest drainage tube has been removed. Left apical pneumothorax line, measuring approximately 2.3 cm. Continued extensive shadowing of the left upper field, most likely postoperative, infiltrate cannot be definitively ruled out. Slightly hypotransparent left lung in comparison, most likely due to residual postoperative reduced ventilation. No effusion. Widened cardiac silhouette. Regression of dystelectasis in the right lower field. No acute signs of pulmonary venous congestion. Trachea is mid-positioned and not stenosed. Left-sided port catheter still in place. [Summary]{.underline}: Left apical corax with a width of 2.3 cm. Continued extensive shadowing of the left upper field, most likely postoperative, with infiltrate not definitively excluded. Residual postoperative reduced ventilation on the left side. Regression of dystelectasis in the right lower field. No effusion. No acute signs of pulmonary venous congestion. Follow-up recommended. Examinations Chest X-ray, anterior-posterior view from 01/23/2022: [Question]{.underline}: Follow-up. [Findings]{.underline}: Left apical pneumothorax, measuring approximately 1.4 cm. Extensive shadowing in projection onto the left upper lobe, differentials include postoperative changes, incipient infiltrate not excluded. Dystelectasis of the right lower field. No evidence of pleural effusion or acute pulmonary venous congestion. Cardiomegaly. Indwelling chest drainage with the catheter tip projecting onto the left upper lobe. Well-positioned port catheter tip projecting onto the right atrial entrance plane. No evidence of pleural effusion. Assessment Left apical pneumothorax, measuring approximately 1.4 cm, with indwelling left chest drainage. Extensive shadowing in projection onto the left upper lobe, differentials include postoperative changes, incipient infiltrate not excluded. Dystelectasis of the right lower field. No significant pleural effusion. No acute pulmonary venous congestion. Cardiomegaly. Chest X-ray, anterior-posterior view from 01/25/2022 [Previous Examinations]{.underline}: Appearance of a diffuse postoperative shadow in the left upper field. No evidence of pleural effusion, inflammatory infiltrate, or pulmonary venous congestion. [Findings]{.underline}: Left-sided chest port with the tip projecting onto the superior vena cava. The upper mediastinum is narrow, the trachea is mid-positioned and patent. [Assessment]{.underline}: The pneumothorax appears to be largely resolved. Urinanalysis: Material: Urine, midstream sample collected on 01/11/2022 - Antimicrobial inhibitors negative - No evidence of growth-inhibiting substances in the sample material. - Colony Count (CFU) / mL \<1,000, Assessment: A low colony count typically does not support a urinary tract infection. - Epithelial cells (microscopic) \<20 epithelial cells/μL - Leukocytes (microscopic) \<20 leukocytes/μL - Microorganisms (microscopic) 20-100 microorganisms/μL Pathogen Enterococci Lab values upon Discharge: Parameter Result Reference Range -------------------- --------------------- --------------------- Sodium 141 mEq/L 135 - 145 mEq/L Potassium 4.7 mEq/L 3.5 - 5.0 mEq/L Creatinine 1.1 mg/dL 0.7 - 1.3 mg/dL Calcium 10.4 mg/dL 8.8 - 10.6 mg/dL eGFR (MDRD) \> 60 mL/min/1.73m² \> 60 mL/min/1.73m² eGFR (CKD-EPI) 85 mL/min/1.73m² \> 90 mL/min/1.73m² C-Reactive Protein 5.0 mg/dL \< 0.5 mg/dL ### Patient Report 6 Dear colleague, We are reporting on Mr. Paul Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who presented to our surgical outpatient clinic on 01/24/2022. Diagnoses: Metachronous pulmonary metastatic squamous cell carcinoma at the base of the tongue. Surgical Procedure from 01/11/2022: - Perioperative bronchoscopy - Left-sided video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery - Pleurolysis - Anatomical upper lobe resection - Systematic mediastinal, hilar, and interlobar lymph node dissection - Placement of double chest drains Previous Diagnoses and Therapies: - Recurrent oropharyngeal carcinoma ICD-10: C01 - Stage: rpT2 rpN2(2/24, ECE -) L1 V0 Pn0 G2 R0 - Tumor localization: base of tongue, crossing midline - Since 04/2014: Odynophagia - 04/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III - 08-10/2015: radiotherapy of former PTR with 60 Gy à 2 Gy. - OSAS with CPAP incompliance <!-- --> - Liver cirrhosis with alcohol abuse - Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus type II - Arterial hypertension - History of endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Current Presentation: Mr. Doe presented for postoperative follow-up after his left-sided videothoracoscopic upper lobe resection due to previously diagnosed pulmonary metastatic hypopharyngeal carcinoma. Medical History: The patient\'s general condition is good. He is currently on intermittent as-needed analgesia with Acetaminophen. The final resection specimen histologically confirmed the presence of a 2.9 cm squamous cell carcinoma, consistent with a metastatic recurrence of the previously known hypopharyngeal carcinoma. The dissected lymph nodes were free of tumor. Therapy and Progression: During the follow-up appointment, Mr. Doe underwent a clinical examination and a chest X-ray to assess his postoperative condition. The examination revealed no new concerning findings, and Mr. Doe continued to remain in stable general condition. His surgical incision site was inspected, showing signs of satisfactory healing without any signs of infection or complications. Furthermore, Mr. Doe\'s lung function was evaluated through spirometry, which indicated adequate pulmonary function post-surgery. He was also provided with personalized recommendations for respiratory exercises to optimize his lung function during the recovery period. Current Recommendations: - Mr. Doe is connected to the radiation therapy team for ongoing follow-up. ### Patient Report 7 Dear colleague, We are reporting on Mr. Paul Doe, born on 08/08/1965, who presented to our surgical outpatient clinic on 01/24/2022. Diagnoses: Metachronous pulmonary metastatic squamous cell carcinoma at the base of the tongue. Surgery on 01/11/2022: - Left-sided video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery - Anatomical upper lobe resection - Systematic mediastinal, hilar, and interlobar lymph node dissection Previous Diagnoses and Therapies: - Recurrent oropharyngeal carcinoma ICD-10: C01 - Stage: rpT2 rpN2(2/24, ECE -) L1 V0 Pn0 G2 R0 - Tumor localization: base of tongue, crossing midline - Since 04/2014: Odynophagia - 04/14/2014: Panendoscopy, biopsy and initial diagnosis of left tongue base carcinoma. - 05/29/2014: Tumor resection and selective neck dissection LI-III - 08-10/2015 Radiotherapy of former PTR with 60 Gy à 2 Gy. Other Diagnoses: - OSAS with CPAP incompliance - Liver cirrhosis with alcohol abuse - Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus type II - Arterial hypertension - History of endoprosthetic hip treatment - Hypothyroidism - Oral thrush - Hypacusis Current Presentation: Mr. Doe presented for routine follow-up. Clinically, he remains in stable general condition, with no signs of B-symptoms. Medical History: The surgical procedure performed on 01/11/2022 involved perioperative bronchoscopy, left VATS, pleurolysis, anatomical upper lobe resection, systematic mediastinal, hilar, and interlobar lymph node dissection, as well as the placement of double chest drains. Histologically, the final resection specimen confirmed a 2.9 cm solid carcinoma, consistent with metastasis from the previously diagnosed squamous cell carcinoma. Lymph nodes dissected during the procedure were tumor-free. Mr. Doe\'s postoperative course was uneventful, and surgical sutures were removed on day 10 after surgery. Physical Examination: Patient in good general condition. Weight loss 0°, MUST score: 0, pain VAS 1-2/10, fatigue I°, dysphagia I° with solid food (liquids occasionally flow out of the nose again when swallowing), aspiration 0°, ulcer 0°, trismus 0°, taste disorder I° (present in approx. 80%), xerostomia I°, osteonecrosis 0°, hypothyroidism II°, hoarseness II°, hearing loss, I°, dyspnea: 0°, pneumonitis 0°, nausea/vomiting 0°. No suspicious lymph nodes palpable, movement restrictions I° head reclination restricted with tension and pain, subcutaneous fibrosis: I°, hyperpigmentation: I°, mucositis 0°, lymphedema I° (lymphatic drainage), telangiectasia 0°. Current Recommendations: Mr. Doe is advised to continue his follow-up appointments. Lab results upon Discharge: Parameter Results Reference Range -------------------------------- -------------- --------------------- Neutrophils 72.2 % 42.0-77.0 % Lymphocytes 8.6 % 20.0-44.0 % Monocytes 11.6 % 2.0-9.5 % Basophils 1.4 % 0.0-1.8 % Eosinophils 6.0 % 0.5-5.5 % Immature Granulocytes 0.2 % 0.0-1.0 % Sodium 137 mEq/L 136-145 mEq/L Potassium 4.2 mEq/L 3.5-4.5 mEq/L Calcium 9.24 mg/dL 8.8-10.2 mg/dL Chloride 100 mEq/L 98-107 mEq/L Creatinine 1.27 mg/dL 0.70-1.20 mg/dL BUN 48 mg/dL 17-48 mg/dL Uric Acid 5.2 mg/dL 3.6-8.2 mg/dL CRP 0.8 mg/L \< 5.0 mg/L PSA 2.31 ng/mL \< 4.40 ng/mL ALT 12 U/L \< 41 U/L AST 38 U/L \< 50 U/L Alkaline Phosphatase 115 U/L 40-130 U/L GGT 20 U/L 8-61 U/L LDH 335 U/L 135-250 U/L Testosterone \<0.03 ng/mL 1.32-8.92 ng/mL TSH 1.42 mIU/L 0.27-4.20 mIU/L Hemoglobin 10.1 g/dL 12.5-17.2 g/dL Hematocrit 28.5 % 37.0-49.0 % RBC 3.3 M/µL 4.0-5.6 M/µL WBC 4.98 K/µL 3.90-10.50 K/µL Platelets 281 K/µL 150-370 K/µL MCV 85.6 fL 80.0-101.0 fL MCH 30.3 pg 27.0-34.0 pg MCHC 35.4 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL MPV 9.2 fL 7.0-12.0 fL RDW 13.4 % 11.5-15.0 % Absolute Neutrophils 3.59 K/µL 1.50-7.70 K/µL Absolute Immature Granulocytes 0.010 K/µL \< 0.050 K/µL Absolute Lymphocytes 0.43 K/µL 1.10-4.50 K/µL Absolute Monocytes 0.58 K/µL 0.10-0.90 K/µL Absolute Eosinophils 0.30 K/µL 0.02-0.50 K/µL Absolute Basophils 0.07 K/µL 0.00-0.20 K/µL Reticulocytes 31.3 K/µL 25.0-105.0 K/µL Reticulocyte % 0.94 % 0.50-2.00 % Ret-Hb 33.9 pg 28.5-34.5 pg PT 112 % \> 78 % INR 0.95 \< 1.25 aPTT 30.2 sec. 25.0-38.0 sec.	07/27/2014 - 09/06/2014
Why does Paul think an alien wouldn't be able to hide on Earth? A. Aliens don't look like Earthlings. B. An alien would not be able to mimic a human enough to fit in with society. C. An alien wouldn't be able to assimilate into Earth's backward culture. D. The Earth has so many intelligence agencies, at least one would be watching when an alien gave itself away.	One can't be too cautious about the people one meets in Tangier. They're all weirdies of one kind or another. Me? Oh, I'm A Stranger Here Myself By MACK REYNOLDS The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid. It's quite a town, Tangier. King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange. You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by. Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans—from both sides of the Curtain. In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something. In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these. Like I said, it's quite a town. I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?" He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone. Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years." The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports. "What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly. "Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer." He grunted. "Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite." "They have, eh? How big?" "Several times bigger than anything we Americans have." The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too. Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?" "What flying saucers?" A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her. "You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one." "That's an idea," I said. We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest. My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States. Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers." He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace." "Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader , or something." Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?" I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil. I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense." Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?" "Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress." Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do." A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her. I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars." "Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life." "Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?" "I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?" "Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it." Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different." I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility." "I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there." I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going ?" "Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like." Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer. Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him." I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier." "Why Tangier?" "It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living." "That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?" "California," I told him. "No, you're not," he grinned. I was taken aback. "What do you mean?" "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?" "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?" "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him. "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?" "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in—well shielded, of course—and get their kicks watching it." Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.	D. The Earth has so many intelligence agencies, at least one would be watching when an alien gave itself away.
What datasets were used for this work?	### Introduction The extraction of temporal relations among events is an important natural language understanding (NLU) task that can benefit many downstream tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and narrative generation. The task can be modeled as building a graph for a given text, whose nodes represent events and edges are labeled with temporal relations correspondingly. Figure FIGREF1 illustrates such a graph for the text shown therein. The nodes assassination, slaughtered, rampage, war, and Hutu are the candidate events, and different types of edges specify different temporal relations between them: assassination is BEFORE rampage, rampage INCLUDES slaughtered, and the relation between slaughtered and war is VAGUE. Since “Hutu” is actually not an event, a system is expected to annotate the relations between “Hutu” and all other nodes in the graph as NONE (i.e., no relation). As far as we know, all existing systems treat this task as a pipeline of two separate subtasks, i.e., event extraction and temporal relation classification, and they also assume that gold events are given when training the relation classifier BIBREF0, BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5. Specifically, they built end-to-end systems that extract events first and then predict temporal relations between them (Fig. FIGREF1). In these pipeline models, event extraction errors will propagate to the relation classification step and cannot be corrected afterwards. Our first contribution is the proposal of a joint model that extracts both events and temporal relations simultaneously (see Fig. FIGREF1). The motivation is that if we train the relation classifier with NONE relations between non-events, then it will potentially have the capability of correcting event extraction mistakes. For instance in Fig. FIGREF1, if the relation classifier predicts NONE for (Hutu, war) with a high confidence, then this is a strong signal that can be used by the event classifier to infer that at least one of them is not an event. Our second contribution is that we improve event representations by sharing the same contextualized embeddings and neural representation learner between the event extraction and temporal relation extraction modules for the first time. On top of the shared embeddings and neural representation learner, the proposed model produces a graph-structured output representing all the events and relations in the given sentences. A valid graph prediction in this context should satisfy two structural constraints. First, the temporal relation should always be NONE between two non-events or between one event and one non-event. Second, for those temporal relations among events, no loops should exist due to the transitive property of time (e.g., if A is before B and B is before C, then A must be before C). The validity of a graph is guaranteed by solving an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem with those structural constraints, and our joint model is trained by structural support vector machines (SSVM) in an end-to-end fashion. Results show that, according to the end-to-end $F_1$ score for temporal relation extraction, the proposed method improves CAEVO BIBREF3 by 10% on TB-Dense, and improves CogCompTime BIBREF6 by 6.8% on MATRES. We further show ablation studies to confirm that the proposed joint model with shared representations and structured learning is very effective for this task. ### Related Work In this section we briefly summarize the existing work on event extraction and temporal relation extraction. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work on joint event and relation extraction, so we will review joint entity and relation extraction works instead. Existing event extraction methods in the temporal relation domain, as in the TempEval3 workshop BIBREF2, all use conventional machine learning models (logistic regression, SVM, or Max-entropy) with hand-engineered features (e.g., ClearTK BIBREF7 and NavyTime BIBREF8). While other domains have shown progress on event extraction using neural methods BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11, recent progress in the temporal relation domain is focused more on the setting where gold events are provided. Therefore, we first show the performance of a neural event extractor on this task, although it is not our main contribution. Early attempts on temporal relation extraction use local pair-wise classification with hand-engineered features BIBREF12, BIBREF0, BIBREF13, BIBREF14. Later efforts, such as ClearTK BIBREF7, UTTime BIBREF15, NavyTime BIBREF8, and CAEVO BIBREF3 improve earlier work with better linguistic and syntactic rules. BIBREF16, BIBREF4, BIBREF17 explore structured learning for this task, and more recently, neural methods have also been shown effective BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20, BIBREF5. In practice, we need to extract both events and those temporal relations among them from raw text. All the works above treat this as two subtasks that are solved in a pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no existing work on joint event-temporal relation extraction. However, the idea of “joint” has been studied for entity-relation extraction in many works. BIBREF21 frame their joint model as table filling tasks, map tabular representation into sequential predictions with heuristic rules, and construct global loss to compute the best joint predictions. BIBREF22 define a global structure for joint entity and relation extraction, encode local and global features based on domain and linguistic knowledge. and leverage beam-search to find global optimal assignments for entities and relations. BIBREF23 leverage LSTM architectures to jointly predict both entity and relations, but fall short on ensuring prediction consistency. BIBREF24 combine the benefits of both neural net and global optimization with beam search. Motivated by these works, we propose an end-to-end trainable neural structured support vector machine (neural SSVM) model to simultaneously extract events and their relations from text and ensure the global structure via ILP constraints. Next, we will describe in detail our proposed method. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model In this section we first provide an overview of our neural SSVM model, and then describe each component in our framework in detail (i.e., the multi-tasking neural scoring module, and how inference and learning are performed). We denote the set of all possible relation labels (including NONE) as $\mathcal {R}$, all event candidates (both events and non-events) as $\mathcal {E}$, and all relation candidates as $\mathcal {E}\mathcal {E}$. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: Neural SSVM Our neural SSVM adapts the SSVM loss as: where $\bar{S}^n_{\mathcal {E}} = S(\hat{y}^n_\mathcal {E}; x^n) - S(y^n_\mathcal {E};x^n)$ and $\bar{S}^n_{\mathcal {R}} = S(\hat{y}^n_\mathcal {R}; x^n) - S(y^n_\mathcal {R};x^n)$ ; $\Phi $ denotes model parameters, $n$ indexes instances, $M^n = \|\mathcal {E}\|^n + \|\mathcal {E}\mathcal {E}\|^n$ denotes the total number of relations $\|\mathcal {E}\|^n$ and events $\|\mathcal {E}\mathcal {E}\|^n$ in instance $n$. $y^n,\hat{y}^n$ denote the gold and predicted global assignments of events and relations for instance $n$—each of which consists of either one hot vector representing true and predicted relation labels $y_{\mathcal {R}}^n, \hat{y}_{\mathcal {R}}^n \in \lbrace 0, 1\rbrace ^{\|\mathcal {E}\mathcal {E}\|}$, or entity labels $y_{\mathcal {E}}^n, \hat{y}_{\mathcal {E}}^n \in \lbrace 0, 1\rbrace ^{\|\mathcal {E}\|}$. A maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) inference is needed to find $\hat{y}^n$, which we formulate as an interger linear programming (ILP) problem and describe more details in Section SECREF12. $\Delta (y^n, \hat{y}^n)$ is a distance measurement between the gold and the predicted assignments; we simply use the Hamming distance. $C$ and $C_{\mathcal {E}}$ are the hyper-parameters to balance the losses between event, relation and the regularizer, and $S(y^n_\mathcal {E};x^n), S(y^n_\mathcal {R};x^n)$ are scoring functions, which we design a multi-tasking neural architecture to learn. The intuition behind the SSVM loss is that it requires the score of gold output structure $y^n$ to be greater than the score of the best output structure under the current model $\hat{y}^n$ with a margin $\Delta (y^n, \hat{y}^n)$ or else there will be some loss. The training objective is to minimize the loss. The major difference between our neural-SSVM and the traditional SSVM model is the scoring function. Traditional SSVM uses a linear function over hand-crafted features to compute the scores, whereas we propose to use a recurrent neural network to estimate the scoring function and train the entire architecture end-to-end. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: Multi-Tasking Neural Scoring Function The recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture has been widely adopted by prior temporal extraction work to encode context information BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20. Motivated by these works, we adopt a RNN-based scoring function for both event and relation prediction in order to learn features in a data driven way and capture long-term contexts in the input. In Fig. FIGREF6, we skip the input layer for simplicity. The bottom layer corresponds to contextualized word representations denoted as $v_k$. We use ($i, j$) $\in \mathcal {E}\mathcal {E}$ to denote a candidate relation and $i \in \mathcal {E}$ to indicate a candidate event in the input sentences of length N. We fix word embeddings computed by a pre-trained BERT-base model BIBREF27. They are then fed into a BiLSTM layer to further encode task-specific contextual information. Both event and relation tasks share this layer. The event scorer is illustrated by the left two branches following the BiLSTM layer. We simply concatenate both forward and backward hidden vectors to encode the context of each token. As for the relation scorer shown in the right branches, for each pair ($i,j$) we take the forward and backward hidden vectors corresponding to them, $f_i, b_i, f_j, b_j$, and concatenate them with linguistic features as in previous event relation prediction research. We denote linguistic features as $L_{i,j}$ and only use simple features provided in the original datasets: token distance, tense, and polarity of events. Finally, all hidden vectors and linguistic features are concatenated to form the input to compute the probability of being an event or a softmax distribution over all possible relation labels—which we refer to as the RNN-based scoring function in the following sections. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: MAP Inference A MAP inference is needed both during training to obtain $\hat{y}^n$ in the loss function (Equation DISPLAY_FORM8), as well as during the test time to get globally coherent assignments. We formulate the inference problem as an ILP problem. The inference framework is established by constructing a global objective function using scores from local scorers and imposing several global constraints: 1) one-label assignment, 2) event-relation consistency, and 3) symmetry and transitivity as in BIBREF28, BIBREF29, BIBREF30, BIBREF31, BIBREF4. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: MAP Inference ::: Objective Function The objective function of the global inference is to find the global assignment that has the highest probability under the current model, as specified in Equation DISPLAY_FORM14: where $y^e_k$ is a binary indicator of whether the $k$-th candidate is an event or not, and $y^r_{i,j}$ is a binary indicator specifying whether the global prediction of the relation between $(i,j)$ is $r \in \mathcal {R}$. $S(y^e_k,x), \forall e \in \lbrace 0, 1\rbrace $ and $S(y^r_{i,j},x), \forall r \in \mathcal {R}$ are the scoring functions obtained from the event and relation scoring functions, respectively. The output of the global inference $\bf {\hat{y}}$ is a collection of optimal label assignments for all events and relation candidates in a fixed context. $C_{\mathcal {E}}$ is a hyper-parameter controlling weights between relation and event. The constraint that follows immediately from the objective function is that the global inference should only assign one label for all entities and relations. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: MAP Inference ::: Constraints We introduce several additional constraints to ensure the resulting optimal output graph forms a valid and plausible event graph. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: MAP Inference ::: Constraints ::: Event-Relation Consistency. Event and relation prediction consistency is defined with the following property: a pair of input tokens have a positive temporal relation if and only if both tokens are events. The following global constraints will satisfy this property, where $e^P_i$ denotes an event and $e^N_i$ denotes a non-event token. $r^P_{i,j}$ indicates positive relations: BEFORE, AFTER, SIMULTANEOUS, INCLUDES, IS_INCLUDED, VAGUE and $r^N_{i,j}$ indicate a negative relation, i.e., NONE. A formal proof of this property can be found in Appendix A. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: MAP Inference ::: Constraints ::: Symmetry and Transitivity Constraint. We also explore the symmetry and transitivity constraints of relations. They are specified as follows: Intuitively, the symmetry constraint forces two pairs of events with flipping orders to have reversed relations. For example, if $r_{i,j}$ = BEFORE, then $r_{j,i}$ = AFTER. The transitivity constraint rules that if ($i,j$), ($j,k$) and ($i,k$) pairs exist in the graph, the label (relation) prediction of ($i,k$) pair has to fall into the transitivity set specifyed by ($i,j$) and ($j,k$) pairs. The full transitivity table can be found in BIBREF25. ### Joint Event-Relation Extraction Model ::: Learning We begin by experimenting with optimizing SSVM loss directly, but model performance degrades. Therefore, we develop a two-state learning approach which first trains a pipeline version of the joint model without feedback from global constraints. In other words, the local neural scoring functions are optimized with cross-entropy loss using gold events and relation candidates that are constructed directly from the outputs of the event model. During the second stage, we switch to the global SSVM loss function in Equation DISPLAY_FORM8 and re-optimize the network to adjust for global properties. We will provide more details in Section SECREF4. ### Implementation Details In this section we describe implementation details of the baselines and our four models to build an end-to-end event temporal relation extraction system with an emphasis on the structured joint model. In Section SECREF6 we will compare and contrast them and show why our proposed structured joint model works the best. ### Implementation Details ::: Baselines We run two event and relation extraction systems, CAEVO BIBREF3 and CogCompTime BIBREF6, on TB-Dense and MATRES, respectively. These two methods both leverage conventional learning algorithms (i.e., MaxEnt and averaged perceptron, respectively) based on manually designed features to obtain separate models for events and temporal relations, and conduct end-to-end relation extraction as a pipeline. Note BIBREF3 does not report event and end-to-end temporal relation extraction performances, so we calculate the scores per our implementation. ### Implementation Details ::: End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction ::: Single-Task Model. The most basic way to build an end-to-end system is to train separate event detection and relation prediction models with gold labels, as we mentioned in our introduction. In other words, the BiLSTM layer is not shared as in Fig. FIGREF6. During evaluation and test time, we use the outputs from the event detection model to construct relation candidates and apply the relation prediction model to make the final prediction. ### Implementation Details ::: End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction ::: Multi-Task Model. This is the same as the single-task model except that the BiLSTM layer is now shared for both event and relation tasks. Note that both single-task and multi-task models are not trained to tackle the NONE relation directly. They both rely on the predictions of the event model to annotate relations as either positive pairs or NONE. ### Implementation Details ::: End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction ::: Pipeline Joint Model. This shares the same architecture as the multi-task model, except that during training, we use the predictions of the event model to construct relation candidates to train the relation model. This strategy will generate NONE pairs during training if one argument of the relation candidate is not an event. These NONE pairs will help the relation model to distinguish negative relations from positive ones, and thus become more robust to event prediction errors. We train this model with gold events and relation candidates during the first several epochs in order to obtain a relatively accurate event model and switch to a pipeline version afterwards inspired by BIBREF23. ### Implementation Details ::: End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction ::: Structured Joint Model. This is described in detail in Section SECREF3. However, we experience difficulties in training the model with SSVM loss from scratch. This is due to large amounts of non-event tokens, and the model is not capable of distinguishing them in the beginning. We thus adopt a two-stage learning procedure where we take the best pipeline joint model and re-optimize it with the SSVM loss. To restrict the search space for events in the ILP inference of the SSVM loss, we use the predicted probabilities from the event detection model to filter out non-events since the event model has a strong performance, as shown in Section SECREF6. Note that this is very different from the pipeline model where events are first predicted and relations are constructed with predicted events. Here, we only leverage an additional hyper-parameter $T_{evt}$ to filter out highly unlikely event candidates. Both event and relation labels are assigned simutaneously during the global inference with ILP, as specified in Section SECREF12. We also filter out tokens with POS tags that do not appear in the training set as most of the events are either nouns or verbs in TB-Dense, and all events are verbs in MATRES. ### Implementation Details ::: End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction ::: Hyper-Parameters. All single-task, multi-task and pipeline joint models are trained by minimizing cross-entropy loss. We observe that model performances vary significantly with dropout ratio, hidden layer dimensions of the BiLSTM model and entity weight in the loss function (with relation weight fixed at 1.0). We leverage a pre-trained BERT model to compute word embedding and all MLP scoring functions have one hidden layer. In the SSVM loss function, we fix the value of $C = 1$, but fine-tune $C_\mathcal {E}$ in the objective function in Equation DISPLAY_FORM14. Hyper-parameters are chosen using a standard development set for TB-Dense and a random holdout-set based on an 80/20 split of training data for MATRES. To solve ILP in the inference process, we leverage an off-the-shelf solver provided by Gurobi optimizer; i.e. the best solutions from the Gurobi optimizer are inputs to the global training. The best combination of hyper-parameters can be found in Table 9 in our appendix. ### Experimental Setup In this section we first provide a brief overview of temporal relation data and describe the specific datasets used in this paper. We also explain the evaluation metrics at the end. ### Experimental Setup ::: Temporal Relation Data Temporal relation corpora such as TimeBank BIBREF32 and RED BIBREF33 facilitate the research in temporal relation extraction. The common issue in these corpora is missing annotations. Collecting densely annotated temporal relation corpora with all events and relations fully annotated is reported to be a challenging task as annotators could easily overlook some facts BIBREF34, BIBREF35, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, which made both modeling and evaluation extremely difficult in previous event temporal relation research. The TB-Dense dataset mitigates this issue by forcing annotators to examine all pairs of events within the same or neighboring sentences, and it has been widely evaluated on this task BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF19, BIBREF5. Recent data construction efforts such as MATRES BIBREF25 further enhance the data quality by using a multi-axis annotation scheme and adopting a start-point of events to improve inter-annotator agreements. We use TB-Dense and MATRES in our experiments and briefly summarize the data statistics in Table TABREF33. ### Experimental Setup ::: Evaluation Metrics To be consistent with previous research, we adopt two different evaluation metrics. The first one is the standard micro-average scores. For densely annotated data, the micro-average metric should share the same precision, recall and F1 scores. However, since our joint model includes NONE pairs, we follow the convention of IE tasks and exclude them from evaluation. The second one is similar except that we exclude both NONE and VAGUE pairs following BIBREF6. Please refer to Figure 4 in the appendix for a visualizations of the two metrics. ### Results and Analysis The main results of this paper can be found in Table TABREF34. All best-recall and F1 scores are achieved by our structured joint model, and the results outperform the baseline systems by 10.0% and 6.8% on end-to-end relation extraction per F1 scores and 3.5% and 2.6% on event extraction per F1 scores. The best precision score for the TB-Dense dataset is achieved by CAEVO, which indicates that the linguistic rule-based system can make highly precise predictions by being conservative. Table TABREF35 shows a more detailed analysis, in which we can see that our single-task models with BERT embeddings and a BiLSTM encoder already outperform the baseline systems on end-to-end relation extraction tasks by 4.9% and 4.4% respectively. In the following sections we discuss step-by-step improvement by adopting multi-task, pipeline joint, and structured joint models on end-to-end relation extraction, event extraction, and relation extraction on gold event pairs. ### Results and Analysis ::: End-to-End Relation Extraction ::: TB-Dense. The improvements over the single-task model per F1 score are 4.1% and 4.2% for the multi-task and pipeline joint model respectively. This indicates that the pipeline joint model is helpful only marginally. Table TABREF46 shows that the structured joint model improves both precision and recall scores for BEFORE and AFTER and achieves the best end-to-end relation extraction performance at 49.4%—which outperforms the baseline system by 10.0% and the single-task model by 5.1%. ### Results and Analysis ::: End-to-End Relation Extraction ::: MATRES. Compared to the single-task model, the multi-task model improves F1 scores by 1.5%, while the pipeline joint model improves F1 scores by 1.3%—which means that pipeline joint training does not bring any gains for MATRES. The structured joint model reaches the best end-to-end F1 score at 59.6%, which outperforms the baseline system by 6.8% and the single-task model by 2.4%. We speculate that the gains come from the joint model's ability to help deal with NONE pairs, since recall scores for BEFORE and AFTER increase by 1.5% and 1.1% respectively (Table 10 in our appendix). ### Results and Analysis ::: Event Extraction ::: TB-Dense. Our structured joint model out-performs the CAEVO baseline by 3.5% and the single-task model by 1.3%. Improvements on event extraction can be difficult because our single-task model already works quite well with a close-to 89% F1 score, while the inter-annotator agreement for events in TimeBank documents is merely 87% BIBREF2. ### Results and Analysis ::: Event Extraction ::: MATRES. The structured model outperforms the the baseline model and the single-task model by 2.6% and 0.9% respectively. However, we observe that the multi-task model has a slight drop in event extraction performance over the single-task model (86.4% vs. 86.9%). This indicates that incorporating relation signals are not particularly helpful for event extraction on MATRES. We speculate that one of the reasons could be the unique event characteristics in MATERS. As we described in Section SECREF32, all events in MATRES are verbs. It is possible that a more concentrated single-task model works better when events are homogeneous, whereas a multi-task model is more powerful when we have a mixture of event types, e.g., both verbs and nouns as in TB-Dense. ### Results and Analysis ::: Relation Extraction with Gold Events ::: TB-Dense. There is much prior work on relation extraction based on gold events in TB-Dense. meng2018context proposed a neural model with global information that achieved the best results as far as we know. The improvement of our single-task model over that baseline is mostly attributable to the adoption of BERT embedding. We show that sharing the LSTM layer for both events and relations can help further improve performance of the relation classification task by 2.6%. For the joint models, since we do not train them on gold events, the evaluation would be meaningless. We simply skip this evaluation. ### Results and Analysis ::: Relation Extraction with Gold Events ::: MATRES. Both single-task and multi-task models outperform the baseline by nearly 10%, while the improvement of multi-task over single task is marginal. In MATRES, a relation pair is equivalent to a verb pair, and thus the event prediction task probably does not provide much more information for relation extraction. In Table TABREF46 we further show the breakdown performances for each positive relation on TB-Dense. The breakdown on MATRES is shown in Table 10 in the appendix. BEFORE, AFTER and VAGUE are the three dominant label classes in TB-Dense. We observe that the linguistic rule-based model, CAEVO, tends to have a more evenly spread-out performance, whereas our neural network-based models are more likely to have concentrated predictions due to the imbalance of the training sample across different label classes. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Label Imbalance. One way to mitigate the label imbalance issue is to increase the sample weights for small classes during model training. We investigate the impact of class weights by refitting our single-task model with larger weights on INCLUDES, IS_INCLUDED and VAGUE in the cross-entropy loss. Figure FIGREF50 shows that increasing class weights up to 4 times can significantly improve the F1 scores of INCLUDES and IS_INCLUDED classes with a decrease less than 2% for the overall F1 score. Performance of INCLUDES and IS_INCLUDED eventually degrades when class weights are too large. These results seem to suggest that more labels are needed in order to improve the performance on both of these two classes and the overall model. For SIMULTANEOUS, our model does not make any correct predictions for both TB-DENSE and MATRES by increasing class weight up to 10 times, which implies that SIMULTANEOUS could be a hard temporal relation to predict in general. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Global Constraints. In Table TABREF51 we conduct an ablation study to understand the contributions from the event-relation prediction consistency constraint and the temporal relation transitivity constraint for the structured joint model. As we can see, the event-relation consistency help s improve the F1 scores by 0.9% and 1% for TB-Dense and MATRES, respectively, but the gain by using transitivity is either non-existing or marginal. We hypothesize two potential reasons: 1) We leveraged BERT contextualized embedding as word representation, which could tackle transitivity in the input context; 2) NONE pairs could make transitivity rule less useful, as positive pairs can be predicted as NONE and transitivity rule does not apply to NONE pairs. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Error Analysis. By comparing gold and predicted labels for events and temporal relations and examining predicted probabilities for events, we identified three major sources of mistakes made by our structured model, as illustrated in Table TABREF57 with examples. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Type 1. Both events in Ex 1 are assigned low scores by the event module ($<< 0.01$). Although the structured joint model is designed to predict events and relations jointly, we leverage the event module to filter out tokens with scores lower than a threshold. Consequently, some true events can be mistakenly predicted as non-events, and the relation pairs including them are automatically assigned NONE. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Type 2. In Ex 2 the event module assigns high scores to tokens happened (0.97) and according (0.89), but according is not an event. When the structured model makes inference jointly, the decision will weigh heavily towards assigning 1 (event) to both tokens. With the event-relation consistency constraint, this pair is highly likely to be predicted as having a positive temporal relation. Nearly all mistakes made in this category follow the same pattern illustrated by this example. ### Results and Analysis ::: Discussion ::: Type 3. The existence of VAGUE makes temporal relation prediction challenging as it can be easily confused with other temporal relations, as shown in Ex 3. This challenge is compounded with NONE in our end-to-end extraction task. Type 1 and Type 2 errors suggest that building a stronger event detection module will be helpful for both event and temporal relation extraction tasks. To improve the performance on VAGUE pairs, we could either build a stronger model that incorporates both contextual information and commonsense knowledge or create datasets with annotations that better separate VAGUE from other positive temporal relations. ### Conclusion In this paper we investigate building an end-to-end event temporal relation extraction system. We propose a novel neural structured prediction model with joint representation learning to make predictions on events and relations simultaneously; this can avoid error propagation in previous pipeline systems. Experiments and comparative studies on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model is effective for end-to-end event temporal relation extraction. Specifically, we improve the performances of previously published systems by 10% and 6.8% on the TB-Dense and MATRES datasets, respectively. Future research can focus on creating more robust structured constraints between events and relations, especially considering event types, to improve the quality of global assignments using ILP. Since a better event model is generally helpful for relation extraction, another promising direction would be to incorporate multiple datasets to enhance the performance of our event extraction systems. ### Acknowledgements This work is supported in part by Contracts W911NF-15-1-0543 and HR0011-18-2-0052 with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. Figure 1: An illustration of event and relation models in our proposed joint framework. (a) is a (partial) graph of the output of the relation extraction model. “Hutu” is not an event and hence all relations including it should be annotated as NONE. (b) and (c) are comparisons between a pipeline model and our joint model. Figure 2: Deep neural network architecture for joint structured learning. Note that on the structured learning layer, grey bars denote tokens being predicted as events. Edge types between events follow the same notations as in 1a. yel = 0 (non-event), so all edges connecting to yel are NONE. y e i = 1, y e j = 1, y e k = 1 (events) and hence edges between them are forced to be the same (yrij = y r jk = y r ik = BEFORE in this example) by transitivity. These global assignments are input to compute the SSVM loss. Table 1: Data overview. Note that the numbers reported for MATRES do not include the AQUAINT section. Table 2: Event and Relation Extraction Results on TB-Dense and MATRES Table 3: Further ablation studies on event and relation extractions. Relation (G) denotes train and evaluate using gold events to compose relation candidates, whereas Relation (E) means end-to-end relation extraction. † is the event extraction and pipeline relation extraction F1 scores for CAEVO (Chambers et al., 2014). 57.0‡ is the best previously reported micro-average score for temporal relation extraction based on gold events by Meng and Rumshisky (2018). All MATRES baseline results are provided by Ning et al. (2018c). Table 4: Model performance breakdown for TB-Dense. “-” indicates no predictions were made for that particular label, probably due to the small size of the training sample. BEFORE (B), AFTER (A), INCLUDES (I), IS INCLUDED (II), SIMULTANEOUS (S), VAGUE (V) Table 5: Label Size Breakdown in the Test Data Figure 3: Performances from a single-task relation model under different class weights. Left-axis: overall model; right-axis: two minority relations. Table 6: Ablation Study on Global Constraints Table 7: Error Types Based on MATRES Test Data	TB-Dense, MATRES
How is the accuracy of the system measured?	### Introduction In recent years, the spread of misinformation has become a growing concern for researchers and the public at large BIBREF1 . Researchers at MIT found that social media users are more likely to share false information than true information BIBREF2 . Due to renewed focus on finding ways to foster healthy political conversation, the profile of factcheckers has been raised. Factcheckers positively influence public debate by publishing good quality information and asking politicians and journalists to retract misleading or false statements. By calling out lies and the blurring of the truth, they make those in positions of power accountable. This is a result of labour intensive work that involves monitoring the news for spurious claims and carrying out rigorous research to judge credibility. So far, it has only been possible to scale their output upwards by hiring more personnel. This is problematic because newsrooms need significant resources to employ factcheckers. Publication budgets have been decreasing, resulting in a steady decline in the size of their workforce BIBREF0 . Factchecking is not a directly profitable activity, which negatively affects the allocation of resources towards it in for-profit organisations. It is often taken on by charities and philanthropists instead. To compensate for this shortfall, our strategy is to harness the latest developments in NLP to make factchecking more efficient and therefore less costly. To this end, the new field of automated factchecking has captured the imagination of both non-profits and start-ups BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 . It aims to speed up certain aspects of the factchecking process rather than create AI that can replace factchecking personnel. This includes monitoring claims that are made in the news, aiding decisions about which statements are the most important to check and automatically retrieving existing factchecks that are relevant to a new claim. The claim detection and claim clustering methods that we set out in this paper can be applied to each of these. We sought to devise a system that would automatically detect claims in articles and compare them to previously submitted claims. Storing the results to allow a factchecker's work on one of these claims to be easily transferred to others in the same cluster. ### Related Work It is important to decide what sentences are claims before attempting to cluster them. The first such claim detection system to have been created is ClaimBuster BIBREF6 , which scores sentences with an SVM to determine how likely they are to be politically pertinent statements. Similarly, ClaimRank BIBREF7 uses real claims checked by factchecking institutions as training data in order to surface sentences that are worthy of factchecking. These methods deal with the question of what is a politically interesting claim. In order to classify the objective qualities of what set apart different types of claims, the ClaimBuster team created PolitiTax BIBREF8 , a taxonomy of claims, and factchecking organisation Full Fact BIBREF9 developed their preferred annotation schema for statements in consultation with their own factcheckers. This research provides a more solid framework within which to construct claim detection classifiers. The above considers whether or not a sentence is a claim, but often claims are subsections of sentences and multiple claims might be found in one sentence. In order to accommodate this, BIBREF10 proposes extracting phrases called Context Dependent Claims (CDC) that are relevant to a certain `Topic'. Along these lines, BIBREF11 proposes new definitions for frames to be incorporated into FrameNet BIBREF12 that are specific to facts, in particular those found in a political context. Traditional text clustering methods, using TFIDF and some clustering algorithm, are poorly suited to the problem of clustering and comparing short texts, as they can be semantically very similar but use different words. This is a manifestation of the the data sparsity problem with Bag-of-Words (BoW) models. BIBREF16 . Dimensionality reduction methods such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) can help solve this problem by giving a dense approximation of this sparse representation BIBREF17 . More recently, efforts in this area have used text embedding-based systems in order to capture dense representation of the texts BIBREF18 . Much of this recent work has relied on the increase of focus in word and text embeddings. Text embeddings have been an increasingly popular tool in NLP since the introduction of Word2Vec BIBREF19 , and since then the number of different embeddings has exploded. While many focus on giving a vector representation of a word, an increasing number now exist that will give a vector representation of a entire sentence or text. Following on from this work, we seek to devise a system that can run online, performing text clustering on the embeddings of texts one at a time Some considerations to bear in mind when deciding on an embedding scheme to use are: the size of the final vector, the complexity of the model itself and, if using a pretrained implementation, the data the model has been trained on and whether it is trained in a supervised or unsupervised manner. The size of the embedding can have numerous results downstream. In our example we will be doing distance calculations on the resultant vectors and therefore any increase in length will increase the complexity of those distance calculations. We would therefore like as short a vector as possible, but we still wish to capture all salient information about the claim; longer vectors have more capacity to store information, both salient and non-salient. A similar effect is seen for the complexity of the model. A more complicated model, with more trainable parameters, may be able to capture finer details about the text, but it will require a larger corpus to achieve this, and will require more computational time to calculate the embeddings. We should therefore attempt to find the simplest embedding system that can accurately solve our problem. When attempting to use pretrained models to help in other areas, it is always important to ensure that the models you are using are trained on similar material, to increase the chance that their findings will generalise to the new problem. Many unsupervised text embeddings are trained on the CommonCrawl dataset of approx. 840 billion tokens. This gives a huge amount of data across many domains, but requires a similarly huge amount of computing power to train on the entire dataset. Supervised datasets are unlikely ever to approach such scale as they require human annotations which can be expensive to assemble. The SNLI entailment dataset is an example of a large open source dataset BIBREF20 . It features pairs of sentences along with labels specifying whether or not one entails the other. Google's Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) BIBREF14 is a sentence embedding created with a hybrid supervised/unsupervised method, leveraging both the vast amounts of unsupervised training data and the extra detail that can be derived from a supervised method. The SNLI dataset and the related MultiNLI dataset are often used for this because textual entailment is seen as a good basis for general Natural Language Understanding (NLU) BIBREF21 . ### Method It is much easier to build a dataset and reliably evaluate a model if the starting definitions are clear and objective. Questions around what is an interesting or pertinent claim are inherently subjective. For example, it is obvious that a politician will judge their opponents' claims to be more important to factcheck than their own. Therefore, we built on the methodologies that dealt with the objective qualities of claims, which were the PolitiTax and Full Fact taxonomies. We annotated sentences from our own database of news articles based on a combination of these. We also used the Full Fact definition of a claim as a statement about the world that can be checked. Some examples of claims according to this definition are shown in Table TABREF3 . We decided the first statement was a claim since it declares the occurrence of an event, while the second was considered not to be a claim as it is an expression of feeling. Full Fact's approach centred around using sentence embeddings as a feature engineering step, followed by a simple classifier such as logistic regression, which is what we used. They used Facebook's sentence embeddings, InferSent BIBREF13 , which was a recent breakthrough at the time. Such is the speed of new development in the field that since then, several papers describing textual embeddings have been published. Due to the fact that we had already evaluated embeddings for clustering, and therefore knew our system would rely on Google USE Large BIBREF14 , we decided to use this instead. We compared this to TFIDF and Full Fact's results as baselines. The results are displayed in Table TABREF4 . However, ClaimBuster and Full Fact focused on live factchecking of TV debates. Logically is a news aggregator and we analyse the bodies of published news stories. We found that in our corpus, the majority of sentences are claims and therefore our model needed to be as selective as possible. In practice, we choose to filter out sentences that are predictions since generally the substance of the claim cannot be fully checked until after the event has occurred. Likewise, we try to remove claims based on personal experience or anecdotal evidence as they are difficult to verify. ### Choosing an embedding In order to choose an embedding, we sought a dataset to represent our problem. Although no perfect matches exist, we decided upon the Quora duplicate question dataset BIBREF22 as the best match. To study the embeddings, we computed the euclidean distance between the two questions using various embeddings, to study the distance between semantically similar and dissimilar questions. The graphs in figure 1 show the distances between duplicate and non-duplicate questions using different embedding systems. The X axis shows the euclidean distance between vectors and the Y axis frequency. A perfect result would be a blue peak to the left and an entirely disconnected orange spike to the right, showing that all non-duplicate questions have a greater euclidean distance than the least similar duplicate pair of questions. As can be clearly seen in the figure above, Elmo BIBREF23 and Infersent BIBREF13 show almost no separation and therefore cannot be considered good models for this problem. A much greater disparity is shown by the Google USE models BIBREF14 , and even more for the Google USE Large model. In fact the Google USE Large achieved a F1 score of 0.71 for this task without any specific training, simply by choosing a threshold below which all sentence pairs are considered duplicates. In order to test whether these results generalised to our domain, we devised a test that would make use of what little data we had to evaluate. We had no original data on whether sentences were semantically similar, but we did have a corpus of articles clustered into stories. Working on the assumption that similar claims would be more likely to be in the same story, we developed an equation to judge how well our corpus of sentences was clustered, rewarding clustering which matches the article clustering and the total number of claims clustered. The precise formula is given below, where INLINEFORM0 is the proportion of claims in clusters from one story cluster, INLINEFORM1 is the proportion of claims in the correct claim cluster, where they are from the most common story cluster, and INLINEFORM2 is the number of claims placed in clusters. A,B and C are parameters to tune. INLINEFORM3 figureFormula to assess the correctness of claim clusters based on article clusters This method is limited in how well it can represent the problem, but it can give indications as to a good or bad clustering method or embedding, and can act as a check that the findings we obtained from the Quora dataset will generalise to our domain. We ran code which vectorized 2,000 sentences and then used the DBScan clustering method BIBREF24 to cluster using a grid search to find the best INLINEFORM0 value, maximizing this formula. We used DBScan as it mirrored the clustering method used to derive the original article clusters. The results for this experiment can be found in Table TABREF10 . We included TFIDF in the experiment as a baseline to judge other results. It is not suitable for our eventual purposes, but it the basis of the original keyword-based model used to build the clusters . That being said, TFIDF performs very well, with only Google USE Large and Infersent coming close in terms of `accuracy'. In the case of Infersent, this comes with the penalty of a much smaller number of claims included in the clusters. Google USE Large, however, clusters a greater number and for this reason we chose to use Google's USE Large. Since Google USE Large was the best-performing embedding in both the tests we devised, this was our chosen embedding to use for clustering. However as can be seen from the results shown above, this is not a perfect solution and the inaccuracy here will introduce inaccuracy further down the clustering pipeline. ### Clustering Method We decided to follow a methodology upon the DBScan method of clustering BIBREF24 . DBScan considers all distances between pairs of points. If they are under INLINEFORM0 then those two are linked. Once the number of connected points exceeds a minimum size threshold, they are considered a cluster and all other points are considered to be unclustered. This method is advantageous for our purposes because unlike other methods, such as K-Means, it does not require the number of clusters to be specified. To create a system that can build clusters dynamically, adding one point at a time, we set the minimum cluster size to one, meaning that every point is a member of a cluster. A potential disadvantage of this method is that because points require only one connection to a cluster to join it, they may only be related to one point in the cluster, but be considered in the same cluster as all of them. In small examples this is not a problem as all points in the cluster should be very similar. However as the number of points being considered grows, this behaviour raises the prospect of one or several borderline clustering decisions leading to massive clusters made from tenuous connections between genuine clusters. To mitigate this problem we used a method described in the Newslens paper BIBREF25 to solve a similar problem when clustering entire articles. We stored all of our claims in a graph with the connections between them added when the distance between them was determined to be less than INLINEFORM0 . To determine the final clusters we run a Louvain Community Detection BIBREF26 over this graph to split it into defined communities. This improved the compactness of a cluster. When clustering claims one by one, this algorithm can be performed on the connected subgraph featuring the new claim, to reduce the computation required. As this method involves distance calculations between the claim being added and every existing claim, the time taken to add one claim will increase roughly linearly with respect to the number of previous claims. Through much optimization we have brought the computational time down to approximately 300ms per claim, which stays fairly static with respect to the number of previous claims. ### Next Steps The clustering described above is heavily dependent on the embedding used. The rate of advances in this field has been rapid in recent years, but an embedding will always be an imperfect representation of an claim and therefore always an area of improvement. A domain specific-embedding will likely offer a more accurate representation but creates problems with clustering claims from different domains. They also require a huge amount of data to give a good model and that is not possible in all domains. Table 1: Examples of claims taken from real articles. Table 2: Claim Detection Results. Figure 1: Analysis of Different Embeddings on the Quora Question Answering Dataset Table 3: Comparing Sentence Embeddings for Clustering News Claims.	F1 score of 0.71 for this task without any specific training, simply by choosing a threshold below which all sentence pairs are considered duplicates, distances between duplicate and non-duplicate questions using different embedding systems
How is face and audio data analysis evaluated?	### Introduction Automatic emotion recognition is commonly understood as the task of assigning an emotion to a predefined instance, for example an utterance (as audio signal), an image (for instance with a depicted face), or a textual unit (e.g., a transcribed utterance, a sentence, or a Tweet). The set of emotions is often following the original definition by Ekman Ekman1992, which includes anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and surprise, or the extension by Plutchik Plutchik1980 who adds trust and anticipation. Most work in emotion detection is limited to one modality. Exceptions include Busso2004 and Sebe2005, who investigate multimodal approaches combining speech with facial information. Emotion recognition in speech can utilize semantic features as well BIBREF0. Note that the term “multimodal” is also used beyond the combination of vision, audio, and text. For example, Soleymani2012 use it to refer to the combination of electroencephalogram, pupillary response and gaze distance. In this paper, we deal with the specific situation of car environments as a testbed for multimodal emotion recognition. This is an interesting environment since it is, to some degree, a controlled environment: Dialogue partners are limited in movement, the degrees of freedom for occurring events are limited, and several sensors which are useful for emotion recognition are already integrated in this setting. More specifically, we focus on emotion recognition from speech events in a dialogue with a human partner and with an intelligent agent. Also from the application point of view, the domain is a relevant choice: Past research has shown that emotional intelligence is beneficial for human computer interaction. Properly processing emotions in interactions increases the engagement of users and can improve performance when a specific task is to be fulfilled BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4. This is mostly based on the aspect that machines communicating with humans appear to be more trustworthy when they show empathy and are perceived as being natural BIBREF3, BIBREF5, BIBREF4. Virtual agents play an increasingly important role in the automotive context and the speech modality is increasingly being used in cars due to its potential to limit distraction. It has been shown that adapting the in-car speech interaction system according to the drivers' emotional state can help to enhance security, performance as well as the overall driving experience BIBREF6, BIBREF7. With this paper, we investigate how each of the three considered modalitites, namely facial expressions, utterances of a driver as an audio signal, and transcribed text contributes to the task of emotion recognition in in-car speech interactions. We focus on the five emotions of joy, insecurity, annoyance, relaxation, and boredom since terms corresponding to so-called fundamental emotions like fear have been shown to be associated to too strong emotional states than being appropriate for the in-car context BIBREF8. Our first contribution is the description of the experimental setup for our data collection. Aiming to provoke specific emotions with situations which can occur in real-world driving scenarios and to induce speech interactions, the study was conducted in a driving simulator. Based on the collected data, we provide baseline predictions with off-the-shelf tools for face and speech emotion recognition and compare them to a neural network-based approach for emotion recognition from text. Our second contribution is the introduction of transfer learning to adapt models trained on established out-of-domain corpora to our use case. We work on German language, therefore the transfer consists of a domain and a language transfer. ### Related Work ::: Facial Expressions A common approach to encode emotions for facial expressions is the facial action coding system FACS BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11. As the reliability and reproducability of findings with this method have been critically discussed BIBREF12, the trend has increasingly shifted to perform the recognition directly on images and videos, especially with deep learning. For instance, jung2015joint developed a model which considers temporal geometry features and temporal appearance features from image sequences. kim2016hierarchical propose an ensemble of convolutional neural networks which outperforms isolated networks. In the automotive domain, FACS is still popular. Ma2017 use support vector machines to distinguish happy, bothered, confused, and concentrated based on data from a natural driving environment. They found that bothered and confused are difficult to distinguish, while happy and concentrated are well identified. Aiming to reduce computational cost, Tews2011 apply a simple feature extraction using four dots in the face defining three facial areas. They analyze the variance of the three facial areas for the recognition of happy, anger and neutral. Ihme2018 aim at detecting frustration in a simulator environment. They induce the emotion with specific scenarios and a demanding secondary task and are able to associate specific face movements according to FACS. Paschero2012 use OpenCV (https://opencv.org/) to detect the eyes and the mouth region and track facial movements. They simulate different lightning conditions and apply a multilayer perceptron for the classification task of Ekman's set of fundamental emotions. Overall, we found that studies using facial features usually focus on continuous driver monitoring, often in driver-only scenarios. In contrast, our work investigates the potential of emotion recognition during speech interactions. ### Related Work ::: Acoustic Past research on emotion recognition from acoustics mainly concentrates on either feature selection or the development of appropriate classifiers. rao2013emotion as well as ververidis2004automatic compare local and global features in support vector machines. Next to such discriminative approaches, hidden Markov models are well-studied, however, there is no agreement on which feature-based classifier is most suitable BIBREF13. Similar to the facial expression modality, recent efforts on applying deep learning have been increased for acoustic speech processing. For instance, lee2015high use a recurrent neural network and palaz2015analysis apply a convolutional neural network to the raw speech signal. Neumann2017 as well as Trigeorgis2016 analyze the importance of features in the context of deep learning-based emotion recognition. In the automotive sector, Boril2011 approach the detection of negative emotional states within interactions between driver and co-driver as well as in calls of the driver towards the automated spoken dialogue system. Using real-world driving data, they find that the combination of acoustic features and their respective Gaussian mixture model scores performs best. Schuller2006 collects 2,000 dialog turns directed towards an automotive user interface and investigate the classification of anger, confusion, and neutral. They show that automatic feature generation and feature selection boost the performance of an SVM-based classifier. Further, they analyze the performance under systematically added noise and develop methods to mitigate negative effects. For more details, we refer the reader to the survey by Schuller2018. In this work, we explore the straight-forward application of domain independent software to an in-car scenario without domain-specific adaptations. ### Related Work ::: Text Previous work on emotion analysis in natural language processing focuses either on resource creation or on emotion classification for a specific task and domain. On the side of resource creation, the early and influential work of Pennebaker2015 is a dictionary of words being associated with different psychologically relevant categories, including a subset of emotions. Another popular resource is the NRC dictionary by Mohammad2012b. It contains more than 10000 words for a set of discrete emotion classes. Other resources include WordNet Affect BIBREF14 which distinguishes particular word classes. Further, annotated corpora have been created for a set of different domains, for instance fairy tales BIBREF15, Blogs BIBREF16, Twitter BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20, BIBREF21, Facebook BIBREF22, news headlines BIBREF23, dialogues BIBREF24, literature BIBREF25, or self reports on emotion events BIBREF26 (see BIBREF27 for an overview). To automatically assign emotions to textual units, the application of dictionaries has been a popular approach and still is, particularly in domains without annotated corpora. Another approach to overcome the lack of huge amounts of annotated training data in a particular domain or for a specific topic is to exploit distant supervision: use the signal of occurrences of emoticons or specific hashtags or words to automatically label the data. This is sometimes referred to as self-labeling BIBREF21, BIBREF28, BIBREF29, BIBREF30. A variety of classification approaches have been tested, including SNoW BIBREF15, support vector machines BIBREF16, maximum entropy classification, long short-term memory network, and convolutional neural network models BIBREF18. More recently, the state of the art is the use of transfer learning from noisy annotations to more specific predictions BIBREF29. Still, it has been shown that transferring from one domain to another is challenging, as the way emotions are expressed varies between areas BIBREF27. The approach by Felbo2017 is different to our work as they use a huge noisy data set for pretraining the model while we use small high quality data sets instead. Recently, the state of the art has also been pushed forward with a set of shared tasks, in which the participants with top results mostly exploit deep learning methods for prediction based on pretrained structures like embeddings or language models BIBREF21, BIBREF31, BIBREF20. Our work follows this approach and builds up on embeddings with deep learning. Furthermore, we approach the application and adaption of text-based classifiers to the automotive domain with transfer learning. ### Data set Collection The first contribution of this paper is the construction of the AMMER data set which we describe in the following. We focus on the drivers' interactions with both a virtual agent as well as a co-driver. To collect the data in a safe and controlled environment and to be able to consider a variety of predefined driving situations, the study was conducted in a driving simulator. ### Data set Collection ::: Study Setup and Design The study environment consists of a fixed-base driving simulator running Vires's VTD (Virtual Test Drive, v2.2.0) simulation software (https://vires.com/vtd-vires-virtual-test-drive/). The vehicle has an automatic transmission, a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals. We collect data from video, speech and biosignals (Empatica E4 to record heart rate, electrodermal activity, skin temperature, not further used in this paper) and questionnaires. Two RGB cameras are fixed in the vehicle to capture the drivers face, one at the sun shield above the drivers seat and one in the middle of the dashboard. A microphone is placed on the center console. One experimenter sits next to the driver, the other behind the simulator. The virtual agent accompanying the drive is realized as Wizard-of-Oz prototype which enables the experimenter to manually trigger prerecorded voice samples playing trough the in-car speakers and to bring new content to the center screen. Figure FIGREF4 shows the driving simulator. The experimental setting is comparable to an everyday driving task. Participants are told that the goal of the study is to evaluate and to improve an intelligent driving assistant. To increase the probability of emotions to arise, participants are instructed to reach the destination of the route as fast as possible while following traffic rules and speed limits. They are informed that the time needed for the task would be compared to other participants. The route comprises highways, rural roads, and city streets. A navigation system with voice commands and information on the screen keeps the participants on the predefined track. To trigger emotion changes in the participant, we use the following events: (i) a car on the right lane cutting off to the left lane when participants try to overtake followed by trucks blocking both lanes with a slow overtaking maneuver (ii) a skateboarder who appears unexpectedly on the street and (iii) participants are praised for reaching the destination unexpectedly quickly in comparison to previous participants. Based on these events, we trigger three interactions (Table TABREF6 provides examples) with the intelligent agent (Driver-Agent Interactions, D–A). Pretending to be aware of the current situation, e. g., to recognize unusual driving behavior such as strong braking, the agent asks the driver to explain his subjective perception of these events in detail. Additionally, we trigger two more interactions with the intelligent agent at the beginning and at the end of the drive, where participants are asked to describe their mood and thoughts regarding the (upcoming) drive. This results in five interactions between the driver and the virtual agent. Furthermore, the co-driver asks three different questions during sessions with light traffic and low cognitive demand (Driver-Co-Driver Interactions, D–Co). These questions are more general and non-traffic-related and aim at triggering the participants' memory and fantasy. Participants are asked to describe their last vacation, their dream house and their idea of the perfect job. In sum, there are eight interactions per participant (5 D–A, 3 D–Co). ### Data set Collection ::: Procedure At the beginning of the study, participants were welcomed and the upcoming study procedure was explained. Subsequently, participants signed a consent form and completed a questionnaire to provide demographic information. After that, the co-driving experimenter started with the instruction in the simulator which was followed by a familiarization drive consisting of highway and city driving and covering different driving maneuvers such as tight corners, lane changing and strong braking. Subsequently, participants started with the main driving task. The drive had a duration of 20 minutes containing the eight previously mentioned speech interactions. After the completion of the drive, the actual goal of improving automatic emotional recognition was revealed and a standard emotional intelligence questionnaire, namely the TEIQue-SF BIBREF32, was handed to the participants. Finally, a retrospective interview was conducted, in which participants were played recordings of their in-car interactions and asked to give discrete (annoyance, insecurity, joy, relaxation, boredom, none, following BIBREF8) was well as dimensional (valence, arousal, dominance BIBREF33 on a 11-point scale) emotion ratings for the interactions and the according situations. We only use the discrete class annotations in this paper. ### Data set Collection ::: Data Analysis Overall, 36 participants aged 18 to 64 years ($\mu $=28.89, $\sigma $=12.58) completed the experiment. This leads to 288 interactions, 180 between driver and the agent and 108 between driver and co-driver. The emotion self-ratings from the participants yielded 90 utterances labeled with joy, 26 with annoyance, 49 with insecurity, 9 with boredom, 111 with relaxation and 3 with no emotion. One example interaction per interaction type and emotion is shown in Table TABREF7. For further experiments, we only use joy, annoyance/anger, and insecurity/fear due to the small sample size for boredom and no emotion and under the assumption that relaxation brings little expressivity. ### Methods ::: Emotion Recognition from Facial Expressions We preprocess the visual data by extracting the sequence of images for each interaction from the point where the agent's or the co-driver's question was completely uttered until the driver's response stops. The average length is 16.3 seconds, with the minimum at 2.2s and the maximum at 54.7s. We apply an off-the-shelf tool for emotion recognition (the manufacturer cannot be disclosed due to licensing restrictions). It delivers frame-by-frame scores ($\in [0;100]$) for discrete emotional states of joy, anger and fear. While joy corresponds directly to our annotation, we map anger to our label annoyance and fear to our label insecurity. The maximal average score across all frames constitutes the overall classification for the video sequence. Frames where the software is not able to detect the face are ignored. ### Methods ::: Emotion Recognition from Audio Signal We extract the audio signal for the same sequence as described for facial expressions and apply an off-the-shelf tool for emotion recognition. The software delivers single classification scores for a set of 24 discrete emotions for the entire utterance. We consider the outputs for the states of joy, anger, and fear, mapping analogously to our classes as for facial expressions. Low-confidence predictions are interpreted as “no emotion”. We accept the emotion with the highest score as the discrete prediction otherwise. ### Methods ::: Emotion Recognition from Transcribed Utterances For the emotion recognition from text, we manually transcribe all utterances of our AMMER study. To exploit existing and available data sets which are larger than the AMMER data set, we develop a transfer learning approach. We use a neural network with an embedding layer (frozen weights, pre-trained on Common Crawl and Wikipedia BIBREF36), a bidirectional LSTM BIBREF37, and two dense layers followed by a soft max output layer. This setup is inspired by BIBREF38. We use a dropout rate of 0.3 in all layers and optimize with Adam BIBREF39 with a learning rate of $10^{-5}$ (These parameters are the same for all further experiments). We build on top of the Keras library with the TensorFlow backend. We consider this setup our baseline model. We train models on a variety of corpora, namely the common format published by BIBREF27 of the FigureEight (formally known as Crowdflower) data set of social media, the ISEAR data BIBREF40 (self-reported emotional events), and, the Twitter Emotion Corpus (TEC, weakly annotated Tweets with #anger, #disgust, #fear, #happy, #sadness, and #surprise, Mohammad2012). From all corpora, we use instances with labels fear, anger, or joy. These corpora are English, however, we do predictions on German utterances. Therefore, each corpus is preprocessed to German with Google Translate. We remove URLs, user tags (“@Username”), punctuation and hash signs. The distributions of the data sets are shown in Table TABREF12. To adapt models trained on these data, we apply transfer learning as follows: The model is first trained until convergence on one out-of-domain corpus (only on classes fear, joy, anger for compatibility reasons). Then, the parameters of the bi-LSTM layer are frozen and the remaining layers are further trained on AMMER. This procedure is illustrated in Figure FIGREF13 ### Results ::: Facial Expressions and Audio Table TABREF16 shows the confusion matrices for facial and audio emotion recognition on our complete AMMER data set and Table TABREF17 shows the results per class for each method, including facial and audio data and micro and macro averages. The classification from facial expressions yields a macro-averaged $\text{F}_1$ score of 33 % across the three emotions joy, insecurity, and annoyance (P=0.31, R=0.35). While the classification results for joy are promising (R=43 %, P=57 %), the distinction of insecurity and annoyance from the other classes appears to be more challenging. Regarding the audio signal, we observe a macro $\text{F}_1$ score of 29 % (P=42 %, R=22 %). There is a bias towards negative emotions, which results in a small number of detected joy predictions (R=4 %). Insecurity and annoyance are frequently confused. ### Results ::: Text from Transcribed Utterances The experimental setting for the evaluation of emotion recognition from text is as follows: We evaluate the BiLSTM model in three different experiments: (1) in-domain, (2) out-of-domain and (3) transfer learning. For all experiments we train on the classes anger/annoyance, fear/insecurity and joy. Table TABREF19 shows all results for the comparison of these experimental settings. ### Results ::: Text from Transcribed Utterances ::: Experiment 1: In-Domain application We first set a baseline by validating our models on established corpora. We train the baseline model on 60 % of each data set listed in Table TABREF12 and evaluate that model with 40 % of the data from the same domain (results shown in the column “In-Domain” in Table TABREF19). Excluding AMMER, we achieve an average micro $\text{F}_1$ of 68 %, with best results of F$_1$=73 % on TEC. The model trained on our AMMER corpus achieves an F1 score of 57%. This is most probably due to the small size of this data set and the class bias towards joy, which makes up more than half of the data set. These results are mostly in line with Bostan2018. ### Results ::: Text from Transcribed Utterances ::: Experiment 2: Simple Out-Of-Domain application Now we analyze how well the models trained in Experiment 1 perform when applied to our data set. The results are shown in column “Simple” in Table TABREF19. We observe a clear drop in performance, with an average of F$_1$=48 %. The best performing model is again the one trained on TEC, en par with the one trained on the Figure8 data. The model trained on ISEAR performs second best in Experiment 1, it performs worst in Experiment 2. ### Results ::: Text from Transcribed Utterances ::: Experiment 3: Transfer Learning application To adapt models trained on previously existing data sets to our particular application, the AMMER corpus, we apply transfer learning. Here, we perform leave-one-out cross validation. As pre-trained models we use each model from Experiment 1 and further optimize with the training subset of each crossvalidation iteration of AMMER. The results are shown in the column “Transfer L.” in Table TABREF19. The confusion matrix is also depicted in Table TABREF16. With this procedure we achieve an average performance of F$_1$=75 %, being better than the results from the in-domain Experiment 1. The best performance of F$_1$=76 % is achieved with the model pre-trained on each data set, except for ISEAR. All transfer learning models clearly outperform their simple out-of-domain counterpart. To ensure that this performance increase is not only due to the larger data set, we compare these results to training the model without transfer on a corpus consisting of each corpus together with AMMER (again, in leave-one-out crossvalidation). These results are depicted in column “Joint C.”. Thus, both settings, “transfer learning” and “joint corpus” have access to the same information. The results show an increase in performance in contrast to not using AMMER for training, however, the transfer approach based on partial retraining the model shows a clear improvement for all models (by 7pp for Figure8, 10pp for EmoInt, 8pp for TEC, 13pp for ISEAR) compared to the ”Joint” setup. ### Summary & Future Work We described the creation of the multimodal AMMER data with emotional speech interactions between a driver and both a virtual agent and a co-driver. We analyzed the modalities of facial expressions, acoustics, and transcribed utterances regarding their potential for emotion recognition during in-car speech interactions. We applied off-the-shelf emotion recognition tools for facial expressions and acoustics. For transcribed text, we developed a neural network-based classifier with transfer learning exploiting existing annotated corpora. We find that analyzing transcribed utterances is most promising for classification of the three emotional states of joy, annoyance and insecurity. Our results for facial expressions indicate that there is potential for the classification of joy, however, the states of annoyance and insecurity are not well recognized. Future work needs to investigate more sophisticated approaches to map frame predictions to sequence predictions. Furthermore, movements of the mouth region during speech interactions might negatively influence the classification from facial expressions. Therefore, the question remains how facial expressions can best contribute to multimodal detection in speech interactions. Regarding the classification from the acoustic signal, the application of off-the-shelf classifiers without further adjustments seems to be challenging. We find a strong bias towards negative emotional states for our experimental setting. For instance, the personalization of the recognition algorithm (e. g., mean and standard deviation normalization) could help to adapt the classification for specific speakers and thus to reduce this bias. Further, the acoustic environment in the vehicle interior has special properties and the recognition software might need further adaptations. Our transfer learning-based text classifier shows considerably better results. This is a substantial result in its own, as only one previous method for transfer learning in emotion recognition has been proposed, in which a sentiment/emotion specific source for labels in pre-training has been used, to the best of our knowledge BIBREF29. Other applications of transfer learning from general language models include BIBREF41, BIBREF42. Our approach is substantially different, not being trained on a huge amount of noisy data, but on smaller out-of-domain sets of higher quality. This result suggests that emotion classification systems which work across domains can be developed with reasonable effort. For a productive application of emotion detection in the context of speech events we conclude that a deployed system might perform best with a speech-to-text module followed by an analysis of the text. Further, in this work, we did not explore an ensemble model or the interaction of different modalities. Thus, future work should investigate the fusion of multiple modalities in a single classifier. ### Acknowledgment We thank Laura-Ana-Maria Bostan for discussions and data set preparations. This research has partially been funded by the German Research Council (DFG), project SEAT (KL 2869/1-1). Figure 1: The setup of the driving simulator. Table 1: Examples for triggered interactions with translations to English. (D: Driver, A: Agent, Co: Co-Driver) Table 2: Examples from the collected data set (with translation to English). E: Emotion, IT: interaction type with agent (A) and with Codriver (C). J: Joy, A: Annoyance, I: Insecurity, B: Boredom, R: Relaxation, N: No emotion. Figure8 8,419 1,419 9,179 19,017 EmoInt 2,252 1,701 1,616 5,569 ISEAR 1,095 1,096 1,094 3,285 TEC 2,782 1,534 8,132 12,448 AMMER 49 26 90 165 Figure 2: Model for Transfer Learning from Text. Grey boxes contain frozen parameters in the corresponding learning step. Figure8 66 55 59 76 EmoInt 62 48 56 76 TEC 73 55 58 76 ISEAR 70 35 59 72 AMMER 57 — — — Table 4: Confusion Matrix for Face Classification and Audio Classification (on full AMMER data) and for transfer learning from text (training set of EmoInt and test set of AMMER). Insecurity, annoyance and joy are the gold labels. Fear, anger and joy are predictions. Table 5: Performance for classification from vision, audio, and transfer learning from text (training set of EmoInt).	confusion matrices, $\text{F}_1$ score
What is CamemBERT trained on?	### Introduction Pretrained word representations have a long history in Natural Language Processing (NLP), from non-neural methods BIBREF0, BIBREF1, BIBREF2 to neural word embeddings BIBREF3, BIBREF4 and to contextualised representations BIBREF5, BIBREF6. Approaches shifted more recently from using these representations as an input to task-specific architectures to replacing these architectures with large pretrained language models. These models are then fine-tuned to the task at hand with large improvements in performance over a wide range of tasks BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10. These transfer learning methods exhibit clear advantages over more traditional task-specific approaches, probably the most important being that they can be trained in an unsupervised manner. They nevertheless come with implementation challenges, namely the amount of data and computational resources needed for pretraining that can reach hundreds of gigabytes of uncompressed text and require hundreds of GPUs BIBREF11, BIBREF9. The latest transformer architecture has gone uses as much as 750GB of plain text and 1024 TPU v3 for pretraining BIBREF10. This has limited the availability of these state-of-the-art models to the English language, at least in the monolingual setting. Even though multilingual models give remarkable results, they are often larger and their results still lag behind their monolingual counterparts BIBREF12. This is particularly inconvenient as it hinders their practical use in NLP systems as well as the investigation of their language modeling capacity, something that remains to be investigated in the case of, for instance, morphologically rich languages. We take advantage of the newly available multilingual corpus OSCAR BIBREF13 and train a monolingual language model for French using the RoBERTa architecture. We pretrain the model - which we dub CamemBERT- and evaluate it in four different downstream tasks for French: part-of-speech (POS) tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition (NER) and natural language inference (NLI). CamemBERT improves the state of the art for most tasks over previous monolingual and multilingual approaches, which confirms the effectiveness of large pretrained language models for French. We summarise our contributions as follows: We train a monolingual BERT model on the French language using recent large-scale corpora. We evaluate our model on four downstream tasks (POS tagging, dependency parsing, NER and natural language inference (NLI)), achieving state-of-the-art results in most tasks, confirming the effectiveness of large BERT-based models for French. We release our model in a user-friendly format for popular open-source libraries so that it can serve as a strong baseline for future research and be useful for French NLP practitioners. ### Related Work ::: From non-contextual to contextual word embeddings The first neural word vector representations were non-contextualised word embeddings, most notably word2vec BIBREF3, GloVe BIBREF4 and fastText BIBREF14, which were designed to be used as input to task-specific neural architectures. Contextualised word representations such as ELMo BIBREF5 and flair BIBREF6, improved the expressivity of word embeddings by taking context into account. They improved the performance of downstream tasks when they replaced traditional word representations. This paved the way towards larger contextualised models that replaced downstream architectures in most tasks. These approaches, trained with language modeling objectives, range from LSTM-based architectures such as ULMFiT BIBREF15 to the successful transformer-based architectures such as GPT2 BIBREF8, BERT BIBREF7, RoBERTa BIBREF9 and more recently ALBERT BIBREF16 and T5 BIBREF10. ### Related Work ::: Non-contextual word embeddings for languages other than English Since the introduction of word2vec BIBREF3, many attempts have been made to create monolingual models for a wide range of languages. For non-contextual word embeddings, the first two attempts were by BIBREF17 and BIBREF18 who created word embeddings for a large number of languages using Wikipedia. Later BIBREF19 trained fastText word embeddings for 157 languages using Common Crawl and showed that using crawled data significantly increased the performance of the embeddings relatively to those trained only on Wikipedia. ### Related Work ::: Contextualised models for languages other than English Following the success of large pretrained language models, they were extended to the multilingual setting with multilingual BERT , a single multilingual model for 104 different languages trained on Wikipedia data, and later XLM BIBREF12, which greatly improved unsupervised machine translation. A few monolingual models have been released: ELMo models for Japanese, Portuguese, German and Basque and BERT for Simplified and Traditional Chinese and German. However, to the best of our knowledge, no particular effort has been made toward training models for languages other than English, at a scale similar to the latest English models (e.g. RoBERTa trained on more than 100GB of data). ### CamemBERT Our approach is based on RoBERTa BIBREF9, which replicates and improves the initial BERT by identifying key hyper-parameters for more robust performance. In this section, we describe the architecture, training objective, optimisation setup and pretraining data that was used for CamemBERT. CamemBERT differs from RoBERTa mainly with the addition of whole-word masking and the usage of SentencePiece tokenisation BIBREF20. ### CamemBERT ::: Architecture Similar to RoBERTa and BERT, CamemBERT is a multi-layer bidirectional Transformer BIBREF21. Given the widespread usage of Transformers, we do not describe them in detail here and refer the reader to BIBREF21. CamemBERT uses the original BERT $_{\small \textsc {BASE}}$ configuration: 12 layers, 768 hidden dimensions, 12 attention heads, which amounts to 110M parameters. ### CamemBERT ::: Pretraining objective We train our model on the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task. Given an input text sequence composed of $N$ tokens $x_1, ..., x_N$, we select $15\%$ of tokens for possible replacement. Among those selected tokens, 80% are replaced with the special $<$mask$>$ token, 10% are left unchanged and 10% are replaced by a random token. The model is then trained to predict the initial masked tokens using cross-entropy loss. Following RoBERTa we dynamically mask tokens instead of fixing them statically for the whole dataset during preprocessing. This improves variability and makes the model more robust when training for multiple epochs. Since we segment the input sentence into subwords using SentencePiece, the input tokens to the models can be subwords. An upgraded version of BERT and BIBREF22 have shown that masking whole words instead of individual subwords leads to improved performance. Whole-word masking (WWM) makes the training task more difficult because the model has to predict a whole word instead of predicting only part of the word given the rest. As a result, we used WWM for CamemBERT by first randomly sampling 15% of the words in the sequence and then considering all subword tokens in each of these 15% words for candidate replacement. This amounts to a proportion of selected tokens that is close to the original 15%. These tokens are then either replaced by $<$mask$>$ tokens (80%), left unchanged (10%) or replaced by a random token. Subsequent work has shown that the next sentence prediction task (NSP) originally used in BERT does not improve downstream task performance BIBREF12, BIBREF9, we do not use NSP as a consequence. ### CamemBERT ::: Optimisation Following BIBREF9, we optimise the model using Adam BIBREF23 ($\beta _1 = 0.9$, $\beta _2 = 0.98$) for 100k steps. We use large batch sizes of 8192 sequences. Each sequence contains at most 512 tokens. We enforce each sequence to only contain complete sentences. Additionally, we used the DOC-SENTENCES scenario from BIBREF9, consisting of not mixing multiple documents in the same sequence, which showed slightly better results. ### CamemBERT ::: Segmentation into subword units We segment the input text into subword units using SentencePiece BIBREF20. SentencePiece is an extension of Byte-Pair encoding (BPE) BIBREF24 and WordPiece BIBREF25 that does not require pre-tokenisation (at the word or token level), thus removing the need for language-specific tokenisers. We use a vocabulary size of 32k subword tokens. These are learned on $10^7$ sentences sampled from the pretraining dataset. We do not use subword regularisation (i.e. sampling from multiple possible segmentations) in our implementation for simplicity. ### CamemBERT ::: Pretraining data Pretrained language models can be significantly improved by using more data BIBREF9, BIBREF10. Therefore we used French text extracted from Common Crawl, in particular, we use OSCAR BIBREF13 a pre-classified and pre-filtered version of the November 2018 Common Craw snapshot. OSCAR is a set of monolingual corpora extracted from Common Crawl, specifically from the plain text WET format distributed by Common Crawl, which removes all HTML tags and converts all text encodings to UTF-8. OSCAR follows the same approach as BIBREF19 by using a language classification model based on the fastText linear classifier BIBREF26, BIBREF27 pretrained on Wikipedia, Tatoeba and SETimes, which supports 176 different languages. OSCAR performs a deduplication step after language classification and without introducing a specialised filtering scheme, other than only keeping paragraphs containing 100 or more UTF-8 encoded characters, making OSCAR quite close to the original Crawled data. We use the unshuffled version of the French OSCAR corpus, which amounts to 138GB of uncompressed text and 32.7B SentencePiece tokens. ### Evaluation ::: Part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing We fist evaluate CamemBERT on the two downstream tasks of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. POS tagging is a low-level syntactic task, which consists in assigning to each word its corresponding grammatical category. Dependency parsing consists in predicting the labeled syntactic tree capturing the syntactic relations between words. We run our experiments using the Universal Dependencies (UD) paradigm and its corresponding UD POS tag set BIBREF28 and UD treebank collection version 2.2 BIBREF29, which was used for the CoNLL 2018 shared task. We perform our work on the four freely available French UD treebanks in UD v2.2: GSD, Sequoia, Spoken, and ParTUT. GSD BIBREF30 is the second-largest treebank available for French after the FTB (described in subsection SECREF25), it contains data from blogs, news articles, reviews, and Wikipedia. The Sequoia treebank BIBREF31, BIBREF32 comprises more than 3000 sentences, from the French Europarl, the regional newspaper L’Est Républicain, the French Wikipedia and documents from the European Medicines Agency. Spoken is a corpus converted automatically from the Rhapsodie treebank BIBREF33, BIBREF34 with manual corrections. It consists of 57 sound samples of spoken French with orthographic transcription and phonetic transcription aligned with sound (word boundaries, syllables, and phonemes), syntactic and prosodic annotations. Finally, ParTUT is a conversion of a multilingual parallel treebank developed at the University of Turin, and consisting of a variety of text genres, including talks, legal texts, and Wikipedia articles, among others; ParTUT data is derived from the already-existing parallel treebank Par(allel)TUT BIBREF35 . Table TABREF23 contains a summary comparing the sizes of the treebanks. We evaluate the performance of our models using the standard UPOS accuracy for POS tagging, and Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS) and Labeled Attachment Score (LAS) for dependency parsing. We assume gold tokenisation and gold word segmentation as provided in the UD treebanks. ### Evaluation ::: Part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing ::: Baselines To demonstrate the value of building a dedicated version of BERT for French, we first compare CamemBERT to the multilingual cased version of BERT (designated as mBERT). We then compare our models to UDify BIBREF36. UDify is a multitask and multilingual model based on mBERT that is near state-of-the-art on all UD languages including French for both POS tagging and dependency parsing. It is relevant to compare CamemBERT to UDify on those tasks because UDify is the work that pushed the furthest the performance in fine-tuning end-to-end a BERT-based model on downstream POS tagging and dependency parsing. Finally, we compare our model to UDPipe Future BIBREF37, a model ranked 3rd in dependency parsing and 6th in POS tagging during the CoNLL 2018 shared task BIBREF38. UDPipe Future provides us a strong baseline that does not make use of any pretrained contextual embedding. We will compare to the more recent cross-lingual language model XLM BIBREF12, as well as the state-of-the-art CoNLL 2018 shared task results with predicted tokenisation and segmentation in an updated version of the paper. ### Evaluation ::: Named Entity Recognition Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a sequence labeling task that consists in predicting which words refer to real-world objects, such as people, locations, artifacts and organisations. We use the French Treebank (FTB) BIBREF39 in its 2008 version introduced by cc-clustering:09short and with NER annotations by sagot2012annotation. The NER-annotated FTB contains more than 12k sentences and more than 350k tokens extracted from articles of the newspaper Le Monde published between 1989 and 1995. In total, it contains 11,636 entity mentions distributed among 7 different types of entities, namely: 2025 mentions of “Person”, 3761 of “Location”, 2382 of “Organisation”, 3357 of “Company”, 67 of “Product”, 15 of “POI” (Point of Interest) and 29 of “Fictional Character”. A large proportion of the entity mentions in the treebank are multi-word entities. For NER we therefore report the 3 metrics that are commonly used to evaluate models: precision, recall, and F1 score. Here precision measures the percentage of entities found by the system that are correctly tagged, recall measures the percentage of named entities present in the corpus that are found and the F1 score combines both precision and recall measures giving a general idea of a model's performance. ### Evaluation ::: Named Entity Recognition ::: Baselines Most of the advances in NER haven been achieved on English, particularly focusing on the CoNLL 2003 BIBREF40 and the Ontonotes v5 BIBREF41, BIBREF42 English corpora. NER is a task that was traditionally tackled using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) BIBREF43 which are quite suited for NER; CRFs were later used as decoding layers for Bi-LSTM architectures BIBREF44, BIBREF45 showing considerable improvements over CRFs alone. These Bi-LSTM-CRF architectures were later enhanced with contextualised word embeddings which yet again brought major improvements to the task BIBREF5, BIBREF6. Finally, large pretrained architectures settled the current state of the art showing a small yet important improvement over previous NER-specific architectures BIBREF7, BIBREF46. In non-English NER the CoNLL 2002 shared task included NER corpora for Spanish and Dutch corpora BIBREF47 while the CoNLL 2003 included a German corpus BIBREF40. Here the recent efforts of BIBREF48 settled the state of the art for Spanish and Dutch, while BIBREF6 did it for German. In French, no extensive work has been done due to the limited availability of NER corpora. We compare our model with the strong baselines settled by BIBREF49, who trained both CRF and BiLSTM-CRF architectures on the FTB and enhanced them using heuristics and pretrained word embeddings. ### Evaluation ::: Natural Language Inference We also evaluate our model on the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task, using the French part of the XNLI dataset BIBREF50. NLI consists in predicting whether a hypothesis sentence is entailed, neutral or contradicts a premise sentence. The XNLI dataset is the extension of the Multi-Genre NLI (MultiNLI) corpus BIBREF51 to 15 languages by translating the validation and test sets manually into each of those languages. The English training set is also machine translated for all languages. The dataset is composed of 122k train, 2490 valid and 5010 test examples. As usual, NLI performance is evaluated using accuracy. To evaluate a model on a language other than English (such as French), we consider the two following settings: TRANSLATE-TEST: The French test set is machine translated into English, and then used with an English classification model. This setting provides a reasonable, although imperfect, way to circumvent the fact that no such data set exists for French, and results in very strong baseline scores. TRANSLATE-TRAIN: The French model is fine-tuned on the machine-translated English training set and then evaluated on the French test set. This is the setting that we used for CamemBERT. ### Evaluation ::: Natural Language Inference ::: Baselines For the TRANSLATE-TEST setting, we report results of the English RoBERTa to act as a reference. In the TRANSLATE-TRAIN setting, we report the best scores from previous literature along with ours. BiLSTM-max is the best model in the original XNLI paper, mBERT which has been reported in French in BIBREF52 and XLM (MLM+TLM) is the best-presented model from BIBREF50. ### Experiments In this section, we measure the performance of CamemBERT by evaluating it on the four aforementioned tasks: POS tagging, dependency parsing, NER and NLI. ### Experiments ::: Experimental Setup ::: Pretraining We use the RoBERTa implementation in the fairseq library BIBREF53. Our learning rate is warmed up for 10k steps up to a peak value of $0.0007$ instead of the original $0.0001$ given our large batch size (8192). The learning rate fades to zero with polynomial decay. We pretrain our model on 256 Nvidia V100 GPUs (32GB each) for 100k steps during 17h. ### Experiments ::: Experimental Setup ::: Fine-tuning For each task, we append the relevant predictive layer on top of CamemBERT's Transformer architecture. Following the work done on BERT BIBREF7, for sequence tagging and sequence labeling we append a linear layer respectively to the $<$s$>$ special token and to the first subword token of each word. For dependency parsing, we plug a bi-affine graph predictor head as inspired by BIBREF54 following the work done on multilingual parsing with BERT by BIBREF36. We refer the reader to these two articles for more details on this module. We fine-tune independently CamemBERT for each task and each dataset. We optimise the model using the Adam optimiser BIBREF23 with a fixed learning rate. We run a grid search on a combination of learning rates and batch sizes. We select the best model on the validation set out of the 30 first epochs. Although this might push the performances even further, for all tasks except NLI, we don't apply any regularisation techniques such as weight decay, learning rate warm-up or discriminative fine-tuning. We show that fine-tuning CamemBERT in a straight-forward manner leads to state-of-the-art results on most tasks and outperforms the existing BERT-based models in most cases. The POS tagging, dependency parsing, and NER experiments are run using hugging face's Transformer library extended to support CamemBERT and dependency parsing BIBREF55. The NLI experiments use the fairseq library following the RoBERTa implementation. ### Experiments ::: Results ::: Part-of-Speech tagging and dependency parsing For POS tagging and dependency parsing, we compare CamemBERT to three other near state-of-the-art models in Table TABREF32. CamemBERT outperforms UDPipe Future by a large margin for all treebanks and all metrics. Despite a much simpler optimisation process, CamemBERT beats UDify performances on all the available French treebanks. CamemBERT also demonstrates higher performances than mBERT on those tasks. We observe a larger error reduction for parsing than for tagging. For POS tagging, we observe error reductions of respectively 0.71% for GSD, 0.81% for Sequoia, 0.7% for Spoken and 0.28% for ParTUT. For parsing, we observe error reductions in LAS of 2.96% for GSD, 3.33% for Sequoia, 1.70% for Spoken and 1.65% for ParTUT. ### Experiments ::: Results ::: Natural Language Inference: XNLI On the XNLI benchmark, CamemBERT obtains improved performance over multilingual language models on the TRANSLATE-TRAIN setting (81.2 vs. 80.2 for XLM) while using less than half the parameters (110M vs. 250M). However, its performance still lags behind models trained on the original English training set in the TRANSLATE-TEST setting, 81.2 vs. 82.91 for RoBERTa. It should be noted that CamemBERT uses far fewer parameters than RoBERTa (110M vs. 355M parameters). ### Experiments ::: Results ::: Named-Entity Recognition For named entity recognition, our experiments show that CamemBERT achieves a slightly better precision than the traditional CRF-based SEM architectures described above in Section SECREF25 (CRF and Bi-LSTM+CRF), but shows a dramatic improvement in finding entity mentions, raising the recall score by 3.5 points. Both improvements result in a 2.36 point increase in the F1 score with respect to the best SEM architecture (BiLSTM-CRF), giving CamemBERT the state of the art for NER on the FTB. One other important finding is the results obtained by mBERT. Previous work with this model showed increased performance in NER for German, Dutch and Spanish when mBERT is used as contextualised word embedding for an NER-specific model BIBREF48, but our results suggest that the multilingual setting in which mBERT was trained is simply not enough to use it alone and fine-tune it for French NER, as it shows worse performance than even simple CRF models, suggesting that monolingual models could be better at NER. ### Experiments ::: Discussion CamemBERT displays improved performance compared to prior work for the 4 downstream tasks considered. This confirms the hypothesis that pretrained language models can be effectively fine-tuned for various downstream tasks, as observed for English in previous work. Moreover, our results also show that dedicated monolingual models still outperform multilingual ones. We explain this point in two ways. First, the scale of data is possibly essential to the performance of CamemBERT. Indeed, we use 138GB of uncompressed text vs. 57GB for mBERT. Second, with more data comes more diversity in the pretraining distribution. Reaching state-of-the-art performances on 4 different tasks and 6 different datasets requires robust pretrained models. Our results suggest that the variability in the downstream tasks and datasets considered is handled more efficiently by a general language model than by Wikipedia-pretrained models such as mBERT. ### Conclusion CamemBERT improves the state of the art for multiple downstream tasks in French. It is also lighter than other BERT-based approaches such as mBERT or XLM. By releasing our model, we hope that it can serve as a strong baseline for future research in French NLP, and expect our experiments to be reproduced in many other languages. We will publish an updated version in the near future where we will explore and release models trained for longer, with additional downstream tasks, baselines (e.g. XLM) and analysis, we will also train additional models with potentially cleaner corpora such as CCNet BIBREF56 for more accurate performance evaluation and more complete ablation. ### Acknowledgments This work was partly funded by three French National grants from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, namely projects PARSITI (ANR-16-CE33-0021), SoSweet (ANR-15-CE38-0011) and BASNUM (ANR-18-CE38-0003), as well as by the last author's chair in the PRAIRIE institute. ### Appendix ::: Impact of Whole-Word Masking We analyze the addition of whole-word masking on the downstream performance of CamemBERT. As reported for English on other downstream tasks, whole word masking improves downstream performances for all tasks but NER as seen in Table TABREF46. NER is highly sensitive to capitalisation, prefixes, suffixes and other subword features that could be used by a model to correctly identify entity mentions. Thus the added information by learning the masking at a subword level rather than at whole-word level seems to have a detrimental effect on downstream NER results. Table 1: Sizes in Number of tokens, words and phrases of the 4 treebanks used in the evaluations of POS-tagging and dependency parsing. Table 2: Final POS and dependency parsing scores of CamemBERT and mBERT (fine-tuned in the exact same conditions as CamemBERT), UDify as reported in the original paper on 4 French treebanks (French GSD, Spoken, Sequoia and ParTUT), reported on test sets (4 averaged runs) assuming gold tokenisation. Best scores in bold, second to best underlined. Table 3: Accuracy of models for French on the XNLI test set. Best scores in bold, second to best underlined. Table 4: Results for NER on the FTB. Best scores in bold, second to best underlined. Table 5: Comparing subword and whole-word masking procedures on the validation sets of each task. Each score is an average of 4 runs with different random seeds. For POS tagging and Dependency parsing, we average the scores on the 4 treebanks.)	unshuffled version of the French OSCAR corpus
Given the details in the article, what best describes Captain Walsh and Major Polk's relationship? A. They had strong disdain for each other. B. They often bantered while still being close friends. C. They enjoyed competing with each other. D. They liked to make jokes out of each other.	A PLANET NAMED JOE By S. A. LOMBINO There were more Joes on Venus than you could shake a ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel Walsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major Polk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Colonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor. For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus. He might even have picked a Captain. But he liked me about as much as I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. At least, that's what he told me. I stood at attention before his desk in the Patrol Station. We were somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in Space II. The duty was fine, and I liked it a lot. Come to think of it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get by with gravy. "It will be a simple assignment, Major," he said to me, peering over his fingers. He held them up in front of him like a cathedral. "Yes, sir," I said. "It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native." I wanted to say, "Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on the job? Why me?" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his fingers. "The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent." He paused, then added, "For a native, that is." I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there. Which brought to mind an important point. "I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I thought our activities were confined to Mars." He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk as if he were waiting for me to cut. "Mmmm," he said, "yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just what's happening on Mars." I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very far. "He's had many dealings with the natives there," Walsh explained. "If anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can." If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called it "revolt." It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt. "And this man is on Venus now?" I asked for confirmation. I'd never been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place. "Yes, Major," he said. "This man is on Venus." At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night. He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in any military organization, he outranked me. "And the man's name, sir?" "Joe." A tight smile played on his face. "Joe what?" I asked. "Just Joe." "Just Joe?" "Yes," Walsh said. "A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like Joe. Among the natives, I mean." "I don't know, sir." "A relatively simple assignment," Walsh said. "Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance? Personal habits? Anything?" Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. "Well, physically he's like any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He does have a peculiar habit, though." "What's that?" "He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes." I sighed. "Well, it's not very much to go on." "You'll find him," Walsh said, grinning. "I'm sure of it." The trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took over. Swell guy, Walsh. Venus was hotter than I'd expected it to be. Much too hot for the tunic I was wearing. It smelled, too. A funny smell I couldn't place. Like a mixture of old shoe and after-shave. There were plants everywhere I looked. Big plants and small ones, some blooming with flowers I'd never seen before, and some as bare as cactus. I recognized a blue figure as one of the natives the pilot had told me about. He was tall, looking almost human except that everything about him was elongated. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have been stretched like a rubber band. I kept expecting him to pop back to normal. Instead, he flashed a double row of brilliant teeth at me. I wondered if he spoke English. "Hey, boy," I called. He ambled over with long-legged strides that closed the distance between us in seconds. "Call me Joe," he said. I dropped my bags and stared at him. Maybe this was going to be a simple assignment after all. "I sure am glad to see you, Joe," I said. "Same here, Toots," he answered. "The guys back in Space II are searching high and low for you," I told him. "You've got the wrong number," he said, and I was a little surprised at his use of Terran idiom. "You are Joe, aren't you? Joe the trader?" "I'm Joe, all right," he said. "Only thing I ever traded, though, was a pocketknife. Got a set of keys for it." "Oh," I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a drink first. "Where's the Officer's Club?" I asked the Venusian. "Are you buying information or are you just curious?" "Can you take me there?" I asked. "Sure thing, Toots." He picked up my bags and started walking up a heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when he dropped my bags and said, "There it is." The Officer's Club was a plasteel hut with window shields that protected it from the heat of the sun. It didn't look too comfortable but I really wanted that drink. I reached into my tunic and slipped the native thirty solars. He stared at the credits curiously and then shrugged his shoulders. "Oh well, you're new here. We'll let it go." He took off then, while I stared after him, wondering just what he'd meant. Had I tipped him too little? I shrugged and looked over at the Officer's Club. From the outside it looked as hot as hell. On the inside it was about two degrees short of that mark. I began to curse Walsh for taking me away from my nice soft job in Space II. There wasn't much inside the club. A few tables and chairs, a dart game and a bar. Behind the bar a tall Venusian lounged. I walked over and asked, "What are you serving, pal?" "Call me Joe," he answered. He caught me off balance. "What?" "Joe," he said again. A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull. "You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about Mars, would you?" "I never left home," he said simply. "What are you drinking?" That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled.... But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like Joe. Among the natives, I mean. Sure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most contemptible.... "What are you drinking, pal?" the Venusian asked again. "Skip it," I said. "How do I get to the captain's shack?" "Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it." I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at the bartender. "Hello, Joe," he said. "How's it going?" "Not so hot, Joe," the bartender replied. I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a great gag. Very funny. Very.... "You Major Polk, sweetheart?" the Venusian who'd just come in asked. "Yes," I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh. "You better get your butt over to the captain's shack," he said. "He's about ready to post you as overdue." "Sure," I said wearily. "Will you take my bags, please?" "Roger," he answered. He picked up the bags and nodded at the bar. "So long, Joe," he said to the bartender. "See you, Joe," the bartender called back. Captain Bransten was a mousey, unimpressive sort of man. He was wearing a tropical tunic, but he still resembled a wilted lily more than he did an officer. "Have a seat, Major," he offered. He reached for a cigarette box on the desk and extended it to me. He coughed in embarrassment when he saw it was empty. Quickly, he pressed a button on his desk and the door popped open. A tall, blue Venusian stepped lithely into the room. "Sir?" the Venusian asked. "We're out of cigarettes, Joe," the Captain said. "Will you get us some, please?" "Sure thing," the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the door behind him. Another Joe , I thought. Another damned Joe. "They steal them," Captain Bransten said abruptly. "Steal what?" I asked. "Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things they like about Terran culture." So Walsh had taken care of that angle too. He does have a peculiar habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes. Cigarettes was the tip I should have given; not solars. "All right," I said, "suppose we start at the beginning." Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. "Sir?" he asked. "What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but I think its popularity here is a little outstanding." Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and waited for his explanation. "I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus," he said. "Is there a local hero named Joe?" I asked. "No, no, nothing like that," he assured me. "It's a simple culture, you know. Not nearly as developed as Mars." "I can see that," I said bitingly. "And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture. Lots of enlisted men, you know." I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful ancestry more keenly. "It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course," Bransten was saying. I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth. "Get to the point, Captain!" I barked. "Easy, sir," Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain wasn't used to entertaining Majors. "The enlisted men. You know how they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?" "I follow, all right," I said bitterly. "Well," Bransten went on, "that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the cigarettes." He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first place. "Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all." Just a case of extended idiot , I thought. An idiot on a wild goose chase a hell of a long way from home. "I understand perfectly," I snapped. "Where are my quarters?" Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered. I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical tunic. I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose. Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat pussy cat. "What is it, Major?" he asked. "This man Joe," I said. "Can you give me any more on him?" Walsh's grin grew wider. "Why, Major," he said, "you're not having any difficulties, are you?" "None at all," I snapped back. "I just thought I'd be able to find him a lot sooner if...." "Take your time, Major," Walsh beamed. "There's no rush at all." "I thought...." "I'm sure you can do the job," Walsh cut in. "I wouldn't have sent you otherwise." Hell, I was through kidding around. "Look...." "He's somewhere in the jungle, you know," Walsh said. I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles away. He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on him. "Polk!" he shouted, "can you hear me?" I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen on my end went blank, too. He's somewhere in the jungle, you know. I thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my quarters. As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow. One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping the next ship back to Earth. It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer. It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the Service altogether. Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might really find a guy who was trader Joe. I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though. I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed. A tall Venusian stepped into the room. "Joe?" I asked, just to be sure. "Who else, boss?" he answered. "I'm trying to locate someone," I said. "I'll need a guide to take me into the jungle. Can you get me one?" "It'll cost you, boss," the Venusian said. "How much?" "Two cartons of cigarettes at least." "Who's the guide?" I asked. "How's the price sound?" "Fine, fine," I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were almost a childish people! "His name is Joe," the Venusian told me. "Best damn guide on the planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do. Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to...." "Skip it," I said, cutting the promotion short. "Tell him to show up around fifteen hundred with a complete list of what we'll need." The Venusian started to leave. "And Joe," I said, stopping him at the door, "I hope you're not overlooking your commission on the deal." His face broke into a wide grin. "No danger of that, boss," he said. When he was gone I began figuring out a plan of action. Obviously, I'd just have to traipse through the jungle looking for a guy named Joe on a planet where everyone was named Joe. Everybody, at least, but the Captain, the small garrison attached to the Station, and me. I began wondering why Walsh had gone to so much trouble to get rid of me. The job, as I saw it, would take a hell of a long time. It seemed like a silly thing to do, just to get even with a guy for something that had happened years ago. He surely must have realized that I'd be back again, sooner or later. Maybe he had another little junket all set for me. Or maybe he didn't expect me to come back. The thought hadn't occurred to me before this, and I began to consider it seriously. Walsh was no good, rotten clear through. He was failing at the job of keeping Mars in hand, and he probably realized that a few more mistakes on his part would mean the end of his career with Space II. I chuckled as I thought of him isolated in some God-forsaken place like Space V or Space VII. This probably bothered him a lot, too. But what probably bothered him more was the fact that I was next in command. If he were transferred, I'd be in charge of Space II, and I could understand how much that would appeal to Walsh. I tried to figure the thing out sensibly, tried to weigh his good points against his bad. But it all came back to the same thing. A guy who would deliberately go to sleep on Boiler Watch with a ton of uranium ready to blast a barracks to smithereens if it wasn't watched, would deliberately do just about anything. Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in. The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall, elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far. "I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir," he said. "Are you familiar with the jungle?" I asked him. "Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand." "Has Joe told you what the payment will be?" "Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes." I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled. "When can we leave?" "Right away, sir. We won't need much really. I've made a list of supplies and I can get them in less than an hour. I suggest you wear light clothing, boots, and a hat." "Will I need a weapon?" He looked at me, his eyes faintly amused. "Why, what for, sir?" "Never mind," I said. "What's your name, by the way?" He lifted his eyebrows, and his eyes widened in his narrow face. He was definitely surprised. "Joe," he said. "Didn't you know?" When we'd been out for a while I discovered why Joe had suggested the boots and the hat. The undergrowth was often sharp and jagged and it would have sliced my legs to ribbons were they not protected by the high boots. The hat kept the strong sun off my head. Joe was an excellent guide and a pleasant companion. He seemed to be enjoying a great romp, seemed to love the jungle and take a secret pleasure in the work he was doing. There were times when I couldn't see three feet ahead of me. He'd stand stock still for a few minutes, his head barely moving, his eyes darting from one plant to another. Then he'd say, "This way," and take off into what looked like more impenetrable jungle invariably to find a little path leading directly to another village. Each village was the same. The natives would come running out of their huts, tall and blue, shouting, "Cigarettes, Joe? Cigarettes?" It took me a while to realize they were addressing me and not my guide. Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low about the whole affair. Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again. His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle. "I like Venus," he said once. "I would never leave it." "Have you ever been to Earth?" I asked. "No," Joe replied. "I like Terrans too, you understand. They are good for Venus. And they are fun." "Fun?" I asked, thinking of a particular species of Terran: species Leonard Walsh. "Yes, yes," he said wholeheartedly. "They joke and they laugh and ... well, you know." "I suppose so," I admitted. Joe smiled secretly, and we pushed on. I began to find, more and more, that I had started to talk freely to Joe. In the beginning he had been just my guide. There had been the strained relationship of employer and employee. But as the days lengthened into weeks, the formal atmosphere began to crumble. I found myself telling him all about Earth, about the people there, about my decision to attend the Academy, the rigid tests, the grind, even the Moon run. Joe was a good listener, nodding sympathetically, finding experiences in his own life to parallel my own. And as our relationship progressed from a casual one to a definitely friendly one, Joe seemed more enthusiastic than ever to keep up our grinding pace to find what we were looking for. Once we stopped in a clearing to rest. Joe lounged on the matted greenery, his long body stretched out in front of him, the knife gleaming in his belt. I'd seen him slash his way through thick, tangled vines with that knife, his long, muscular arms powerfully slicing through them like strips of silk. "How far are we from the Station?" I asked. "Three or four Earth weeks," he replied. I sighed wearily. "Where do we go from here?" "There are more villages," he said. "We'll never find him." "Possibly," Joe mused, the smile creeping over his face again. "A wild goose chase. A fool's errand." "We'd better get started," Joe said simply. I got to my feet and we started the march again. Joe was still fresh, a brilliant contrast to me, weary and dejected. Somehow, I had the same feeling I'd had a long time ago on my sixteenth birthday. One of my friends had taken me all over the city, finally dropping me off at my own house where the whole gang was gathered for a surprise party. Joe reminded me of that friend. "There's a village ahead," he said, and the grin on his face was large now, his eyes shining. Something was missing here. Natives. There were no natives rushing out to greet us. No cries of "Cigarettes? Cigarettes?" I caught up with Joe. "What's the story?" I whispered. He shrugged knowingly and continued walking. And then I saw the ship, nose pointing into space, catching the rays of the sun like a great silver bullet. "What...?" I started. "It's all right," Joe said, smiling. The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand. "Hello, Major," he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head. "Fancy meeting you here, Colonel," I said, trying to match his joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off. Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with happiness. "I see you found your man," Walsh said. I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game. I faced Walsh again. "Okay, what's it all about, pal?" "Colonel," Walsh corrected me. "You mustn't forget to say Colonel, Major ." He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless finality. I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh pointing the stun gun at my middle. "We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?" "If you mean in miles," I said, looking around at the plants, "we sure have." Walsh grinned a little. "Always the wit," he said drily. And then the smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. "I'm going to kill you, you know." He said it as if he were saying, "I think it'll rain tomorrow." Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying this. Another of those funny Terran games. "You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome," Walsh said. "I suppose I should thank you, really." "You're welcome," I said. "It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me." "It was your own damn fault," I said. "You knew what you were doing when you decided to cork off." Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely. "You didn't have to report me," Walsh said. "No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!" Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small, unimportant drama. I could hear Joe breathing beside me. "I'm on my way out," Walsh rasped. "Finished, do you understand?" "Good," I said. And I meant it. "This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible." Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the game, the fun? "You brought the Mars business on yourself," I told Walsh. "There was never any trouble before you took command." "The natives," he practically shouted. "They ... they...." Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native. Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it. "What about the natives?" I asked. "Nothing," Walsh said. "Nothing." He was silent for a while. "A man of my calibre," he said then, his face grim. "Dealing with savages." He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe. The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the colonel in puzzlement.	A. They had strong disdain for each other.
How is this approach used to detect incorrect facts?	### Introduction Knowledge graphs (KG) play a critical role in many real-world applications such as search, structured data management, recommendations, and question answering. Since KGs often suffer from incompleteness and noise in their facts (links), a number of recent techniques have proposed models that embed each entity and relation into a vector space, and use these embeddings to predict facts. These dense representation models for link prediction include tensor factorization BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , algebraic operations BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , multiple embeddings BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , and complex neural models BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 . However, there are only a few studies BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 that investigate the quality of the different KG models. There is a need to go beyond just the accuracy on link prediction, and instead focus on whether these representations are robust and stable, and what facts they make use of for their predictions. In this paper, our goal is to design approaches that minimally change the graph structure such that the prediction of a target fact changes the most after the embeddings are relearned, which we collectively call Completion Robustness and Interpretability via Adversarial Graph Edits (). First, we consider perturbations that red!50!blackremove a neighboring link for the target fact, thus identifying the most influential related fact, providing an explanation for the model's prediction. As an example, consider the excerpt from a KG in Figure 1 with two observed facts, and a target predicted fact that Princes Henriette is the parent of Violante Bavaria. Our proposed graph perturbation, shown in Figure 1 , identifies the existing fact that Ferdinal Maria is the father of Violante Bavaria as the one when removed and model retrained, will change the prediction of Princes Henriette's child. We also study attacks that green!50!blackadd a new, fake fact into the KG to evaluate the robustness and sensitivity of link prediction models to small additions to the graph. An example attack for the original graph in Figure 1 , is depicted in Figure 1 . Such perturbations to the the training data are from a family of adversarial modifications that have been applied to other machine learning tasks, known as poisoning BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 . Since the setting is quite different from traditional adversarial attacks, search for link prediction adversaries brings up unique challenges. To find these minimal changes for a target link, we need to identify the fact that, when added into or removed from the graph, will have the biggest impact on the predicted score of the target fact. Unfortunately, computing this change in the score is expensive since it involves retraining the model to recompute the embeddings. We propose an efficient estimate of this score change by approximating the change in the embeddings using Taylor expansion. The other challenge in identifying adversarial modifications for link prediction, especially when considering addition of fake facts, is the combinatorial search space over possible facts, which is intractable to enumerate. We introduce an inverter of the original embedding model, to decode the embeddings to their corresponding graph components, making the search of facts tractable by performing efficient gradient-based continuous optimization. We evaluate our proposed methods through following experiments. First, on relatively small KGs, we show that our approximations are accurate compared to the true change in the score. Second, we show that our additive attacks can effectively reduce the performance of state of the art models BIBREF2 , BIBREF10 up to $27.3\%$ and $50.7\%$ in Hits@1 for two large KGs: WN18 and YAGO3-10. We also explore the utility of adversarial modifications in explaining the model predictions by presenting rule-like descriptions of the most influential neighbors. Finally, we use adversaries to detect errors in the KG, obtaining up to $55\%$ accuracy in detecting errors. ### Background and Notation In this section, we briefly introduce some notations, and existing relational embedding approaches that model knowledge graph completion using dense vectors. In KGs, facts are represented using triples of subject, relation, and object, $\langle s, r, o\rangle $ , where $s,o\in \xi $ , the set of entities, and $r\in $ , the set of relations. To model the KG, a scoring function $\psi :\xi \times \times \xi \rightarrow $ is learned to evaluate whether any given fact is true. In this work, we focus on multiplicative models of link prediction, specifically DistMult BIBREF2 because of its simplicity and popularity, and ConvE BIBREF10 because of its high accuracy. We can represent the scoring function of such methods as $\psi (s,r,o) = , ) \cdot $ , where $,,\in ^d$ are embeddings of the subject, relation, and object respectively. In DistMult, $, ) = \odot $ , where $\odot $ is element-wise multiplication operator. Similarly, in ConvE, $, )$ is computed by a convolution on the concatenation of $$ and $s,o\in \xi $0 . We use the same setup as BIBREF10 for training, i.e., incorporate binary cross-entropy loss over the triple scores. In particular, for subject-relation pairs $(s,r)$ in the training data $G$ , we use binary $y^{s,r}_o$ to represent negative and positive facts. Using the model's probability of truth as $\sigma (\psi (s,r,o))$ for $\langle s,r,o\rangle $ , the loss is defined as: (G) = (s,r)o ys,ro(((s,r,o))) + (1-ys,ro)(1 - ((s,r,o))). Gradient descent is used to learn the embeddings $,,$ , and the parameters of $, if any. $ ### Completion Robustness and Interpretability via Adversarial Graph Edits () For adversarial modifications on KGs, we first define the space of possible modifications. For a target triple $\langle s, r, o\rangle $ , we constrain the possible triples that we can remove (or inject) to be in the form of $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o\rangle $ i.e $s^{\prime }$ and $r^{\prime }$ may be different from the target, but the object is not. We analyze other forms of modifications such as $\langle s, r^{\prime }, o^{\prime }\rangle $ and $\langle s, r^{\prime }, o\rangle $ in appendices "Modifications of the Form 〈s,r ' ,o ' 〉\langle s, r^{\prime }, o^{\prime } \rangle " and "Modifications of the Form 〈s,r ' ,o〉\langle s, r^{\prime }, o \rangle " , and leave empirical evaluation of these modifications for future work. ### Removing a fact () For explaining a target prediction, we are interested in identifying the observed fact that has the most influence (according to the model) on the prediction. We define influence of an observed fact on the prediction as the change in the prediction score if the observed fact was not present when the embeddings were learned. Previous work have used this concept of influence similarly for several different tasks BIBREF19 , BIBREF20 . Formally, for the target triple ${s,r,o}$ and observed graph $G$ , we want to identify a neighboring triple ${s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}\in G$ such that the score $\psi (s,r,o)$ when trained on $G$ and the score $\overline{\psi }(s,r,o)$ when trained on $G-\lbrace {s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}\rbrace $ are maximally different, i.e. argmax(s', r')Nei(o) (s',r')(s,r,o) where $\Delta _{(s^{\prime },r^{\prime })}(s,r,o)=\psi (s, r, o)-\overline{\psi }(s,r,o)$ , and $\text{Nei}(o)=\lbrace (s^{\prime },r^{\prime })\|\langle s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o \rangle \in G \rbrace $ . ### Adding a new fact () We are also interested in investigating the robustness of models, i.e., how sensitive are the predictions to small additions to the knowledge graph. Specifically, for a target prediction ${s,r,o}$ , we are interested in identifying a single fake fact ${s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}$ that, when added to the knowledge graph $G$ , changes the prediction score $\psi (s,r,o)$ the most. Using $\overline{\psi }(s,r,o)$ as the score after training on $G\cup \lbrace {s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}\rbrace $ , we define the adversary as: argmax(s', r') (s',r')(s,r,o) where $\Delta _{(s^{\prime },r^{\prime })}(s,r,o)=\psi (s, r, o)-\overline{\psi }(s,r,o)$ . The search here is over any possible $s^{\prime }\in \xi $ , which is often in the millions for most real-world KGs, and $r^{\prime }\in $ . We also identify adversaries that increase the prediction score for specific false triple, i.e., for a target fake fact ${s,r,o}$ , the adversary is ${s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}$0 , where ${s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o}$1 is defined as before. ### Challenges There are a number of crucial challenges when conducting such adversarial attack on KGs. First, evaluating the effect of changing the KG on the score of the target fact ( $\overline{\psi }(s,r,o)$ ) is expensive since we need to update the embeddings by retraining the model on the new graph; a very time-consuming process that is at least linear in the size of $G$ . Second, since there are many candidate facts that can be added to the knowledge graph, identifying the most promising adversary through search-based methods is also expensive. Specifically, the search size for unobserved facts is $\|\xi \| \times \|\|$ , which, for example in YAGO3-10 KG, can be as many as $4.5 M$ possible facts for a single target prediction. ### Efficiently Identifying the Modification In this section, we propose algorithms to address mentioned challenges by (1) approximating the effect of changing the graph on a target prediction, and (2) using continuous optimization for the discrete search over potential modifications. ### First-order Approximation of Influence We first study the addition of a fact to the graph, and then extend it to cover removal as well. To capture the effect of an adversarial modification on the score of a target triple, we need to study the effect of the change on the vector representations of the target triple. We use $$ , $$ , and $$ to denote the embeddings of $s,r,o$ at the solution of $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$ , and when considering the adversarial triple $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ , we use $$ , $$ , and $$ for the new embeddings of $s,r,o$ , respectively. Thus $$0 is a solution to $$1 , which can also be written as $$2 . Similarly, $$3 s', r', o $$4 $$5 $$6 $$7 o $$8 $$9 $$0 $$1 $$2 $$3 O(n3) $$4 $$5 $$6 (s,r,o)-(s, r, o) $$7 - $$8 s, r = ,) $$9 - $s,r,o$0 (G)= (G)+(s', r', o ) $s,r,o$1 $s,r,o$2 s', r' = ',') $s,r,o$3 = ((s',r',o)) $s,r,o$4 eo (G)=0 $s,r,o$5 eo (G) $s,r,o$6 Ho $s,r,o$7 dd $s,r,o$8 o $s,r,o$9 $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$0 - $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$1 -= $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$2 Ho $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$3 Ho + (1-) s',r's',r' $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$4 Ho $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$5 dd $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$6 d $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$7 s,r,s',r'd $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$8 s, r, o $\operatornamewithlimits{argmin} (G)$9 s', r', o $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $0 $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $1 $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $2 ### Continuous Optimization for Search Using the approximations provided in the previous section, Eq. () and (), we can use brute force enumeration to find the adversary $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ . This approach is feasible when removing an observed triple since the search space of such modifications is usually small; it is the number of observed facts that share the object with the target. On the other hand, finding the most influential unobserved fact to add requires search over a much larger space of all possible unobserved facts (that share the object). Instead, we identify the most influential unobserved fact $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ by using a gradient-based algorithm on vector $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}$ in the embedding space (reminder, $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}=^{\prime },^{\prime })$ ), solving the following continuous optimization problem in $^d$ : *argmaxs', r' (s',r')(s,r,o). After identifying the optimal $_{s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }}$ , we still need to generate the pair $(s^{\prime },r^{\prime })$ . We design a network, shown in Figure 2 , that maps the vector $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}$ to the entity-relation space, i.e., translating it into $(s^{\prime },r^{\prime })$ . In particular, we train an auto-encoder where the encoder is fixed to receive the $s$ and $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $0 as one-hot inputs, and calculates $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $1 in the same way as the DistMult and ConvE encoders respectively (using trained embeddings). The decoder is trained to take $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $2 as input and produce $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $3 and $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $4 , essentially inverting $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $5 s, r $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $6 s $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $7 r $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $8 s, r $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $9 We evaluate the performance of our inverter networks (one for each model/dataset) on correctly recovering the pairs of subject and relation from the test set of our benchmarks, given the $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}$0 . The accuracy of recovered pairs (and of each argument) is given in Table 1 . As shown, our networks achieve a very high accuracy, demonstrating their ability to invert vectors $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}$1 to $_{s^{\prime },r^{\prime }}$2 pairs. ### Experiments We evaluate by ( "Influence Function vs " ) comparing estimate with the actual effect of the attacks, ( "Robustness of Link Prediction Models" ) studying the effect of adversarial attacks on evaluation metrics, ( "Interpretability of Models" ) exploring its application to the interpretability of KG representations, and ( "Finding Errors in Knowledge Graphs" ) detecting incorrect triples. ### Influence Function vs To evaluate the quality of our approximations and compare with influence function (IF), we conduct leave one out experiments. In this setup, we take all the neighbors of a random target triple as candidate modifications, remove them one at a time, retrain the model each time, and compute the exact change in the score of the target triple. We can use the magnitude of this change in score to rank the candidate triples, and compare this exact ranking with ranking as predicted by: , influence function with and without Hessian matrix, and the original model score (with the intuition that facts that the model is most confident of will have the largest impact when removed). Similarly, we evaluate by considering 200 random triples that share the object entity with the target sample as candidates, and rank them as above. The average results of Spearman's $\rho $ and Kendall's $\tau $ rank correlation coefficients over 10 random target samples is provided in Table 3 . performs comparably to the influence function, confirming that our approximation is accurate. Influence function is slightly more accurate because they use the complete Hessian matrix over all the parameters, while we only approximate the change by calculating the Hessian over $$ . The effect of this difference on scalability is dramatic, constraining IF to very small graphs and small embedding dimensionality ( $d\le 10$ ) before we run out of memory. In Figure 3 , we show the time to compute a single adversary by IF compared to , as we steadily grow the number of entities (randomly chosen subgraphs), averaged over 10 random triples. As it shows, is mostly unaffected by the number of entities while IF increases quadratically. Considering that real-world KGs have tens of thousands of times more entities, making IF unfeasible for them. ### Robustness of Link Prediction Models Now we evaluate the effectiveness of to successfully attack link prediction by adding false facts. The goal here is to identify the attacks for triples in the test data, and measuring their effect on MRR and Hits@ metrics (ranking evaluations) after conducting the attack and retraining the model. Since this is the first work on adversarial attacks for link prediction, we introduce several baselines to compare against our method. For finding the adversarial fact to add for the target triple $\langle s, r, o \rangle $ , we consider two baselines: 1) choosing a random fake fact $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ (Random Attack); 2) finding $(s^{\prime }, r^{\prime })$ by first calculating $, )$ and then feeding $-, )$ to the decoder of the inverter function (Opposite Attack). In addition to , we introduce two other alternatives of our method: (1) , that uses to increase the score of fake fact over a test triple, i.e., we find the fake fact the model ranks second after the test triple, and identify the adversary for them, and (2) that selects between and attacks based on which has a higher estimated change in score. All-Test The result of the attack on all test facts as targets is provided in the Table 4 . outperforms the baselines, demonstrating its ability to effectively attack the KG representations. It seems DistMult is more robust against random attacks, while ConvE is more robust against designed attacks. is more effective than since changing the score of a fake fact is easier than of actual facts; there is no existing evidence to support fake facts. We also see that YAGO3-10 models are more robust than those for WN18. Looking at sample attacks (provided in Appendix "Sample Adversarial Attacks" ), mostly tries to change the type of the target object by associating it with a subject and a relation for a different entity type. Uncertain-Test To better understand the effect of attacks, we consider a subset of test triples that 1) the model predicts correctly, 2) difference between their scores and the negative sample with the highest score is minimum. This “Uncertain-Test” subset contains 100 triples from each of the original test sets, and we provide results of attacks on this data in Table 4 . The attacks are much more effective in this scenario, causing a considerable drop in the metrics. Further, in addition to significantly outperforming other baselines, they indicate that ConvE's confidence is much more robust. Relation Breakdown We perform additional analysis on the YAGO3-10 dataset to gain a deeper understanding of the performance of our model. As shown in Figure 4 , both DistMult and ConvE provide a more robust representation for isAffiliatedTo and isConnectedTo relations, demonstrating the confidence of models in identifying them. Moreover, the affects DistMult more in playsFor and isMarriedTo relations while affecting ConvE more in isConnectedTo relations. Examples Sample adversarial attacks are provided in Table 5 . attacks mostly try to change the type of the target triple's object by associating it with a subject and a relation that require a different entity types. ### Interpretability of Models To be able to understand and interpret why a link is predicted using the opaque, dense embeddings, we need to find out which part of the graph was most influential on the prediction. To provide such explanations for each predictions, we identify the most influential fact using . Instead of focusing on individual predictions, we aggregate the explanations over the whole dataset for each relation using a simple rule extraction technique: we find simple patterns on subgraphs that surround the target triple and the removed fact from , and appear more than $90\%$ of the time. We only focus on extracting length-2 horn rules, i.e., $R_1(a,c)\wedge R_2(c,b)\Rightarrow R(a,b)$ , where $R(a,b)$ is the target and $R_2(c,b)$ is the removed fact. Table 6 shows extracted YAGO3-10 rules that are common to both models, and ones that are not. The rules show several interesting inferences, such that hasChild is often inferred via married parents, and isLocatedIn via transitivity. There are several differences in how the models reason as well; DistMult often uses the hasCapital as an intermediate step for isLocatedIn, while ConvE incorrectly uses isNeighbor. We also compare against rules extracted by BIBREF2 for YAGO3-10 that utilizes the structure of DistMult: they require domain knowledge on types and cannot be applied to ConvE. Interestingly, the extracted rules contain all the rules provided by , demonstrating that can be used to accurately interpret models, including ones that are not interpretable, such as ConvE. These are preliminary steps toward interpretability of link prediction models, and we leave more analysis of interpretability to future work. ### Finding Errors in Knowledge Graphs Here, we demonstrate another potential use of adversarial modifications: finding erroneous triples in the knowledge graph. Intuitively, if there is an error in the graph, the triple is likely to be inconsistent with its neighborhood, and thus the model should put least trust on this triple. In other words, the error triple should have the least influence on the model's prediction of the training data. Formally, to find the incorrect triple $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o\rangle $ in the neighborhood of the train triple $\langle s, r, o\rangle $ , we need to find the triple $\langle s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o\rangle $ that results in the least change $\Delta _{(s^{\prime },r^{\prime })}(s,r,o)$ when removed from the graph. To evaluate this application, we inject random triples into the graph, and measure the ability of to detect the errors using our optimization. We consider two types of incorrect triples: 1) incorrect triples in the form of $\langle s^{\prime }, r, o\rangle $ where $s^{\prime }$ is chosen randomly from all of the entities, and 2) incorrect triples in the form of $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o\rangle $ where $s^{\prime }$ and $r^{\prime }$ are chosen randomly. We choose 100 random triples from the observed graph, and for each of them, add an incorrect triple (in each of the two scenarios) to its neighborhood. Then, after retraining DistMult on this noisy training data, we identify error triples through a search over the neighbors of the 100 facts. The result of choosing the neighbor with the least influence on the target is provided in the Table 7 . When compared with baselines that randomly choose one of the neighbors, or assume that the fact with the lowest score is incorrect, we see that outperforms both of these with a considerable gap, obtaining an accuracy of $42\%$ and $55\%$ in detecting errors. ### Related Work Learning relational knowledge representations has been a focus of active research in the past few years, but to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on conducting adversarial modifications on the link prediction task. Knowledge graph embedding There is a rich literature on representing knowledge graphs in vector spaces that differ in their scoring functions BIBREF21 , BIBREF22 , BIBREF23 . Although is primarily applicable to multiplicative scoring functions BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF24 , these ideas apply to additive scoring functions BIBREF18 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF25 as well, as we show in Appendix "First-order Approximation of the Change For TransE" . Furthermore, there is a growing body of literature that incorporates an extra types of evidence for more informed embeddings such as numerical values BIBREF26 , images BIBREF27 , text BIBREF28 , BIBREF29 , BIBREF30 , and their combinations BIBREF31 . Using , we can gain a deeper understanding of these methods, especially those that build their embeddings wit hmultiplicative scoring functions. Interpretability and Adversarial Modification There has been a significant recent interest in conducting an adversarial attacks on different machine learning models BIBREF16 , BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 , BIBREF34 , BIBREF35 , BIBREF36 to attain the interpretability, and further, evaluate the robustness of those models. BIBREF20 uses influence function to provide an approach to understanding black-box models by studying the changes in the loss occurring as a result of changes in the training data. In addition to incorporating their established method on KGs, we derive a novel approach that differs from their procedure in two ways: (1) instead of changes in the loss, we consider the changes in the scoring function, which is more appropriate for KG representations, and (2) in addition to searching for an attack, we introduce a gradient-based method that is much faster, especially for “adding an attack triple” (the size of search space make the influence function method infeasible). Previous work has also considered adversaries for KGs, but as part of training to improve their representation of the graph BIBREF37 , BIBREF38 . Adversarial Attack on KG Although this is the first work on adversarial attacks for link prediction, there are two approaches BIBREF39 , BIBREF17 that consider the task of adversarial attack on graphs. There are a few fundamental differences from our work: (1) they build their method on top of a path-based representations while we focus on embeddings, (2) they consider node classification as the target of their attacks while we attack link prediction, and (3) they conduct the attack on small graphs due to restricted scalability, while the complexity of our method does not depend on the size of the graph, but only the neighborhood, allowing us to attack real-world graphs. ### Conclusions Motivated by the need to analyze the robustness and interpretability of link prediction models, we present a novel approach for conducting adversarial modifications to knowledge graphs. We introduce , completion robustness and interpretability via adversarial graph edits: identifying the fact to add into or remove from the KG that changes the prediction for a target fact. uses (1) an estimate of the score change for any target triple after adding or removing another fact, and (2) a gradient-based algorithm for identifying the most influential modification. We show that can effectively reduce ranking metrics on link prediction models upon applying the attack triples. Further, we incorporate the to study the interpretability of KG representations by summarizing the most influential facts for each relation. Finally, using , we introduce a novel automated error detection method for knowledge graphs. We have release the open-source implementation of our models at: https://pouyapez.github.io/criage. ### Acknowledgements We would like to thank Matt Gardner, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Zhengli Zhao, Robert L. Logan IV, Dheeru Dua and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback and suggestions. This work is supported in part by Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and in part by NSF awards #IIS-1817183 and #IIS-1756023. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the funding agencies. ### Appendix We approximate the change on the score of the target triple upon applying attacks other than the $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ ones. Since each relation appears many times in the training triples, we can assume that applying a single attack will not considerably affect the relations embeddings. As a result, we just need to study the attacks in the form of $\langle s, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ and $\langle s, r^{\prime }, o^{\prime } \rangle $ . Defining the scoring function as $\psi (s,r,o) = , ) \cdot = _{s,r} \cdot $ , we further assume that $\psi (s,r,o) =\cdot (, ) =\cdot _{r,o}$ . ### Modifications of the Form 〈s,r ' ,o ' 〉\langle s, r^{\prime }, o^{\prime } \rangle Using similar argument as the attacks in the form of $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ , we can calculate the effect of the attack, $\overline{\psi }{(s,r,o)}-\psi (s, r, o)$ as: (s,r,o)-(s, r, o)=(-) s, r where $_{s, r} = (,)$ . We now derive an efficient computation for $(-)$ . First, the derivative of the loss $(\overline{G})= (G)+(\langle s, r^{\prime }, o^{\prime } \rangle )$ over $$ is: es (G) = es (G) - (1-) r', o' where $_{r^{\prime }, o^{\prime }} = (^{\prime },^{\prime })$ , and $\varphi = \sigma (\psi (s,r^{\prime },o^{\prime }))$ . At convergence, after retraining, we expect $\nabla _{e_s} (\overline{G})=0$ . We perform first order Taylor approximation of $\nabla _{e_s} (\overline{G})$ to get: 0 - (1-)r',o'+ (Hs+(1-)r',o' r',o')(-) where $H_s$ is the $d\times d$ Hessian matrix for $s$ , i.e. second order derivative of the loss w.r.t. $$ , computed sparsely. Solving for $-$ gives us: -= (1-) (Hs + (1-) r',o'r',o')-1 r',o' In practice, $H_s$ is positive definite, making $H_s + \varphi (1-\varphi ) _{r^{\prime },o^{\prime }}^\intercal _{r^{\prime },o^{\prime }}$ positive definite as well, and invertible. Then, we compute the score change as: (s,r,o)-(s, r, o)= r,o (-) = ((1-) (Hs + (1-) r',o'r',o')-1 r',o')r,o. ### Modifications of the Form 〈s,r ' ,o〉\langle s, r^{\prime }, o \rangle In this section we approximate the effect of attack in the form of $\langle s, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ . In contrast to $\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle $ attacks, for this scenario we need to consider the change in the $$ , upon applying the attack, in approximation of the change in the score as well. Using previous results, we can approximate the $-$ as: -= (1-) (Ho + (1-) s,r's,r')-1 s,r' and similarly, we can approximate $-$ as: -= (1-) (Hs + (1-) r',or',o)-1 r',o where $H_s$ is the Hessian matrix over $$ . Then using these approximations: s,r(-) = s,r ((1-) (Ho + (1-) s,r's,r')-1 s,r') and: (-) r,o= ((1-) (Hs + (1-) r',or',o)-1 r',o) r,o and then calculate the change in the score as: (s,r,o)-(s, r, o)= s,r.(-) +(-).r,o = s,r ((1-) (Ho + (1-) s,r's,r')-1 s,r')+ ((1-) (Hs + (1-) r',or',o)-1 r',o) r, o ### First-order Approximation of the Change For TransE In here we derive the approximation of the change in the score upon applying an adversarial modification for TransE BIBREF18 . Using similar assumptions and parameters as before, to calculate the effect of the attack, $\overline{\psi }{(s,r,o)}$ (where $\psi {(s,r,o)}=\|+-\|$ ), we need to compute $$ . To do so, we need to derive an efficient computation for $$ . First, the derivative of the loss $(\overline{G})= (G)+(\langle s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }, o \rangle )$ over $$ is: eo (G) = eo (G) + (1-) s', r'-(s',r',o) where $_{s^{\prime }, r^{\prime }} = ^{\prime }+ ^{\prime }$ , and $\varphi = \sigma (\psi (s^{\prime },r^{\prime },o))$ . At convergence, after retraining, we expect $\nabla _{e_o} (\overline{G})=0$ . We perform first order Taylor approximation of $\nabla _{e_o} (\overline{G})$ to get: 0 (1-) (s', r'-)(s',r',o)+(Ho - Hs',r',o)(-) Hs',r',o = (1-)(s', r'-)(s', r'-)(s',r',o)2+ 1-(s',r',o)-(1-) (s', r'-)(s', r'-)(s',r',o)3 where $H_o$ is the $d\times d$ Hessian matrix for $o$ , i.e., second order derivative of the loss w.r.t. $$ , computed sparsely. Solving for $$ gives us: = -(1-) (Ho - Hs',r',o)-1 (s', r'-)(s',r',o) + Then, we compute the score change as: (s,r,o)= \|+-\| = \|++(1-) (Ho - Hs',r',o)-1 (s', r'-)(s',r',o) - \| Calculating this expression is efficient since $H_o$ is a $d\times d$ matrix. ### Sample Adversarial Attacks In this section, we provide the output of the for some target triples. Sample adversarial attacks are provided in Table 5 . As it shows, attacks mostly try to change the type of the target triple's object by associating it with a subject and a relation that require a different entity types. Figure 1: Completion Robustness and Interpretability via Adversarial Graph Edits (CRIAGE): Change in the graph structure that changes the prediction of the retrained model, where (a) is the original sub-graph of the KG, (b) removes a neighboring link of the target, resulting in a change in the prediction, and (c) shows the effect of adding an attack triple on the target. These modifications were identified by our proposed approach. Figure 2: Inverter Network The architecture of our inverter function that translate zs,r to its respective (s̃, r̃). The encoder component is fixed to be the encoder network of DistMult and ConvE respectively. Table 1: Inverter Functions Accuracy, we calculate the accuracy of our inverter networks in correctly recovering the pairs of subject and relation from the test set of our benchmarks. Table 2: Data Statistics of the benchmarks. Figure 3: Influence function vs CRIAGE. We plot the average time (over 10 facts) of influence function (IF) and CRIAGE to identify an adversary as the number of entities in the Kinship KG is varied (by randomly sampling subgraphs of the KG). Even with small graphs and dimensionality, IF quickly becomes impractical. Table 3: Ranking modifications by their impact on the target. We compare the true ranking of candidate triples with a number of approximations using ranking correlation coefficients. We compare our method with influence function (IF) with and without Hessian, and ranking the candidates based on their score, on two KGs (d = 10, averaged over 10 random targets). For the sake of brevity, we represent the Spearman’s ρ and Kendall’s τ rank correlation coefficients simply as ρ and τ . Table 4: Robustness of Representation Models, the effect of adversarial attack on link prediction task. We consider two scenario for the target triples, 1) choosing the whole test dataset as the targets (All-Test) and 2) choosing a subset of test data that models are uncertain about them (Uncertain-Test). Figure 4: Per-Relation Breakdown showing the effect of CRIAGE-Add on different relations in YAGO3-10. Table 5: Extracted Rules for identifying the most influential link. We extract the patterns that appear more than 90% times in the neighborhood of the target triple. The output of CRIAGE-Remove is presented in red. Table 6: Error Detection Accuracy in the neighborhood of 100 chosen samples. We choose the neighbor with the least value of ∆(s′,r′)(s, r, o) as the incorrect fact. This experiment assumes we know each target fact has exactly one error. Table 7: Top adversarial triples for target samples.	if there is an error in the graph, the triple is likely to be inconsistent with its neighborhood, and thus the model should put least trust on this triple. In other words, the error triple should have the least influence on the model's prediction of the training data.
What was Orison’s excuse to visit the upper floors? A. To deliver a message from Mr. Wanji B. To see what the Earmuffs were doing C. To feed the Microfabridae D. To complain about Auga Vingt	CINDERELLA STORY By ALLEN KIM LANG What a bank! The First Vice-President was a cool cat—the elevator and the money operators all wore earmuffs—was just as phony as a three-dollar bill! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The First Vice-President of the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company, the gentleman to whom Miss Orison McCall was applying for a job, was not at all the public picture of a banker. His suit of hound's-tooth checks, the scarlet vest peeping above the vee of his jacket, were enough to assure Orison that the Taft Bank was a curious bank indeed. "I gotta say, chick, these references of yours really swing," said the Vice-President, Mr. Wanji. "Your last boss says you come on real cool in the secretary-bit." "He was a very kind employer," Orison said. She tried to keep from staring at the most remarkable item of Mr. Wanji's costume, a pair of furry green earmuffs. It was not cold. Mr. Wanji returned to Orison her letters of reference. "What color bread you got eyes for taking down, baby?" he asked. "Beg pardon?" "What kinda salary you bucking for?" he translated, bouncing up and down on the toes of his rough-leather desert boots. "I was making one-twenty a week in my last position," Miss McCall said. "You're worth more'n that, just to jazz up the decor," Mr. Wanji said. "What you say we pass you a cee-and-a-half a week. Okay?" He caught Orison's look of bewilderment. "One each, a Franklin and a Grant," he explained further. She still looked blank. "Sister, you gonna work in a bank, you gotta know who's picture's on the paper. That's a hunnerd-fifty a week, doll." "That will be most satisfactory, Mr. Wanji," Orison said. It was indeed. "Crazy!" Mr. Wanji grabbed Orison's right hand and shook it with athletic vigor. "You just now joined up with our herd. I wanna tell you, chick, it's none too soon we got some decent scenery around this tomb, girlwise." He took her arm and led her toward the bank of elevators. The uniformed operator nodded to Mr. Wanji, bowed slightly to Orison. He, too, she observed, wore earmuffs. His were more formal than Mr. Wanji's, being midnight blue in color. "Lift us to five, Mac," Mr. Wanji said. As the elevator door shut he explained to Orison, "You can make the Taft Bank scene anywhere between the street floor and floor five. Basement and everything higher'n fifth floor is Iron Curtain Country far's you're concerned. Dig, baby?" "Yes, sir," Orison said. She was wondering if she'd be issued earmuffs, now that she'd become an employee of this most peculiar bank. The elevator opened on five to a tiny office, just large enough to hold a single desk and two chairs. On the desk were a telephone and a microphone. Beside them was a double-decked "In" and "Out" basket. "Here's where you'll do your nine-to-five, honey," Mr. Wanji said. "What will I be doing, Mr. Wanji?" Orison asked. The Vice-President pointed to the newspaper folded in the "In" basket. "Flip on the microphone and read the paper to it," he said. "When you get done reading the paper, someone will run you up something new to read. Okay?" "It seems a rather peculiar job," Orison said. "After all, I'm a secretary. Is reading the newspaper aloud supposed to familiarize me with the Bank's operation?" "Don't bug me, kid," Mr. Wanji said. "All you gotta do is read that there paper into this here microphone. Can do?" "Yes, sir," Orison said. "While you're here, Mr. Wanji, I'd like to ask you about my withholding tax, social security, credit union, coffee-breaks, union membership, lunch hour and the like. Shall we take care of these details now? Or would you—" "You just take care of that chicken-flickin' kinda stuff any way seems best to you, kid," Mr. Wanji said. "Yes, sir," Orison said. This laissez-faire policy of Taft Bank's might explain why she'd been selected from the Treasury Department's secretarial pool to apply for work here, she thought. Orison McCall, girl Government spy. She picked up the newspaper from the "In" basket, unfolded it to discover the day's Wall Street Journal , and began at the top of column one to read it aloud. Wanji stood before the desk, nodding his head as he listened. "You blowing real good, kid," he said. "The boss is gonna dig you the most." Orison nodded. Holding her newspaper and her microphone, she read the one into the other. Mr. Wanji flicked his fingers in a good-by, then took off upstairs in the elevator. By lunchtime Orison had finished the Wall Street Journal and had begun reading a book an earmuffed page had brought her. The book was a fantastic novel of some sort, named The Hobbit . Reading this peculiar fare into the microphone before her, Miss McCall was more certain than ever that the Taft Bank was, as her boss in Washington had told her, the front for some highly irregular goings-on. An odd business for a Federal Mata Hari, Orison thought, reading a nonsense story into a microphone for an invisible audience. Orison switched off her microphone at noon, marked her place in the book and took the elevator down to the ground floor. The operator was a new man, ears concealed behind scarlet earmuffs. In the car, coming down from the interdicted upper floors, were several gentlemen with briefcases. As though they were members of a ballet-troupe, these gentlemen whipped off their hats with a single motion as Orison stepped aboard the elevator. Each of the chivalrous men, hat pressed to his heart, wore a pair of earmuffs. Orison nodded bemused acknowledgment of their gesture, and got off in the lobby vowing never to put a penny into this curiousest of banks. Lunch at the stand-up counter down the street was a normal interlude. Girls from the ground-floor offices of Taft Bank chattered together, eyed Orison with the coolness due so attractive a competitor, and favored her with no gambit to enter their conversations. Orison sighed, finished her tuna salad on whole-wheat, then went back upstairs to her lonely desk and her microphone. By five, Orison had finished the book, reading rapidly and becoming despite herself engrossed in the saga of Bilbo Baggins, Hobbit. She switched off the microphone, put on her light coat, and rode downstairs in an elevator filled with earmuffed, silent, hat-clasping gentlemen. What I need, Orison thought, walking rapidly to the busline, is a double Scotch, followed by a double Scotch. And what the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company needs is a joint raid by forces of the U.S. Treasury Department and the American Psychiatric Association. Earmuffs, indeed. Fairy-tales read into a microphone. A Vice-President with the vocabulary of a racetrack tout. And what goes on in those upper floors? Orison stopped in at the restaurant nearest her apartment house—the Windsor Arms—and ordered a meal and a single Martini. Her boss in Washington had told her that this job of hers, spying on Taft Bank from within, might prove dangerous. Indeed it was, she thought. She was in danger of becoming a solitary drinker. Home in her apartment, Orison set the notes of her first day's observations in order. Presumably Washington would call tonight for her initial report. Item: some of the men at the Bank wore earmuffs, several didn't. Item: the Vice-President's name was Mr. Wanji: Oriental? Item: the top eight floors of the Taft Bank Building seemed to be off-limits to all personnel not wearing earmuffs. Item: she was being employed at a very respectable salary to read newsprint and nonsense into a microphone. Let Washington make sense of that, she thought. In a gloomy mood, Orison McCall showered and dressed for bed. Eleven o'clock. Washington should be calling soon, inquiring after the results of her first day's spying. No call. Orison slipped between the sheets at eleven-thirty. The clock was set; the lights were out. Wasn't Washington going to call her? Perhaps, she thought, the Department had discovered that the Earmuffs had her phone tapped. "Testing," a baritone voice muttered. Orison sat up, clutching the sheet around her throat. "Beg pardon?" she said. "Testing," the male voice repeated. "One, two, three; three, two, one. Do you read me? Over." Orison reached under the bed for a shoe. Gripping it like a Scout-ax, she reached for the light cord with her free hand and tugged at it. The room was empty. "Testing," the voice repeated. "What you're testing," Orison said in a firm voice, "is my patience. Who are you?" "Department of Treasury Monitor J-12," the male voice said. "Do you have anything to report, Miss McCall?" "Where are you, Monitor?" she demanded. "That's classified information," the voice said. "Please speak directly to your pillow, Miss McCall." Orison lay down cautiously. "All right," she whispered to her pillow. "Over here," the voice instructed her, coming from the unruffled pillow beside her. Orison transferred her head to the pillow to her left. "A radio?" she asked. "Of a sort," Monitor J-12 agreed. "We have to maintain communications security. Have you anything to report?" "I got the job," Orison said. "Are you ... in that pillow ... all the time?" "No, Miss McCall," the voice said. "Only at report times. Shall we establish our rendezvous here at eleven-fifteen, Central Standard Time, every day?" "You make it sound so improper," Orison said. "I'm far enough away to do you no harm, Miss McCall," the monitor said. "Now, tell me what happened at the bank today." Orison briefed her pillow on the Earmuffs, on her task of reading to a microphone, and on the generally mimsy tone of the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company. "That's about it, so far," she said. "Good report," J-12 said from the pillow. "Sounds like you've dropped into a real snakepit, beautiful." "How do you know ... why do you think I'm beautiful?" Orison asked. "Native optimism," the voice said. "Good night." J-12 signed off with a peculiar electronic pop that puzzled Orison for a moment. Then she placed the sound: J-12 had kissed his microphone. Orison flung the shoe and the pillow under her bed, and resolved to write Washington for permission to make her future reports by registered mail. II At ten o'clock the next morning, reading page four of the current Wall Street Journal , Orison was interrupted by the click of a pair of leather heels. The gentleman whose heels had just slammed together was bowing. And she saw with some gratification that he was not wearing earmuffs. "My name," the stranger said, "is Dink Gerding. I am President of this bank, and wish at this time to welcome you to our little family." "I'm Orison McCall," she said. A handsome man, she mused. Twenty-eight? So tall. Could he ever be interested in a girl just five-foot-three? Maybe higher heels? "We're pleased with your work, Miss McCall," Dink Gerding said. He took the chair to the right of her desk. "It's nothing," Orison said, switching off the microphone. "On the contrary, Miss McCall. Your duties are most important," he said. "Reading papers and fairy-tales into this microphone is nothing any reasonably astute sixth-grader couldn't do as well," Orison said. "You'll be reading silently before long," Mr. Gerding said. He smiled, as though this explained everything. "By the way, your official designation is Confidential Secretary. It's me whose confidences you're to keep secret. If I ever need a letter written, may I stop down here and dictate it?" "Please do," Orison said. This bank president, for all his grace and presence, was obviously as kookie as his bank. "Have you ever worked in a bank before, Miss McCall?" Mr. Gerding asked, as though following her train of thought. "No, sir," she said. "Though I've been associated with a rather large financial organization." "You may find some of our methods a little strange, but you'll get used to them," he said. "Meanwhile, I'd be most grateful if you'd dispense with calling me 'sir.' My name is Dink. It is ridiculous, but I'd enjoy your using it." "Dink?" she asked. "And I suppose you're to call me Orison?" "That's the drill," he said. "One more question, Orison. Dinner this evening?" Direct, she thought. Perhaps that's why he's president of a bank, and still so young. "We've hardly met," she said. "But we're on a first-name basis already," he pointed out. "Dance?" "I'd love to," Orison said, half expecting an orchestra to march, playing, from the elevator. "Then I'll pick you up at seven. Windsor Arms, if I remember your personnel form correctly." He stood, lean, all bone and muscle, and bowed slightly. West Point? Hardly. His manners were European. Sandhurst, perhaps, or Saint Cyr. Was she supposed to reply with a curtsy? Orison wondered. "Thank you," she said. He was a soldier, or had been: the way, when he turned, his shoulders stayed square. The crisp clicking of his steps, a military metronome, to the elevator. When the door slicked open Orison, staring after Dink, saw that each of the half-dozen men aboard snapped off their hats (but not their earmuffs) and bowed, the earmuffed operator bowing with them. Small bows, true; just head-and-neck. But not to her. To Dink Gerding. Orison finished the Wall Street Journal by early afternoon. A page came up a moment later with fresh reading-matter: a copy of yesterday's Congressional Record . She launched into the Record , thinking as she read of meeting again this evening that handsome madman, that splendid lunatic, that unlikely bank-president. "You read so well , darling," someone said across the desk. Orison looked up. "Oh, hello," she said. "I didn't hear you come up." "I walk ever so lightly," the woman said, standing hip-shot in front of the desk, "and pounce ever so hard." She smiled. Opulent, Orison thought. Built like a burlesque queen. No, she thought, I don't like her. Can't. Wouldn't if I could. Never cared for cats. "I'm Orison McCall," she said, and tried to smile back without showing teeth. "Delighted," the visitor said, handing over an undelighted palm. "I'm Auga Vingt. Auga, to my friends." "Won't you sit down, Miss Vingt?" "So kind of you, darling," Auga Vingt said, "but I shan't have time to visit. I just wanted to stop and welcome you as a Taft Bank co-worker. One for all, all for one. Yea, Team. You know." "Thanks," Orison said. "Common courtesy," Miss Vingt explained. "Also, darling, I'd like to draw your attention to one little point. Dink Gerding—you know, the shoulders and muscles and crewcut? Well, he's posted property. Should you throw your starveling charms at my Dink, you'd only get your little eyes scratched out. Word to the wise, n'est-ce pas ?" "Sorry you have to leave so suddenly," Orison said, rolling her Wall Street Journal into a club and standing. "Darling." "So remember, Tiny, Dink Gerding is mine. You're all alone up here. You could get broken nails, fall down the elevator shaft, all sorts of annoyance. Understand me, darling?" "You make it very clear," Orison said. "Now you'd best hurry back to your stanchion, Bossy, before the hay's all gone." "Isn't it lovely, the way you and I reached an understanding right off?" Auga asked. "Well, ta-ta." She turned and walked to the elevator, displaying, Orison thought, a disgraceful amount of ungirdled rhumba motion. The elevator stopped to pick up the odious Auga. A passenger, male, stepped off. "Good morning, Mr. Gerding," Miss Vingt said, bowing. "Carry on, Colonel," the stranger replied. As the elevator door closed, he stepped up to Orison's desk. "Good morning. Miss McCall," he said. "What is this?" Orison demanded. "Visiting-day at the zoo?" She paused and shook her head. "Excuse me, sir," she said. "It's just that ... Vingt thing...." "Auga is rather intense," the new Mr. Gerding said. "Yeah, intense," Orison said. "Like a kidney-stone." "I stopped by to welcome you to the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company family, Miss McCall," he said. "I'm Kraft Gerding, Dink's elder brother. I understand you've met Dink already." "Yes, sir," Orison said. The hair of this new Mr. Gerding was cropped even closer than Dink's. His mustache was gray-tipped, like a patch of frosted furze; and his eyes, like Dink's, were cobalt blue. The head, Orison mused, would look quite at home in one of Kaiser Bill's spike-topped Pickelhauben ; but the ears were in evidence, and seemed normal. Mr. Kraft Gerding bowed—what continental manners these bankers had!—and Orison half expected him to free her hand from the rolled-up paper she still clutched and plant a kiss on it. Instead, Kraft Gerding smiled a smile as frosty as his mustache and said, "I understand that my younger brother has been talking with you, Miss McCall. Quite proper, I know. But I must warn you against mixing business with pleasure." Orison jumped up, tossing the paper into her wastebasket. "I quit!" she shouted. "You can take this crazy bank ... into bankruptcy, for all I care. I'm not going to perch up here, target for every uncaged idiot in finance, and listen to another word." "Dearest lady, my humblest pardon," Kraft Gerding said, bowing again, a bit lower. "Your work is splendid; your presence is Taft Bank's most charming asset; my only wish is to serve and protect you. To this end, dear lady, I feel it my duty to warn you against my brother. A word to the wise...." " N'est-ce pas? " Orison said. "Well, Buster, here's a word to the foolish. Get lost." Kraft Gerding bowed and flashed his gelid smile. "Until we meet again?" "I'll hold my breath," Orison promised. "The elevator is just behind you. Push a button, will you? And bon voyage ." Kraft Gerding called the elevator, marched aboard, favored Orison with a cold, quick bow, then disappeared into the mysterious heights above fifth floor. First the unspeakable Auga Vingt, then the obnoxious Kraft Gerding. Surely, Orison thought, recovering the Wall Street Journal from her wastebasket and smoothing it, no one would convert a major Midwestern bank into a lunatic asylum. How else, though, could the behavior of the Earmuffs be explained? Could madmen run a bank? Why not, she thought. History is rich in examples of madmen running nations, banks and all. She began again to read the paper into the microphone. If she finished early enough, she might get a chance to prowl those Off-Limits upper floors. Half an hour further into the paper, Orison jumped, startled by the sudden buzz of her telephone. She picked it up. " Wanji e-Kal, Datto. Dink ger-Dink d'summa. " Orison scribbled down this intelligence in bemused Gregg before replying, "I'm a local girl. Try me in English." "Oh. Hi, Miss McCall," the voice said. "Guess I goofed. I'm in kinda clutch. This is Wanji. I got a kite for Mr. Dink Gerding. If you see him, tell him the escudo green is pale. Got that, doll?" "Yes, Mr. Wanji. I'll tell Mr. Gerding." Orison clicked the phone down. What now, Mata Hari? she asked herself. What was the curious language Mr. Wanji had used? She'd have to report the message to Washington by tonight's pillow, and let the polyglots of Treasury Intelligence puzzle it out. Meanwhile, she thought, scooting her chair back from her desk, she had a vague excuse to prowl the upper floors. The Earmuffs could only fire her. Orison folded the paper and put it in the "Out" basket. Someone would be here in a moment with something new to read. She'd best get going. The elevator? No. The operators had surely been instructed to keep her off the upstairs floors. But the building had a stairway. III The door on the sixth floor was locked. Orison went on up the stairs to seven. The glass of the door there was painted black on the inside, and the landing was cellar-dark. Orison closed her eyes for a moment. There was a curious sound. The buzzing of a million bees, barely within the fringes of her hearing. Somehow, a very pleasant sound. She opened her eyes and tried the knob. The door opened. Orison was blinded by the lights, brilliant as noonday sun. The room extended through the entire seventh floor, its windows boarded shut, its ceiling a mass of fluorescent lamps. Set about the floor were galvanized steel tanks, rectangular and a little bigger than bathtubs. Orison counted the rows of tanks. Twelve rows, nine tiers. One hundred and eight tanks. She walked closer. The tubs were laced together by strands of angel-hair, delicate white lattices scintillating with pink. She walked to the nearest of the tubs and looked in. It was half full of a greenish fluid, seething with tiny pink bubbles. For a moment Orison thought she saw Benjamin Franklin winking up at her from the liquid. Then she screamed. The pink bubbles, the tiny flesh-colored flecks glinting light from the spun-sugar bridges between the tanks, were spiders. Millions upon millions of spiders, each the size of a mustard-seed; crawling, leaping, swinging, spinning webs, seething in the hundred tanks. Orison put her hands over her ears and screamed again, backing toward the stairway door. Into a pair of arms. "I had hoped you'd be happy here, Miss McCall," Kraft Gerding said. Orison struggled to release herself. She broke free only to have her wrists seized by two Earmuffs that had appeared with the elder Gerding. "It seems that our Pandora doesn't care for spiders," he said. "Really, Miss McCall, our little pets are quite harmless. Were we to toss you into one of these tanks...." Orison struggled against her two sumo -sized captors, whose combined weights exceeded hers by some quarter-ton, without doing more than lifting her feet from the floor. "... your flesh would be unharmed, though they spun and darted all around you. Our Microfabridae are petrovorous, Miss McCall. Of course, once they discovered your teeth, and through them a skeleton of calcium, a delicacy they find most toothsome, you'd be filleted within minutes." "Elder Compassion wouldn't like your harming the girl, Sire," one of the earmuffed sumo -wrestlers protested. "Elder Compassion has no rank," Kraft Gerding said. "Miss McCall, you must tell me what you were doing here, or I'll toss you to the spiders." "Dink ... Dink!" Orison shouted. "My beloved younger brother is otherwise engaged than in the rescue of damsels in distress," Kraft said. "Someone, after all, has to mind the bank." "I came to bring a message to Dink," Orison said. "Let me go, you acromegalic apes!" "The message?" Kraft Gerding demanded. "Something about escudo green. Put me down!" Suddenly she was dropped. Her mountainous keepers were on the floor as though struck by lightning, their arms thrown out before them, their faces abject against the floor. Kraft Gerding was slowly lowering himself to one knee. Dink had entered the spider-room. Without questions, he strode between the shiko-ing Earmuffs and put his arms around Orison. "They can't harm you," he said. She turned to press her face against his chest. "You're all right, child. Breathe deep, swallow, and turn your brain back on. All right, now?" "All right," she said, still trembling. "They were going to throw me to the spiders." "Kraft told you that?" Dink Gerding released her and turned to the kneeling man. "Stand up, Elder Brother." "I...." Dink brought his right fist up from hip-level, crashing it into Kraft's jaw. Kraft Gerding joined the Earmuffs on the floor. "If you'd care to stand again, Elder Brother, you may attempt to recover your dignity without regard for the difference in our rank." Kraft struggled to one knee and remained kneeling, gazing up at Dink through half-closed eyes. "No? Then get out of here, all of you. Samma! " Kraft Gerding arose, stared for a moment at Dink and Orison, then, with the merest hint of a bow, led his two giant Earmuffs to the elevator. "I wish you hadn't come up here, Orison," Dink said. "Why did you do it?" "Have you read the story of Bluebeard?" Orison asked. She stood close to Dink, keeping her eyes on the nearest spidertank. "I had to see what it was you kept up here so secretly, what it was that I was forbidden to see. My excuse was to have been that I was looking for you, to deliver a message from Mr. Wanji. He said I was to tell you that the escudo green is pale." "You're too curious, and Wanji is too careless," Dink said. "Now, what is this thing you have about spiders?" "I've always been terrified of them," Orison said. "When I was a little girl, I had to stay upstairs all day one Sunday because there was a spider hanging from his thread in the stairway. I waited until Dad came home and took it down with a broom. Even then, I didn't have appetite for supper." "Strange," Dink said. He walked over to the nearest tank and plucked one of the tiny pink creatures from a web-bridge. "This is no spider, Orison," he said. She backed away from Dink Gerding and the minuscule creature he cupped in the palm of his hand. "These are Microfabridae, more nearly related to shellfish than to spiders," he said. "They're stone-and-metal eaters. They literally couldn't harm a fly. Look at it, Orison." He extended his palm. Orison forced herself to look. The little creature, flesh-colored against his flesh, was nearly invisible, scuttling around the bowl of his hand. "Pretty little fellow, isn't he?" Dink asked. "Here. You hold him." "I'd rather not," she protested. "I'd be happier if you did," Dink said. Orison extended her hand as into a furnace. Dink brushed the Microfabridus from his palm to hers. It felt crisp and hard, like a legged grain of sand. Dink took a magnifier from his pocket and unfolded it, to hold it over Orison's palm. "He's like a baby crawdad," Orison said. "A sort of crustacean," Dink agreed. "We use them in a commercial process we're developing. That's why we keep this floor closed off and secret. We don't have a patent on the use of Microfabridae, you see." "What do they do?" Orison asked. "That's still a secret," Dink said, smiling. "I can't tell even you that, not yet, even though you're my most confidential secretary." "What's he doing now?" Orison asked, watching the Microfabridus, perched up on the rear four of his six microscopic legs, scratching against her high-school class-ring with his tiny chelae. "They like gold," Dink explained, peering across her shoulder, comfortably close. "They're attracted to it by a chemical tropism, as children are attracted to candy. Toss him back into his tank, Orison. We'd better get you down where you belong." Orison brushed the midget crustacean off her finger into the nearest tank, where he joined the busy boil of his fellows. She felt her ring. It was pitted where the Microfabridus had been nibbling. "Strange, using crawdads in a bank," she said. She stood silent for a moment. "I thought I heard music," she said. "I heard it when I came in. Something like the sighing of wind in winter trees." "That's the hymn of the Microfabridae," Dink said. "They all sing together while they work, a chorus of some twenty million voices." He took her arm. "If you listen very carefully, you'll find the song these little workers sing the most beautiful music in the world." Orison closed her eyes, leaning back into Dink's arms, listening to the music that seemed on the outermost edge of her hearing. Wildness, storm and danger were its theme, counterpointed by promises of peace and harbor. She heard the wash of giant waves in the song, the crash of breakers against granite, cold and insatiable. And behind this, the quiet of sheltered tide-pools, the soft lub of sea-arms landlocked. "It's an ancient song," Dink said. "The Microfabridae have been singing it for a million years." He released her, and opened a wood-covered wooden box. He scooped up a cupful of the sand inside. "Hold out your hands," he told Orison. He filled them with the sand. "Throw our singers some supper for their song," he said. Orison went with her cupped hands to the nearest tank and sprinkled the mineral fishfood around inside it. The Microfabridae leaped from the liquid like miniature porpoises, seizing the grains of sand in mid-air. "They're so very strange," Orison said. At the bottom of the tank she thought she saw Ben Franklin again, winking at her through the bubbling life. Nonsense, she thought, brushing her hands.	A. To deliver a message from Mr. Wanji
What isn't a way that the Times treated Dole unfairly? A. they published unfavorable pictures of him B. the way they quoted him emphasized his flaws C. they had no full-time reporters following him D. they omitted information about Dole's successes	Dole vs. the Times For several weeks now, pundits have debated how Bob Dole would exit the stage. Would he depart on a negative note about his opponent or a positive one about himself? Would he leave with anger or with humor? In the past several days, the issue has been settled. Dole, it appears, will end his political career raging against the New York Times . Dole's spat with the gray lady went public on Thursday, Oct. 24. In New Orleans, Dole charged the paper with ignoring a story about a Miami drug dealer who got invited to the White House. "This is a disgrace," Dole insisted. "I doubt if you even read it in the New York Times . They probably put it in the want ads. They don't put any anti-Clinton stories in the New York Times . Only anti-Dole stories in the New York Times ." Dole repeated his attack for the next five days. "We are not going to let the media steal this election," he told a crowd in Dallas on Friday. "This country belongs to the people, not the New York Times ." On Saturday, in Visalia, Calif., he added, "I know that with a crowd this size, the New York Times will write not many people showed up, but the other papers will get it right." On Sunday (the day the Times endorsed Clinton), Dole called the paper "the apologist for President Clinton for the last four years and an arm of the Democratic National Committee." In a CNN interview broadcast Monday, Dole said the Times "might as well be part of the Democratic Party. ... They hammer us on a daily basis. We make a major speech, they bury it back on section D. They put a front-page story that, well, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp didn't get along together 12 years ago." On Tuesday, Dole was still at it, referring to the 28 words of the 10th Amendment, and quipping, "That's about what I got in the New York Times today." The Times has reacted to this assault by highhandedly quoting everything and explaining none of it, leaving its readers baffled as to why the Republican nominee is so upset at the paper. In fact, Dole's fury at the Times is hardly news to those who work at the paper. According to Katharine Seelye, who has covered Dole since the beginning of his campaign, the complaints date from December 1995, when Dole staff members first protested that she had misunderstood the candidate's position on abortion. The real bitterness, however, began in May, when the paper played what Dole aides billed as a major address about welfare on Page 19 of the business section. Since then, campaign honchos have peppered the paper's reporters and editors with constant phone calls and letters complaining about unfair treatment. Reporters traveling with Dole caught a glimpse of the enmity Oct. 9, when Nelson Warfield, Dole's press secretary, staged a public confrontation with Seelye. The candidate, Warfield told reporters waiting to board the campaign plane, had just come from an appearance on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show. Why, Seelye asked, weren't reporters told about the appearance in advance? According to reporters present, Warfield snapped that it wouldn't make any difference because the Times would get the story wrong anyway. Then, on the plane, Warfield walked back to the press section and grandly served Seelye with a copy of a letter from Communications Director John Buckley to her boss, Times Washington Editor Andrew Rosenthal. That letter, which has fallen into the hands of Slate, protests Seelye's coverage of a speech the previous day. Dole, in New Jersey, had talked about Clinton being AWOL in the drug war. "Where has he been for four years? How many hundreds of thousands of young people started drugs?" Dole said. "Three million have started smoking while he was playing around with smoking and all this stuff finally in an election year." Seelye's front-page story reported that "Mr. Dole accused the President of 'playing around' while the drug war raged out of control." Buckley complains that the story "could lead the reader to believe that Dole was talking about a very different kind of 'playing around'--something he did not say, and something he would not say." The letter continues: "Since May, I have been pointing out to you a problem we see with the accuracy and understanding of context revealed in Kit's reporting," going on to assert that "Seelye has misquoted Dole on numerous occasions and done so in a manner that distorted the accuracy of her assertions and your coverage." No Dole staff would be quoted by name for this story, but speaking on background, a senior campaign official elaborated upon the complaint. "They've just done a miserable job throughout this campaign," the official said. "The coverage of Dole has been excessively bitchy from day one, in addition to having a number of extraordinary factual problems." With Seelye, the official says, the problem is "not being able to transcribe a tape accurately." With Adam Nagourney, the Times ' other reporter covering Dole full time since the summer, "the problem is an incredible focus on the little picture as opposed to the big picture." As an example, the official cites a September story in which Nagourney lumped together Dole's fall from a platform in Chico, Calif., and his mistaken reference to the "Brooklyn" Dodgers as "a rough stretch of politicking." Other than those two episodes, the official says, Dole actually had a great week. The campaign's complaint extends to unequal treatment--a nine-part series on Clinton's record, which the official describes as "the softest portrait since they invented black velvet"--and the Times perpetually underestimating the size of Dole crowds. "Clinton even gets better photographs," the official contends. Rosenthal, who has direct responsibility for campaign coverage at the Times , professes bewilderment at these complaints. "We don't make editorial judgments based on disposition to be tough on Bob Dole or nice to Bob Dole," he says. On the specifics, Rosenthal says that the Times ran an editor's note acknowledging that it shouldn't have truncated the "playing around" quote. He points out that the Times ran its story on the Miami drug dealer who visited the White House the same day Dole accused the paper of not covering it. As for the nine-part series on Clinton, Rosenthal says it is the long-standing practice of the paper to do a lengthy series on the incumbent's record. "If Dole wins and runs again in 2000, he will get nine-part series too," he says. "Ithink we have been tough on him," Seelye says. This stems, however, not from any bias, she says, but from the campaign's own internal problems. Dole's campaign has been especially "porous," with aides emulating the proverbial seafaring rats. This is true enough--in recent days ex-strategist Don Sipple has trashed the campaign on the record. But there's another point, too. Contrary to Buckley's charge that she misquotes Dole, Seelye routinely makes Dole look ridiculous by quoting him all too accurately, depicting him in what one colleague calls a "cinema veritÃ© " style. Famous for going over and over her tape recordings on the campaign plane, Seelye manages to get every Dole mumble, repetition, and verbal miscue down. For instance, in her Oct. 26 story reporting Dole's attack on the Times , Seelye writes: "In Phoenix on Friday night, he had a delightful time drawing out his vowels as he described financial contributions to the Clinton campaign. "From Indoneeesia," he said. "Yeah. From INdiaaaaah. Some fellow named Gandhi out there. He owes $10,000 in back taxes, but he found $300,000 to give to the Clinton campaign. And now Gandhi is gaaaawn. Gaaaaandhi, gone gone gone. They can't find him." Two days later, she quoted Dole in another story: "They've turned the White House into something else, I don't know what it is. It's the animal house! It's the animal house!" Most reporters would write, Bob Dole yesterday compared the White House to an "animal house," sparing the exclamation points, and making him sound at least compos mentis. But though unflattering, Seelye's Mametizing of Bob Dole can hardly be called unfair. It is not as if the Times cleans up Clinton's quotes; the president simply observes the rules of syntax most of the time. Something similar may be happening with the pictures. After four years, Clinton has learned how to avoid looking unpresidential. He no longer allows himself to be photographed wearing too-short running shorts, and he avoids pulling faces in public. Dole, who is simply less photogenic, is an easier victim for picture editors--who, like their editorial counterparts, have a strong bias against dullness. Take, for instance, the two pictures shown above. The front-page picture the Times ran the day after the second presidential debate does make Dole look like a decomposing monster. But unlike the picture in the Washington Post the same day, it captures the spirit of the event, with Dole grimly taking the offensive and Clinton watching warily but standing aside from the attacks. Dole sounds absurd when he alleges that the paper that broke Whitewater and the story of the first lady's commodities trades has not been aggressive in pursuing Clinton scandals. All sorts of potential Dole scandals have been soft-pedaled by the media, including the Times , because he is so far behind. It's true that coverage of Clinton on the campaign trail has been somewhat softer than the coverage of Dole, as even other Times reporters acknowledge. But the explanation is institutional, not ideological. The press, as many have complained, overemphasizes the "horse race" aspect of politics. As a side effect of that disease, reporters have excessive respect for a well-run campaign. (In 1988, Republican George Bush benefited from this phenomenon.) A cruder reality is that reporters need to have a relationship with Clinton after Tuesday. None of these factors, though, is unique to the Times . So why is Dole singling it out? Dole's attacks on the Times have the appearance of being an exercise in populist demagogy. In one of his great cue-card reading remarks, Dole tried to explain his recent attacks on CNN the other night by saying, "I like the media. They don't like them in the South." But this pat explanation doesn't entirely make sense. Red meat for right-wing crowds doesn't help Dole with the centrist voters he would need to turn around in order to make the miraculous happen. And in fact, according to a senior Dole aide, the attacks are heartfelt on the candidate's part. Dole has been going after the Times over the objections of advisers who have been telling him there's no percentage in picking fights with the press. But if Dole is attacking the Times because he is truly furious and not because he thinks it will help him get elected, what is he so angry about? The answer, I think, is that there has always been a Nixonian streak in Bob Dole, by which I mean a part of him which feels shut out of the closed circle of the Eastern establishment. At the Republican convention, Dole blasted the Clinton administration as a "corps of the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered, and never learned." That phrase recalled an attack he made on the press long ago, in the days of Watergate, when he accused the Washington Post of being in bed with George McGovern. "There is a cultural and social affinity between the McGovernites and the Post executives and editors," Dole said then. "They belong to the same elite: They can be found living cheek-by-jowl in the same exclusive chic neighborhoods, and hob-nobbing at the same Georgetown parties." The deeper story here isn't whether Dole was wrongly shunted onto D19 when he ought to have been on A1. It's his feelings, as he says goodbye to politics, about the people who get to decide.	C. they had no full-time reporters following him
What is the initial imaging finding suggestive of tuberculosis in Mr. Hurley? Choose the correct answer from the following options: A. Splenomegaly B. Mediastinal lymph node conglomerate C. Liver tuberculosis D. Bronchial and vascular stenosis E. Neck/Thorax CT showing regression of pulmonary infiltrates	### Patient Report 0 Dear colleague, We are reporting on Mr. Bruno Hurley, born on 12/24/1965, who has been under our outpatient treatment since 02/11/2020. Diagnoses: - Refractory tuberculosis - Manifestations: Open pulmonary tuberculosis, lymph node tuberculosis (cervical, hilar, mediastinal), liver tuberculosis Imaging: - 11/01/19 Chest CT: Mediastinal lymph node conglomerate centrally with poststenotic infiltrates on both sides. Splenomegaly. - 11/04/19 Bronchoscopy: Large mediastinal and right hilar lymphomas. Subcritical constriction of right segmental bronchi. EBUS-TBNA LK4R and 10/11R. Microbiology: - 11/04/19 Tracheobronchial Secretions: Microscopic detection of acid-fast rods, cultural detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, phenotypically no evidence of resistance. Therapy: - Initial omission of pyrazinamide due to pancytopenia. - Moxifloxacin: 11/10/19-11/20/19 - Pyrazinamide: 11/20/19-02/11/20 - Ethambutol: 11/08/19-02/11/20 - Rifampicin since: 11/08/19 - Isoniazid since: 11/08/19 - Levofloxacin since: 02/11/20 - Immunomodulatory therapy for low basal interferon / interferon levels (ACTIMMUNE®) Microbiology: - 01/20/20 Sputum: Cultural detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Phenotypically no evidence of resistance. - 01/02/20 Sputum: Last cultural detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. - 06/15/20 BAL: Occasional acid-fast rods, 16S-rRNA-PCR: M. tuberculosis complex, no cultural evidence of Mycobacteria. - 06/15/20 Lung biopsy: Occasional acid-fast rods, no cultural evidence of Mycobacteria. - 03/12/21 Sputum: first sputum without acid-fast rods, consistently microscopically negative sputum samples since then. Histology: - 07/16/21: Mediastinal lymph node biopsy: Histologically no evidence of malignancy/lymphoma. Other Diagnoses: - Secondary Acute Myeloid Leukemia with Myelodysplastic Syndrome - Blood count at initial diagnosis: 15% blasts, erythrocyte substitution required. Therapy: - 12/20-03/21 TB therapy - 02/20-01/21 TB therapy: RMP + INH + FQ - 01/21-04/21 RMP + INH + FQ + Actimmune® 04/22 CT: Regressive findings of pulmonary TB changes, regressive cervical lymph nodes, mediastinal LAP, and liver lesions size-stable; Sputum: No acid-fast rods detected for the first time since 03/21. - BM aspiration: Secondary AML. Current Presentation: Admission for allogeneic stem cell transplantation Pathogen Location / Material of Detection or Infection Month/Year or Last Detection - HIV Serology: Negative - 11/19 - Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex: Bronchoalveolar Lavage, Tracheobronchial Secretion, Sputum - 11/19 Medical History: We took over Mr. Hurley for the continuation of TB therapy on 11/02/20. His hospital admission took place at the end of October 2019 due to neutropenic fever. The patient reported temperatures up to 39°C for the past 3 days. Since 08/19, the patient has been receiving hematological-oncological treatment for MDS. The colleagues from hematology performed a repeat bone marrow aspiration before transferring to Station 12. The blast percentage was significantly reduced. HLA typing of the brother for allogeneic stem cell transplantation planning had already been done in the summer of 2019. After a chest CT revealed extensive mediastinal lymphomas with compression of the bronchial tree bilaterally and post-stenotic infiltrates, a bronchoscopy was performed. M. tuberculosis was cultured from sputum and TBS. An EBUS-guided lymph node biopsy was histologically processed, revealing granulomatous inflammation and molecular evidence of the M. tuberculosis complex. On 11/08/19, a four-drug anti-tuberculosis therapy was initiated, initially with Moxifloxacin instead of Pyrazinamide due to pancytopenia. Moxifloxacin was replaced by Pyrazinamide on 11/20/19. The four-drug therapy was continued for a total of 3 months due to prolonged microscopic evidence of acid-fast rods in follow-up sputum samples. Isoniazid dosage was adjusted after peak level control (450 mg q24h), as was Rifampicin dose (900 mg q24h). On 01/02/20, Mycobacterium tuberculosis was last cultured in a sputum sample. Nevertheless, acid-fast rods continued to be detected in the sputum. Due to the lack of culturability of mycobacteria, Mr. Hurley was discharged to home care after consultation with the Tuberculosis Welfare Office. Allergies: None known. Toxic Substances: Smoking: Non-smoker; Alcohol: No; Drugs: No Social History: Originally from Brazil, has been living in the US for 8 years. Lives with his partner. Current lab results: Parameter Results Reference Range ---------------------------------------- -------------- --------------------- ConA-Induced Cytokines (Th1/Th2) Interleukin 10 10 pg/mL \< 364 pg/mL Interferon Gamma 265-6781 pg/mL Interleukin 2 74 pg/mL 43-374 pg/mL Interleukin 4 13 pg/mL \< 34 pg/mL Interleukin 5 3 pg/mL \< 55 pg/mL Naive CD45RA+CCR7+ (% of CD8+) 6.35 % 8.22-59.58 % TEMRA CD45RA+CCR7- (% of CD8+) 50.44 % 7.32-55.99 % Central Memory CD45RA-CCR7+ (% of CD) 2.60 % 1.67-5.84 % Effector Memory CD45RA-CCR7- (% of CD) 40.60 % 22.52-62.25 % Naive CD45RA+ (% of CD4+) 26.26 % 17.46-60.24 % TEMRA CD45RA+ CCR7- (% of CD4+) 1.26 % 2.74-15.54 % Central Memory CD45RA-CCR7+ (% of CD) 34.21 % 16.40-33.41 % Effector Memory CD45RA-CCR7- (% of CD) 38.28 % 17.38-40.38 % Granulocytes 0.60 abs./nL 3.00-6.50 abs./nL Granulocytes (relative) 45 % 50-80 % Lymphocytes 0.57 abs./nL 1.50-3.00 abs./nL Lymphocytes (relative) 43 % 20-40 % Monocytes 0.13 abs./nL \<0.50 abs./nL Monocytes (relative) 10 % 2-10 % NK Cells 0.16 abs./nL 0.10-0.40 abs./nL NK Cells (% of Lymphocytes) 29 5-25 γ/δ TCR+ T-Cells (relative) 2 % \< 10 % α/β TCR+ T-Cells (relative) 98 % \>90 % CD19+ B-Cells (% of Lymphocytes) 3 % 5-25 % CD4/CD8 Ratio 0.9 % 1.1-3.0 % CD8-CD4-T-Cells (% of T-Cells) 5.86 % \< 15.00 % CD8+CD4+-T-Cells (% of T-Cells) 0.74 % \< 10.00 % CD3+ T-Cells 0.38 abs./nL 0.90-2.20 abs./nL Parameter Results Reference Range -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- --------------------- Complete Blood Count (EDTA) Hemoglobin 6.6 g/dL 13.5-17.0 g/dL Hematocrit 19.0 % 39.5-50.5 % Erythrocytes 2.3 x 10\^6/uL 4.3-5.8 x 10\^6/uL Platelets 61 x 10\^3/uL 150-370 x 10\^3/uL MCV (Mean Corpuscular Volume) 81.5 fL 80.0-99.0 fL MCH (Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin) 28.3 pg 27.0-33.5 pg MCHC (Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin Concentration) 34.7 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL MPV (Mean Platelet Volume) 10.4 fL 7.0-12.0 fL RDW-CV (Red Cell Distribution Width-CV) 12.7 % 11.5-15.0 % Parameter Results Reference Range -------------------------- ------------- --------------------- Other Investigations QFT-TB Gold plus TB1 0.11 IU/mL \<0.35 IU/mL QFT-TB Gold plus TB2 0.07 IU/mL \<0.35 IU/mL QFT-TB Gold plus Mitogen 3.38 IU/mL \>0.50 IU/mL QFT-TB Gold plus Result Negative Lung Aspiration from 06/15/20: Examination Request: Acid-fast rods (Microscopy + Culture) Microscopic Findings: - Auramine stain: Occasionally, acid-fast rods Result: No growth of Mycobacterium sp. after 12 weeks of incubation. 2. Forceps Biopsy Exophytic Trachea: One piece of tissue. Microscopy: HE, PAS, Giemsa, Diagnosis: 3. Predominantly blood clot and necrotic material alongside sparsely altered lymphatic tissue due to sampling (EBUS-TBNA LK 7 as indicated). 4. Components of a granulation tissue polyp (Forceps Biopsy Exophytic Trachea as indicated). Comment: The finding in 1. continues to be suspicious of a mycobacterial infection. We are conducting molecular pathological examinations in this regard and will report again. > [Comment]{.underline}: Detection of mycobacterial DNA of the M. > tuberculosis complex type. No evidence of atypical mycobacteria. No > evidence of malignancy. Current Medication: Medication Dosage Frequency ------------------------- ------------ --------------- Rifampin (Rifadin) 600 mg 1-0-0 Isoniazid (Nydrazid) 500 mg 1-0-0 Levofloxacin (Levaquin) 450 mg 1-0-1 \ ### Patient Report 1 Dear colleague, We report to you about our patient Mr. Bruno Hurley, born on 12/24/1965. Who has received inpatient treatment from 07/17/2021 to 09/03/2021. Diagnoses: - Acute Myeloid Leukemia with Myelodysplasia-Related Changes (AML-MRC) <!-- --> - Myelodysplastic Syndrome EB-2, diagnosed in July 2010. Blood count at initial diagnosis: 15% blasts, erythrocyte transfusion-dependent. Cytogenetics: 46,XY \[1\]; 47,XY,+Y,i(21)(q10)\[15\]; 47,XY,+Y,trp(21)(q11q22)\[4\]. Molecular genetics: Mutations in RUNX1, SF3B1. IPSS-R: 7 (very high risk). - In 08/2020, diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome with ring sideroblasts. - Received transfusions of 2 units of red blood cells every 3-4 weeks to maintain hemoglobin between 4-6 g/dL. - Bone marrow biopsy showed MDS-EB2 with 14.5% blasts. - Initiated Azacitidine treatment (2x 75 mg subcutaneously, days 1-5 + 8-9 every 4 weeks) as an outpatient. - 10/23/2019: Hospitalized for fever during neutropenia. - 12/06/2019: Diagnosed with tuberculosis - positive Tbc-PCR in tracheobronchial secretions, acid-fast bacilli in tracheobronchial secretions, histological confirmation from EBUS biopsy of a conglomerate of melted lymph nodes from 11/03/2019. - 01/2021: Bone marrow biopsy showed secondary AML with 26% blasts. - 03/2021: Started Venetoclax/Vidaza. - 05/2021: Bone marrow biopsy showed 0.8% myeloid blasts coexpressing CD117 and CD7. Cytology showed 6% blasts. - 05/2021: Started the 4th cycle of Vidaza/Venetoclax. - 06/17/2022: Started the 5th cycle of Vidaza/Venetoclax. - 07/29/2021: Underwent allogeneic stem cell transplantation from a HLA-identical unrelated donor (10/10 antigen match) for AML-MRC in first complete remission (CR). Conditioning regimen included Treosulfan 12g/m2, Fludarabin 5x 30 mg/m2, ATG 3x 10 mg/kg. Other Diagnoses: - Persistent tuberculosis with lymph node swelling since June 2020. - Open lung tuberculosis diagnosed in November 2019. - Location: CT of the chest showed central mediastinal lymph node conglomerate with post-stenotic infiltrates bilaterally, splenomegaly. - Bronchoscopy on December 5, 2020, showed large mediastinal and right hilar lymph nodes, subcritical narrowing of right segmental bronchi. EBUS-TBNA - CT Chest/Neck on 02/05/2020: Regression of pulmonary infiltrates, enlargement of necrotic lymph nodes in the upper mediastinum and infraclavicular on the right (compressing the internal jugular vein/esophagus). - Culture confirmation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, pansensitive: Tracheobronchial secretion - Initiated antituberculous combination therapy Current Presentation: Admission for allogeneic stem cell transplantation from a HLA-identical unrelated donor (10/10 antigen match) for AML-MRC in first complete remission. Medical History: In 2019, Mr. Hurley was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome EB-2. Starting from September 2019, he received Azacitidine therapy. In December 2020, he was diagnosed with open lung tuberculosis, which was challenging to treat due to his dysfunctional immune system. In January 2021, his MDS progressed to AML-MRC with 26% blasts. After treatment with Venetoclax/Vidaza, he achieved remission in May 2021. Tuberculosis remained largely under control. Due to AML-MRC, he was recommended for allogeneic stem cell transplantation from a HLA-identical unrelated donor. At the time of admission for transplantation, he was largely asymptomatic. He occasionally experienced mild dry cough but denied fever, night sweats, or weight loss. The admission and counseling were conducted with translation assistance from his life partner due to limited proficiency in English. Allergies: None Transfusion History: Currently requires transfusions every 14 days. Both red blood cell and platelet transfusions have been tolerated without problems. Abdominal CT from 01/20/2021: Findings: Significant peripancreatic fluid accumulation in the upper abdominal area with a somewhat indistinct border between the pancreatic tissue, particularly in the pancreatic head region. Evidence of inflammation affecting the stomach and duodenum. No presence of free air or indications of hollow organ perforation. No conclusive signs of a well-defined abscess. Moreover, the other parenchymal abdominal organs, especially those lacking focal abnormalities suggestive of neoplastic or inflammatory conditions, displayed normal appearances. The gallbladder showed no notable issues, and there were no radiopaque concretions observed. Both the intra- and extrahepatic bile ducts appeared adequately dilated. Abdominal hollow organs exhibited unremarkable and normal appearances without corresponding contrast and dilation. The appendix appeared within normal parameters. Abdominal lymph nodes showed no unusual findings. Some degree of aortic vasosclerosis was noted. The depiction of the included lung portions revealed no abnormalities. Results: Findings indicative of acute pancreatitis, most likely of an exudative nature. No signs of hollow organ perforation were detected, and there was no definitive evidence of an abscess (as far as could be determined from native imaging). Summary: The patient was admitted to our hospital through the emergency department with the symptoms described above. With typical upper abdominal pain and significantly elevated serum lipase levels, we diagnosed acute pancreatitis. This diagnosis was corroborated by peripancreatic fluid and ill-defined organ involvement in the abdominal CT scan. There were no laboratory or anamnestic indications of a biliary origin. The patient denied excessive alcohol consumption. Medication upon Admission: Medication Dosage Frequency ------------------------- ------------ --------------- Rifampin (Rifadin) 600 mg 1-0-0 Isoniazid (Nydrazid) 500 mg 1-0-0 Levofloxacin (Levaquin) 450 mg 1-0-1 Physical Examination: General: Oriented in all qualities, in good general condition with normal body weight (75 kg, 187 cm) Vital signs at admission: Heart rate 63/min, Blood pressure 110/78 mmHg. Temperature at admission 36.8 °C, Oxygen saturation 100% on room air. Skin and mucous membranes: Dry skin, normal skin color, normal skin turgor. No scleral icterus, non-irritated conjunctiva. Normal oral mucosa, moist tongue without coating, no ulcers or thrush. Heart: Normal heart sounds, rhythmic, regular rate, no pathological heart murmurs heard on auscultation. Lungs: Resonant percussion sound, clear breath sounds bilaterally, no wheezing, no prolonged expiration. Abdomen: Unremarkable scar tissue, normal bowel sounds in all quadrants, soft, non-tender, no guarding, liver and spleen not enlarged. Vascular: Central and peripheral pulses palpable, no jugular vein distention, no peripheral edema, extremities warm with no significant difference in size. Lymph nodes: Palpable cervical swelling, inguinal and axillary lymph nodes unremarkable. Neurology: Grossly neurologically unremarkable. On 08/22/2021, a four-lumen central venous catheter was placed in the right internal jugular vein without complications. During the conditioning regimen, the patient received the following: Medication Dosage Frequency ---------------------------------------------- ---------------------- ------------------------- Fludarabine (Fludara) 30 mg/m² (5x 57 mg) 07/23/2023 - 07/27/2023 Treosulfan (Ovastat) 12 g/m² (3x 22.9 g) 07/23/2023 - 07/25/2023 Anti-Thymocyte Globulin (ATG, Thymoglobulin) 10 mg/kg (3x 700 mg) 07/23/2023 - 07/28/2023 Antiemetic Therapy: The antiemetic therapy included Ondansetron, Aprepitant, and Dexamethasone, and the conditioning regimen was well tolerated. Prophylaxis of Graft-Versus-Host Disease (GvHD): Substances Start Date Day -2 Day 1 ---------------- ---------------- ------------ ----------- Cyclosporine 08/28/2022 Mycophenolate 07/30/2021 Stem Cell Source Date CD34/kg KG CD45/kg KG CD3/kg KG Volume ---------------------- ------------ ---------------- ---------------- --------------- ------------ PBSCT 07/29/2021 7.39 x10\^6 8.56 x10\^8 260.7 x10\^6 194 ml Summary: Mr. Hurley was admitted for allogeneic stem cell transplantation from a HLA-identical unrelated donor for AML-MRC. The conditioning regimen with Treosulfan, Fludarabin, and ATG was well tolerated, and the transplantation proceeded without complications. Toxicities: There was an adverse event-related increase in bilirubin levels, reaching a maximum of 2.68 mg/dL. Elevated ALT levels, up to a maximum of 53 U/L, were observed. Acute Graft-Versus-Host Disease (GvHD): Signs of GvHD were not observed until the time of discharge. Medication upon Discharge:Formularbeginn Medication Dosage Frequency ---------------------------------- ------------ ------------------------------------------------ Acyclovir (Zovirax) 500 mg 1-0-1-0 Entecavir (Baraclude) 0.5 mg 1-0-0-0 Rifampin (Rifadin) 600 mg 1.5-0-0-0 Isoniazid/Pyridoxine (Nydrazid) 300 mg 2-0-0-0 Levofloxacin (Levaquin) 500 mg 1-0-1-0 Mycophenolate Mofetil (CellCept) 500 mg 2-0-2-0 Folic Acid 5 mg 1-0-0-0 Magnesium \-- 3-3-3-0 Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0-0 (before a meal) Ursodeoxycholic Acid (Actigall) 250 mg 1-1-1-0 Cyclosporine (Sandimmune) 100 mg 100 mg 4-0-4-0 Cyclosporine (Sandimmune) 50 mg 50 mg 4-0-4-0 (based on TDM, last dose 400 mg 1-0-1) Cyclosporine (Sandimmune) 10 mg 10 mg 4-0-4-0 (based on TDM, last dose 400 mg 1-0-1) Current Recommendations: 1. Bone marrow puncture on Day +60, +120, and +360 post-transplantation (including MRD and chimerism) and Day +180 depending on MRD and chimerism progression. 2. Continuation of immunosuppressive therapy with ciclosporin adjusted to achieve target levels of around 150 ng/ml, for a minimum of 3 months post-transplantation. Immunosuppression with mycophenolate mofetil will be continued until Day +40. 3. Prophylaxis with Aciclovir must continue for 6 weeks after discontinuation of immunosuppression at a dosage of 15-20 mg/kg/day (divided into 2 doses). Dose adjustment based on renal function may be necessary. 4. Pneumocystis pneumonia prophylaxis through monthly Pentamidine inhalation or administration of Cotrim forte 960mg must continue at least until immunosuppression is discontinued or until an absolute CD4+ T-cell count exceeds \>200/µL in peripheral blood. Cotrim forte 960mg has not been started when leukocytes are \<2/nL. 5. Weekly monitoring of CMV and EBV viral loads through quantitative PCR from EDTA blood. 6. Timing of antituberculous medication intake: - Take Rifampicin and Isoniazid in the morning on an empty stomach, 30 minutes before breakfast. - Take levofloxacin with a 2-hour gap from divalent cations (Mg2+, strongly calcium-rich foods). Lab results upon Discharge: Parameter Result Reference Range ------------------------------ -------------------- --------------------- Cyclosporine 127.00 ng/mL \-- Sodium 141 mEq/L 136-145 mEq/L Potassium 4.1 mEq/L 3.5-4.5 mEq/L Glucose 108 mg/dL 60-110 mg/dL Creatinine 0.65 mg/dL 0.70-1.20 mg/dL Estimated GFR (eGFR CKD-EPI) 111 mL/min/1.73 m² \-- Urea 26 mg/dL 17-48 mg/dL Total Bilirubin 0.35 mg/dL \<1.20 mg/dL Complete Blood Count Parameter Results Reference Range --------------- ----------------- ----------------------- Hemoglobin 9.5 g/dL 13.5-17.0 g/dL Hematocrit 28.2% 39.5-50.5% Erythrocytes 3.2 x 10\^6/µL 4.3-5.8 x 10\^6/µL Leukocytes 1.47 x 10\^3/µL 3.90-10.50 x 10\^3/µL Platelets 193 x 10\^3/µL 150-370 x 10\^3/µL MCV 88.7 fL 80.0-99.0 fL MCH 29.9 pg 27.0-33.5 pg MCHC 33.7 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL MPV 9.8 fL 7.0-12.0 fL RDW-CV 18.9% 11.5-15.0% ### Patient Report 2 Dear colleague, We report on Mr. Bruno Hurley, born on 12/24/1965, who was under our inpatient care from 2/20/2022, to 02/24/2022. Diagnoses: - Acute Pancreatitis, possibly medication-related under antitubercular therapy. - Current medications include Entecavir, Rifampicin, and Isoniazid/Pyridoxin, which have been paused after consultation with the infectious disease team. Other Diagnoses: - Acute Myeloid Leukemia with Myelodysplasia-Related Changes (AML-MRC) - Myelodysplastic Syndrome EB-2 - Allogeneic stem cell transplantation - EBV Reactivation (Treated with immunoglobulins for 3 days) - Persistent Tuberculosis with lymph node swelling - Open Lung Tuberculosis - Initial Diagnosis - Antitubercular combination therapy since (Moxifloxacin, Pyrazinamid, Ethambutol, Rifampicin, Isoniazid). - Rectal colonization with 4-MRGN. Medical History: The patient presented via ambulance from his workplace. The patient reported sudden onset upper abdominal pain, mainly in the epigastric region, accompanied by nausea and vomiting. He also experienced watery diarrhea once today. He had lunch around noon, consisting noodles. There was no fever, cough, sputum production, dyspnea, or urinary abnormalities. He has been taking daily antitubercular combination therapy, including Rifampicin, for open tuberculosis. The patient denied alcohol consumption and weight loss. Medication Dosage Frequency ----------------------------------------- ------------ ---------------------------- Acyclovir (Zovirax) 400 mg 1-0-1 Entecavir (Baraclude) 0.5 mg 1-0-0 Rifampin (Rifadin) 600 mg 1.5-0-0 Isoniazid/Pyridoxine (Nydrazid) 300 mg 1-0-1 Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0 Trimethoprim/Sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim) 960 mg 1 tablet, on Mon, Wed, Fri Methylprednisolone (Medrol) 0.79 mg As needed Prednisolone 4 mg As needed Allergies: None Physical Exam: Vital Signs: Blood Pressure 178/90 mmHg, Pulse 85/min, SpO2 89%, Temperature 36.7°C, Respiratory Rate 20/min. Clinical Status: Upon initial examination, a reduced general condition. Cardiovascular: Heart sounds were normal, rhythm was regular, and no murmurs were heard. Respiratory: Vesicular breath sounds, sonorous percussion. Abdominal: Sluggish peristalsis, soft abdominal walls, guarding and tenderness in the epigastrium, liver and spleen not palpable, no free fluid. Extremities: Minimal edema. ECG Findings: ECG on admission showed normal sinus rhythm (69/min), normal ST intervals, R/S transition in V3/V4, and no significant abnormalities. ´ Medication upon Discharge: Medication Dosage Frequency ----------------------------------------- ------------ ---------------------------- Acyclovir (Zovirax) 400 mg 1-0-1 Entecavir (Baraclude) 0.5 mg PAUSED Rifampin (Rifadin) 600 mg PAUSED Isoniazid/Pyridoxine (Nydrazid) 300 mg PAUSED Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0 Trimethoprim/Sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim) 960 mg 1 tablet, on Mon, Wed, Fri Methylprednisolone (Medrol) 0.79 mg As needed (as needed) Prednisolone 4 mg As needed (as needed) Tramadol (Ultram) 50 mg 1 tablet, every 6 hours Parameter Results Reference Range ------------------------- ----------------- ----------------------- White Blood Cells (WBC) 5.0 x 10\^9/L 3.7 - 9.9 x 10\^9/L Hemoglobin 14.0 g/dL 13.6 - 17.5 g/dL Hematocrit 40% 40 - 53% Red Blood Cells (RBC) 4.00 x 10\^12/L 4.4 - 5.9 x 10\^12/L MCV 99 fL 80 - 96 fL MCH 32.8 pg 28.3 - 33.5 pg MCHC 33.1 g/dL 31.5 - 34.5 g/dL Platelets 161 x 10\^9/L 146 - 328 x 10\^9/L Absolute Neutrophils 3.7 x 10\^9/L 1.8 - 6.2 x 10\^9/L Absolute Monocytes 0.31 x 10\^9/L 0.25 - 0.85 x 10\^9/L Absolute Eosinophils 0.03 x 10\^9/L 0.03 - 0.44 x 10\^9/L Absolute Basophils 0.01 x 10\^9/L 0.01 - 0.08 x 10\^9/L Absolute Lymphocytes 0.9 x 10\^9/L 1.1 - 3.2 x 10\^9/L Immature Granulocytes 0.0 x 10\^9/L 0.0 x 10\^9/L ### Patient Report 3 Dear colleague, We are writing to inform you on our patient, Mr. Hurley, who presented to our outpatient clinic on 07/12/2022. Diagnoses: - Acute Pancreatitis, possibly medication-related under antitubercular therapy. - Current medications include Entecavir, Rifampicin, and Isoniazid/Pyridoxin, which have been paused after consultation with the infectious disease team. Other Diagnoses: - Acute Myeloid Leukemia with Myelodysplasia-Related Changes (AML-MRC) - Myelodysplastic Syndrome EB-2 - Allogeneic stem cell transplantation - EBV Reactivation (Treated with immunoglobulins for 3 days) - Persistent Tuberculosis with lymph node swelling - Open Lung Tuberculosis - Initial Diagnosis - Antitubercular combination therapy since (Moxifloxacin, Pyrazinamid, Ethambutol, Rifampicin, Isoniazid). - Rectal colonization with 4-MRGN. Current Presentation: Presented with a referral from outpatient oncologist for suspected recurrent AML, with DD GvHD ITP in the setting of progressive pancytopenia, primarily thrombocytopenia. The patient is in good general condition, denying acute symptoms, particularly no rash, diarrhea, dyspnea, or fever. Physical Examination: Alert, oriented, no signs of respiratory distress, heart sounds regular, abdomen soft, no tenderness, no skin rashes, especially no signs of GvHD, no edema. - Heart Rate (HR): 130/85 - Temperature (Temp): 36.7°C - Oxygen Saturation (SpO2): 97 - Respiratory Rate (AF): 12 - Pupillary Response: 15 Imaging (CT): - [11/04/19 CT Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis ]{.underline} - [01/04/20 Chest CT:]{.underline} Marked necrotic lymph nodes hilar right with bronchus and vascular stenosis. Significant increasing pneumonic infiltrates predominantly on the right. - [02/05/20 Neck/Chest CT]{.underline}: Regression of pulmonary infiltrates, but increased size of necrotic lymph nodes, especially in the upper mediastinum and right infraclavicular with slit-like compression of the right internal jugular vein and the esophagus. - [06/07/20 Neck/Chest CT]{.underline}: Size-stable necrotic lymph node conglomerate infraclavicular right, dimensioned axially up to about 6 x 2 cm, with ongoing slit-shaped compression of the right internal jugular vein. Hypoplastic mastoid cells left, idem. Progressive, partly new and large-volume consolidations with adjacent ground glass infiltrates on the right in the anterior, less posterior upper lobe and perihilar. Inhomogeneous, partially reduced contrast of consolidated lung parenchyma, broncho pneumogram preserved dorsally only. - [10/02/20 Neck/Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis CT:]{.underline} Size-regressive consolidating infiltrate in the right upper lobe and adjacent central lower lobe with increasing signs of liquefaction. Progressive right pleural effusion and progressive signs of pulmonary volume load. Regressive cervical, mediastinal, and right hilar lymphadenopathy. Ongoing central hilar conglomerates that compress the central hilar structures. Partly constant, partly regressive presentation of known tuberculosis-suspected liver lesions. - [12/02/20 CT Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis]{.underline}. - [01/20/2021 Abdominal CT.]{.underline} - [02/23/21 Neck/Chest CT:]{.underline} Slightly regressive/nodular fibrosing infiltrate in the right upper lobe and adjacent central lower lobe with continuing significant residual findings. Within the infiltrate, larger poorly perfused areas with cavitations and scarred bronchiectasis. Increasing, partly patchy densities on the left basal region, differential diagnoses include infiltrates and ventilation disorders. Essentially constant cervical, mediastinal, and hilar lymphadenopathy. Constant liver lesions in the upper abdomen, differential diagnoses include TB manifestations and cystic changes. - [06/12/21 Neck/Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis CT:]{.underline} Improved ventilation with regressive necrotic TB manifestations perihilar, now only subtotal lobar atelectasis. Essentially constant necrotic lymph node manifestations cervical, mediastinal, and right hilar, exemplarily suprasternal right or right paratracheal. Narrow right pleural effusion. Medium-term constant hypodense liver lesions (regressive). Patient History: Known to have AML with myelodysplastic changes, first diagnosed 01/2021, myelodysplastic syndrome EB-2, fist diagnoses 07/2019, and history of allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Treatment and Progression: Patient is hemodynamically stable, vital signs within normal limits, afebrile. In good general condition, clinical examination unremarkable, especially no skin GvHD signs. Venous blood gas: Acid-base status balanced, electrolytes within normal range. Laboratory findings show pancytopenia, Hb 11.3 g/dL, thrombocytopenia 29/nL, leukopenia 1.8/nL, atypical lymphocytes described as \"resembling CLL,\" no blasts noted. Consultation with Hemato/Oncology confirmed no acute need for hospitalization. Follow-up in the Hemato-Oncological Clinic in September. Imaging: CT Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis on 11/04/19: Assessment: In comparison with 10/23/19: In today\'s contrast-enhanced examination, a newly unmasked large tumor is noted in the right pulmonary hilum with encasement of the conduits of the right lung lobe. Differential diagnosis includes a lymph node conglomerate, central bronchial carcinoma, or, less likely, an inflammatory lesion. Multiple suspicious malignant enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes, particularly on the right paratracheal and infracarinal regions. Short-term progression of peribronchovascular consolidation in the right upper lobe and multiple new subsolid micronodules bilaterally. Differential diagnosis includes inflammatory lesions, especially in the presence of known neutropenia, which could raise suspicion of fungal infection. Intraabdominally, there is an image suggestive of small bowel subileus without a clearly defined mechanical obstruction. Density-elevated and ill-defined cystic lesion in the left upper pole of the kidney. Primary consideration is a hemorrhaged or thickened cyst, but ultimately, the nature of the lesion remains uncertain. CT Chest on 01/04/20: Significant necrotic hilar lymph nodes on the right with bronchial and vascular stenosis. Marked progression of pulmonary infiltrates, particularly on the right, still compatible with superinfection in the context of known active tuberculosis CT Chest from 02/05/20: Marked necrotic lymph nodes hilar right with bronchial and vascular stenosis. Significantly increasing pneumonia-like infiltrates, particularly on the right, still compatible with superinfection in the context of known open tuberculosis. Neck/Chest CT from 06/07/20: Size-stable necrotic lymph node conglomerate infraclavicular right, dimensioned axially up to about 6 x 2 cm, with ongoing slit-shaped compression of the right internal jugular vein. Hypoplastic mastoid cells left, idem. Progressive, partly new and large-volume consolidations with adjacent ground glass infiltrates on the right in the anterior, less posterior upper lobe and perihilar. Inhomogeneous, partially reduced contrast of consolidated lung parenchyma, broncho pneumogram preserved dorsally only. Neck Ultrasound from 08/14/2020: Clinical History, Question, Justifying Indication: Follow-up of cervical lymph nodes in tuberculosis. Findings/Assessment: Neck Lymph Node Ultrasound from 05/20/2020 for comparison. As in the previous examination, evidence of two significantly enlarged supraclavicular lymph nodes on the right, both showing a decrease in size compared to the previous examination: The more medial node measures 2.9 x 1.6 cm compared to the previous 3.7 x 1.7 cm, while the more laterally located lymph node measures 3.3 x 1.4 cm compared to the previous 4.2 x 1.5 cm. The more medial lymph node appears centrally hypoechoic, indicative of partial liquefaction, while the more lateral lymph node has a rather solid appearance. No other pathologically enlarged lymph nodes detected in the cervical region. CT Neck/Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis from 10/02/2020: Assessment: Compared to the previous examination from 06/07/2020, there is evidence of regression in findings: Size regression of consolidating infiltrate in the right upper lobe and the adjacent central lower lobe, albeit with increasing signs of cavitation. Progressive right pleural effusion and progressive signs of pulmonary volume overload. Regression of cervical, mediastinal, and right hilar lymphadenopathy. Persistent centrally liquefying lymph node conglomerates in the right hilar region, compressing central hilar structures. Some findings remain stable, while others have regressed. No evidence of new manifestations. CT Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis from 12/02/20: Assessment: Compared to 10/02/20: In today\'s contrast examination, a newly unmasked large tumor is located right pulmonary hilar, encasing the conduits of the right lung lobe; Differential diagnosis includes lymph node conglomerate, central bronchial carcinoma, and a distant possibility of inflammatory lesions. Multiple suspiciously enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes, especially right paratracheal and infracarinal. In a short time, progressive peribronchovascular consolidations in the right upper lobe and multiple new subsolid micronodules bilaterally; Differential diagnosis includes inflammatory lesions, potentially fungal in the context of known neutropenia. Intra-abdominally, there is a picture of small bowel subileus without discernible mechanical obstruction. Corresponding symptoms? Densely elevated and ill-defined cystic lesion in the upper pole of the left kidney; Differential diagnosis primarily includes a hemorrhaged/thickened cyst, ultimately with uncertain malignancy. Chest in two planes on 04/23/2021: Findings/Assessment: In comparison with the corresponding prior images, most recently on 08/14/2020. Also refer to CT Neck and Chest on 01/23/2021. The heart is enlarged with a leftward emphasis, but there are no signs of acute congestion. Extensive consolidation projecting onto the right mid-field, with a long-term trend toward regression but still clearly demarcated. No pneumothorax. No pleural effusion. Known lymph nodes in the mediastinum/hilum. Degenerative spinal changes. Neck/Chest CT on 02/23/21: Slightly regressive/nodular fibrosing infiltrate in the right upper lobe and adjacent central lower lobe with continuing significant residual findings. Within the infiltrate, larger poorly perfused areas with cavitations and scarred bronchiectasis. Increasing, partly patchy densities on the left basal region, differential diagnoses include infiltrates and ventilation disorders. Essentially constant cervical, mediastinal, and hilar lymphadenopathy. Constant liver lesions in the upper abdomen, differential diagnoses include TB manifestations and cystic changes. CT Neck/Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis from 06/12/2021: CT from 02/23/2021 available for comparison. Neck/Chest: Improved right upper lobe (ROL) ventilation with regressive necrotic TB manifestations peri-hilar, now only with subtotal lobar atelectasis. Essentially stable necrotic lymph node manifestations in the cervical, mediastinal, and right hilar regions, for example, supraclavicular on the right (18 mm, previously 30.1 Im 21.2) or right paratracheal (18 mm, previously 30.1 Im 33.8). Narrow right pleural effusion, same as before. No pneumothorax. Heart size normal. No pericardial effusion. Abdomen: Mid-term stable hypodense liver lesions (regressing since 07/2021). Treatment and Progression: Due to the extensive findings and the untreatable immunocompromising underlying condition, we decided to switch from a four-drug TB therapy to a three-drug therapy after nearly 3 months. In addition to rifampicin and isoniazid, levofloxacin was initiated. Despite very good therapy adherence, acid-fast bacilli continued to be detected microscopically in sputum samples without culture confirmation of mycobacteria, even after discharge. Furthermore, the radiological findings worsened. In April 2020, liver lesions were identified in the CT that had not been described up to that point, and pulmonary and mediastinal changes increased. Clinically, right cervical lymphadenopathy also progressed in size. Due to a possible immune reaction, a therapy with prednisolone was attempted for several weeks, which did not lead to improvement. In June 2020, Mr. Hurley was readmitted for bronchoscopy with BAL and EBUS-guided biopsy to rule out differential diagnoses. An NTM-NGS-PCR was performed on the BAL, which did not detect DNA from nontuberculous mycobacteria. Histologically, predominantly necrotic material was found in the lymph node tissue, and molecular pathological analysis detected DNA from the M. tuberculosis complex. There were no indications of malignancy. In addition, whole-genome sequencing of the most recently cultured mycobacteria was performed, and latent resistance genes were also ruled out. Other pathogens, including fungi, were likewise not detected. Aspergillus antigen in BAL and serum was also negative. We continued the three-drug therapy with Rifampicin, Isoniazid, and Levofloxacin. Mr. Hurley developed an increasing need for red blood cell transfusions due to myelodysplastic syndrome and began receiving regular transfusions from his outpatient hematologist-oncologist in the summer of 2020. In a repeat CT control in October 2020, increasing necrotic breakdown of the right upper and middle lobes was observed, as well as progressive ipsilateral pleural effusion and persistent mediastinal lymphadenopathy and liver lesions. Mr. Hurley was referred to the immunology colleagues to discuss additional immunological treatment options. After extensive immune deficiency assessment, a low basal interferon-gamma level was noted in the setting of lymphopenia due to MDS. In an immunological conference, the patient was thoroughly discussed, and a trial of interferon-gamma therapy in addition to antituberculous therapy was discussed due to a low basal interferon-gamma level and a negative Quantiferon test. After approval of an off-label application, we began Actimmune® injections in January 2021 after extensive patient education. Mr. Hurley learned to self-administer the subcutaneous injections and initially tolerated the treatment well. Due to continuous worsening of the blood count, a bone marrow puncture was performed again on an outpatient basis by the attending hematologist-oncologist, and secondary AML was diagnosed. Since February 2021, Mr. Hurley has received Azacitidine and regular red blood cell and platelet concentrates. After 3 months of Actimmune® therapy, sputum no longer showed acid-fast bacilli in March 2021, and radiologically, the left pleural effusion had completely regressed, and the infiltrates had decreased. Actimmune® was discontinued after 3 months. Towards the end of Actimmune® therapy, Mr. Hurley developed pronounced shoulder arthralgia and pain in the upper thoracic spine. Fractures were ruled out. With pain therapy, the pain became tolerable and gradually improved. Arthralgia and myalgia are common side effects of interferon-gamma. Due to the demonstrable therapeutic response, we presented Mr. Hurley, along with an interpreter, at the Department of Hematology and Oncology to discuss further therapeutic options for AML in the context of the hematological and infectious disease situation. After extensive explanation of the disease situation, the risks of aggressive AML therapy in the presence of unresolved tuberculosis, and the consequences of palliative AML therapy. Mr. Hurley agreed to allogeneic stem cell transplantation after some consideration. On an outpatient basis, the cytostatic therapy with Azacitidine was expanded to include Venetoclax. Antituberculous therapy with rifampicin, isoniazid, and levofloxacin was continued. Regular sputum checks remained consistently microscopically negative until complete AML remission was achieved. Mr. will be admitted for allogeneic stem cell transplantation in July 2021. A repeat CT in June 2021 confirmed continued regression of the tuberculosis findings. Antituberculous therapy will be continued indefinitely. CT Neck/Chest/Abdomen/Pelvis on 06/12/2022: CT for comparison. Neck/Chest: Improved right lung upper lobe ventilation with regressing necrotic tuberculosis manifestations, now with only subtotal lobar atelectasis. Essentially constant necrotic lymph node manifestations in the cervical, mediastinal, and right hilar regions, as exemplified by the right supraclavicular (18 mm, SE 301 HU 212) or right paratracheal (18 mm, SE 301 HU 338) nodes. Narrow pleural effusion on the right, likewise. No pneumothorax. The heart is not enlarged. No pericardial effusion. Abdomen: Medium-term constant hypodense liver lesions (regressing) Current Recommendations: Continue antituberculous therapy without a defined endpoint. Sputum checks during allogeneic stem cell transplantation every 1-2 weeks. In case of clinical signs of persistent infection, perform early CT scans of the neck, chest, and abdomen. Follow-up appointment in our infectious diseases outpatient clinic after allogeneic stem cell transplantation.	Mediastinal lymph node conglomerate
Who is the man climbing the mountain? A. A mountain guide looking for survivors B. An astronomical surveyor who ended up there by accident C. A mountaineer who happened to stumble upon an old radio D. A Chang native looking for people on this planet	ACCIDENTAL DEATH BY PETER BAILY The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. But the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. When the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible more than a yard away, weary but still cocky, there leaked from the shape in the hollow the sound of a human voice. "I've tried my hands and arms and they seem to work," it began. "I've wiggled my toes with entire success. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. Right now I don't feel like struggling up and finding out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie here for a while and relax, and get some of the story on tape. This suit's got a built-in recorder, I might as well use it. That way even if I'm not as well as I feel, I'll leave a message. You probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong. "I suppose I'm in a state of shock. That's why I can't seem to get up. Who wouldn't be shocked after luck like that? "I've always been lucky, I guess. Luck got me a place in the Whale . Sure I'm a good astronomer but so are lots of other guys. If I were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. At my age it was luck. "You'll want to know if the ship worked. Well, she did. Went like a bomb. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button and there we were: Alpha Centauri . Two months later your time, one second later by us. We covered our whole survey assignment like that, smooth as a pint of old and mild which right now I could certainly use. Better yet would be a pint of hot black coffee with sugar in. Failing that, I could even go for a long drink of cold water. There was never anything wrong with the Whale till right at the end and even then I doubt if it was the ship itself that fouled things up. "That was some survey assignment. We astronomers really lived. Wait till you see—but of course you won't. I could weep when I think of those miles of lovely color film, all gone up in smoke. "I'm shocked all right. I never said who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside Observatory, back of the Moon, just back from a proving flight cum astronomical survey in the starship Whale . Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. Take it to any radio station or newspaper office. You'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels. "Where had I got to? I'd told you how we happened to find Chang, hadn't I? That's what the natives called it. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. The odds against finding Chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. We certainly were lucky. "The Chang natives aren't very technical—haven't got space travel for instance. They're good astronomers, though. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. In their way, they're a highly civilized people. Look more like cats than people, but they're people all right. If you doubt it, chew these facts over. "One, they learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them. "Two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale . "Three, they've a great sense of humor. Ran rather to silly practical jokes, but still. Can't say I care for that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ. "Four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis. "But why go on? People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers. "It was funny the way they won all the time at table tennis. They certainly weren't so hot at it. Maybe that ten per cent extra gravity put us off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov was our champion. He won sometimes. The rest of us seemed to lose whichever Chingsi we played. There again it wasn't so much that they were good. How could they be, in the time? It was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them and that's fatal in chess. Of course it's a screwy situation, playing chess with something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes an inch and a half long and long white whiskers. Could you have kept your mind on the game? "And don't think I fell victim to their feline charm. The children were pets, but you didn't feel like patting the adults on their big grinning heads. Personally I didn't like the one I knew best. He was called—well, we called him Charley, and he was the ethnologist, ambassador, contact man, or whatever you like to call him, who came back with us. Why I disliked him was because he was always trying to get the edge on you. All the time he had to be top. Great sense of humor, of course. I nearly broke my neck on that butter-slide he fixed up in the metal alleyway to the Whale's engine room. Charley laughed fit to bust, everyone laughed, I even laughed myself though doing it hurt me more than the tumble had. Yes, life and soul of the party, old Charley ... "My last sight of the Minnow was a cabin full of dead and dying men, the sweetish stink of burned flesh and the choking reek of scorching insulation, the boat jolting and shuddering and beginning to break up, and in the middle of the flames, still unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ... "My God, it's dark out here. Wonder how high I am. Must be all of fifty miles, and doing eight hundred miles an hour at least. I'll be doing more than that when I land. What's final velocity for a fifty-mile fall? Same as a fifty thousand mile fall, I suppose; same as escape; twenty-four thousand miles an hour. I'll make a mess ... "That's better. Why didn't I close my eyes before? Those star streaks made me dizzy. I'll make a nice shooting star when I hit air. Come to think of it, I must be deep in air now. Let's take a look. "It's getting lighter. Look at those peaks down there! Like great knives. I don't seem to be falling as fast as I expected though. Almost seem to be floating. Let's switch on the radio and tell the world hello. Hello, earth ... hello, again ... and good-by ... "Sorry about that. I passed out. I don't know what I said, if anything, and the suit recorder has no playback or eraser. What must have happened is that the suit ran out of oxygen, and I lost consciousness due to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on the radio, but I actually switched on the emergency tank, thank the Lord, and that brought me round. "Come to think of it, why not crack the suit and breath fresh air instead of bottled? "No. I'd have to get up to do that. I think I'll just lie here a little bit longer and get properly rested up before I try anything big like standing up. "I was telling about the return journey, wasn't I? The long jump back home, which should have dumped us between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Instead of which, when James took his finger off the button, the mass-detector showed nothing except the noise-level of the universe. "We were out in that no place for a day. We astronomers had to establish our exact position relative to the solar system. The crew had to find out exactly what went wrong. The physicists had to make mystic passes in front of meters and mutter about residual folds in stress-free space. Our task was easy, because we were about half a light-year from the sun. The crew's job was also easy: they found what went wrong in less than half an hour. "It still seems incredible. To program the ship for a star-jump, you merely told it where you were and where you wanted to go. In practical terms, that entailed first a series of exact measurements which had to be translated into the somewhat abstruse co-ordinate system we used based on the topological order of mass-points in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on the computer and hit the button. Nothing was wrong with the computer. Nothing was wrong with the engines. We'd hit the right button and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed for. All we'd done was aim for the wrong place. It hurts me to tell you this and I'm just attached personnel with no space-flight tradition. In practical terms, one highly trained crew member had punched a wrong pattern of holes on the tape. Another equally skilled had failed to notice this when reading back. A childish error, highly improbable; twice repeated, thus squaring the improbability. Incredible, but that's what happened. "Anyway, we took good care with the next lot of measurements. That's why we were out there so long. They were cross-checked about five times. I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit and went outside and took some photographs of the Sun which I hoped would help to determine hydrogen density in the outer regions. When I got back everything was ready. We disposed ourselves about the control room and relaxed for all we were worth. We were all praying that this time nothing would go wrong, and all looking forward to seeing Earth again after four months subjective time away, except for Charley, who was still chuckling and shaking his head, and Captain James who was glaring at Charley and obviously wishing human dignity permitted him to tear Charley limb from limb. Then James pressed the button. "Everything twanged like a bowstring. I felt myself turned inside out, passed through a small sieve, and poured back into shape. The entire bow wall-screen was full of Earth. Something was wrong all right, and this time it was much, much worse. We'd come out of the jump about two hundred miles above the Pacific, pointed straight down, traveling at a relative speed of about two thousand miles an hour. "It was a fantastic situation. Here was the Whale , the most powerful ship ever built, which could cover fifty light-years in a subjective time of one second, and it was helpless. For, as of course you know, the star-drive couldn't be used again for at least two hours. "The Whale also had ion rockets of course, the standard deuterium-fusion thing with direct conversion. As again you know, this is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five minutes to abandon ship. "James got us all into the Minnow at a dead run. There was no time to take anything at all except the clothes we stood in. The Minnow was meant for short heavy hops to planets or asteroids. In addition to the ion drive it had emergency atomic rockets, using steam for reaction mass. We thanked God for that when Cazamian canceled our downwards velocity with them in a few seconds. We curved away up over China and from about fifty miles high we saw the Whale hit the Pacific. Six hundred tons of mass at well over two thousand miles an hour make an almighty splash. By now you'll have divers down, but I doubt they'll salvage much you can use. "I wonder why James went down with the ship, as the saying is? Not that it made any difference. It must have broken his heart to know that his lovely ship was getting the chopper. Or did he suspect another human error? "We didn't have time to think about that, or even to get the radio working. The steam rockets blew up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a crisp. Only thing that saved me was the spacesuit I was still wearing. I snapped the face plate down because the cabin was filling with fumes. I saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's how he'd escaped—and I saw him beginning to laugh. Then the port side collapsed and I fell out. "I saw the launch spinning away, glowing red against a purplish black sky. I tumbled head over heels towards the huge curved shield of earth fifty miles below. I shut my eyes and that's about all I remember. I don't see how any of us could have survived. I think we're all dead. "I'll have to get up and crack this suit and let some air in. But I can't. I fell fifty miles without a parachute. I'm dead so I can't stand up." There was silence for a while except for the vicious howl of the wind. Then snow began to shift on the ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and came shakily to his feet. He moved slowly around for some time. After about two hours he returned to the hollow, squatted down and switched on the recorder. The voice began again, considerably wearier. "Hello there. I'm in the bleakest wilderness I've ever seen. This place makes the moon look cozy. There's precipice around me every way but one and that's up. So it's up I'll have to go till I find a way to go down. I've been chewing snow to quench my thirst but I could eat a horse. I picked up a short-wave broadcast on my suit but couldn't understand a word. Not English, not French, and there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen minutes just to hear a human voice again. I haven't much hope of reaching anyone with my five milliwatt suit transmitter but I'll keep trying. "Just before I start the climb there are two things I want to get on tape. The first is how I got here. I've remembered something from my military training, when I did some parachute jumps. Terminal velocity for a human body falling through air is about one hundred twenty m.p.h. Falling fifty miles is no worse than falling five hundred feet. You'd be lucky to live through a five hundred foot fall, true, but I've been lucky. The suit is bulky but light and probably slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile an hour updraft this side of the mountain, skidded downhill through about half a mile of snow and fetched up in a drift. The suit is part worn but still operational. I'm fine. "The second thing I want to say is about the Chingsi, and here it is: watch out for them. Those jokers are dangerous. I'm not telling how because I've got a scientific reputation to watch. You'll have to figure it out for yourselves. Here are the clues: (1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but after all they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light-years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop? A talent that's so uncertain and rudimentary here that most people don't believe it, might be highly developed out there. (2) The Whale expedition did fine till it found Chang. Then it hit a seam of bad luck. Real stinking bad luck that went on and on till it looks fishy. We lost the ship, we lost the launch, all but one of us lost our lives. We couldn't even win a game of ping-pong. "So what is luck, good or bad? Scientifically speaking, future chance events are by definition chance. They can turn out favorable or not. When a preponderance of chance events has occurred unfavorably, you've got bad luck. It's a fancy name for a lot of chance results that didn't go your way. But the gambler defines it differently. For him, luck refers to the future, and you've got bad luck when future chance events won't go your way. Scientific investigations into this have been inconclusive, but everyone knows that some people are lucky and others aren't. All we've got are hints and glimmers, the fumbling touch of a rudimentary talent. There's the evil eye legend and the Jonah, bad luck bringers. Superstition? Maybe; but ask the insurance companies about accident prones. What's in a name? Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious. Call him accident prone and that's sound business sense. I've said enough. "All the same, search the space-flight records, talk to the actuaries. When a ship is working perfectly and is operated by a hand-picked crew of highly trained men in perfect condition, how often is it wrecked by a series of silly errors happening one after another in defiance of probability? "I'll sign off with two thoughts, one depressing and one cheering. A single Chingsi wrecked our ship and our launch. What could a whole planetful of them do? "On the other hand, a talent that manipulates chance events is bound to be chancy. No matter how highly developed it can't be surefire. The proof is that I've survived to tell the tale." At twenty below zero and fifty miles an hour the wind ravaged the mountain. Peering through his polarized vizor at the white waste and the snow-filled air howling over it, sliding and stumbling with every step on a slope that got gradually steeper and seemed to go on forever, Matt Hennessy began to inch his way up the north face of Mount Everest. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction February 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.	B. An astronomical surveyor who ended up there by accident
Why did the Groacians hide the ship? A. To overthrow the government. B. They wanted to hide the Terrestrials as long as they could. C. They were afraid to admit they knew where it was. D. They wanted to keep it for further research.	THE MADMAN FROM EARTH BY KEITH LAUMER You don't have to be crazy to be an earth diplomat—but on Groac it sure helps! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "The Consul for the Terrestrial States," Retief said, "presents his compliments, et cetera, to the Ministry of Culture of the Groacian Autonomy, and with reference to the Ministry's invitation to attend a recital of interpretive grimacing, has the honor to express regret that he will be unable—" "You can't turn this invitation down," Administrative Assistant Meuhl said flatly. "I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'." Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke. "Miss Meuhl," he said, "in the past couple of weeks I've sat through six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty hour since I got here—" "You can't offend the Groaci," Miss Meuhl said sharply. "Consul Whaffle would never have been so rude." "Whaffle left here three months ago," Retief said, "leaving me in charge." "Well," Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. "I'm sure I don't know what excuse I can give the Minister." "Never mind the excuses," Retief said. "Just tell him I won't be there." He stood up. "Are you leaving the office?" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. "I have some important letters here for your signature." "I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl," Retief said, pulling on a light cape. "I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted them." "Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?" "Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man," Miss Meuhl said stiffly. "He had complete confidence in me." "Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on," Retief said, "I won't be so busy." "Well!" Miss Meuhl said. "May I ask where you'll be if something comes up?" "I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives." Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. "Whatever for?" Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. "You've been here on Groac for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put the present government in power?" "I'm sure I haven't pried into—" "What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this way about ten years back?" "Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we avoid with the Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—" "Why?" "The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one occasion." "You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?" "I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed, grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief." "They never found the cruiser, did they?" "Certainly not on Groac." Retief nodded. "Thanks, Miss Meuhl," he said. "I'll be back before you close the office." Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim disapproval as he closed the door. The pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed bleat. "Not to enter the Archives," he said in his faint voice. "The denial of permission. The deep regret of the Archivist." "The importance of my task here," Retief said, enunciating the glottal dialect with difficulty. "My interest in local history." "The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly." "The necessity that I enter." "The specific instructions of the Archivist." The Groacian's voice rose to a whisper. "To insist no longer. To give up this idea!" "OK, Skinny, I know when I'm licked," Retief said in Terran. "To keep your nose clean." Outside, Retief stood for a moment looking across at the deeply carved windowless stucco facades lining the street, then started off in the direction of the Terrestrial Consulate General. The few Groacians on the street eyed him furtively, veered to avoid him as he passed. Flimsy high-wheeled ground cars puffed silently along the resilient pavement. The air was clean and cool. At the office, Miss Meuhl would be waiting with another list of complaints. Retief studied the carving over the open doorways along the street. An elaborate one picked out in pinkish paint seemed to indicate the Groacian equivalent of a bar. Retief went in. A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in mid-motion, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot. "To enjoy a cooling drink," Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at the edge of the pit. "To sample a true Groacian beverage." "To not enjoy my poor offerings," the Groacian mumbled. "A pain in the digestive sacs; to express regret." "To not worry," Retief said, irritated. "To pour it out and let me decide whether I like it." "To be grappled in by peace-keepers for poisoning of—foreigners." The barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers, eyes elsewhere, were drifting away. "To get the lead out," Retief said, placing a thick gold-piece in the dish provided. "To shake a tentacle." "The procuring of a cage," a thin voice called from the sidelines. "The displaying of a freak." Retief turned. A tall Groacian vibrated his mandibles in a gesture of contempt. From his bluish throat coloration, it was apparent the creature was drunk. "To choke in your upper sac," the bartender hissed, extending his eyes toward the drunk. "To keep silent, litter-mate of drones." "To swallow your own poison, dispenser of vileness," the drunk whispered. "To find a proper cage for this zoo-piece." He wavered toward Retief. "To show this one in the streets, like all freaks." "Seen a lot of freaks like me, have you?" Retief asked, interestedly. "To speak intelligibly, malodorous outworlder," the drunk said. The barkeep whispered something, and two customers came up to the drunk, took his arms and helped him to the door. "To get a cage!" the drunk shrilled. "To keep the animals in their own stinking place." "I've changed my mind," Retief said to the bartender. "To be grateful as hell, but to have to hurry off now." He followed the drunk out the door. The other Groaci released him, hurried back inside. Retief looked at the weaving alien. "To begone, freak," the Groacian whispered. "To be pals," Retief said. "To be kind to dumb animals." "To have you hauled away to a stockyard, ill-odored foreign livestock." "To not be angry, fragrant native," Retief said. "To permit me to chum with you." "To flee before I take a cane to you!" "To have a drink together—" "To not endure such insolence!" The Groacian advanced toward Retief. Retief backed away. "To hold hands," Retief said. "To be palsy-walsy—" The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him, head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local, who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following Groacian. Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose; Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed. "To not be going anywhere for a few minutes," Retief said. "To stay right here and have a nice long talk." II "There you are!" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. "There are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen." "Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast." Retief pulled off his cape. "This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign Ministry." "What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling you." "I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder." Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right. "I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Consul," the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. "May I present Shluh, of the Internal Police?" "Sit down, gentlemen," Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair. "Oh, it's such a pleasure—" she began. "Never mind that," Retief said. "These gentlemen didn't come here to sip tea today." "So true," Fith said. "Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report, Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it." He nodded to the police chief. "One hour ago," The Groacian said, "a Groacian national was brought to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of the Terrestrial Consul." Miss Meuhl gasped audibly. "Have you ever heard," Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, "of a Terrestrial cruiser, the ISV Terrific , which dropped from sight in this sector nine years ago?" "Really!" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. "I wash my hands—" "Just keep that recorder going," Retief snapped. "I'll not be a party—" "You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl," Retief said quietly. "I'm telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation." Miss Meuhl sat down. Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. "You reopen an old wound, Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial hands—" "Hogwash," Retief said. "That tune went over with my predecessors, but it hits a sour note with me." "All our efforts," Miss Meuhl said, "to live down that terrible episode! And you—" "Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left. Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were innocent." "IF!" Miss Meuhl burst out. "If, indeed!" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. "I must protest your—" "Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't think your story will be good enough." "It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—" "Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory." "Then you admit—" "It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to it." Fith rose; Shluh followed suit. "I shall ask for your immediate recall, Mr. Consul. Were it not for your diplomatic immunity, I should do more—" "Why did the government fall, Fith? It was just after the task force paid its visit, and before the arrival of the first Terrestrial diplomatic mission." "This is an internal matter!" Fith cried, in his faint Groacian voice. "The new regime has shown itself most amiable to you Terrestrials. It has outdone itself—" "—to keep the Terrestrial consul and his staff in the dark," Retief said. "And the same goes for the few terrestrial businessmen you've visaed. This continual round of culture; no social contacts outside the diplomatic circle; no travel permits to visit out-lying districts, or your satellite—" "Enough!" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. "I can talk no more of this matter—" "You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do the talking," Retief said. "You can't!" Miss Meuhl gasped. Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The Groaci sat down. "Answer me this one," Retief said, looking at Shluh. "A few years back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged, they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show. "Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit. "Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the parade was over?" Fith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly. "How did they die?" Retief snapped. "Did you murder them, cut their throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them yell...." "No!" Fith gasped. "I must correct this terrible false impression at once." "False impression, hell," Retief said. "They were Terrans! A simple narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the parade." "Yes," Fith said weakly. "It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there was no killing." "They're alive?" "Alas, no. They ... died." Miss Meuhl yelped faintly. "I see," Retief said. "They died." "We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what foods—" "Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?" "They fell ill," Fith said. "One by one...." "We'll deal with that question later," Retief said. "Right now, I want more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship? What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the big parade?" "There were no more! Absolutely, I assure you!" "Killed in the crash landing?" "No crash landing. The ship descended intact, east of the city. The ... Terrestrials ... were unharmed. Naturally, we feared them. They were strange to us. We had never before seen such beings." "Stepped off the ship with guns blazing, did they?" "Guns? No, no guns—" "They raised their hands, didn't they? Asked for help. You helped them; helped them to death." "How could we know?" Fith moaned. "How could you know a flotilla would show up in a few months looking for them, you mean? That was a shock, wasn't it? I'll bet you had a brisk time of it hiding the ship, and shutting everybody up. A close call, eh?" "We were afraid," Shluh said. "We are a simple people. We feared the strange creatures from the alien craft. We did not kill them, but we felt it was as well they ... did not survive. Then, when the warships came, we realized our error. But we feared to speak. We purged our guilty leaders, concealed what had happened, and ... offered our friendship. We invited the opening of diplomatic relations. We made a blunder, it is true, a great blunder. But we have tried to make amends...." "Where is the ship?" "The ship?" "What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget. Where is it?" The two Groacians exchanged looks. "We wish to show our contrition," Fith said. "We will show you the ship." "Miss Meuhl," Retief said. "If I don't come back in a reasonable length of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed." He stood, looked at the Groaci. "Let's go," he said. Retief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern. He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull. "Any lights in here?" he asked. A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up. Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy. "How did you get it in here?" Retief asked. "It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant," Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. "This is a natural crevasse. The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over." "How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?" "All here is high-grade iron ore," Fith said, waving a member. "Great veins of almost pure metal." Retief grunted. "Let's go inside." Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship. Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding. "The cargo compartment—" Shluh began. "I've seen enough," Retief said. Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the steam car, Fith came to Retief's side. "Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair," he said. "Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—" "You can skip all that," Retief said. "You're nine years late. The crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what you'd done." "We were at fault," Fith said abjectly. "Now we wish only friendship." "The Terrific was a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons." Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. "Where is she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat." Fith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off. "I know nothing of ... of...." He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly as he struggled for calm. "My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul," he said at last. "I have been completely candid with you, I have overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of responsibility. My patience is at an end." "Where is that ship?" Retief rapped out. "You never learn, do you? You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm telling you you can't." "We return to the city now," Fith said. "I can do no more." "You can and you will, Fith," Retief said. "I intend to get to the truth of this matter." Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in. Retief eyed Fith. "Don't try it," he said. "You'll just get yourself in deeper." Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively toward the Terrestrial. "Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall ignore your insulting remarks," Fith said in his reedy voice. "Let us now return to the city." Retief looked at the four policemen. "I see your point," he said. Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat. "I advise you to remain very close to your consulate," Fith said. "I advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to the Groacian government." In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing. III "Miss Meuhl," Retief said, "I want you to listen carefully to what I'm going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off guard." "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Miss Meuhl snapped, her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses. "If you'll listen, you may find out," Retief said. "I have no time to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I hope—and that may give me the latitude I need." "You're still determined to make an issue of that incident!" Miss Meuhl snorted. "I really can hardly blame the Groaci. They are not a sophisticated race; they had never before met aliens." "You're ready to forgive a great deal, Miss Meuhl. But it's not what happened nine years ago I'm concerned with. It's what's happening now. I've told you that it was only a lifeboat the Groaci have hidden out. Don't you understand the implication? That vessel couldn't have come far. The cruiser itself must be somewhere near by. I want to know where!" "The Groaci don't know. They're a very cultured, gentle people. You can do irreparable harm to the reputation of Terrestrials if you insist—" "That's my decision," Retief said. "I have a job to do and we're wasting time." He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a slim-barreled needler. "This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the Groaci. I think I can get past them all right." "Where are you going with ... that?" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler. "What in the world—" "The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll find nothing but blank smiles." "You're out of your mind!" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with indignation. "You're like a ... a...." "You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know what happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed him out—for the moment." Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. "Your fantasies are getting the better of you," she gasped. "In danger, indeed! Disposing of me! I've never heard anything so ridiculous." "Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in touch with you via hand-phone." "What are you planning to do?" "If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you. Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you. A force can be here in a week." "I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ... Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—" "Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better," Retief said, "but don't be fool enough to trust them." He pulled on a cape, opened the door. "I'll be back in a couple of hours," he said. Miss Meuhl stared after him silently as he closed the door. It was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked tired. Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare. "What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your clothing?" "I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it." Retief went to his desk, opened a drawer and replaced the needler. "Where have you been?" Miss Meuhl demanded. "I stayed here—" "I'm glad you did," Retief said. "I hope you piled up a supply of food and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week, at least." He jotted figures on a pad. "Warm up the official sender. I have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters." "Are you going to tell me where you've been?" "I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl," Retief said sharply. "I've been to the Foreign Ministry," he added. "I'll tell you all about it later." "At this hour? There's no one there...." "Exactly." Miss Meuhl gasped. "You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign Office?" "That's right," Retief said calmly. "Now—" "This is absolutely the end!" Miss Meuhl said. "Thank heaven I've already—" "Get that sender going, woman!" Retief snapped. "This is important." "I've already done so, Mr. Retief!" Miss Meuhl said harshly. "I've been waiting for you to come back here...." She turned to the communicator, flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance image appeared. "He's here now," Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief triumphantly. "That's good," Retief said. "I don't think the Groaci can knock us off the air, but—" "I have done my duty, Mr. Retief," Miss Meuhl said. "I made a full report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me." Retief looked at her levelly. "You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?" "That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say, in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less suited to diplomatic work." The screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed. "Mr. Retief," the face on the screen said, "I am Counsellor Pardy, DSO-1, Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you administratively, vice Miss Yolanda Meuhl, DAO-9. Pending the findings of a Board of Inquiry, you will—" Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant look faded from Miss Meuhl's face. "Why, what is the meaning—" "If I'd listened any longer, I might have heard something I couldn't ignore. I can't afford that, at this moment. Listen, Miss Meuhl," Retief went on earnestly, "I've found the missing cruiser." "You heard him relieve you!" "I heard him say he was going to, Miss Meuhl. But until I've heard and acknowledged a verbal order, it has no force. If I'm wrong, he'll get my resignation. If I'm right, that suspension would be embarrassing all around." "You're defying lawful authority! I'm in charge here now." Miss Meuhl stepped to the local communicator. "I'm going to report this terrible thing to the Groaci at once, and offer my profound—" "Don't touch that screen," Retief said. "You go sit in that corner where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task force. Then we'll settle down to wait." Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder. The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it. "Go ahead," Retief said. "Answer it." A Groacian official appeared on the screen. "Yolanda Meuhl," he said without preamble, "for the Foreign Minister of the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs." "Why, why," Miss Meuhl stammered. "Yes, of course. And I do want to express my deepest regrets—" Retief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside. "Listen carefully, Fith," he said. "Your bluff has been called. You don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist the temptation to make matters worse than they are." "Miss Meuhl," Fith said, "a peace squad waits outside your consulate. It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—" "Don't bother," Retief said. "You know what was in those files I looked over this morning." Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door, reaching for the safe-lock release.... "Don't!" Retief jumped—too late. The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room, pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief Shluh pushed forward. "Attempt no violence, Terrestrial," he said. "I cannot promise to restrain my men." "You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh," Retief said steadily. "I suggest you move back out the same way you came in." "I invited them here," Miss Meuhl spoke up. "They are here at my express wish." "Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad of armed Groaci in the consulate?" "You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl," Shluh said. "Would it not be best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?" "You're making a serious mistake, Shluh," Retief said. "Yes," Miss Meuhl said. "You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—" "I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith," Retief said. "As chief of mission," Miss Meuhl said quickly, "I hereby waive immunity in the case of Mr. Retief." Shluh produced a hand recorder. "Kindly repeat your statement, Madam, officially," he said. "I wish no question to arise later." "Don't be a fool, woman," Retief said. "Don't you see what you're letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to figure out whose side you're on." "I'm on the side of common decency!" "You've been taken in. These people are concealing—" "You think all women are fools, don't you, Mr. Retief?" She turned to the police chief and spoke into the microphone he held up. "That's an illegal waiver," Retief said. "I'm consul here, whatever rumors you've heard. This thing's coming out into the open, whatever you do. Don't add violation of the Consulate to the list of Groacian atrocities." "Take the man," Shluh said.	C. They were afraid to admit they knew where it was.
Why was Macklin's wife hysterical when she called to speak with Ferris and Mitchell? A. Her husband was very ill from the virus B. Her husband was still having headaches C. She thought they had given her husband heroin. D. Her husband's blood pressure had dropped extremely low.	THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.	C. She thought they had given her husband heroin.
How did Ned become a mummy? A. Loy Chuk's workers wrapped Ned's body in strips of cloth to preserve it in transport. B. The earth became a desert wasteland. All the moisture was leached from the corpse. C. A combination of the alkali and mud his body had been soaked in. Also, the years of dryness after the world became a desert. D. The body had been devoid of moisture for a million years.	THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye, Betty ... The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... "Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..." The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. "Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals. But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success. He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy. "Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah! "Tik, tik, tik!..." But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering. With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine. Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome. The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known. At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form. For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday. Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong! The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis. "Take it easy, Ned Vince...." The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys. To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this. Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aid of a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know that in the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy, whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficulty speaking English words, anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced with a curious calm. "Stark—starin'—nuts...." Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying. Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned, not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science that can do that. I'm Loy Chuk...." It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make his charge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that he could succeed, thus. Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "A prairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution. The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A lot easier than men from fish...." It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tuned to ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million years. God!... Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about," he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go back where I came from! Do you understand—whoever, or whatever you are?" Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the Twentieth Century," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to be now, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, though their forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyond you in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people—our minds are much more like yours. We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...." But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world! His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp. He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface. He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt. "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet—so changed had the Earth become. A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed—those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied.... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years.... Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope. "Hey, somebody!" he called. "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again. "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And—well—there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!" Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come. Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study. So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, this Kaalleee.... Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do—to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...." Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm.... As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed. A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived. With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise. "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!" He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always. "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend—and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..." Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply. He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance—and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin—a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions. It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man—this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish. Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen. "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...." THE END PRINTED IN U. S. A. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April 1956 and was first published in Amazing Stories November 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.	C. A combination of the alkali and mud his body had been soaked in. Also, the years of dryness after the world became a desert.
What programming language is target language?	### Introduction Removing computer-human language barrier is an inevitable advancement researchers are thriving to achieve for decades. One of the stages of this advancement will be coding through natural human language instead of traditional programming language. On naturalness of computer programming D. Knuth said, “Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”BIBREF0. Unfortunately, learning programming language is still necessary to instruct it. Researchers and developers are working to overcome this human-machine language barrier. Multiple branches exists to solve this challenge (i.e. inter-conversion of different programming language to have universally connected programming languages). Automatic code generation through natural language is not a new concept in computer science studies. However, it is difficult to create such tool due to these following three reasons– Programming languages are diverse An individual person expresses logical statements differently than other Natural Language Processing (NLP) of programming statements is challenging since both human and programming language evolve over time In this paper, a neural approach to translate pseudo-code or algorithm like human language expression into programming language code is proposed. ### Problem Description Code repositories (i.e. Git, SVN) flourished in the last decade producing big data of code allowing data scientists to perform machine learning on these data. In 2017, Allamanis M et al. published a survey in which they presented the state-of-the-art of the research areas where machine learning is changing the way programmers code during software engineering and development process BIBREF1. This paper discusses what are the restricting factors of developing such text-to-code conversion method and what problems need to be solved– ### Problem Description ::: Programming Language Diversity According to the sources, there are more than a thousand actively maintained programming languages, which signifies the diversity of these language . These languages were created to achieve different purpose and use different syntaxes. Low-level languages such as assembly languages are easier to express in human language because of the low or no abstraction at all whereas high-level, or Object-Oriented Programing (OOP) languages are more diversified in syntax and expression, which is challenging to bring into a unified human language structure. Nonetheless, portability and transparency between different programming languages also remains a challenge and an open research area. George D. et al. tried to overcome this problem through XML mapping BIBREF2. They tried to convert codes from C++ to Java using XML mapping as an intermediate language. However, the authors encountered challenges to support different features of both languages. ### Problem Description ::: Human Language Factor One of the motivations behind this paper is - as long as it is about programming, there is a finite and small set of expression which is used in human vocabulary. For instance, programmers express a for-loop in a very few specific ways BIBREF3. Variable declaration and value assignment expressions are also limited in nature. Although all codes are executable, human representation through text may not due to the semantic brittleness of code. Since high-level languages have a wide range of syntax, programmers use different linguistic expressions to explain those. For instance, small changes like swapping function arguments can significantly change the meaning of the code. Hence the challenge remains in processing human language to understand it properly which brings us to the next problem- ### Problem Description ::: NLP of statements Although there is a finite set of expressions for each programming statements, it is a challenge to extract information from the statements of the code accurately. Semantic analysis of linguistic expression plays an important role in this information extraction. For instance, in case of a loop, what is the initial value? What is the step value? When will the loop terminate? Mihalcea R. et al. has achieved a variable success rate of 70-80% in producing code just from the problem statement expressed in human natural language BIBREF3. They focused solely on the detection of step and loops in their research. Another research group from MIT, Lei et al. use a semantic learning model for text to detect the inputs. The model produces a parser in C++ which can successfully parse more than 70% of the textual description of input BIBREF4. The test dataset and model was initially tested and targeted against ACM-ICPC participantsínputs which contains diverse and sometimes complex input instructions. A recent survey from Allamanis M. et al. presented the state-of-the-art on the area of naturalness of programming BIBREF1. A number of research works have been conducted on text-to-code or code-to-text area in recent years. In 2015, Oda et al. proposed a way to translate each line of Python code into natural language pseudocode using Statistical Machine Learning Technique (SMT) framework BIBREF5 was used. This translation framework was able to - it can successfully translate the code to natural language pseudo coded text in both English and Japanese. In the same year, Chris Q. et al. mapped natural language with simple if-this-then-that logical rules BIBREF6. Tihomir G. and Viktor K. developed an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) integrated code assistant tool anyCode for Java which can search, import and call function just by typing desired functionality through text BIBREF7. They have used model and mapping framework between function signatures and utilized resources like WordNet, Java Corpus, relational mapping to process text online and offline. Recently in 2017, P. Yin and G. Neubig proposed a semantic parser which generates code through its neural model BIBREF8. They formulated a grammatical model which works as a skeleton for neural network training. The grammatical rules are defined based on the various generalized structure of the statements in the programming language. ### Proposed Methodology The use of machine learning techniques such as SMT proved to be at most 75% successful in converting human text to executable code. BIBREF9. A programming language is just like a language with less vocabulary compared to a typical human language. For instance, the code vocabulary of the training dataset was 8814 (including variable, function, class names), whereas the English vocabulary to express the same code was 13659 in total. Here, programming language is considered just like another human language and widely used SMT techniques have been applied. ### Proposed Methodology ::: Statistical Machine Translation SMT techniques are widely used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). SMT plays a significant role in translation from one language to another, especially in lexical and grammatical rule extraction. In SMT, bilingual grammatical structures are automatically formed by statistical approaches instead of explicitly providing a grammatical model. This reduces months and years of work which requires significant collaboration between bi-lingual linguistics. Here, a neural network based machine translation model is used to translate regular text into programming code. ### Proposed Methodology ::: Statistical Machine Translation ::: Data Preparation SMT techniques require a parallel corpus in thr source and thr target language. A text-code parallel corpus similar to Fig. FIGREF12 is used in training. This parallel corpus has 18805 aligned data in it . In source data, the expression of each line code is written in the English language. In target data, the code is written in Python programming language. ### Proposed Methodology ::: Statistical Machine Translation ::: Vocabulary Generation To train the neural model, the texts should be converted to a computational entity. To do that, two separate vocabulary files are created - one for the source texts and another for the code. Vocabulary generation is done by tokenization of words. Afterwards, the words are put into their contextual vector space using the popular word2vec BIBREF10 method to make the words computational. ### Proposed Methodology ::: Statistical Machine Translation ::: Neural Model Training In order to train the translation model between text-to-code an open source Neural Machine Translation (NMT) - OpenNMT implementation is utilized BIBREF11. PyTorch is used as Neural Network coding framework. For training, three types of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) layers are used – an encoder layer, a decoder layer and an output layer. These layers together form a LSTM model. LSTM is typically used in seq2seq translation. In Fig. FIGREF13, the neural model architecture is demonstrated. The diagram shows how it takes the source and target text as input and uses it for training. Vector representation of tokenized source and target text are fed into the model. Each token of the source text is passed into an encoder cell. Target text tokens are passed into a decoder cell. Encoder cells are part of the encoder RNN layer and decoder cells are part of the decoder RNN layer. End of the input sequence is marked by a $<$eos$>$ token. Upon getting the $<$eos$>$ token, the final cell state of encoder layer initiate the output layer sequence. At each target cell state, attention is applied with the encoder RNN state and combined with the current hidden state to produce the prediction of next target token. This predictions are then fed back to the target RNN. Attention mechanism helps us to overcome the fixed length restriction of encoder-decoder sequence and allows us to process variable length between input and output sequence. Attention uses encoder state and pass it to the decoder cell to give particular attention to the start of an output layer sequence. The encoder uses an initial state to tell the decoder what it is supposed to generate. Effectively, the decoder learns to generate target tokens, conditioned on the input sequence. Sigmoidal optimization is used to optimize the prediction. ### Result Analysis Training parallel corpus had 18805 lines of annotated code in it. The training model is executed several times with different training parameters. During the final training process, 500 validation data is used to generate the recurrent neural model, which is 3% of the training data. We run the training with epoch value of 10 with a batch size of 64. After finishing the training, the accuracy of the generated model using validation data from the source corpus was 74.40% (Fig. FIGREF17). Although the generated code is incoherent and often predict wrong code token, this is expected because of the limited amount of training data. LSTM generally requires a more extensive set of data (100k+ in such scenario) to build a more accurate model. The incoherence can be resolved by incorporating coding syntax tree model in future. For instance– "define the method tzname with 2 arguments: self and dt." is translated into– def __init__ ( self , regex ) :. The translator is successfully generating the whole codeline automatically but missing the noun part (parameter and function name) part of the syntax. ### Conclusion & Future Works The main advantage of translating to a programming language is - it has a concrete and strict lexical and grammatical structure which human languages lack. The aim of this paper was to make the text-to-code framework work for general purpose programming language, primarily Python. In later phase, phrase-based word embedding can be incorporated for improved vocabulary mapping. To get more accurate target code for each line, Abstract Syntax Tree(AST) can be beneficial. The contribution of this research is a machine learning model which can turn the human expression into coding expressions. This paper also discusses available methods which convert natural language to programming language successfully in fixed or tightly bounded linguistic paradigm. Approaching this problem using machine learning will give us the opportunity to explore the possibility of unified programming interface as well in the future. ### Acknowledgment We would like to thank Dr. Khandaker Tabin Hasan, Head of the Depertment of Computer Science, American International University-Bangladesh for his inspiration and encouragement in all of our research works. Also, thanks to Future Technology Conference - 2019 committee for partially supporting us to join the conference and one of our colleague - Faheem Abrar, Software Developer for his thorough review and comments on this research work and supporting us by providing fund. Fig. 1. Text-Code bi-lingual corpus Fig. 2. Neural training model architecture of Text-To-Code Fig. 3. Accuracy gain in progress of training the RNN	Python
What data augmentation techniques are used?	### Introduction Virtual assistants help users accomplish tasks including but not limited to finding flights, booking restaurants, by providing a natural language interface to services and APIs on the web. Large-scale assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana etc. need to support a large and constantly increasing number of services, over a wide variety of domains. Consequently, recent work has focused on scalable dialogue systems that can handle tasks across multiple application domains. Data-driven deep learning based approaches for multi-domain modeling have shown promise, both for end-to-end and modular systems involving dialogue state tracking and policy learning. This line of work has been facilitated by the release of multi-domain dialogue corpora such as MultiWOZ BIBREF0, Taskmaster-1 BIBREF1, M2M BIBREF2 and FRAMES BIBREF3. However, building large-scale assistants, as opposed to dialogue systems managing a few APIs, poses a new set of challenges. Apart from the handling a very large variety of domains, such systems need to support heterogeneous services or APIs with possibly overlapping functionality. It should also offer an efficient way of supporting new APIs or services, while requiring little or no additional training data. Furthermore, to reduce maintenance workload and accommodate future growth, such assistants need to be robust to changes in the API's interface or addition of new slot values. Such changes shouldn't require collection of additional training data or retraining the model. The Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking task at the Eighth Dialogue System Technology Challenge explores the aforementioned challenges in context of dialogue state tracking. In a task-oriented dialogue, the dialogue state is a summary of the entire conversation till the current turn. The dialogue state is used to invoke APIs with appropriate parameters as specified by the user over the dialogue history. It is also used by the assistant to generate the next actions to continue the dialogue. DST, therefore, is a core component of virtual assistants. In this task, participants are required to develop innovative approaches to multi-domain dialogue state tracking, with a focus on data-efficient joint modeling across APIs and zero-shot generalization to new APIs. The task is based on the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest publicly available corpus of annotated task-oriented dialogues. With over 16000 dialogues in the training set spanning 26 APIs over 16 domains, it exceeds the existing dialogue corpora in scale. SGD is the first dataset to allow multiple APIs with overlapping functionality within each domain. To adequately test generalization in zero-shot settings, the evaluation sets contain unseen services and domains. The dataset is designed to serve as an effective testbed for intent prediction, slot filling, state tracking and language generation, among other tasks in large-scale virtual assistants. ### Related Work Dialogue systems have constituted an active area of research for the past few decades. The advent of commercial personal assistants has provided further impetus to dialogue systems research. As virtual assistants incorporate diverse domains, zero-shot modeling BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, domain adaptation and transfer learning techniques BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9 have been explored to support new domains in a data efficient manner. Deep learning based approaches to DST have recently gained popularity. Some of these approaches estimate the dialogue state as a distribution over all possible slot-values BIBREF10, BIBREF11 or individually score all slot-value combinations BIBREF12, BIBREF13. Such approaches are, however, hard to scale to real-world virtual assistants, where the set of possible values for certain slots may be very large (date, time or restaurant name) and even dynamic (movie or event name). Other approaches utilizing a dynamic vocabulary of slot values BIBREF14, BIBREF15 still do not allow zero-shot generalization to new services and APIs BIBREF16, since they use schema elements i.e. intents and slots as fixed class labels. Although such systems are capable of parsing the dialogue semantics in terms of these fixed intent labels, they lack understanding of the semantics of these labels. For instance, for the user utterance “I want to buy tickets for a movie.", such models can predict BuyMovieTickets as the correct intent based on patterns observed in the training data, but don't model either its association with the real world action of buying movie tickets, or its similarity to the action of buying concert or theatre tickets. Furthermore, because of their dependence on a fixed schema, such models are not robust to changes in the schema, and need to be retrained as new slots or intents are added. Use of domain-specific parameters renders some approaches unsuitable for zero-shot application. ### Task The primary task of this challenge is to develop multi-domain models for DST suitable for the scale and complexity of large scale virtual assistants. Supporting a wide variety of APIs or services with possibly overlapping functionality is an important requirement of such assistants. A common approach to do this involves defining a large master schema that lists all intents and slots supported by the assistant. Each service either adopts this master schema for the representation of the underlying data, or provides logic to translate between its own schema and the master schema. The first approach involving adoption of the master schema is not ideal if a service wishes to integrate with multiple assistants, since each of the assistants could have their own master schema. The second approach involves definition of logic for translation between master schema and the service's schema, which increases the maintenance workload. Furthermore, it is difficult to develop a master schema catering to all possible use cases. Additionally, while there are many similar concepts across services that can be jointly modeled, for example, the similarities in logic for querying or specifying the number of movie tickets, flight tickets or concert tickets, the master schema approach does not facilitate joint modeling of such concepts, unless an explicit mapping between them is manually defined. To address these limitations, we propose a schema-guided approach, which eliminates the need for a master schema. ### Task ::: Schema-Guided Approach Under the Schema-Guided approach, each service provides a schema listing the supported slots and intents along with their natural language descriptions (Figure FIGREF2 shows an example). The dialogue annotations are guided by the schema of the underlying service or API, as shown in Figure FIGREF3. In this example, the departure and arrival cities are captured by analogously functioning but differently named slots in both schemas. Furthermore, values for the number_stops and direct_only slots highlight idiosyncrasies between services interpreting the same concept. The natural language descriptions present in the schema are used to obtain a semantic representation of intents and slots. The assistant employs a single unified model containing no domain or service specific parameters to make predictions conditioned on these schema elements. Using a single model facilitates representation and transfer of common knowledge across related concepts in different services. Since the model utilizes semantic representation of schema elements as input, it can interface with unseen services or APIs on which it has not been trained. It is also robust to changes like the addition of new intents or slots to the service. In addition, the participants are allowed to use any external datasets or resources to bootstrap their models. ### Dataset As shown in Table TABREF9, our Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset exceeds other datasets in most of the metrics at scale. The especially larger number of domains, slots, and slot values, and the presence of multiple services per domain, are representative of these scale-related challenges. Furthermore, our evaluation sets contain many services, and consequently slots, which are not present in the training set, to help evaluate model performance on unseen services. ### Dataset ::: Data Representation The dataset consists of conversations between a virtual assistant and a user. Each conversation can span multiple services across various domains. The dialogue is represented as a sequence of turns, each containing a user or system utterance. The annotations for each turn are grouped into frames, where each frame corresponds to a single service. The annotations for user turns include the active intent, the dialogue state and slot spans for the different slots values mentioned in the turn. For system turns, we have the system actions representing the semantics of the system utterance. Each system action is represented using a dialogue act with optional parameters. In addition to the dialogues, for each service used in the dataset, a normalized representation of the interface exposed is provided as the schema. The schema contains details like the name of the service, the list of tasks supported by the service (intents) and the attributes of the entities used by the service (slots). The schema also contains natural language descriptions of the service, intents and slots which can be used for developing models which can condition their predictions on the schema. ### Dataset ::: Comparison With Other Datasets To reflect the constraints present in real-world services and APIs, we impose a few constraints on the data. Our dataset does not expose the set of all possible values for certain slots. Having such a list is impractical for slots like date or time because they have infinitely many possible values or for slots like movie or song names, for which new values are periodically added. Such slots are specifically identified as non-categorical slots. In our evaluation sets, we ensured the presence of a significant number of values which were not previously seen in the training set to evaluate the performance of models on unseen values. Some slots like gender, number of people, etc. are classified as categorical and we provide a list of all possible values for them. However, these values are assumed to be not consistent across services. E.g., different services may use (`male', `female'), (`M', `F') or (`he', `she') as possible values for gender slot. Real-world services can only be invoked with certain slot combinations: e.g. most restaurant reservation APIs do not let the user search for restaurants by date without specifying a location. Although this constraint has no implications on the dialogue state tracking task, it restricts the possible conversational flows. Hence, to prevent flows not supported by actual services, we restrict services to be called with a list of slot combinations. The different service calls supported by a service are listed as intents with each intent specifying a list of required slots. The intent cannot be called without providing values for these required slots. Each intent also contains a list of optional slots with default values which can be overridden by the user. In our dataset, we also have multiple services per domain with overlapping functionality. The intents across these services are similar but differ in terms of intent names, intent arguments, slot names, etc. In some cases, there is no one to one mapping between slot names (e.g., the num_stops and direct_only slots in Figure FIGREF3). With an ever increasing number of services and service providers, we believe that having multiple similar services per domain is much closer to the situation faced by virtual assistants than having one unique service per domain. ### Dataset ::: Data Collection And Dataset Analysis Our data collection setup uses a dialogue simulator to generate dialogue outlines first and then paraphrase them to obtain natural utterances. Using a dialogue simulator offers us multiple advantages. First, it ensures the coverage of a large variety of dialogue flows by filtering out similar flows in the simulation phase, thus creating a much diverse dataset. Second, simulated dialogues do not require manual annotation, as opposed to a Wizard-of-Oz setup BIBREF17, which is a common approach utilized in other datasets BIBREF0. It has been shown that such datasets suffer from substantial annotation errors BIBREF18. Thirdly, using a simulator greatly simplifies the data collection task and instructions as only paraphrasing is needed to achieve a natural dialogue. This is particularly important for creating a large dataset spanning multiple domains. The 20 domains present across the train, dev and test datasets are listed in Table TABREF10, as are the details regarding which domains are present in each of the datasets. We create synthetic implementations of a total of 45 services or APIs over these domains. Our simulator framework interacts with these services to generate dialogue outlines, which are structured representations of dialogue semantics. We then use a crowd-sourcing procedure to paraphrase these outlines to natural language utterances. Our novel crowd-sourcing procedure preserves all annotations obtained from the simulator and does not require any extra annotations after dialogue collection. In this section, we describe these steps briefly and then present analyses of the collected dataset. All the services are implemented using a SQL engine. Since entity attributes are often correlated, we decided not to sample synthetic entities and instead relied on sampling entities from Freebase. The dialogue simulator interacts with the services to generate valid dialogue outlines. The simulator consists of two agents playing the roles of the user and the system. Both agents interact with each other using a finite set of actions specified through dialogue acts over a probabilistic automaton designed to capture varied dialogue trajectories. At the start of the conversation, the user agent is seeded with a scenario, which is a sequence of intents to be fulfilled. The user agent generates dialogue acts to be output and combines them with values retrieved from the service/API to create the user actions. The system agent responds by following a similar procedure but also ensures that the generated flows are valid. We identified over 200 distinct scenarios for the training set each consisting up to 5 intents from various domains. Finally, the dialogue outlines generated are paraphrased into a natural conversation by crowd workers. We ensure that the annotations for the dialogue state and slots generated by the simulator are preserved and hence need no other annotation. We omit details for brevity: please refer to BIBREF19 for more details. The entire dataset consists of over 16K dialogues spanning multiple domains. Overall statistics of the dataset and comparison with other datasets can be seen in Table TABREF9. Figure FIGREF8 shows the details of the distribution of dialogue lengths across single-domain and multi-domain dialogues. The single-domain dialogues in our dataset contain an average of 15.3 turns, whereas the multi-domain ones contain 23 turns on average. Figure FIGREF8 shows the frequency of the different dialogue acts contained in the dataset. The dataset also contains a significant number of unseen domains/APIs in the dev and test sets. 77% of the dialogue turns in the test set and 45% of the turns in dev set contain at least one service not present in the training set. This facilitates the development of models which can generalize to new domains with very few labelled examples. ### Submissions The submissions from 25 teams included a variety of approaches and innovative solutions to specific problems posed by this dataset. For the workshop, we received submissions from 9 of these teams. In this section, we provide a short summary of the approaches followed by these teams. For effective generalization to unseen APIs, most teams used pre-trained encoders to encode schema element descriptions. Unless otherwise mentioned, a pre-trained BERT BIBREF20 encoder was used. Team 2 BIBREF21: This was the only paper not using a pre-trained encoder, thus providing another important baseline. They rely on separate RNNs to encode service, slot and intent descriptions, and a BiRNN to encode dialogue history. Slot values are inferred using a TRADE-like encoder-decoder setup with a 3-way slot status gate, using the utterance encoding and schema element embeddings as context. Team 5 BIBREF22: They predict values for categorical slots using a softmax over all candidate values. Non-categorical slot values are predicted by first predicting the status of each slot and then using a BiLSTM-CRF layer for BIO tagging BIBREF23. They also utilize a slot adoption tracker to predict if the values proposed by the system are accepted by the user. Team 9 BIBREF24: This team submitted the winning entry, beating the second-placed team by around 9% in terms of joint goal accuracy. They use two separate models for categorical and non-categorical slots, and treat numerical categorical slots as non-categorical. They also use the entire dialogue history as input. They perform data augmentation by back translation between English and Chinese, which seems to be one of the distinguishing factors resulting in a much higher accuracy. Team 12 BIBREF25: They use auxiliary binary features to connect previous intent to current intent, slots to dialogue history and source slots to target slots for slot transfer. Non-categorical slots are modeled similar to question answering by adding a null token and predicting spans for slot values. In-domain and cross-domain slot transfers are modeled as separate binary decisions by passing the slot descriptions as additional inputs. Team 16 BIBREF26: They convert the tracking task for both categorical and non-categorical slots into a question answering task by feeding in the schema and the previous turns as the context. Similar to the baseline model, prediction is performed in two stages. The status of each slot (active/inactive/dontcare) is predicted using a classifier, following which the value is predicted as a span in the context. The same network is used for the different prediction tasks but the leading token and separator tokens used are different. They observe large gains by fine-tuning the schema embeddings and increasing the number of past turns fed as context. Team 23 BIBREF27: They use a large scale multi-task model utilizing a single pass of a BERT based model for all tasks. Embeddings are calculated for the intents and slot value by using dialogue history, service and slot descriptions, possible values for categorical slots and are used for the various predictions. Anonymous Team A BIBREF28: We could not identify which team submitted this model. They use multi-head attention twice to obtain domain-conditioned and slot-conditioned representations of the dialogue history. These representations are concatenated to obtain the full context which is used for the various predictions. Anonymous Team B BIBREF29: We could not identify which team submitted this model. They use separate NLU systems for the sub tasks of predicting intents, requested slots, slot status, categorical and non-categorical slot values. They use a rule-based DST system with a few additions resulting in significant improvement. The improvements include adding dropout to intent prediction to account for train-test mismatch, using the entire predicted slot status distribution and separate binary predictions for slot transfer. Anonymous Team C BIBREF30: They use a two-stage model with a candidate tracker for NLU and a candidate classifier to update the dialogue state. A slot tagger identifies slot values, which are used to update the candidate tracker. The candidate classifier uses the utterances and slot/intent descriptions to predict the final dialogue state. They also use an additional loss to penalize incorrect prediction on which slots appear in the current turn. ### Evaluation We consider the following metrics for automatic evaluation of different submissions. Joint goal accuracy has been used as the primary metric to rank the submissions. Active Intent Accuracy: The fraction of user turns for which the active intent has been correctly predicted. Requested Slot F1: The macro-averaged F1 score for requested slots over all eligible turns. Turns with no requested slots in ground truth and predictions are skipped. Average Goal Accuracy: For each turn, we predict a single value for each slot present in the dialogue state. This is the average accuracy of predicting the value of a slot correctly. Joint Goal Accuracy: This is the average accuracy of predicting all slot assignments for a given service in a turn correctly. In order to better reflect model performance in our task's specific setting, we introduce changes in the definitions of evaluation metrics from prior work. These are listed below: [leftmargin=] Joint goal accuracy calculation: Traditionally, joint goal accuracy has been defined as the accuracy of predicting the dialogue state for all domains correctly. This is not practical in our setup, as the large number of services would result in near zero joint goal accuracy if the traditional definition is used. Furthermore, an incorrect dialogue state prediction for a service in the beginning of a dialogue degrades the joint goal accuracy for all future turns, even if the predictions for all other services are correct. Hence, joint goal accuracy calculated this way may not provide as much insight into the performance on different services. To address these concerns, only the services which are active or pertinent in a turn are included in the dialogue state. Thus, a service ceases to be a part of the dialogue state once its intent has been fulfilled. Fuzzy matching for non-categorical slot values: The presence of non-categorical slots is another distinguishing feature of our dataset. These slots don't have a predefined vocabulary, and their values are predicted as a substring or span of the past user or system utterances. Drawing inspiration from the metrics used for slot tagging in spoken language understanding, we use a fuzzy matching score for non-categorical slots to reward partial matches with the ground truth. Average goal accuracy: To calculate average goal accuracy, we do not take into account instances when both the ground truth and the predicted values for a slot are empty. Since for a given slot, a large number of utterances have an empty assignment, models can achieve a relatively high average goal accuracy just by predicting an empty assignment for each slot unless specifically excluded as in our evaluation. ### Results The test set contains a total of 21 services, among which 6 services are also present in the training set (seen services), whereas the remaining 15 are not present in the training set (unseen services). Table TABREF11 shows the evaluation metrics for the different submissions obtained on the test set. It also lists the performance of different submissions on seen and unseen services, helping evaluate the effectiveness in zero-shot settings. Team 9 achieved a very high joint goal accuracy of 86.53%, around 9% higher than the second-placed team. We observed the following trends across submissions: For unseen services, performance on categorical slots is comparable to that on non-categorical slots. On the other hand, for seen services, the performance on categorical slots is better. This could be because there is less signal to differentiate between the different possible values for a categorical slot when they have not been observed in the training set. The winning team's performance on seen services is similar to that of the other top teams. However, the winning team has a considerable edge on unseen services, outperforming the second team by around 12% in terms of joint goal accuracy. This margin was observed across both categorical and non-categorical slots. Among unseen services, when looking at services belonging to unseen domains, the winning team was ahead of the other teams by at least 15%. The performance on categorical slots for unseen domains was about the same as that for seen services and domains. For other teams, there was at least a 20% drop in accuracy of categorical slots in unseen domains vs seen domains and services. The joint goal accuracy of most of the models was worse by 15 percentage points on an average on the test set as compared to the dev set. This could be because the test set contains a much higher proportion of turns with at least one unseen services as compared to the dev set (77% and 45% respectively). ### Summary In this paper, we summarized the Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking task conducted at the Eighth Dialogue System Technology Challenge. This task challenged participants to develop dialogue state tracking models for large scale virtual assistants, with particular emphasis on joint modeling across different domains and APIs for data-efficiency and zero-shot generalization to new/unseen APIs. In order to encourage the development of such models, we constructed a new dataset spanning 16 domains (and 4 new domains in dev and test sets), defining multiple APIs with overlapping functionality for each of these domains. We advocated the use of schema-guided approach to building large-scale assistants, facilitating data-efficient joint modeling across domains while reducing maintenance workload. The Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset released as part of this task is the first to highlight many of the aforementioned challenges. As a result, this task led to the development of several models utilizing the schema-guided approach for dialogue state tracking. The models extensively utilized pre-trained encoders like BERT BIBREF20, XLNet BIBREF31 etc. and employed data augmentation techniques to achieve effective zero-shot generalization to new APIs. The proposed schema-guided approach is fairly general and can be used to develop other dialogue system components such as language understanding, policy and response generation. We plan to explore them in future works. ### Summary ::: Acknowledgements The authors thank Guan-Lin Chao, Amir Fayazi and Maria Wang for their advice and assistance. Figure 1: Example schema for a digital wallet service. Figure 2: Dialogue state tracking labels after each user utterance in a dialogue in the context of two different flight services. Under the schema-guided approach, the annotations are conditioned on the schema (extreme left/right) of the underlying service. Figure 3: Detailed statistics of the SGD dataset. Table 1: Comparison of our SGD dataset to existing related datasets for task-oriented dialogue. Note that the numbers reported are for the training portions for all datasets except FRAMES, where the numbers for the complete dataset are reported. Table 2: The total number of intents (services in parentheses) and dialogues for each domain across train1, dev2 and test3 sets. Superscript indicates the datasets in which dialogues from the domain are present. Multi-domain dialogues contribute to counts of each domain. The domain Services includes salons, dentists, doctors, etc. Table 3: The best submission from each team, ordered by the joint goal accuracy on the test set. Teams marked with submitted their papers to the workshop. We could not identify the teams for three of the submitted papers.	back translation between English and Chinese
What is the purpose of the battle scene from the story? A. To accurately depict a significant battle from the Crusades B. To associate tobacco products with masculinity, brotherhood, and pride C. To illustrate the powerful bonds of allegiance among soldiers on the battlefield D. To reveal how the King Phillip's cowardice initiated the downfall of one of the world's greatest armies	... After a Few Words ... by Seaton McKettrig Illustrated by Summer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have today. He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment, he could see nothing. Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor. Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying, was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of Jerusalem and the host of Poitou. He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of the lion-hearted Richard of England— gules, in pale three lions passant guardant or . Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his firm-held shield, was the King himself. Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins. "By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre, and the accursed Saracens still elude us." Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton. They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so they have been marching with us in those hills to the east." "Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to face us in open battle." "Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?" "Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all truly Christian knights." "Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not." "We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable." Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps 'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable. Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect. "In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard of England." Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy to remain with us." "Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip Augustus," said Sir Gaeton. "No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said, he spoke in haste." "And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton. "It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy, too?" "You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have not gained the love of Richard by doing so." Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal." Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty of Sir Robert de Bouain. Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath him. There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger. Sir Robert turned his horse to look. The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a thousand anvils. "Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle. Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey the orders of Richard. The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they were slowly being forced back. The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard, which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had stopped moving. The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears. "Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou and the Knights Templars. The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!" "Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack. No one can be everywhere at once." The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the fray. The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen." A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank attack." It was Sir Gaeton. "My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing time. Are you with me?" "Against the orders of the King?" "The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?" After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!" "Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St. George and for England!" "St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed. Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights, their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop. The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the Christian knights. Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored. The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand. Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance. There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard. The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless body. Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!" The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break Church Law by shedding blood. Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy. He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the battle rather than participating in it. But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian onslaught. And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at. Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword. Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them completely." "Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end." "This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an Old Kings ." He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took that one. "Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an Old Kings ." He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand. "Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, " Old Kings are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking pleasure." "There's no doubt about it, Old Kings are a man's cigarette." Sir Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply. "That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just any cigarette." "Nor I," agreed the Gascon. " Old Kings is the only real cigarette when you're doing a real man's work." "That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air. There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of Old Kings right down to the very end." "No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight. King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear! Saladin had expected him to hold fast! Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping banner of England. The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging. Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he hacked down the Moslem foes. And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the red-and-gold banner of Richard? He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started to fall back. And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden coronet! Richard! And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde! Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him. He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain. He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy, but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in, bringing with them the banner of England! And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was biting viciously into the foe. The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight. And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight. Richard Plantagenet will not forget." Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king. "My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you call." King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to England, sir knight." And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after the retreating Saracens. Robert took off his helmet. He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely cavelike. "How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show. Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor ought to like it—for a while, at least." "What do you mean, 'for a while'?" Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll lose sales." "Why? Commercial not good enough?" " Too good! Man, I've smoked Old Kings , and, believe me, the real thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"	B. To associate tobacco products with masculinity, brotherhood, and pride
How did suspension help the crew? A. They could survive without oxygen. B. They could live on an inhospitable planet. C. They could survive with lack of gravity. D. They could travel through space for a long distance.	CAPTAIN CHAOS By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time; sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not aware of where I was, waiting for the voice. "Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?" I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the rush of anxiety. "No." I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was. "Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your right." I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle. I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead. I was weightless. How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet me. "If you understand, press button A on your right." What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room? When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left that appeared to be air tight. I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself. "My name ... my name is...." "Your name is David Corbin." I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like treading water that couldn't be seen or felt. I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere. It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room crowded with equipment and.... I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning into my eyes and brain. It was space. I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes. When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was.... David Corbin. I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand the function or design of the compact machinery. WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on Earth. This was not the same sky. Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the same words. It must tell me.... "Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your right." I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a phrase ... some words about precaution. Precaution against forgetting. It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of the clear portholes. "It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said. What experiment? "You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this ship." Control of a ship? Going where? "Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension." What others? Tell me what to do. "Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates. Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck." The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here. "Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until the pain in my hands made me stop. "I can't remember what to do." I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel. Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the hall. Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage. The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits. The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him. I couldn't remember his face. The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the others. A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ... instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts, instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate. Not mine. Not now. I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of smooth colored buttons, wondering. The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy, hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion, no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway. The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone. Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I could stand it no longer. Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside. The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls, driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start from was back in the room. I searched it carefully. Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied. It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty. That meant a measured amount. In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of me. I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I searched again and again for a release mechanism. I found it. I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle. The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber drained under pressure and the arm moved back. I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me. I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first, moving about the confines of the room back to me. "It looks like we made it," he said. "Yes." He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up finding little humor in the comic expression on his face. "No gravity," he grunted and sat back. "You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he watched me. "How do you feel?" He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember." He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off to sleep," he finished. I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?" "I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects from this." "Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked. He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?" I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your name or anything about this ship." "What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except my name." "You don't know me?" "No." "Are you serious?" "Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened." He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your head?" "I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough." "The others. What about the others?" he blurted. "I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I stumbled on the way to revive you." He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the rest right away." "Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they might be." "Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out." II The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us. He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's quarters. "What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion. He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew." "A girl?" "Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said. I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist. "There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a girl." "I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and experience were all that mattered to the brass." "It's a bad thing to do." "I suppose. The mission stated one chemist." "What is the mission of this ship?" I asked. He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach." "Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her." We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened. We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking. "How do you feel?" I asked. Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head. "Can you remember?" "I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low. "Do you know my name?" The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a minute to think." I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?" She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help, frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook uncontrollably. "What's happened to me?" she asked. The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control." The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm afraid we've got trouble." He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?" "Croft. John Croft." "John, what are your duties if any?" "Automatic control. I helped to install it." "Can you run this ship? How about the other two?" He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?" "I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over. Maybe I'm trying too hard." "You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said. "I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me, shaking my head. He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than a hundred years ago." We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick, a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now frightened and trying to remember. I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me, for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off." "You ask the questions," he said. I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?" "We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center of our Galaxy." "From Earth? How could we?" "Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an hour." "Through space?" "Yes." "What direction?" Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting life." "I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?" "It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly. "You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension." "Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star." "How long ago was it?" "It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?" "I can't believe it's possible." Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all. It puts us near a calculated destination." "We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently while we talked. "Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all right if you don't lose your nerve." "What are we to do?" she asked. John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know this ship but I can't fly it." "Can I?" I asked. We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the rations. I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the control room and watched John at the panel. "I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely. "Give it time." "We can't spare any, can we?" I asked. "I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?" "She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to be shocked out of a mental state like that." "I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer the suspension on the return trip." I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that." "We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said. "How old are you, John?" "Twenty-eight." "What about me?" "Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about shock treatment? It sounds risky." "I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone react the same?" "That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you go about making her remember?" "Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess." He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself. I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the room. "Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead." I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board. My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar control screen. It wasn't operating. John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into my heaving lungs. "What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly. "Shock treatment." "I must have acted on instinct." "You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed. "I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms around his massive shoulders. "You did it." "You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen." "It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief. "I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up." "I wouldn't want to wake up like that again." "You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing sun. I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a star...." "It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship." The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said you're all right." "John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is any one hurt?" "No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat." "We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?" "No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?" I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it when you can. I've got to find out where we are." We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead. In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the figures into the calculator for our rate of approach. Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not, we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it.	D. They could travel through space for a long distance.
What did Kolin think about becoming a tree himself? A. He wanted to be an animal, not a plant. B. He was intrigued but wanted to try something slightly different. C. He figured it was an effective way to escape his crew. D. He refused to give up his own body.	By H. B. Fyfe THE TALKATIVE TREE Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men! All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State . He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized." Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're— Ammet! " Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny!" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog. "I have to climb down," he told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. "Just what I said," continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old—?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark , the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. " He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well … matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" " Uh -uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "Haurtoz. It's a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion—" "Whoosh! Who'd find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. I'd better watch myself! he thought. Don't drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth…." Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got , he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men , thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!" END Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Worlds of If January 1962 . Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.	B. He was intrigued but wanted to try something slightly different.