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What are the series of simple models?
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### Introduction
Currently, voice-controlled smart devices are widely used in multiple areas to fulfill various tasks, e.g. playing music, acquiring weather information and booking tickets. The SLU system employs several modules to enable the understanding of the semantics of the input speeches. When there is an incoming speech, the ASR module picks it up and attempts to transcribe the speech. An ASR model could generate multiple interpretations for most speeches, which can be ranked by their associated confidence scores. Among the $n$-best hypotheses, the top-1 hypothesis is usually transformed to the NLU module for downstream tasks such as domain classification, intent classification and named entity recognition (slot tagging). Multi-domain NLU modules are usually designed hierarchically BIBREF0. For one incoming utterance, NLU modules will firstly classify the utterance as one of many possible domains and the further analysis on intent classification and slot tagging will be domain-specific. In spite of impressive development on the current SLU pipeline, the interpretation of speech could still contain errors. Sometimes the top-1 recognition hypothesis of ASR module is ungrammatical or implausible and far from the ground-truth transcription BIBREF1, BIBREF2. Among those cases, we find one interpretation exact matching with or more similar to transcription can be included in the remaining hypotheses ($2^{nd}- n^{th}$). To illustrate the value of the $2^{nd}- n^{th}$ hypotheses, we count the frequency of exact matching and more similar (smaller edit distance compared to the 1st hypothesis) to transcription for different positions of the $n$-best hypotheses list. Table TABREF1 exhibits the results. For the explored dataset, we only collect the top 5 interpretations for each utterance ($n = 5$). Notably, when the correct recognition exists among the 5 best hypotheses, 50% of the time (sum of the first row's percentages) it occurs among the $2^{nd}-5^{th}$ positions. Moreover, as shown by the second row in Table TABREF1, compared to the top recognition hypothesis, the other hypotheses can sometimes be more similar to the transcription. Over the past few years, we have observed the success of reranking the $n$-best hypotheses BIBREF1, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10 before feeding the best interpretation to the NLU module. These approaches propose the reranking framework by involving morphological, lexical or syntactic features BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, speech recognition features like confidence score BIBREF1, BIBREF4, and other features like number of tokens, rank position BIBREF1. They are effective to select the best from the hypotheses list and reduce the word error rate (WER) BIBREF11 of speech recognition. Those reranking models could benefit the first two cases in Table TABREF2 when there is an utterance matching with transcription. However, in other cases like the third row, it is hard to integrate the fragmented information in multiple hypotheses. This paper proposes various methods integrating $n$-best hypotheses to tackle the problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to collectively exploit the $n$-best speech interpretations in the SLU system. This paper serves as the basis of our $n$-best-hypotheses-based SLU system, focusing on the methods of integration for the hypotheses. Since further improvements of the integration framework require considerable setup and descriptions, where jointly optimized tasks (e.g. transcription reconstruction) trained with multiple ways (multitask BIBREF12, multistage learning BIBREF13) and more features (confidence score, rank position, etc.) are involved, we leave those to a subsequent article. This paper is organized as follows. Section SECREF2 introduces the Baseline, Oracle and Direct models. Section SECREF3 describes proposed ways to integrate $n$-best hypotheses during training. The experimental setup and results are described in Section SECREF4. Section SECREF5 contains conclusions and future work. ### Baseline, Oracle and Direct Models ::: Baseline and Oracle
The preliminary architecture is shown in Fig. FIGREF4. For a given transcribed utterance, it is firstly encoded with Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) BIBREF14, a compression algorithm splitting words to fundamental subword units (pairs of bytes or BPs) and reducing the embedded vocabulary size. Then we use a BiLSTM BIBREF15 encoder and the output state of the BiLSTM is regarded as a vector representation for this utterance. Finally, a fully connected Feed-forward Neural Network (FNN) followed by a softmax layer, labeled as a multilayer perceptron (MLP) module, is used to perform the domain/intent classification task based on the vector. For convenience, we simplify the whole process in Fig.FIGREF4 as a mapping $BM$ (Baseline Mapping) from the input utterance $S$ to an estimated tag's probability $p(\tilde{t})$, where $p(\tilde{t}) \leftarrow BM(S)$. The $Baseline$ is trained on transcription and evaluated on ASR 1st best hypothesis ($S=\text{ASR}\ 1^{st}\ \text{best})$. The $Oracle$ is trained on transcription and evaluated on transcription ($S = \text{Transcription}$). We name it Oracle simply because we assume that hypotheses are noisy versions of transcription. ### Baseline, Oracle and Direct Models ::: Direct Models
Besides the Baseline and Oracle, where only ASR 1-best hypothesis is considered, we also perform experiments to utilize ASR $n$-best hypotheses during evaluation. The models evaluating with $n$-bests and a BM (pre-trained on transcription) are called Direct Models (in Fig. FIGREF7): Majority Vote. We apply the BM model on each hypothesis independently and combine the predictions by picking the majority predicted label, i.e. Music. Sort by Score. After parallel evaluation on all hypotheses, sort the prediction by the corresponding confidence score and choose the one with the highest score, i.e. Video. Rerank (Oracle). Since the current rerank models (e.g., BIBREF1, BIBREF3, BIBREF4) attempt to select the hypothesis most similar to transcription, we propose the Rerank (Oracle), which picks the hypothesis with the smallest edit distance to transcription (assume it is the $a$-th best) during evaluation and uses its corresponding prediction. ### Integration of N-BEST Hypotheses
All the above mentioned models apply the BM trained on one interpretation (transcription). Their abilities to take advantage of multiple interpretations are actually not trained. As a further step, we propose multiple ways to integrate the $n$-best hypotheses during training. The explored methods can be divided into two groups as shown in Fig. FIGREF11. Let $H_1, H_2,..., H_n $ denote all the hypotheses from ASR and $bp_{H_k, i} \in BPs$ denotes the $i$-th pair of bytes (BP) in the $k^{th}$ best hypothesis. The model parameters associated with the two possible ways both contain: embedding $e_{bp}$ for pairs of bytes, BiLSTM parameters $\theta $ and MLP parameters $W, b$. ### Integration of N-BEST Hypotheses ::: Hypothesized Text Concatenation
The basic integration method (Combined Sentence) concatenates the $n$-best hypothesized text. We separate hypotheses with a special delimiter ($<$SEP$>$). We assume BPE totally produces $m$ BPs (delimiters are not split during encoding). Suppose the $n^{th}$ hypothesis has $j$ pairs. The entire model can be formulated as: In Eqn. DISPLAY_FORM13, the connected hypotheses and separators are encoded via BiLSTM to a sequence of hidden state vectors. Each hidden state vector, e.g. $h_1$, is the concatenation of forward $h_{1f}$ and backward $h_{1b}$ states. The concatenation of the last state of the forward and backward LSTM forms the output vector of BiLSTM (concatenation denoted as $[,]$). Then, in Eqn. DISPLAY_FORM14, the MLP module defines the probability of a specific tag (domain or intent) $\tilde{t}$ as the normalized activation ($\sigma $) output after linear transformation of the output vector. ### Integration of N-BEST Hypotheses ::: Hypothesis Embedding Concatenation
The concatenation of hypothesized text leverages the $n$-best list by transferring information among hypotheses in an embedding framework, BiLSTM. However, since all the layers have access to both the preceding and subsequent information, the embedding among $n$-bests will influence each other, which confuses the embedding and makes the whole framework sensitive to the noise in hypotheses. As the second group of integration approaches, we develop models, PoolingAvg/Max, on the concatenation of hypothesis embedding, which isolate the embedding process among hypotheses and summarize the features by a pooling layer. For each hypothesis (e.g., $i^{th}$ best in Eqn. DISPLAY_FORM16 with $j$ pairs of bytes), we could get a sequence of hidden states from BiLSTM and obtain its final output state by concatenating the first and last hidden state ($h_{output_i}$ in Eqn. DISPLAY_FORM17). Then, we stack all the output states vertically as shown in Eqn. SECREF15. Note that in the real data, we will not always have a fixed size of hypotheses list. For a list with $r$ ($<n$) interpretations, we get the embedding for each of them and pad with the embedding of the first best hypothesis until a fixed size $n$. When $r\ge n$, we only stack the top $n$ embeddings. We employ $h_{output_1}$ for padding to enhance the influence of the top 1 hypothesis, which is more reliable. Finally, one unified representation could be achieved via Pooling (Max/Avg pooling with $n$ by 1 sliding window and stride 1) on the concatenation and one score could be produced per possible tag for the given task. ### Experiment ::: Dataset
We conduct our experiments on $\sim $ 8.7M annotated anonymised user utterances. They are annotated and derived from requests across 23 domains. ### Experiment ::: Performance on Entire Test Set
Table TABREF24 shows the relative error reduction (RErr) of Baseline, Oracle and our proposed models on the entire test set ($\sim $ 300K utterances) for multi-class domain classification. We can see among all the direct methods, predicting based on the hypothesis most similar to the transcription (Rerank (Oracle)) is the best. As for the other models attempting to integrate the $n$-bests during training, PoolingAvg gets the highest relative improvement, 14.29%. It as well turns out that all the integration methods outperform direct models drastically. This shows that having access to $n$-best hypotheses during training is crucial for the quality of the predicted semantics. ### Experiment ::: Performance Comparison among Various Subsets
To further detect the reason for improvements, we split the test set into two parts based on whether ASR first best agrees with transcription and evaluate separately. Comparing Table TABREF26 and Table TABREF27, obviously the benefits of using multiple hypotheses are mainly gained when ASR 1st best disagrees with the transcription. When ASR 1st best agrees with transcription, the proposed integration models can also keep the performance. Under that condition, we can still improve a little (3.56%) because, by introducing multiple ASR hypotheses, we could have more information and when the transcription/ASR 1st best does not appear in the training set's transcriptions, its $n$-bests list may have similar hypotheses included in the training set's $n$-bests. Then, our integration model trained on $n$-best hypotheses as well has clue to predict. The series of comparisons reveal that our approaches integrating the hypotheses are robust to the ASR errors and whenever the ASR model makes mistakes, we can outperform more significantly. ### Experiment ::: Improvements on Different Domains and Different Numbers of Hypotheses
Among all the 23 domains, we choose 8 popular domains for further comparisons between the Baseline and the best model of Table TABREF24, PoolingAvg. Fig. FIGREF29 exhibits the results. We could find the PoolingAvg consistently improves the accuracy for all 8 domains. In the previous experiments, the number of utilized hypotheses for each utterance during evaluation is five, which means we use the top 5 interpretations when the size of ASR recognition list is not smaller than 5 and use all the interpretations otherwise. Changing the number of hypotheses while evaluation, Fig. FIGREF30 shows a monotonic increase with the access to more hypotheses for the PoolingAvg and PoolingMax (Sort by Score is shown because it is the best achievable direct model while the Rerank (Oracle) is not realistic). The growth becomes gentle after four hypotheses are leveraged. ### Experiment ::: Intent Classification
Since another downstream task, intent classification, is similar to domain classification, we just show the best model in domain classification, PoolingAvg, on domain-specific intent classification for three popular domains due to space limit. As Table TABREF32 shows, the margins of using multiple hypotheses with PoolingAvg are significant as well. ### Conclusions and Future Work
This paper improves the SLU system robustness to ASR errors by integrating $n$-best hypotheses in different ways, e.g. the aggregation of predictions from hypotheses or the concatenation of hypothesis text or embedding. We can achieve significant classification accuracy improvements over production-quality baselines on domain and intent classifications, 14% to 25% relative gains. The improvement is more significant for a subset of testing data where ASR first best is different from transcription. We also observe that with more hypotheses utilized, the performance can be further improved. In the future, we aim to employ additional features (e.g. confidence scores for hypotheses or tokens) to integrate $n$-bests more efficiently, where we can train a function $f$ to obtain a weight for each hypothesis embedding before pooling. Another direction is using deep learning framework to embed the word lattice BIBREF16 or confusion network BIBREF17, BIBREF18, which can provide a compact representation of multiple hypotheses and more information like times, in the SLU system. ### Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Junghoo (John) Cho for proofreading. Fig. 3: Integration of n-best hypotheses with two possible ways: 1) concatenate hypothesized text and 2) concatenate hypothesis embedding. Table 3: Micro and Macro F1 score for multi-class domain classification. Table 4: Performance comparison for the subset (∼ 19%) where ASR first best disagrees with transcription. Table 5: Performance comparison for the subset (∼ 81%) where ASR first best agrees with transcription. Fig. 5: The influence of different amount of hypotheses. Table 6: Intent classification for three important domains. Fig. 4: Improvements on important domains.
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perform experiments to utilize ASR $n$-best hypotheses during evaluation
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Why is Jerome in search of the museum in the futuristic civilization?
A. That's where the guard who has information on the generator is located.
B. That's where the generator is held.
C. That's where the information for the real inventor is located.
D. That's where the guard who has information on the real inventory of the generator is located.
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... and it comes out here By LESTER DEL REY Illustrated by DON SIBLEY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with ... everything has a beginning and an end. But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so! No, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have ... or do ... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this. Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will. Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years. You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago. Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter. Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. You sense things. So I'll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this. So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but you'll want to go along. I'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button, and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn't protected, though. You start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no there . You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are. You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening and you don't try it again. Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. "So this is the fourth dimension?" you ask. Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak. "Not exactly," I try to explain. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. Don't ask me. I didn't invent the machine and I don't understand it." "But...." I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer. Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't think about that then, either. I'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. "Where are we getting our air?" you ask. "Or why don't we lose it?" "No place for it to go," I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still. Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the machine, just as I do. I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels comfortable. "I'm staying here," I tell you. "This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming back with you." You nod, remembering I've told you about it. "What century is this, anyway?" I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. "As near as I can guess, it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an interstellar civilization." You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor. This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs, and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open. "What about the time machine?" you ask. "Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe." We get in the elevator, and I say "first" to it. It gives out a coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says "first" back at us. It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. "You go that way. Don't worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum, grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you." You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream. You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later, you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off. You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at them, realizing for the first time that things have changed. Steij:neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri. The signs are very quiet and dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains, and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign that announces: Trav:l Biwrou—F:rst-Clas Twrz—Marz, Viin*s, and x: Trouj:n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz! But there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get the hang of the spelling they use, though. Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you. Why should they? You wouldn't care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin suit; you'd figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well, people don't change much. You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might be papers on tapes. "Where can I find the Museum of Science?" "Downayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss," he tells you. Around you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don't know. You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface of the walk: Miuzi:m *v Syens . There's an arrow pointing and you turn left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the information that it is the museum. You go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other guard. What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather pleasant. "Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice." "Thanks," you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce guards as polite as that. "I—I'm told I should investigate your display of atomic generators." He beams at that. "Of course." The gate is swung to behind you, but obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a lock. "Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though. Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period. Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our oldest tapes." You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny toward you. "Souvenir," it announces in a well-modulated voice. "This is a typical gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child, press the red button for the number of stones you desire." You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then there is one labeled Wep:nz , filled with everything from a crossbow to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil, marked Fynal Hand Arm . Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big place that bears a sign, Mad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez . By that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it. You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order, and the latest one, marked 2147—Rincs Dyn*pat: , is about the size of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier, but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically final form. You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation, and full patent application. They state that it has all major refinements, operating on any fuel, producing electricity at any desired voltage up to five million, any chosen cyclic rate from direct current to one thousand megacycles, and any amperage up to one thousand, its maximum power output being fifty kilowatts, limited by the current-carrying capacity of the outputs. They also mention that the operating principle is still being investigated, and that only such refinements as better alloys and the addition of magnetric and nucleatric current outlets have been added since the original. So you go to the end and look over the thing. It's simply a square box with a huge plug on each side, and a set of vernier controls on top, plus a little hole marked, in old-style spelling, Drop BBs or wire here . Apparently that's the way it's fueled. It's about one foot on each side. "Nice," the guard says over your shoulder. "It finally wore out one of the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever. Like to have me tell you about it?" "Not particularly," you begin, and then realize bad manners might be conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls something out of his pocket and stares at it. "Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?" You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge it, either. You work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect. And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed. Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing. You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be carried. You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact, if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered, after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say. Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing happens, though. You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street. Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see. There's another yell behind you. Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you dart past. The street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting heavier at every step. Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop. "You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow," the cop says. "There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let me grab you a taxi." Reaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake your head and come up for air. "I—I left my money home," you begin. The cop nods. "Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me." He reaches out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. "Sir, an emergency request. Would you help this gentleman?" The pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. "How far?" You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him. Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming at you both. That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there before you. And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck. "You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications," he says. "They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and we'll pick it up." You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction and heads back to the museum. You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator. There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there. You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were. Then there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in, gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light. You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine. You've located it. You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one beside it and you finally decide on that. Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating it. Your finger touches the red button. You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe. It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with some pencil marks over them—"Press these to return to yourself 30 years"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't because there is only one of you this time. Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in your own back yard. You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement, land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then, you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic generator and taking it inside. It isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals. But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice something. Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again. And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of the makeshift job you've just done. But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and that the date of the patent application is 1951. It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the future and bring it back to the past—your present—so that it can be put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be the inventor. And you do it in a time machine which you bring back to yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to yourself.... Who invented what? And who built which? Before long, your riches from the generator are piling in. Little kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed history and made atomic power so common that no nation could hope to be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one—after some of the worst times in history for a few years. Your name eventually becomes as common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital letter. But you're thinking of the puzzle. You can't find any answer. One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you. But now.... Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left. Let's go.
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B. That's where the generator is held.
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What word doesn't describe the natives from Tunpesh?
A. generous
B. secretive
C. skeptical
D. beautiful
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THE FIRE and THE SWORD By FRANK M. ROBINSON Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction August 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Nothing could have seemed pleasanter than that peaceful planet. Then why was a non-suicidal man driven to suicide there? Yet it made sense. Why do people commit suicide? Templin tightened his safety belt and lay back on the acceleration bunk. The lights in the cabin dimmed to a dull, red glow that meant the time for takeoff was nearing. He could hear noises from deep within the ship and the tiny whir of the ventilator fan, filling the air with the sweetish smell of sleeping gas. To sleep the trip away was better than to face the dull monotony of the stars for days on end. Oh, they kill themselves for lots of reasons. Maybe ill health or financial messes or family difficulties. An unhappy love affair. Or more complex ones, if you went into it deeper. The failure to achieve an ambition, failure to live up to one's own ideals. Weltschmerz, perhaps. He could smell the bitter fragrance of tobacco smoke mingling with the gas. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke at the neon "No Smoking" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical disapproval. He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride because, at one time or another, they had had to. It was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told him that Don Pendleton had killed himself. Only Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the status of a breakfast food testimonial. The soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin. Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was out. Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight. And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out. He shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton should have done it? If, of course, he had.... The cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy perfume. Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular, hard-working. How long would it be before memories faded and all there was left of Pendleton was a page of statistics? He had been on this team, he had been elected president of that, he had graduated with such and such honors. But try getting a picture of him by reading the records, resurrect him from a page of black print. Would he be human? Would he be flesh and blood? Hell, no! In the statistics Pendleton was the All-Around Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. Maybe someday fate would play a trick on a hero-worshiping public and there would actually be kids like that. But they wouldn't be human; they wouldn't be born. Parents would get them by sending in so many box tops. He was drowsy; the room was filled with the gas now. It would be only a matter of minutes before he would be asleep. Pendleton had been in his second year as attache on Tunpesh, a small planet with a G-type sun. The Service had stumbled across it recently and decided the system was worth diplomatic recognition of some kind, so Pendleton had been sent there. He had been the first attache to be sent and naturally he had gone alone. There was no need to send more. Tunpesh had been inspected and certified and approved. The natives were primitive and friendly. Or maybe the Service had slipped up, as it sometimes did, and Tunpesh had received something less than a thorough survey. And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. The captain had tried to pay his respects to Pendleton. Only Pendleton wasn't there. The natives said he had killed himself and showed the captain the little flower-covered plot where they had buried him. Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment. The natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles, needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed. People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they didn't. But sometimes they were murdered. It was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't keep open much longer. Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had killed himself. But that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it. Who had killed Cock Robin? The thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his mind. Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish data and reports. "Ted?" he murmured sleepily. A faint stirring in the black bulk opposite him. "Yes?" "How come our anthropologist on Tunpesh didn't come across with more information?" A drowsy mumble from the other cot: "He wasn't there long enough. He committed suicide not long after landing." The room was a whirling pool of blackness into which his mind was slowly slipping. Takeoff was only seconds away. Why do people commit suicide? "It's a nice day, isn't it, Ted?" Eckert took a deep and pleasurable breath. "It's the type of day that makes you feel good just to be alive." Warm breezes rustled through Eckert's graying hair and tugged gently at his tunic. The air smelled as if it had been washed and faintly perfumed with the balsamy scent of something very much like pine. A few hundred yards away, a forest towered straight and slim and coolly inviting, and brilliantly colored birds whirled and fluttered in the foliage. The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage, was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and discharge cargo or make repairs. There was a blackened patch on it now, with little blast-ignited flames dying out around the edges. It won't be long before it will be green again , he thought. The grass looked as though it grew fast—it would certainly have plenty of time to grow before the next ship landed. He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were up. He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting. I must be getting old , he thought, thinking about the warmth and comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians. Templin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment felt vaguely concerned. "Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath." "It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this." Eckert nodded agreement. "It wouldn't fit, would it? It would be like a famous singer suddenly doing a jazz number in an opera, or having the princess in a fairy tale turn out to be ugly." He gestured toward the village. "You could hardly class that as dangerous from its outward appearance, could you?" The rocketport was in a small valley, surrounded by low, wooded hills. The village started where the port left off and crawled and wound over the wooded ridges. Small houses of sun-baked, white-washed mud crouched in the shadow of huge trees and hugged the banks of a small stream. It looked fairly primitive, Eckert thought, and yet it didn't have the earmarks, the characteristics of most primitive villages. It didn't seem cluttered or dirty and you didn't feel like beating a hasty retreat when the wind was blowing toward you. A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered. Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him and Templin. Templin studied them warily. "Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be dangerous." It's because you never suspect kids , Eckert thought, you never think they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have other weapons. But the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the piny scent of the trees. One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them. "The reception committee," Templin said tightly. His hand went inside his tunic. He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton had been a pretty good friend of his. "I'd be very careful what I did," Eckert said softly. "I would hate to start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions." The committee of one was a middle-aged man dressed in a simple strip of white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look at his teeth or know something about his epiphyseal closures. "You are menshars from Earth?" The voice was husky and pleasant and the pronunciation was very clear. Eckert regarded him thoughtfully and made a few mental notes. He wasn't bowing and scraping like most natives who weren't too familiar with visitors from the sky, and yet he was hardly either friendly or hostile. "You learned our language from Pendleton and Reynolds?" Reynolds had been the anthropologist. "We have had visitors from Earth before." He hesitated a moment and then offered his hand, somewhat shyly, Eckert thought, in the Terrestrial sign of greeting. "You may call me Jathong if you wish." He paused a moment to say something in his native tongue to the kids who were around. They promptly scattered and picked up the luggage. "While you are here, you will need a place to stay. There is one ready, if you will follow me." He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin. The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see, much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving. Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and practically every house in the village had its small garden. What manufacturing there was seemed to be carried on in the central square of the town, where a few adults and children squatted in the warm afternoon sun and worked industriously at potter's wheels and weaver's looms. The other part of the square was given over to the native bazaar where pots and bolts of cloth were for sale, and where numerous stalls were loaded with dried fruits and vegetables and the cleaned and plucked carcasses of the local variety of fowl. It was late afternoon when they followed Jathong into a small, white-washed house midway up a hill. "You are free to use this while you are here," he said. Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along, took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong. "You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may take what you wish of anything within this box." He opened another of the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination. Jathong ran his hand over the cloth and held some of the jewelry up to the light. Eckert knew by the way he looked at it that he wasn't at all impressed. "I am grateful," he said finally, "but there is nothing I want." He turned and walked away into the gathering darkness. "The incorruptible native." Templin laughed sarcastically. Eckert shrugged. "That's one of the things you do out of habit, try and buy some of the natives so you'll have friends in case you need them." He stopped for a moment, thinking. "Did you notice the context? He didn't say he didn't want what we showed him. He said there was nothing that he wanted. Implying that everything he wanted, he already had." "That's not very typical of a primitive society, is it?" "No, I'm afraid it's not." Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes. "You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking lot, aren't they?" "Too healthy," Templin said. "There didn't seem to be any sick ones or ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem natural." "They're probably just well brought-up kids," Eckert said sharply. "Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the mud on the way home from school." He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was potentially dangerous. "Ted." Templin's voice was strained. "This could be a trap, you know." "In what way?" The words came out slowly. "The people are too casual, as though they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the cute, harmless little kids." He looked at Eckert. "Maybe that's what we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end." He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every corner. "It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's keep an open mind until we know for certain." He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass, and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably excellent.... He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's. A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon. There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too. "Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?" Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his pipe and tobacco. "I don't think it's primitive at all. There are too many disparities. Their knowledge of a lot of things is a little more than empirical knowledge; they associate the growth of crops with fertilizer and nitrogen in the soil as well as sunlight, rather than the blessings of some native god. And they differ a lot in other respects. Their art and their music are advanced. Free art exists along with purely decorative art, and their techniques are finely developed." "I'm glad you agree, then. Take a look at this." Templin threw a shiny bit of metal on the rough-hewn table. Eckert picked it up and inspected it. It was heavy and one side of it was extremely sharp. "What's it for?" "They've got a hospital set up here. Not a hospital like any we know, of course, but a hospital nonetheless. It's not used very much; apparently the natives don't get sick here. But occasionally there are hunting accidents and injuries that require surgery. The strip of metal there is a scalpel." He laughed shortly. "Primitive little gadget, but it works well—as well as any of ours." Eckert hefted it in his palm. "The most important thing is that they have the knowledge to use it. Surgery isn't a simple science." "Well, what do you think about it?" "The obvious. They evidently have as much technology as they want, at least in fields where they have to have it." "How come they haven't gone any further?" "Why should they? You can live without skycars and rocket ships, you know." "Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?" "The important thing," Eckert mused, "is not if they have them, but if they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing that we've had food and water and what fuel we need." "It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the slaughter," Templeton said. Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything. "You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?" Templin nodded. "Sure." "Why?" "The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered any information about him. And he was an attache here for three years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends, yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any information about him is being withheld for a reason." "What reason?" Templin shrugged. "Murder. What other reason could there be?" Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to market, leading a species of food animal by the halter. "They grow their women nice, don't they?" "Physically perfect, like the men," Templin grumbled. "You could get an inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while." "Does it? I hadn't noticed." Eckert turned away from the blinds. His voice was crisp. "I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too," he said. "But it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already made up your mind." "You knew Pendleton," Templin repeated grimly. "Do you think it was suicide?" "I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm trying to keep an open mind." "What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?" "We've got six months," Eckert said quietly. "Six months in which we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find out that we know it is?" Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked to the window. "I suppose you're right," he said at last. "It's nice living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help thinking that Don must have liked it here, too." One of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry. " Pelache, menshar? " " Sharra! " He took the small bowl of pelache nuts, helped himself to a few, and passed the bowl on. This was definitely the time to enjoy himself, not to work or worry. He had heard about the halera a few days ago, and, by judicious hinting to the proper authorities, he and Templin had been invited. It was a good chance to observe native customs. A little anthropology—with refreshments. The main courses started making the rounds and he took generous helpings of the roasted ulami and the broiled halunch and numerous dabs from the side dishes of steaming vegetables. Between every course, they passed around a small flagon of the hot, spiced native wine, but he noticed that nobody drank to excess. The old Greek ideal , he thought: moderation in everything. He looked at Templin, sitting across from him in the huge circle, and shrugged mentally. Templin looked as if he was about to break down and enjoy himself, but there was still a slight bulge under his tunic, where he had strapped his power pack. Any fool should have known that nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now. There will be hell to pay , Eckert thought, if Templin ever finds out that I sabotaged his power pack. "You look thoughtful, menshar Eckert." Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a certain aura of authority. "I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in any way, Nayova." Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he knew about Pendleton's death. "So far as I know, menshar Pendleton offended no one. I do not know what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous man." Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender ulami bone and tried to appear casual in his questioning. "I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to you for that." Nayova seemed pleased. "We tried to do as well for menshar Pendleton as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities." Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about. He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and took another sip of the wine. "We were shocked to find out that menshar Pendleton had killed himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to believe he had done such a thing." Nayova's gaze slid away from him. "Perhaps it was the will of the Great One," he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it. Eckert stared bleakly at his wine glass and tried to put the pieces of information together. They probably had a taboo about self-destruction which would make it difficult to talk about. That would make it even harder for him to find out by direct questioning. A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native dance. The sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was the Tunpeshan version of the rites de passage . He glanced across the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the flickering light—was brick red. A voice spoke in his ear. "It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing what menshar Pendleton did. It is ..." and he used a native word that Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to " obscene ." The dancers at the center of the circle finally bowed out with small garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went through a dizzying routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer. They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too good. The bowl of pelache nuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned over to speak to him. "If there is any possibility that I can help you while you are here, menshar Eckert, you have but to ask." It would probably be a mistake to ask for a list of Pendleton's friends, but there was a way around that. "I would like to meet any of your people who had dealings with Pendleton, either in business or socially. I will do everything not to inconvenience them in any way." "I think they would be glad to help you. I shall ask them to go to you this coming week."
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C. skeptical
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What is the architecture of the neural network?
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### Introduction
Reasoning about entities and their relations is an important problem for achieving general artificial intelligence. Often such problems are formulated as reasoning over graph-structured representation of knowledge. Knowledge graphs, for example, consist of entities and relations between them BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 . Representation learning BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 and reasoning BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 with such structured representations is an important and active area of research. Most previous work on knowledge representation and reasoning relies on a pipeline of natural language processing systems, often consisting of named entity extraction BIBREF12 , entity resolution and coreference BIBREF13 , relationship extraction BIBREF4 , and knowledge graph inference BIBREF14 . While this cascaded approach of using NLP systems can be effective at reasoning with knowledge bases at scale, it also leads to a problem of compounding of the error from each component sub-system. The importance of each of these sub-component on a particular downstream application is also not clear. For the task of question-answering, we instead make an attempt at an end-to-end approach which directly models the entities and relations in the text as memory slots. While incorporating existing knowledge (from curated knowledge bases) for the purpose of question-answering BIBREF11 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF15 is an important area of research, we consider the simpler setting where all the information is contained within the text itself – which is the approach taken by many recent memory based neural network models BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 , BIBREF19 . Recently, BIBREF17 proposed a dynamic memory based neural network for implicitly modeling the state of entities present in the text for question answering. However, this model lacks any module for relational reasoning. In response, we propose RelNet, which extends memory-augmented neural networks with a relational memory to reason about relationships between multiple entities present within the text. Our end-to-end method reads text, and writes to both memory slots and edges between them. Intuitively, the memory slots correspond to entities and the edges correspond to relationships between entities, each represented as a vector. The only supervision signal for our method comes from answering questions on the text. We demonstrate the utility of the model through experiments on the bAbI tasks BIBREF18 and find that the model achieves smaller mean error across the tasks than the best previously published result BIBREF17 in the 10k examples regime and achieves 0% error on 11 of the 20 tasks. ### RelNet Model
We describe the RelNet model in this section. Figure 1 provides a high-level view of the model. The model is sequential in nature, consisting of the following steps: read text, process it into a dynamic relational memory and then attention conditioned on the question generates the answer. We model the dynamic memory in a fashion similar to Recurrent Entity Networks BIBREF17 and then equip it with an additional relational memory. There are three main components to the model: 1) input encoder 2) dynamic memory, and 3) output module. We will describe these three modules in details. The input encoder and output module implementations are similar to the Entity Network BIBREF17 and main novelty lies in the dynamic memory. We describe the operations executed by the network for a single example consisting of a document with $T$ sentences, where each sentence consists of a sequence of words represented with $K$ -dimensional word embeddings $\lbrace e_1, \ldots , e_N\rbrace $ , a question on the document represented as another sequence of words and an answer to the question. ### Related Work
There is a long line of work in textual question-answering systems BIBREF21 , BIBREF22 . Recent successful approaches use memory based neural networks for question answering, for example BIBREF23 , BIBREF18 , BIBREF24 , BIBREF19 , BIBREF17 . Our model is also a memory network based model and is also related to the neural turing machine BIBREF25 . As described previously, the model is closely related to the Recurrent Entity Networks model BIBREF17 which describes an end-to-end approach to model entities in text but does not directly model relations. Other approaches to question answering use external knowledge, for instance external knowledge bases BIBREF26 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF27 , BIBREF28 , BIBREF9 or external text like Wikipedia BIBREF29 , BIBREF30 . Very recently, and in parallel to this work, a method for relational reasoning called relation networks BIBREF31 was proposed. They demonstrated that simple neural network modules are not as effective at relational reasoning and their proposed module is similar to our model. However, relation network is not a memory-based model and there is no mechanism to read and write relevant information for each pair. Moreover, while their approach scales as the square of the number of sentences, our approach scales as the square of the number of memory slots used per QA pair. The output module in our model can be seen as a type of relation network. Representation learning and reasoning over graph structured data is also relevant to this work. Graph based neural network models BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 , BIBREF34 have been proposed which take graph data as an input. The relational memory however does not rely on a specified graph structure and such models can potentially be used for multi-hop reasoning over the relational memory. BIBREF35 proposed a method for learning a graphical representation of the text data for question answering, however the model requires explicit supervision for the graph at every step whereas RelNet does not require explicit supervision for the graph. ### Experiments
We evaluate the model's performance on the bAbI tasks BIBREF18 , a collection of 20 question answering tasks which have become a benchmark for evaluating memory-augmented neural networks. We compare the performance with the Recurrent Entity Networks model (EntNet) BIBREF17 . Performance is measured in terms of mean percentage error on the tasks. Training Details: We used Adam and did a grid search for the learning rate in {0.01, 0.005, 0.001} and choose a fixed learning rate of 0.005 based on performance on the validation set, and clip the gradient norm at 2. We keep all other details similar to BIBREF17 for a fair comparison. embedding dimensions were fixed to be 100, models were trained for a maximum of 250 epochs with mini-batches size of 32 for all tasks except 3 for which the batch size was 16. The document sizes were limited to most recent 70 sentences for all tasks, except for task 3 for which it was limited to 130. The RelNet models were run for 5 times with random seed on each task and the model with best validation performance was chosen as the final model. The baseline EntNet model was run for 10 times for each task BIBREF17 . The results are shown in Table 1 . The RelNet model achieves a mean error of 0.285% across tasks which is better than the results of the EntNet model BIBREF17 . The RelNet model is able to achieve 0% test error on 11 of the tasks, whereas the EntNet model achieves 0% error on 7 of the tasks. ### Conclusion
We demonstrated an end-to-end trained neural network augmented with a structured memory representation which can reason about entities and relations for question answering. Future work will investigate the performance of these models on more real world datasets, interpreting what the models learn, and scaling these models to answer questions about entities and relations from reading massive text corpora. Figure 1: RelNet Model: The model represents the state of the world as a neural turing machine with relational memory. At each time step, the model reads the sentence into an encoding vector and updates both entity memories and all edges between them representing the relations. Table 1: Mean % Error on the 20 Babi tasks.
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extends memory-augmented neural networks with a relational memory to reason about relationships between multiple entities present within the text. , The model is sequential in nature, consisting of the following steps: read text, process it into a dynamic relational memory and then attention conditioned on the question generates the answer. We model the dynamic memory in a fashion similar to Recurrent Entity Networks BIBREF17 and then equip it with an additional relational memory.
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What is significant about the meal Matilda is served?
A. It lends credence to Gorka’s otherworldly claims. How else could it have happened?
B. She’d been starving, and it was enough to distract her from the reality of what happened to her.
C. It’s exactly what she wanted to eat, and she didn’t have to ask for it. ,
D. It means Gorka’s paranoid servant had been observing her, and determined her favorite foods.
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PEN PAL Illustrated by DON SIBLEY By MILTON LESSER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] All she wanted was a mate and she had the gumption to go out and hunt one down. But that meant poaching in a strictly forbidden territory! The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was also looking for a husband. This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and talk about it all to Matilda. The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she had been waiting for him. Matilda, you see, had patience. She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusive Ursula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yet Matilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would read them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity to her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed, Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws, that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws impatiently told her to go out and get dates. That particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was rocking on the glider and Matilda said hello. The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger. "I thought so," she said. "I knew this was coming when I saw that look in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?" Matilda smiled. "It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darned stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiled politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth college reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down the invitation." The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. "That was thoughtful of Herman to hide his feelings." "Hogwash!" said her daughter. "He has no true feelings. He's sorry that he had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffy Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others." "But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate. You don't fall in love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time." Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her light summer dress and took a cold shower. She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section of the current Literary Review , and because the subject matter of that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect a gratifying selection of pen pals. She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away. Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!). Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the Literary Review off the night table. She flipped through the pages and came to personals. Someone in Nebraska wanted to trade match books; someone in New York needed a midwestern pen pal, but it was a woman; an elderly man interested in ornithology wanted a young chick correspondent interested in the same subject; a young, personable man wanted an editorial position because he thought he had something to offer the editorial world; and— Matilda read the next one twice. Then she held it close to the light and read it again. The Literary Review was one of the few magazines which printed the name of the advertiser rather than a box number, and Matilda even liked the sound of the name. But mostly, she had to admit to herself, it was the flavor of the wording. This very well could be it . Or, that is, him . Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who's really been around, whose universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful opportunity cultural experience ... Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, Ill. The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded as though he would have reason indeed. He only wanted the best because he was the best. Like calls to like. The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda. Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international man, a figure among figures, a paragon.... Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of writing a letter. Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls. Matilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom, dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger, and tiptoed downstairs. The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell. "Mother," gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something unexpected. "What on earth are you doing up?" The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. "I'm fixing breakfast, of course...." Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws. Driving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour, Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar Falls and find out. And so she got there. The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over his glasses and answer questions grudgingly. "Hello," said Matilda. The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda asked him where she could find Haron Gorka. "What?" "I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?" "Is that in the United States?" "It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live? What's the quickest way to get there?" The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. "Now take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—" Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an oh under her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested that if it really were important, she might check with the police. Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka did not exist. Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's. Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by browsing through the dusty slacks. This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the old librarian as she passed. Then Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure.... On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka. Matilda cleared her throat. "Pardon me," she began. "I'm looking for—" "Haron Gorka." The librarian nodded. "How on earth did you know?" "That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka...." Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear. "You know him? You know Haron Gorka?" "Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty years younger—" Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. "Only ten," she assured the librarian. "Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm sure." "Are you? Well. Well, well." The librarian did something with the back of her hair, but it looked the same as before. "Maybe you're right. Maybe you're right at that." Then she sighed. "But I guess a miss is as good as a mile." "What do you mean?" "I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka...." The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry. "Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?" "I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear." "What about the other five women?" "They convinced me that I ought to give them his address." Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill. "Was this the way?" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this sort of thing. The librarian shook her head. Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her hand. "Then is this better?" "That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—" "Sorry. What then?" "If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?" Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car, whistling to herself. Haron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked him all the more for it. There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late.... As it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead, someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly. He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the wall, there was a button. "You want any food or drink," the servant told her, "and you just press that button. The results will surprise you." "What about Mr. Gorka?" "When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to home, lady, and I will tell him you are here." A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside. It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty, she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a neurotic servant. For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however: she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to her overwrought nerves. At that point she remembered what the servant had said about food and she thought at once of the supreme justice she could do to a juicy beefsteak. Well, maybe they didn't have a beefsteak. In that case, she would take what they had, and, accordingly, she walked to the little slot in the wall and pressed the button. She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup, mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce. Matilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic servant. When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right. The feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's servant, and he said, "Mr. Gorka will see you now." "Now?" "Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?" He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair. She told the servant so. "Miss," he replied, "I assure you it will not matter in the least to Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all that matters." "You sure?" Matilda wanted to take no chances. "Yes. Come." She followed him out of the little room and across what should have been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and compare notes. She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was just that he was so ordinary -looking. She almost would have preferred the monster of her dreams. He wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist at each corner. He said, "Greetings. You have come—" "In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?" She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to keep on the middle of the road. "I am fine. Are you ready?" "Ready?" "Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do you not?" "I—do." Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to know the man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit. "I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for dinner," she told him brightly. "Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry." "Yes," said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit. "Ready?" "Uh—ready." "Well?" "Well, what, Mr. Gorka?" "What would you like me to talk about?" "Oh, anything." "Please. As the ad read, my universal experience—is universal. Literally. You'll have to be more specific." "Well, why don't you tell me about some of your far travels? Unfortunately, while I've done a lot of reading, I haven't been to all the places I would have liked—" "Good enough. You know, of course, how frigid Deneb VII is?" Matilda said, "Beg pardon?" "Well, there was the time our crew—before I had retired, of course—made a crash landing there. We could survive in the vac-suits, of course, but the thlomots were after us almost at once. They go mad over plastic. They will eat absolutely any sort of plastic. Our vac-suits—" "—were made of plastic," Matilda suggested. She did not understand a thing he was talking about, but she felt she had better act bright. "No, no. Must you interrupt? The air-hose and the water feed, these were plastic. Not the rest of the suit. The point is that half of us were destroyed before the rescue ship could come, and the remainder were near death. I owe my life to the mimicry of a flaak from Capella III. It assumed the properties of plastic and led the thlomots a merry chase across the frozen surface of D VII. You travel in the Deneb system now and Interstellar Ordinance makes it mandatory to carry flaaks with you. Excellent idea, really excellent." Almost at once, Matilda's educational background should have told her that Haron Gorka was mouthing gibberish. But on the other hand she wanted to believe in him and the result was that it took until now for her to realize it. "Stop making fun of me," she said. "So, naturally, you'll see flaaks all over that system—" "Stop!" "What's that? Making fun of you?" Haron Gorka's voice had been so eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of resignation, and he said, "Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she is right and I am wrong...." Haron Gorka turned his back. Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of Haron Gorka's guests to depart. As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly. Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all alone. As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his voice high-pitched and eager. It was not until she had passed the small library building that she remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it outside the library. The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray, broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up visibly. "Hello, my dear," she said. "Hi." "You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar." "I don't know what they told you," Matilda said. "But this is what happened to me." She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second because she knew it would make her feel better. "So," she finished, "Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or insane. I'm sorry." "He's neither," the librarian contradicted. "Perhaps he is slightly eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither." "What do you mean?" "Did he leave a message for his wife?" "Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the five." "No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a message for his wife—" Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told the little librarian what the message was. "He wanted her to return," she said. The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you something." "What's that?" "I am Mrs. Gorka." The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. "You see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much." Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two. "We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given the opportunity just to listen to him. "But he's wrong. It's a hard life for a woman. Someday—five thousand, ten thousand years from now—I will convince him. And then we will settle down on Canopus XIV and cultivate torgas . That would be so nice—" "I'm sure." "Well, if Haron wants me back, then I have to go. Have a care, my dear. If you marry, choose a home-body. I've had the experience and you've seen my Haron for yourself." And then the woman was gone. Numbly, Matilda walked to the doorway and watched her angular figure disappear down the road. Of all the crazy things.... Deneb and Capella and Canopus, these were stars. Add a number and you might have a planet revolving about each star. Of all the insane— They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually, they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter Matilda would seek the happy medium. And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They were, she realized, for kids. She ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again, preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale rainbow bridge in the sky. Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon, and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place. The glow increased; soon it was a bright red pulse pounding on the horizon. It flickered. It flickered again, and finally it was gone. The stars were white and brilliant in the clear country air. That was why Matilda liked the country better than the city, particularly on a clear summer night when you could see the span of the Milky Way. But abruptly the stars and the Milky Way were paled by the brightest shooting star Matilda had ever seen. It flashed suddenly and it remained in view for a full second, searing a bright orange path across the night sky. Matilda gasped and ran into her car. She started the gears and pressed the accelerator to the floor, keeping it there all the way home. It was the first time she had ever seen a shooting star going up .
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A. It lends credence to Gorka’s otherworldly claims. How else could it have happened?
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The overall reaction to Rocsates' suggestions is symbolic of:
A. Inefficiency of government
B. Resistance to intellectualism
C. Potential of innovation
D. Overzealousness for power
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The Birds and the Bees BY DAVE E. FISHER Which goes to prove that, in some instances, being heroic is easy! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young, cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion. Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began. In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars. But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the ancient evils, wars, emergencies. "Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me. That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were babbling in excitement. Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not been for the friendship of Xeon. "Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone." I stared in amazement. "Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—" "Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—" Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone." "All of it?" I asked. "There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not, what will happen with no more children?" "That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I have never before been in a real emergency. A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city. They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young men do. As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an emergency. For a machine had failed! Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity. Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who knows the mysterious workings of the machines? I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table. Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard. He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for those left were the most earnest and intelligent. "I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial." A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered around the Hall. "But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen. Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has actually failed." Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for the priest had I not been able to insure order. "That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there will be no more children!" At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked, "Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the machines may produce more children for us? "As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are helpless." Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to think. Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it; and yet it came from somewhere." "Riddles are not called for," I answered severely. "Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago, have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of the story of the animals of old—" "I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt. "I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and although not mute, they could not speak." Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films." "If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of men—if it were so, then, what of it?" "May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then we would yet have these animals among us." "And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked. "How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced from within their own bodies?" At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason", went on: "I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or disprove my words." "You wish to search the films—" I began. "Not the films, Sias, but the books." Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient, and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest, being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost. Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race. And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse— "Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the only place where it may be found?" Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the Conclave adjourned. Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet. I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak. "Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage, your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we do. Yet there is one other distinction. "Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what reason?" "Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if you could be quick—" "Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have discovered: "That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines. Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!" These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also. "In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of over-population." Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the assembled overwhelmed him. "It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do, where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?" Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps the process of reproduction was of such a pleasure that the Conclave ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!" At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately, however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search. Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this they cannot do until they meet again. I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave, whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well. The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either. His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them. I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was on his feet and I gave way. "I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes. There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined, but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and bees...." When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words, with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea. It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear to move. I cleared my throat. "Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved into nothingness?" "I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in some, at least, of the She's." We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality. "Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to such horror?" "I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from dungeon. Are there any objections?" There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would undergo such an ordeal for the City? "And who will be the partner?" I asked. "In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall and stood, noble and naked. Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it, but Xeon stepped forward. "My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that the gods may help us?" His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft fields might be some slight help. I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields. It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries— We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first stars. "They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered. "They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately." "It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go through such an ordeal again?" And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me. Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom. "Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed. I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued. "Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and said manfully, "We shall try again." I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice— "We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should like to be left alone, in private, to try." "Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and spoke again. "We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we sort of enjoy it." I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars. My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.
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B. Resistance to intellectualism
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What shocked Myles the most when he woke up on the beach?
A. Enemies arrived that he believed to be dead.
B. He was on Venus instead of Mars.
C. He realized Prince Yuri was alive.
D. He knew he'd been dreaming.
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THE RADIO PLANET Ralph Milne Farley I “It’s too bad that Myles Cabot can’t see this!” I exclaimed, as my eye fell on the following item: SIGNALS FROM MARS FAIL TO REACH HARVARD Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wednesday. The Harvard College Radio Station has for several weeks been in receipt of fragmentary signals of extraordinarily long wave-length, Professor Hammond announced yesterday. So far as it has been possible to test the direction of the source of these waves, it appears that the direction has a twenty-four hour cycle, thus indicating that the origin of these waves is some point outside the earth. The university authorities will express no opinion as to whether or not these messages come from Mars. Myles, alone of all the radio engineers of my acquaintance, was competent to surmount these difficulties, and thus enable the Cambridge savants to receive with clearness the message from another planet. 6 Twelve months ago he would have been available, for he was then quietly visiting at my farm, after five earth-years spent on the planet Venus, where, by the aid of radio, he had led the Cupians to victory over their oppressors, a human-brained race of gigantic black ants. He had driven the last ant from the face of continental Poros, and had won and wed the Princess Lilla, who had borne him a son to occupy the throne of Cupia. While at my farm Cabot had rigged up a huge radio set and a matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had (presumably) shot himself back to Poros on the night of the big October storm which had wrecked his installation. I showed the newspaper item to Mrs. Farley, and lamented on Cabot’s absence. Her response opened up an entirely new line of thought. Said she: “Doesn’t the very fact that Mr. Cabot isn’t here suggest to you that this may be a message, not from Mars, but from him? Or perhaps from the Princess Lilla, inquiring about him in case he has failed in his attempted return?” That had never occurred to me! How stupid! “What had I better do about it, if anything?” I asked. “Drop Professor Hammond a line?” But Mrs. Farley was afraid that I would be taken for a crank. That evening, when I was over in town, the clerk in the drug store waylaid me to say that there had been a long-distance phone call for me, and would I please call a certain Cambridge number. So, after waiting an interminable time in the stuffy booth with my hands full of dimes, nickels, and quarters, I finally got my party. “Mr. Farley?” “Speaking.” “This is Professor Kellogg, O. D. Kellogg,” the voice replied. 7 It was my friend of the Harvard math faculty, the man who had analyzed the measurements of the streamline projectile in which Myles Cabot had shot to earth the account of the first part of his adventures on Venus. Some further adventures Myles had told me in person during his stay on my farm. “Professor Hammond thinks that he is getting Mars on the air,” the voice continued. “Yes,” I replied. “I judged as much from what I read in this morning’s paper. But what do you think?” Kellogg’s reply gave my sluggish mind the second jolt which it had received that day. “Well,” he said, “in view of the fact that I am one of the few people among your readers who take your radio stories seriously, I think that Hammond is getting Venus. Can you run up here and help me try and convince him?” And so it was that I took the early boat next morning for Boston, and had lunch with the two professors. As a result of our conference, a small committee of engineers returned with me to Edgartown that evening for the purpose of trying to repair the wrecked radio set which Myles Cabot had left on my farm. They utterly failed to comprehend the matter-transmitting apparatus, and so—after the fallen tower had been reerected and the rubbish cleared away—they had devoted their attention to the restoration of the conversational part of the set. To make a long story short, we finally restored it, with the aid of some old blue prints of Cabot’s which Mrs. Farley, like Swiss Family Robinson’s wife, produced from somewhere. I was the first to try the earphones, and was rewarded by a faint “bzt-bzt” like the song of a north woods blackfly. In conventional radioese, I repeated the sounds to the Harvard group: “Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dit dit. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit dit dit dah-dah-dah dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit-dit-dit-dah dah-dah-dah.” 8 A look of incredulity spread over their faces. Again came the same message, and again I repeated it. “You’re spoofing us!” one of them shouted. “Give me the earphones.” And he snatched them from my head. Adjusting them on his own head, he spelled out to us, “C-Q C-Q C-Q D-E C-A-B-O-T C-A-B-O-T C-A-B-O-T—” Seizing the big leaf-switch, he threw it over. The motor-generator began to hum. Grasping the key, the Harvard engineer ticked off into space: “Cabot Cabot Cabot D-E—” “Has this station a call letter?” he hurriedly asked me. “Yes,” I answered quickly, “One-X-X-B.” “One-X-X-B,” he continued the ticking “K.” Interplanetary communication was an established fact at last! And not with Mars after all these years of scientific speculations. But what meant more to me was that I was again in touch with my classmate Myles Standish Cabot, the radio man. The next day a party of prominent scientists, accompanied by a telegrapher and two stenographers, arrived at my farm. During the weeks that followed there was recorded Myles’s own account of the amazing adventures on the planet Venus (or Poros, as its own inhabitants call it,) which befell him upon his return there after his brief visit to the earth. I have edited those notes into the following coherent story. II TOO MUCH STATIC Myles Cabot had returned to the earth to study the latest developments of modern terrestrial science for the benefit of the Cupian nation. He was the regent of Cupia during the minority of his baby son, King Kew the Thirteenth. The loyal Prince Toron occupied the throne in his absence. The last of the ant-men and their ally, the renegade Cupian Prince Yuri, had presumably perished in an attempt to escape by flying through the steam-clouds which completely hem in continental Poros. What lay beyond the boiling seas no man knew. 9 During his stay on my farm, Cabot had built the matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had shot himself off into space on that October night on which he had received the message from the skies: “S O S, Lilla.” A thunderstorm had been brewing all that evening, and just as Myles had placed himself between the coordinate axes of his machine and had gathered up the strings which ran from his control levers to within the apparatus, there had come a blinding flash. Lightning had struck his aerial. How long his unconsciousness lasted he knew not. He was some time in regaining his senses. But when he had finally and fully recovered, he found himself lying on a sandy beach beside a calm and placid lake beneath a silver sky. He fell to wondering, vaguely and pleasantly, where he was and how he had got here. Suddenly, however, his ears were jarred by a familiar sound. At once his senses cleared, and he listened intently to the distant purring of a motor. Yes, there could be no mistake; an airplane was approaching. Now he could see it, a speck in the sky, far down the beach. Nearer and nearer it came. Myles sprang to his feet. To his intense surprise, he found that the effort threw him quite a distance into the air. Instantly the idea flashed through his mind: “I must be on Mars! Or some other strange planet.” This idea was vaguely reminiscent of something. But while he was trying to catch this vaguely elusive train of thought, his attention was diverted by the fact that, for some unaccountable reason, his belt buckle and most of the buttons which had held his clothes together were missing, so that his clothing came to pieces as he rose, and that he had to shed it rapidly in order to avoid impeding his movements. He wondered at the cause of this. 10 But his speculations were cut short by the alighting of the plane a hundred yards down the beach. What was his horror when out of it clambered, not men but ants! Ants, six-footed, and six feet high. Huge ants, four of them, running toward him over the glistening sands. Gone was all his languor, as he seized a piece of driftwood and prepared to defend himself. As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had befriended him on his previous visit. Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of his imagination? Horrible thought! And then events began to differ from those of the past; for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he had contrived and built during his previous visit to that planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of which races are earless and converse by means of radiations from their antennae. So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears. Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot, you are our prisoner.” “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of submission. 11 He dreaded the paralyzing bite which Formians usually administer to their victims, and which he had twice experienced in the past; but, fortunately, it was not now forthcoming. The other three ants kept away from him as Doggo led him to the beached airplane, and soon they were scudding along beneath silver skies, northward as it later turned out. Far below them were silver-green fields and tangled tropical woods, interspersed with rivulets and little ponds. This was Cupia, his Cupia. He was home once more, back again upon the planet which held all that was dear to him in two worlds. His heart glowed with the warmth of homecoming. What mattered it that he was now a prisoner, in the hands (or, rather, claws) of his old enemies, the Formians? He had been their prisoner before, and had escaped. Once more he could escape, and rescue the Princess Lilla. Poor girl! How eager he was to reach her side, and save her from that peril, whatever it was, which had caused her to flash that “S O S” a hundred million miles across the solar system from Poros to the earth. He wondered what could have happened in Cupia since his departure, only a few sangths ago. How was it that the ant-men had survived their airplane journey across the boiling seas? What had led them to return? Or perhaps these ants were a group who had hidden somewhere and thus had escaped the general extermination of their race. In either event, how had they been able to reconquer Cupia? And where was their former leader, Yuri, the renegade Cupian prince? These and a hundred other similar questions flooded in upon the earth-man, as the Formian airship carried him, a captive, through the skies. He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be, over which they were now passing? 12 Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles would have to wait until they reached their landing place; for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the country below was wholly unfamiliar. Finally a small settlement loomed ahead. It was of the familiar style of toy-building-block architecture affected by the ant-men, and, from its appearance, was very new. On its outskirts further building operations were actively in progress. Apparently a few survivors of the accursed race of Formians were consolidating their position and attempting to build up a new empire in some out-of-the-way portion of the continent. As the earth-man was turning these thoughts over in his mind the plane softly settled down upon one of the flat roofs, and its occupants disembarked. Three of the ants advanced menacingly toward Myles, but Doggo held them off. Then all of the party descended down one of the ramps to the lower levels of the building. Narrow slitlike window openings gave onto courtyards, where fountains played and masses of blue and yellow flowers bloomed, amid gray-branched lichens with red and purple twig-knobs. It was in just such a garden, through just such a window, that he had first looked upon the lovely blue-eyed, golden-haired Lilla, Crown Princess of Cupia. The earth-man sighed. Where was his beloved wife now? That she needed his help was certain. He must therefore get busy. So once again he made motions of writing on the palm of his left hand with the thumb and forefinger of his right; and this time the sign language produced results, for Doggo halted the procession and led Cabot into a room. 13 It was a plain bare room, devoid of any furniture except a small table, for ant-men have no use for chairs and couches. The sky outside was already beginning to pinken with the unseen sun. With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus, not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw of a Formian. Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment, and then quickly filled a sheet with questions: “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city? Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with me this time?” Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old friend Doggo. They were alone together at last. The ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper; but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not take so very much more time than speaking would have required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to Myles, who read as follows: “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne of Cupia, splendid even in defeat. “It was his brain that conceived our daring plan of escape. If there were other lands beyond the boiling seas, the lands which tradition taught were the origin of the Cupian race, then there we might prosper and raise up a new empire. At the worst we should merely meet death in another form, rather than at your hands. So we essayed. 14 “Your planes followed us, but turned back as we neared the area of terrific heat. Soon the vapor closed over us, blotting our enemies and our native land from view.” For page after page Doggo, the ant-man, related the harrowing details of that perilous flight across the boiling seas, ending with the words: “Here we are, and here are you, in Yuriana, capitol of New Formia. But how is it that you, Myles Cabot, have arrived here on this continent in exactly the same manner and condition in which I discovered you in old Formia eight years ago?” When Myles reached the end of reading this narrative, he in turn took the pad and stylus and related how he had gone to the planet Minos (which we call the Earth) to learn the latest discoveries and inventions there, and how his calculations for his return to Poros had been upset by some static conditions just as he had been about to transmit himself back. Oh, if only he had landed by chance upon the same beach as on his first journey through the skies! Wisely he refrained from mentioning the “S O S” message from Lilla. But his recollection of her predicament spurred him to be anxious about her rescue. His immediate problem was to learn what the ant-men planned for him; so the concluding words which he wrote upon the pad were: “And, now that you have me in your power, what shall you do with me?” “Old friend,” Doggo wrote in reply, “that depends entirely upon Yuri, our king, whose toga you now have on.” III YURI OR FORMIS? The earth-man grimaced, but then smiled. Perhaps, his succeeding to the toga of King Yuri might prove to be an omen. 15 “So Yuri is king of the ants?” he asked. “Yes,” his captor replied, “for Queen Formis did not survive the trip across the boiling seas.” “Then what of your empire?” Myles inquired. “No queen. No eggs. How can your race continue? For you Formians are like the ants on my own planet Minos.” Doggo’s reply astounded him. “Do you remember back at Wautoosa, I told you that some of us lesser Formians had occasionally laid eggs? So now behold before you Doggo, Admiral of the Formian Air Navy, and mother of a new Queen Formis.” This was truly a surprise! All along Cabot had always regarded the Formians as mannish. And rightly so, for they performed in their own country the duties assigned to men among the Cupians. Furthermore, all Formians, save only the reigning Formis herself, were called by the Porovian pronoun, which corresponds to “he” in English. When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment, he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom. “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person of some importance among the Formians.” “It ought to,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me. Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and for the Formians exclusively.” “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own difficulties. But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an autocracy. The earth-man, however, persisted. “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?” 16 “Only one—myself.” And again Doggo tore up the correspondence. Myles tactfully changed the subject. “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked. “We know not,” the Formian wrote in reply. “Six days ago he left us in his airship and flew westward. When he failed to return, we sent out scout planes to search for him, and we have been hunting ever since. When we sighted you on the beach this morning we thought that you might be our lost leader, and that is why we landed and approached you.” At about this point the conversation was interrupted by a worker ant who brought food: roast alta and green aphid milk. With what relish did the earth-man plunge into the feast, his first taste of Porovian delicacies in many months. During the meal conversation lagged, owing to the difficulty of writing and eating at the same time. But now Myles Cabot seized his pad and stylus and wrote: “Have you ever known me to fail in any undertaking on the planet Poros?” “No,” the ant-man wrote in reply. “Have you ever known me to be untrue to a principle, a cause, or a friend?” “No,” Doggo replied. “Then,” Myles wrote, “let us make your daughter queen in fact as well as in name.” “It is treason,” Doggo wrote in reply, but this time he did not tear up the correspondence. “Treason?” Myles asked. If he had spoken the word, he would have spoken it with scorn and derision. “Treason? Is it treason to support your own queen? What has become of the national pride of the once great Formians? Look! I pledge myself to the cause of Formis, rightful Queen of Formia. Formis, daughter of Doggo! What say you?” This time, as he tore up the correspondence, Doggo signified an affirmative. And thus there resulted further correspondence. 17 “Doggo,” Myles wrote, “can you get to the antenna of the queen?” The ant-man indicated that he could. “If she has inherited any of your character,” Myles continued, “she will assert herself, if given half a chance.” So the Pitmanesque conversation continued. Long since had the pink light of Porovian evening faded from the western sky. The ceiling vapor-lamps were lit. The night showed velvet-black through the slit-like windows. And still the two old friends wrote on, Myles Standish Cabot, the Bostonian, and Doggo, No. 334-2-18, the only really humanlike ant-man whom Myles had ever known among the once dominant race of Poros. Finally, as the dials indicated midnight, the two conspirators ceased their labors. All was arranged for the coup d’ etat . They tore into shreds every scrap of used paper, leaving extant merely the ant-man’s concluding words: “Meanwhile you are my prisoner.” Doggo then rang a soundless bell, which was answered by a worker ant, whom he inaudibly directed to bring sufficient draperies to form a bed for the earth-man. These brought, the two friends patted each other a fond good night, and the tired earth-man lay down for the first sleep which he had had in over forty earth hours. It hardly seemed possible! Night before last he had slept peacefully on a conventional feather-bed in a little New England farmhouse. Then had come the S O S message from the skies; and here he was now, millions of miles away through space retiring on matted silver felting on the concrete floor of a Porovian ant-house. Such are the mutations of fortune! With these thoughts the returned wanderer lapsed into a deep and dreamless sleep. When he awakened in the morning there was a guard posted at the door. 18 Doggo did not show up until nearly noon, when he rattled in, bristling with excitement. Seizing the pad he wrote: “A stormy session of the Council of Twelve! We are all agreed that you must be indicted for high crimes and misdemeanors. But the great question is as to just what we can charge you with.” “Sorry I can’t assist you,” the earth-man wrote. “How would it be if I were to slap your daughter’s face, or something? Or why not try me for general cussedness?” “That is just what we finally decided to do,” the ant-man wrote in reply. “We shall try you on general principles, and let the proper accusation develop from the evidence. “At some stage of the proceedings it will inevitably occur to some member of the council to suggest that you be charged with treason to Yuri, whereupon two members of the council, whom I have won over to the cause of my daughter, will raise the objection that Yuri is not our king. This will be the signal for the proclaiming of Queen Formis. If you will waive counsel the trial can take place to-morrow.” “I will waive anything,” Myles replied, “counsel, immunity, extradition, anything in order to speed up my return to Cupia, where Lilla awaits in some dire extremity.” “All right,” Doggo wrote, and the conference was at an end. The morrow would decide the ascendancy of Myles Cabot or the Prince Yuri over the new continent. IV THE COUP D’ETAT The next morning Myles Cabot was led under guard to the council chamber of the dread thirteen: Formis and her twelve advisers. The accused was placed in a wicker cage, from which he surveyed his surroundings as the proceedings opened. 19 On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve was Doggo. Messenger ants hurried hither and thither. First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished with a written copy. The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors. They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved Formia. Their testimony was brief. Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders, sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of making an argument through the antennae of another.” Whereupon the queen and the council went into executive session. Their remarks were not intended for the eyes of the prisoner, but he soon observed that some kind of a dispute was on between Doggo, supported by two councillors named Emu and Fum on one side, and a councillor named Barth on the other. As this dispute reached its height, a messenger ant rushed in and held up one paw. Cabot’s interpreter, not deeming this a part of the executive session, obligingly translated the following into writing: The messenger: “Yuri lives and reigns over Cupia. It is his command that Cabot die.” Barth: “It is the radio. Know then, O Queen, and ye, members of the council, that when we fled across the boiling seas under the gallant leadership of Prince Yuri, the man with the heart of a Formian, he brought with him one of those powerful radio sets invented by the beast who is our prisoner here to-day. “Supporters of Yuri still remained among the Cupians, and he has been in constant communication with these ever since shortly after our arrival here. From them he learned of the return of Myles Cabot to the planet Minos. 20 “Then Yuri disappeared. Those of us who were closest to him suspected that he had gone back across the boiling seas to claim as his own the throne of Cupia. But we hesitated to announce this until we were sure, for we feared that some of our own people would regard his departure as desertion. Yet who can blame him for returning to his father-land and to the throne which is his by rights?” To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us back our own old country, if we too will return across the boiling seas again.” “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted. “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!” shouted Emu. “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth. “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum. “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen. And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation, for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free! With one bound he gained the throne, where fighting was already in progress between the two factions. Barth and Doggo were rolling over and over on the floor in a death grapple, while the ant-queen had backed to the rear of the stage, closely guarded by Emu and Fum. Seizing one of the pikes which supported the scarlet canopy, Myles wrenched it loose and drove it into the thorax of Barth. In another instant the earth-man and Doggo stood beside the queen. Ant-men now came pouring into the chamber through all the entrances, taking sides as they entered and sized up the situation. If it had still been in vogue among the Formians to be known by numbers rather than names, and to have these identifying numbers painted on the backs of their abdomens followed by the numbers of those whom they had defeated in the duels so common among them, then many a Formian would have “got the number” of many another, that day.
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A. Enemies arrived that he believed to be dead.
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What is the access revolution?
A. Globally more homes than ever before have access to the internet.
B. Free global sharing.
C. Authors are giving away their work for free.
D. Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.
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What Is Open Access? Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Before that, it would have sounded like a quixotic dream. Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution. Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales. Let’s sharpen the question, then, by putting to one side authors who want to sell their work. We can even acknowledge that we’re putting aside the vast majority of authors. Imagine a tribe of authors who write serious and useful work, and who follow a centuries-old custom of giving it away without charge. I don’t mean a group of rich authors who don’t need money. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In fact, very few are wealthy. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts. If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution. These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. Open access is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. A price tag is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles we’re generally talking about authors from the special tribe who want to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers. Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it. Terminology When we need to, we can be more specific about access vehicles and access barriers. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called gold OA , and OA delivered by repositories is called green OA . Work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price, is called toll access (TA). Over the years I’ve asked publishers for a neutral, nonpejorative and nonhonorific term for toll-access publishers, and conventional publishers is the suggestion I hear most often. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide gratis OA , and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide libre OA . (Also see section 3.1 on green/gold and section 3.3 on gratis/libre.) OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003). I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. My definition here is the BBB definition reduced to its essential elements and refined with some post-BBB terminology (green, gold, gratis, libre) for speaking precisely about subspecies of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA: There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.” Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. (More in chapter 9 on the future.) In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. But the term “open access” was coined by researchers trying to remove access barriers to research. The next section explains why. 1.1 What Makes OA Possible? OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA? Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher. Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles. Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. It’s not a new fact of academic life, arising from a recent economic downturn in the publishing industry. Nor is it a case of corporate exploitation of unworldly academics. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and the Journal des sçavans , launched in London and Paris in 1665. The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge. This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA. Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars. We might even agree, provided we don’t overlook a few facts. First, it’s a sacrifice that scholars have been making for nearly 350 years. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Many musicians and moviemakers might envy that freedom to disregard sales and popular taste. Third, academics receive other, less tangible rewards from their institutions—like promotion and tenure—when their research is recognized by others, accepted, cited, applied, and built upon. It’s no accident that faculty who advance knowledge in their fields also advance their careers. Academics are passionate about certain topics, ideas, questions, inquiries, or disciplines. They feel lucky to have jobs in which they may pursue these passions and even luckier to be rewarded for pursuing them. Some focus single-mindedly on carrying an honest pebble to the pile of knowledge (as John Lange put it), having an impact on their field, or scooping others working on the same questions. Others focus strategically on building the case for promotion and tenure. But the two paths converge, which is not a fortuitous fact of nature but an engineered fact of life in the academy. As incentives for productivity, these intangible career benefits may be stronger for the average researcher than royalties are for the average novelist or musician. (In both domains, bountiful royalties for superstars tell us nothing about effective payment models for the long tail of less stellar professionals.) There’s no sense in which research would be more free, efficient, or effective if academics took a more “businesslike” position, behaved more like musicians and moviemakers, abandoned their insulation from the market, and tied their income to the popularity of their ideas. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business. We can take this a step further. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties. But why do universities pay salaries and why do funding agencies award grants? They do it to advance research and the range of public interests served by research. They don’t do it to earn profits from the results. They are all nonprofit. They certainly don’t do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research. Universities and funding agencies pay researchers to make their research into gifts to the public in the widest sense. Public and private funding agencies are essentially public and private charities, funding research they regard as useful or beneficial. Universities have a public purpose as well, even when they are private institutions. We support the public institutions with public funds, and we support the private ones with tax exemptions for their property and tax deductions for their donors. We’d have less knowledge, less academic freedom, and less OA if researchers worked for royalties and made their research articles into commodities rather than gifts. It should be no surprise, then, that more and more funding agencies and universities are adopting strong OA policies. Their mission to advance research leads them directly to logic of OA: With a few exceptions, such as classified research, research that is worth funding or facilitating is worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it. (See chapter 4 on OA policies.) Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise. It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to recognize that scholarly publication is accompanied by a strong interest in impact and career building. The result is a mix of interested and disinterested motives. The reasons to make work OA are essentially the same as the reasons to publish. Authors who make their work OA are always serving others but not always acting from altruism. In fact, the idea that OA depends on author altruism slows down OA progress by hiding the role of author self-interest. Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact. There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals. In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming. My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible. Because any content can be digital, and any digital content can be OA, OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature like research articles. Research articles are just ripe examples of low-hanging fruit. OA could extend to royalty-producing work like monographs, textbooks, novels, news, music, and movies. But as soon as we cross the line into OA for royalty-producing work, authors will either lose revenue or fear that they will lose revenue. Either way, they’ll be harder to persuade. But instead of concluding that royalty-producing work is off limits to OA, we should merely conclude that it’s higher-hanging fruit. In many cases we can still persuade royalty-earning authors to consent to OA. (See section 5.3 on OA for books.) Authors of scholarly research articles aren’t the only players who work without pay in the production of research literature. In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors or referees either. In general, editors and referees are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals. An important consequence follows. All the key players in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA needn’t dispense with peer review or favor unrefereed manuscripts over refereed articles. We can aim for the prize of OA to peer-reviewed scholarship. (See section 5.1 on peer review.) Of course, conventional publishers are not as free as authors, editors, and referees to forgo revenue. This is a central fact in the transition to OA, and it explains why the interests of scholars and conventional publishers diverge more in the digital age than they diverged earlier. But not all publishers are conventional, and not all conventional publishers will carry print-era business models into the digital age. Academic publishers are not monolithic. Some new ones were born OA and some older ones have completely converted to OA. Many provide OA to some of their work but not all of it. Some are experimenting with OA, and some are watching the experiments of others. Most allow green OA (through repositories) and a growing number offer at least some kind of gold OA (through journals). Some are supportive, some undecided, some opposed. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide OA themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require OA. Some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA. OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly) that OA doesn’t threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt. A growing number of journal publishers have chosen business models allowing them to dispense with subscription revenue and offer OA. They have expenses but they also have revenue to cover their expenses. In fact, some OA publishers are for-profit and profitable. (See chapter 7 on economics.) Moreover, peer review is done by dedicated volunteers who don’t care how a journal pays its bills, or even whether the journal is in the red or the black. If all peer-reviewed journals converted to OA overnight, the authors, editors, and referees would have the same incentives to participate in peer review that they had the day before. They needn’t stop offering their services, needn’t lower their standards, and needn’t make sacrifices they weren’t already making. They volunteer their time not because of a journal’s choice of business model but because of its contribution to research. They could carry on with solvent or insolvent subscription publishers, with solvent or insolvent OA publishers, or even without publishers. The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.” To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work. A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet. 1.2 What OA Is Not We can dispel a cloud of objections and misunderstandings simply by pointing out a few things that OA is not. (Many of these points will be elaborated in later chapters.) OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative, and all the major public statements on OA insist on its importance. Because scholarly journals generally don’t pay peer-reviewing editors and referees, just as they don’t pay authors, all the participants in peer review can consent to OA without losing revenue. While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles. (More in section 5.1 on peer review.) OA isn’t an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright. It’s compatible with copyright law as it is. OA would benefit from the right kinds of copyright reforms, and many dedicated people are working on them. But it needn’t wait for reforms and hasn’t waited. OA literature avoids copyright problems in exactly the same way that conventional toll-access literature does. For older works, it takes advantage of the public domain, and for newer works, it rests on copyright-holder consent. (More in chapter 4 on policies and chapter 6 on copyright.) OA isn’t an attempt to deprive royalty-earning authors of income. The OA movement focuses on research articles precisely because they don’t pay royalties. In any case, inside and outside that focus, OA for copyrighted work depends on copyright-holder consent. Hence, royalty-earning authors have nothing to fear but persuasion that the benefits of OA might outweigh the risks to royalties. (More in section 5.3 on OA for books.) OA isn’t an attempt to deny the reality of costs. No serious OA advocate has ever argued that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than born-digital toll-access literature. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers. (More in chapter 7 on economics.) Terminology We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder. OA isn’t an attempt to reduce authors’ rights over their work. On the contrary, OA depends on author decisions and requires authors to exercise more rights or control over their work than they are allowed to exercise under traditional publishing contracts. One OA strategy is for authors to retain some of the rights they formerly gave publishers, including the right to authorize OA. Another OA strategy is for publishers to permit more uses than they formerly permitted, including permission for authors to make OA copies of their work. By contrast, traditional journal-publishing contracts demand that authors transfer all rights to publishers, and author rights or control cannot sink lower than that. (See chapters 4 on policies and 6 on copyright.) OA isn’t an attempt to reduce academic freedom. Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring OA do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waiver options, or both. Since 2008 most university OA policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and even enhance their prerogatives. (See chapter 4 on OA policies.) OA isn’t an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism. All the public definitions of OA support author attribution, even construed as a “restriction” on users. All the major open licenses require author attribution. Moreover, plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist’s institution rather than by courts, that is, by social norms rather than by law. Hence, even when attribution is not legally required, plagiarism is still a punishable offense and no OA policy anywhere interferes with those punishments. In any case, if making literature digital and online makes plagiarism easier to commit, then OA makes plagiarism easier to detect. Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine. In this sense, OA deters plagiarism. OA isn’t an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions. The goal is constructive, not destructive. If OA does eventually harm toll-access publishers, it will be in the way that personal computers harmed typewriter manufacturers. The harm was not the goal, but a side effect of developing something better. Moreover, OA doesn’t challenge publishers or publishing per se, just one business model for publishing, and it’s far easier for conventional publishers to adapt to OA than for typewriter manufacturers to adapt to computers. In fact, most toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA. (See section 3.1 on green OA and chapter 8 on casualties.) OA doesn’t require boycotting any kind of literature or publisher. It doesn’t require boycotting toll-access research any more than free online journalism requires boycotting priced online journalism. OA doesn’t require us to strike toll-access literature from our personal reading lists, course syllabi, or libraries. Some scholars who support OA decide to submit new work only to OA journals, or to donate their time as editors or referees only to OA journals, in effect boycotting toll-access journals as authors, editors, and referees. But this choice is not forced by the definition of OA, by a commitment to OA, or by any OA policy, and most scholars who support OA continue to work with toll-access journals. In any case, even those scholars who do boycott toll-access journals as authors, editors, or referees don’t boycott them as readers. (Here we needn’t get into the complexity that some toll-access journals effectively create involuntary reader boycotts by pricing their journals out of reach of readers who want access.) OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users. If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.) Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place: Filtering and censorship barriers Many schools, employers, ISPs, and governments want to limit what users can see. Language barriers Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak. Handicap access barriers Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be. Connectivity barriers The digital divide keeps billions of people offline, including millions of scholars, and impedes millions of others with slow, flaky, or low-bandwidth internet connections. Most us want to remove all four of these barriers. But there’s no reason to save the term open access until we succeed. In the long climb to universal access, removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name.
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D. Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.
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Where is the conference next month?
A. Illinois
B. New Jersey
C. Connecticut
D. Pennsylvania
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BRAMBLE BUSH BY ALAN E. NOURSE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes. And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again. MOTHER GOOSE Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?" "This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth. "He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period." "So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy. "Tommy? Come over and sit down." There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin, with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape. The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear. Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently. "I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy. "Why?" "I just don't. I hate it there." "Are you frightened?" The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly. "Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?" "No. Oh, no!" "Then what?" Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered the grey plastic helmet. "You think that would make you feel better?" "It would, I know it would." Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the monitor is for, don't you?" "It stops things from going out." "That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator. You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off, away from the Farm." The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I never want to go back." "Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has been going on for three weeks ?" "I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so much of that up there." "I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with. I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy downstairs." "Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman. "Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be sure of it. If Tommy's in the trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands." Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book, and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled. Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really get back to work again. The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the International Psionics Conference: Dear Dr. Lessing: In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order— They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right. And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and baffling new science. For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds, with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush became— But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a theory to work by— At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir." He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please." Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about the office in awe. "I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the Master in the trembling flesh!" Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—" "Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!" He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!" "If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch. "I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply, "because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping." Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?" "I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of 'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes. "You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference," snapped Lessing. The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year, but you didn't seem to get the idea." "Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale', we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's true." "If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's false as Satan." "And our controls are above suspicion." "So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too." "Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little misdirected, is all." "According to your Theory, that is." "Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic enough." "We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong." Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is." Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the day to take a trip?" "I've got 'til New Year." Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the Farm this afternoon." The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?" "Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...." Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside. "What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along through the afternoon sun. "I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating." Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose. Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here." "It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped. "Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here." "Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis." "Of course, you're sure you were measuring something ." "Oh, yes. We certainly were." "Yet you said that you didn't know what." "That's right," said Lessing. "We don't." "And you don't know why your instruments measure whatever they're measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at all. It's not inconceivable that the children might be measuring the instruments , eh?" Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable." "Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a theory on." "Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb." "Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories. I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're digging for it?" "We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't work in the dark forever—we've got to have a working hypothesis to guide us." "So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly. "For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality." "Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't prove that, of course, but I'll play along." Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults. Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get at it any more?" "And you think you have an answer," said Melrose. "We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains the available data." The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics. Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a long, low building. "All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show you our answer." In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source. "The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen." "It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose. "As far as we can measure, yes." "Which may not be very far." Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem effective for our purposes." "But you don't know why," added Melrose. "All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by; one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars. They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress. "Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions where they can develope what potential they have— without the presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject to. The results have been remarkable." He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing in a large room. "They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose, they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like that one, for instance—" In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch, nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered. Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of activity. "What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few moments. "Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually, had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale." Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't right. It wasn't the instruments, of course." Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I want you to watch this very closely." He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing. He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall. The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in the tower with his thumb. The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out of place.... Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent bursts of green fire and went dark. The block tower fell with a crash. Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly. "Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a sort of colossal candle-snuffer." "That's what I think," said Lessing. "How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?" Lessing blinked. "Why should they?" "Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down." "But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall down." Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What would you say to that?" "I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data. According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is sheer nonsense." "And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?" "I would." "And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could possibly happen would be— the appearance of an Authority ." Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence. At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force. "Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have to throw them off and keep going." Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific grounds aren't right at all, in this case." Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—" "He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after the theory." "So it seems. But why?" "Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?" "He knows more about his field than anybody else does." "He seems to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then defends them for all he's worth ." "But why shouldn't he?" "Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's what he says that counts." "But we know you're right," Dorffman protested. "Do we?" "Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the Farm." "Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—" A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined." "What happened?" "Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it." She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large children's playroom. "See what you think." The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there, gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands. Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said. The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine. "Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror, clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—" When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on the hand. Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise." "Go away." "Do you know who I am?" Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away." "Why are you afraid, Tommy?" "I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away." "Why do you hurt?" "I—can't get it—off," the boy said. The monitor , Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But this youngster was sick— And yet an animal instinctively seeks its own protection . With trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered. The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head. Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear faded from the boy's face. The fire engine clattered to the floor. They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night when they had the report back in their hands. Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with anything we've observed before. There must be an error." "Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely. We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?" "Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we misread the data—" "Didn't you see his face ?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he acted ? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow for." They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going to do?" "I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed the path altogether." "But the book is due! The Conference speech—" "I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly. "It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian. But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's really sniffing out the trail will get somebody to listen to him! "Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade that puppy out there to come here and work for me—"
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A. Illinois
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What is the connection between places of work and the government discussed in the article?
A. The controlling governments show the same inclination towards fully-specified systems
B. The more free systems such as democracies show more space for innovation than totalitarian governments
C. The governments are in charge of the workplace systems so they are directly linked in any situation
D. Innovation is only found to arise in situations where the government does not control the workplace systems
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COMPLEXITY AND HUMANITY We have all seen the images. Volunteers pitching in. People working day and night; coming up with the most ingenious, improvised solutions to everything from food and shelter to communications and security. Working together; patching up the fabric that is rent. Disaster, natural or otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. For a time, chaos reigns. For a time, what will happen in the next five minutes, five hours, and five days is unknown. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and common humanity Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course, was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviors in Shenzhen and Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to innovation, and information to making more information has become pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old. These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action, and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt, discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work (and are still seen so be many). But it is time we acknowledge that systems work best by making work human. Modern Times Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space. The solution to this increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th century was to increase the role of structure and improve its design. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, this type of rationalization took the form of ever-more complex managed systems, with crisp specification of roles, lines of authority, communication and control. In business, this rationalization was typified by Fredrick Taylor’s Scientific Management, later embodied in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The ambition of these approaches was to specify everything that needed doing in minute detail, to enforce it through monitoring and rewards, and later to build it into the very technology of work−the assembly line. The idea was to eliminate human error and variability in the face of change by removing thinking to the system, and thus neutralizing the variability of the human beings who worked it. Few images captured that time, and what it did to humanity, more vividly than Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line worker in Modern Times. At the same time, government experienced the rise of bureaucratization and the administrative state. Nowhere was this done more brutally than in the totalitarian states of mid-century. But the impulse to build fully-specified systems, designed by experts, monitored and controlled so as to limit human greed and error and to manage uncertainty, was basic and widespread. It underlay the development of the enormously successful state bureaucracies that responded to the Great Depression with the New Deal. It took shape in the Marshall Plan to pull Europe out of the material abyss into which it had been plunged by World War II, and shepherded Japan’s industrial regeneration from it. In technical systems too, we saw in mid-century marvels like the AT&T telephone system and the IBM mainframe. For a moment in history, these large scale managed systems were achieving efficiencies that seemed to overwhelm competing models: from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Sputnik, from Watson’s IBM to General Motors. Yet, to list these paragons from today’s perspective is already to presage the demise of the belief in their inevitable victory. The increasing recognition of the limits of command-and-control systems led to a new approach; but it turned out to be a retrenchment, not an abandonment, of the goal of perfect rationalization of systems design, which assumed much of the human away. What replaced planning and control in these systems was the myth of perfect markets. This was achieved through a hyper-simplification of human nature, wedded to mathematical modeling of what hyper-simplified selfish rational actors, looking only to their own interests, would do under diverse conditions. This approach was widespread and influential; it still is. And yet it led to such unforgettable gems as trying to understand why people do, or do not, use condoms by writing sentences like: “The expected utility (EU) of unsafe sex for m and for f is equal to the benefits (B) of unsafe sex minus its expected costs, and is given by EUm = B - C(1-Pm)(Pf) and EUf = B - C(1-Pf)(Pm),” and believing that you will learn anything useful about lust and desire, recklessness and helplessness, or how to slow down the transmission of AIDS. Only by concocting such a thin model of humanity−no more than the economists’ utility curve−and neglecting any complexities of social interactions that could not be conveyed through prices, could the appearance of rationalization be maintained. Like bureaucratic rationalization, perfect-market rationalization also had successes. But, like its predecessor, its limits as an approach to human systems design are becoming cleare Work, Trust and Play Pricing perfectly requires perfect information. And perfect information, while always an illusion, has become an ever receding dream in a world of constant, rapid change and complex global interactions. What we are seeing instead is the rise of human systems that increasingly shy away from either control or perfect pricing. Not that there isn’t control. Not that there aren’t markets. And not that either of these approaches to coordinating human action will disappear. But these managed systems are becoming increasingly interlaced with looser structures, which invite and enable more engaged human action by drawing on intrinsic motivations and social relations. Dress codes and a culture of play in the workplace in Silicon Valley, like the one day per week that Google employees can use to play at whatever ideas they like, do not exist to make the most innovative region in the United States a Ludic paradise, gratifying employees at the expense of productivity, but rather to engage the human and social in the pursuit of what is, in the long term, the only core business competency−innovation. Wikipedia has eclipsed all the commercial encyclopedias except Britannica not by issuing a large IPO and hiring the smartest guys in the room, but by building an open and inviting system that lets people learn together and pursue their passion for knowledge, and each other’s company. The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex, unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust, cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail, maneuver, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning, or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution. Consider first of all the triumph of Toyota over the programs of Taylor and Ford. Taylorism was typified by the ambition to measure and specify all human and material elements of the production system. The ambition of scientific management was to offer a single, integrated system where all human variance (the source of slothful shirking and inept error) could be isolated and controlled. Fordism took that ambition and embedded the managerial knowledge in the technological platform of the assembly line, guided by a multitude of rigid task specifications and routines. Toyota Production System, by comparison, has a substantially smaller number of roles that are also more loosely defined, with a reliance on small teams where each team member can perform all tasks, and who are encouraged to experiment, improve, fail, adapt, but above all communicate. The system is built on trust and a cooperative dynamic. The enterprise functions through a managerial control system, but also through social cooperation mechanisms built around teamwork and trust. However, even Toyota might be bested in this respect by the even more loosely coupled networks of innovation and supply represented by Taiwanese original-design manufacturers. But let us also consider the system in question that has made this work possible, the Internet, and compare it to the design principles of the AT&T network in its heyday. Unlike the Internet, AT&T’s network was fully managed. Mid-century, the company even retained ownership of the phones at the endpoints, arguing that it needed to prohibit customers from connecting unlicensed phones to the system (ostensibly to ensure proper functioning of the networking and monitoring of customer behavior, although it didn’t hurt either that this policy effectively excluded competitors). This generated profit, but any substantial technical innovations required the approval of management and a re-engineering of the entire network. The Internet, on the other hand, was designed to be as general as possible. The network hardware merely delivers packets of data using standardized addressing information. The hard processing work−manipulating a humanly-meaningful communication (a letter or a song, a video or a software package) and breaking it up into a stream of packets−was to be done by its edge devices, in this case computers owned by users. This system allowed the breathtaking rate of innovation that we have seen, while also creating certain vulnerabilities in online security. These vulnerabilities have led some to argue that a new system to manage the Internet is needed. We see first of all that doubts about trust and security on the Internet arise precisely because the network was originally designed for people who could more-or-less trust each other, and offloaded security from the network to the edges. As the network grew and users diversified, trust (the practical belief that other human agents in the system were competent and benign, or at least sincere) declined. This decline was met with arguments in favor of building security into the technical system, both at its core, in the network elements themselves, and at its periphery, through “trusted computing.” A “trusted computer” will, for example, not run a program or document that its owner wants to run, unless it has received authorization from some other locus: be it the copyright owner, the virus protection company, or the employer. This is thought to be the most completely effective means of preventing copyright infringement or system failure, and preserving corporate security (these are the main reasons offered for implementing such systems). Trusted computing in this form is the ultimate reversal of the human-centric, loosely-coupled design approach of the Internet. Instead of locating authority and capacity to act at the endpoints, where human beings are located and can make decisions about what is worthwhile, it implements the belief that machines−technical systems−are trustworthy, while their human users are malevolent, incompetent, or both. Reintroducing the Human Taylorism, the Bell system and trusted computing are all efforts to remove human agency from action and replace it with well-designed, tightly-bound systems. That is, the specifications and regularities of the system are such that they control or direct action and learning over time. Human agency, learning, communication and adaptation are minimized in managed systems, if not eliminated, and the knowledge in the system comes from the outside, from the designer, in the initial design over time, and through observation of the system’s performance by someone standing outside its constraints−a manager or systems designer. By contrast, loosely-coupled systems affirmatively eschew this level of control, and build in room for human agency, experimentation, failure, communication, learning and adaptation. Loose-coupling is central to the new systems. It is a feature of system design that leaves room for human agency over time, only imperfectly constraining and enabling any given action by the system itself. By creating such domains of human agency, system designers are accepting the limitations of design and foresight, and building in the possibilities of learning over time through action in the system, by agents acting within To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments, experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality−our ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best. Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and social relations that make them.
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A. The controlling governments show the same inclination towards fully-specified systems
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Why does Baron think there was something wrong with Claney's filters?
A. Claney's face is extremely sunburned.
B. Claney's face is twisted and brown.
C. Claney's face is covered in scars.
D. Claney's face is covered in cancerous tumors.
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Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by eight.” Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.” Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.” “At perihelion?” “Of course. When else?” The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.” “Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded. “The name is Claney,” said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?” “That’s right.” Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man— where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!” “I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.” “Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.” “But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need details . Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—” “You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney. “Of course we want to know. We have to know.” “It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.” “Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.” Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.” “Never,” said Baron. “Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said. I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were. “No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?” He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?” I told him one-thirty-five. “That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?” “You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.” “No, I mean real heat.” Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.” “That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.” “What trip?” “Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said. I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?” He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. We dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?” “Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know. “He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.” I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?” “Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.” “Have you ever worked with him?” I asked. “No. Are you worried?” “Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.” The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.” Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. “This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.” Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.” The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—” It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago—but there was CO 2 , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. “And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.” Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?” “Of course.” Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.” Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?” “The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.” “How about the Bugs?” “They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.” “You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?” “We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.” Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. “Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?” “Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right. We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m getting to that.” He settled back in his chair and continued. We jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done—we would still have to travel another two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship, approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?” McIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.” The Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that, Jack?” Stone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—” McIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does it make any difference?” “I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank Peter along with me. Right?” “Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going to do the advance scouting?” “It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible.” Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels.” McIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?” He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?” “That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said sharply. “Charts! I’m talking about detail work. We don’t need to worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then—” “No dice,” the Major broke in. “But why not? We could save ourselves days!” “I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone—any time, any place.” McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.” “Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff. We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?” McIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. “All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight, let’s go.” It was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first twenty miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn’t feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down sixty or seventy degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge—sucking through tubes—protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we’d have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why—they can give you have a dozen interesting reasons—but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn’t sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn’t sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. After a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn’t detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust—silicates and salts, pumice and limestone and granite ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug’s pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. McIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds.... We found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. On the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking much about the others. I was worried about me , plenty worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me. It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet.
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D. Claney's face is covered in cancerous tumors.
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Is growth in JnJ's adjusted EPS expected to accelerate in FY2023?
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Evidence 0:
2022 Fourth-Quarter reported sales decline of 4.4% to $23.7 Billion primarily driven by unfavorable
foreign exchange and reduced COVID-19 Vaccine sales vs. prior year. Operational growth excluding
COVID-19 Vaccine of 4.6%*
2022 Fourth-Quarter earnings per share (EPS) of $1.33 decreasing 24.9% and adjusted EPS of $2.35
increasing by 10.3%*
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2022 Full-Year reported sales growth of 1.3% to $94.9 Billion primarily driven by strong commercial
execution partially offset by unfavorable foreign exchange. Operational growth of 6.1%*
2022 Full-Year earnings per share (EPS) of $6.73 decreasing 13.8% and adjusted EPS of $10.15
increasing by 3.6%*
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Company guides 2023 adjusted operational sales growth excluding COVID-19 Vaccine of 4.0%* and
adjusted operational EPS of $10.50, reflecting growth of 3.5%*
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No, rate of growth in adjusted EPS is expected to decelerate slightly from 3.6% in FY2022 to 3.5% in FY2023.
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How was Gunther defeated?
A. Click and Irish tricked him and his pirate guards.
B. He had a heart attack.
C. He surrendered.
D. The U.S. Cavalry swarmed his base.
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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!"
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A. Click and Irish tricked him and his pirate guards.
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Why did Alis tell Don that he should order his eggs scrambled for breakfast the next morning?
A. It was difficult for him to cut them with the briefcase handcuffed to himself.
B. They were better cooked that way in the cafeteria.
C. Because there were more available scrambled.
D. Because they were not cooked in water when they were scrambled.
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And Then the Town Took Off by RICHARD WILSON ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N.Y. AND THEN THE TOWN TOOK OFF Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved For Felicitas K. Wilson THE SIOUX SPACEMAN Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc. Printed in U.S.A. THE CITY THAT RAN OFF THE MAP The town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name! In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth! Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local townspeople, a crackpot professor. But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his days on the smallest—and the nuttiest—planet in the galaxy! I The town of Superior, Ohio, disappeared on the night of October 31. A truck driver named Pierce Knaubloch was the first to report it. He had been highballing west along Route 202, making up for the time he'd spent over a second cup of coffee in a diner, when he screeched to a stop. If he'd gone another twenty-five feet he'd have gone into the pit where Superior had been. Knaubloch couldn't see the extent of the pit because it was too dark, but it looked big. Bigger than if a nitro truck had blown up, which was his first thought. He backed up two hundred feet, set out flares, then sped off to a telephone. The state police converged on the former site of Superior from several directions. Communicating by radiophone across the vast pit, they confirmed that the town undoubtedly was missing. They put in a call to the National Guard. The guard surrounded the area with troops—more than a thousand were needed—to keep people from falling into the pit. A pilot who flew over it reported that it looked as if a great ice-cream scoop had bitten into the Ohio countryside. The Pennsylvania Railroad complained that one of its passenger trains was missing. The train's schedule called for it to pass through but not stop at Superior at 11:58. That seemed to fix the time of the disappearance at midnight. The truck driver had made his discovery shortly after midnight. Someone pointed out that October 31 was Halloween and that midnight was the witching hour. Somebody else said nonsense, they'd better check for radiation. A civil defense official brought up a Geiger counter, but no matter how he shook it and rapped on it, it refused to click. A National Guard officer volunteered to take a jeep down into the pit, having found a spot that seemed navigable. He was gone a long time but when he came out the other side he reported that the pit was concave, relatively smooth, and did not smell of high explosives. He'd found no people, no houses—no sign of anything except the pit itself. The Governor of Ohio asked Washington whether any unidentified planes had been over the state. Washington said no. The Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission denied that they had been conducting secret experiments. Nor had there been any defense plants in Superior that might have blown up. The town's biggest factory made kitchen sinks and the next biggest made bubble gum. A United Airlines pilot found Superior early on the morning of November 1. The pilot, Captain Eric Studley, who had never seen a flying saucer and hoped never to see one, was afraid now that he had. The object loomed out of a cloudbank at twelve thousand feet and Studley changed course to avoid it. He noted with only minimum satisfaction that his co-pilot also saw the thing and wondered why it wasn't moving at the terrific speed flying saucers were allegedly capable of. Then he saw the church steeple on it. A few minutes later he had relayed a message from Superior, formerly of Ohio, addressed to whom it might concern: It said that Superior had seceded from Earth. One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying plaintively: " Cold up here!" Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window, hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen hurried along the tracks. The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, "Why did we stop?" "Somebody flagged us down," the conductor said. "We don't make a station stop at Superior on this run." The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval. The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had given her. Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe that it was more than adequate. If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered, with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully. But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist. "Will we be here long?" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing. "Can't say," the conductor told him. He let the door close again and went down to the tracks. Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, "Excuse me," and followed the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher. Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even an old red shirt. Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat and riding boots. "You'd go over the edge, I tell you," the old gentleman was saying. "If you don't get this junk off the line," the engineer said, "I'll plow right through it. Off the edge! you crazy or something?" "Look for yourself," the old man in the white helmet said. "Go ahead. Look." The engineer was exasperated. He turned to the fireman. "You look. Humor the old man. Then let's go." The bearded man—he called himself Professor Garet—went off with the fireman. Don followed them. They had tramped a quarter of a mile along the gravel when the fireman stopped. "Okay," he said "where's the edge? I don't see nothing." The tracks seemed to stretch forever into the darkness. "It's another half mile or so," the professor said. "Well, let's hurry up. We haven't got all night." The old man chuckled. "I'm afraid you have." They came to it at last, stopping well back from it. Professor Garet swelled with pride, it seemed, as he made a theatrical gesture. "Behold," he said. "Something even Columbus couldn't find. The edge of the world." True, everything seemed to stop, and they could see stars shining low on the horizon where stars could not properly be expected to be seen. Don Cort and the fireman walked cautiously toward the edge while the professor ambled ahead with the familiarity of one who had been there before. But there was a wind and they did not venture too close. Nevertheless, Don could see that it apparently was a neat, sharp edge, not one of your old ragged, random edges such as might have been caused by an explosion. This one had the feeling of design behind it. Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio. Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding. "You see what I mean," he said. "You would have gone right over. I believe you would have had a two-mile fall." "Of course you could have stayed aboard the train," the man driving the old Pontiac said, "but I really think you'll be more comfortable at Cavalier." Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the club car, asked, "Cavalier?" "The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you say your name was, miss?" "Jen Jervis," she said. "Geneva Jervis, formally." "Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose." The girl smiled sideways. "We have a nodding acquaintance." Don nodded and grinned. "There's plenty of room in the dormitories," Civek said. "People don't exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier." "Are you connected with the college?" Don asked. "Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the world, hasn't it?" "Overnight," Geneva Jervis said. "If what Mr. Cort and the fireman say is true. I haven't seen the edge myself." "You'll have a better chance to look at it in the morning," the mayor said, "if we don't settle back in the meantime." "Was there any sort of explosion?" Don asked. "No. There wasn't any sensation at all, as far as I noticed. I was watching the late show—or trying to. My house is down in a hollow and reception isn't very good, especially with old English movies. Well, all of a sudden the picture sharpened up and I could see just as plain. Then the phone rang and it was Professor Garet." "The old fellow with the whiskers and the riding boots?" Jen Jervis asked. "Yes. Osbert Garet, Professor of Magnology at the Cavalier Institute of Applied Sciences." "Professor of what?" "Magnology. As I say, the school isn't accredited. Well, Professor Garet telephoned and said, 'Hector'—that's my name, Hector Civek—'everything's up in the air.' He was having his little joke, of course. I said, 'What?' and then he told me." "Told you what?" Jen Jervis asked. "I mean, does he have any theory about it?" "He has a theory about everything. I think what he was trying to convey was that this—this levitation confirmed his magnology principle." "What's that?" Don asked. "I haven't the faintest idea. I'm a politician, not a scientist. Professor Garet went on about it for a while, on the telephone, about magnetism and gravity, but I think he was only calling as a courtesy, so the mayor wouldn't look foolish the next morning, not knowing his town had flown the coop." "What's the population of Superior?" "Three thousand, including the students at the institute. Three thousand and forty, counting you people from the train. I guess you'll be with us for a while." "What do you mean by that?" Jen Jervis asked. "Well, I don't see how you can get down. Do you?" "Does Superior have an airport?" Don asked. "I've got to get back to—to Earth." It sounded odd to put it that way. "Nope," Civek said. "No airport. No place for a plane to land, either." "Maybe not a plane," Don said, "but a helicopter could land just about anywhere." "No helicopters here, either." "Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning." "Hm," said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the rearview mirror. "I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier. You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me." The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who was frowning. "Are you thinking," he asked, "that Mayor Civek was perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?" "I'm thinking," she said, "that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie another night, then taken a plane to Washington." "Washington?" Don said. "That's where I'm going. I mean where I was going before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington, Miss Jervis?" "I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?" "Not everybody. Me, for instance." "No?" she said. "Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State." He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably close. "Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?" "I'm with Senator Bobby Thebold, S.O.B." Don laughed again. "He sure is." " Mister Cort!" she said, annoyed. "You know as well as I do that S.O.B. stands for Senate Office Building. I'm his secretary." "I'm sorry. We'd better get out and find a place to sleep. It's getting late." " Places to sleep," she corrected. She looked angry. "Of course," Don said, puzzled by her emphasis. "Come on. Where they put you, you'll probably be surrounded by co-eds, even if I could get out of this cuff." He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. "We'll try to make you comfortable," she said. "What a night, eh? The professor is simply beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the cosmolineator blew up." They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white laboratory smock. II Don Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and did what little dressing was necessary. It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist, and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat building, and other people going in random directions. The first were students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct. Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of Superior were up in the air. He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below. The mess hall, or whatever they called it, was cafeteria style and he got in line with a tray for juice, eggs and coffee. He saw no one he knew, but as he was looking for a table a willowy blonde girl smiled and gestured to the empty place opposite her. "You're Mr. Cort," she said. "Won't you join me?" "Thanks," he said, unloading his tray. "How did you know?" "The mystery man with the handcuff. You'd be hard to miss. I'm Alis—that's A-l-i-s, not A-l-i-c-e—Garet. Are you with the FBI? Or did you escape from jail?" "How do you do. No, just a bank messenger. What an unusual name. Professor Garet's daughter?" "The same," she said. "Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is, I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory." "Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?" Don struggled to manipulate knife and fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case. "Here, let me cut your eggs for you," Alis said. "You'd better order them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and the latter-day alchemist." "I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out of here by then." "How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?" "I'll find a way. I'm more interested at the moment in how I got up here." "You were levitated, like everybody else." "You make it sound deliberate, Miss Garet, as if somebody hoisted a whole patch of real estate for some fell purpose." "Scarcely fell , Mr. Cort. As for it being deliberate, that seems to be a matter of opinion. Apparently you haven't seen the papers." "I didn't know there were any." "Actually there's only one, the Superior Sentry , a weekly. This is an extra. Ed Clark must have been up all night getting it out." She opened her purse and unfolded a four-page tabloid. Don blinked at the headline: Town Gets High "Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior," Alis said. Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an apparently grave situation. Residents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line. A Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on investigating.... Don skimmed the rest. "I don't see anything about it being deliberate." Alis had been creaming and sugaring Don's coffee. She pushed it across to him and said, "It's not on page one. Ed Clark and Mayor Civek don't get along, so you'll find the mayor's statement in a box on page three, bottom." Don creased the paper the other way, took a sip of coffee, nodded his thanks, and read: Mayor Claims Secession From Earth Mayor Hector Civek, in a proclamation issued locally by hand and dropped to the rest of the world in a plastic shatter-proof bottle, said today that Superior has seceded from Earth. His reasons were as vague as his explanation. The "reasons" include these: (1) Superior has been discriminated against by county, state and federal agencies; (2) Cavalier Institute has been held up to global derision by orthodox (presumably meaning accredited) colleges and universities; and (3) chicle exporters have conspired against the Superior Bubble Gum Company by unreasonably raising prices. The "explanation" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to set. Don said, "I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark." "He's a doll," Alis said. "He's about the only one in town who stands up to Father." "Does your father claim that he levitated Superior off the face of the Earth?" "Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them, being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually ever since." "How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?" She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt, emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was. "You may call me Alis," she said. "And I'm nineteen." Don grinned. "Going on?" "Three months past. How old are you , Mr. Cort?" "Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it." "Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go with you to the end of the world." "On such short notice?" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely. "I'll admit to the double entendre ," Alis said. "What I meant—for now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us." "Delighted. But don't you have any classes?" "Sure I do. Non-Einsteinian Relativity 1, at nine o'clock. But I'm a demon class-cutter, which is why I'm still a Senior at my advanced age. On to the brink!" They walked south from the campus and came to the railroad track. The train was standing there with nowhere to go. It had been abandoned except for the conductor, who had dutifully spent the night aboard. "What's happening?" he asked when he saw them. "Any word from down there?" "Not that I know of," Don said. He introduced him to Alis Garet. "What are you going to do?" "What can I do?" the conductor asked. "You can go over to Cavalier and have breakfast," Alis said. "Nobody's going to steal your old train." The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did. "You know," Don said, "I was half-asleep last night but before the train stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while." "South Creek," Alis said. "That's right. It's just over there." "Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that Superior's water supply?" Alis shrugged. "All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water. Let's go look at the creek." They found it coursing along between the banks. "Looks just about the same," she said. "That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge." The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight. Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees, with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended. "Where is the water going?" Don asked. "I can't make it out." "Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people." "I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look." "Don't! You'll fall off!" "I'll be careful." He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down. "Chicken," said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too. "I still can't see where the water goes," Don said. He stretched out on his stomach and began to inch forward. "You stay there." Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there, panting, head pressed to the ground. "How do you feel?" Alis asked. "Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look." Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his ankle and held it tight. "Just in case a high wind comes along," she said. "Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go." He lifted his head. "Damn." "What?" "It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?" "I have a compact." She took it out of her bag with her free hand and tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved and had to put his head back on the ground. "Sorry," she said. Don opened the compact and carefully transferred it to his right hand. He held it out beyond the edge and peered into it, focusing it on the end of the creek. "Now I've got it. The water isn't going off the edge!" "It isn't? Then where is it going?" "Down, of course, but it's as if it's going into a well, or a vertical tunnel, just short of the edge." "Why? How?" "I can't see too well, but that's my impression. Hold on now. I'm coming back." He inched away from the edge, then got up and brushed himself off. He returned her compact. "I guess you know where we go next." "The other end of the creek?" "Exactly." South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again. But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. "This is new," Alis said. The fence, which had a sign on it, warning—electrified , was semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under the tarp and fence. "Look how it comes in spurts," Alis said. "As if it's being pumped." Smaller print on the sign said: Protecting mouth of South Creek, one of two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is sufficient to kill. It was signed: Vincent Grande, Chief of Police, Hector Civek, Mayor . "What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?" Don asked. "North Lake, maybe," Alis said. "People fish there but nobody's allowed to swim." "Is the lake entirely within the town limits?" "I don't know." "If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder what would happen?" "I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you found out." She took his arm as they gazed past the electrified fence at the Earth below and to the west. "It's impressive, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder if that's Indiana way over there?" He patted her hand absent-mindedly. "I wonder if it's west at all. I mean, how do we know Superior is maintaining the same position up here as it used to down there?" "We could tell by the sun, silly." "Of course," he said, grinning at his stupidity. "And I guess we're not high enough to see very far. If we were we'd be able to see the Great Lakes—or Lake Erie, anyway." They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was gone. "Well," Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, "now we know that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not answers, then transportation." "Transportation?" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. "Why? Don't you like it here?" "If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into clean clothes, you're not going to like me." "You're still quite acceptable, if a bit whiskery." She stopped, still holding his arm, and he turned so they were face to face. "So kiss me," she said, "before you deteriorate." They were in the midst of an extremely pleasant kiss when the brief case at the end of Don's handcuff began to talk to him.
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A. It was difficult for him to cut them with the briefcase handcuffed to himself.
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What is now a similar experience to what was once normal for shipping centers?
A. The Cross-Canada Throughway
B. Traveling ashore to Newport
C. Traveling to the Oklahoma Oil Company
D. Traveling through the fringe of Kansas
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THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!
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A. The Cross-Canada Throughway
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What are the differences in the use of emojis between gang member and the rest of the Twitter population?
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### Introduction and Motivation
The crime and violence street gangs introduce into neighborhoods is a growing epidemic in cities around the world. Today, over 1.23 million people in the United States are members of a street gang BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , which is a coalition of peers, united by mutual interests, with identifiable leadership and internal organization, who act collectively to conduct illegal activity and to control a territory, facility, or enterprise BIBREF2 . They promote criminal activities such as drug trafficking, assault, robbery, and threatening or intimidating a neighborhood BIBREF1 . Moreover, data from the Centers for Disease Control in the United States suggests that the victims of at least 1.3% of all gang-related homicides are merely innocent bystanders who live in gang occupied neighborhoods BIBREF3 . Street gang members have established online presences coinciding with their physical occupation of neighborhoods. The National Gang Threat Assessment Report confirms that at least tens of thousands of gang members are using social networking websites such as Twitter and video sharing websites such as YouTube in their daily life BIBREF0 . They are very active online; the 2007 National Assessment Center's survey of gang members found that 25% of individuals in gangs use the Internet for at least 4 hours a week BIBREF4 . Gang members typically use social networking sites and social media to develop online respect for their street gang BIBREF5 and to post intimidating, threatening images or videos BIBREF6 . This “Cyber-” or “Internet banging” BIBREF7 behavior is precipitated by the fact that an increasing number of young members of the society are joining gangs BIBREF8 , and these young members have become enamored with technology and with the notion of sharing information quickly and publicly through social media. Stronger police surveillance in the physical spaces where gangs congregate further encourages gang members to seek out virtual spaces such as social media to express their affiliation, to sell drugs, and to celebrate their illegal activities BIBREF9 . Gang members are able to post publicly on Twitter without fear of consequences because there are few tools law enforcement can use to surveil this medium BIBREF10 . Police departments across the United States instead rely on manual processes to search social media for gang member profiles and to study their posts. For example, the New York City police department employs over 300 detectives to combat teen violence triggered by insults, dares, and threats exchanged on social media, and the Toronto police department teaches officers about the use of social media in investigations BIBREF11 . Officer training is broadly limited to understanding policies on using Twitter in investigations and best practices for data storage BIBREF12 . The safety and security of city neighborhoods can thus be improved if law enforcement were equipped with intelligent tools to study social media for gang activity. The need for better tools for law enforcement cannot be underscored enough. Recent news reports have shown that many incidents involving gangs start on Twitter, escalate over time, and lead to an offline event that could have been prevented by an early warning. For example, the media reported on a possible connection between the death of a teenage rapper from Illinois and the final set of tweets he posted. One of his last tweets linked to a video of him shouting vulgar words at a rival gang member who, in return, replied “I'ma kill you” on social media. In a following tweet, the teenage rapper posted “im on 069”, revealing his location, and was shot dead soon after that post. Subsequent investigation revealed that the rivalry leading to his death began and was carried out entirely on social media. Other reporting has revealed how innocent bystanders have also become targets in online fights, leaving everyone in a neighborhood at risk. This paper investigates whether gang member profiles can be identified automatically on Twitter, which can enable better surveillance of gang members on social media. Classifying Twitter profiles into particular types of users has been done in other contexts BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , but gang member profiles pose unique challenges. For example, many Twitter profile classifiers search for contextual clues in tweets and profile descriptions BIBREF16 , but gang member profiles use a rapidly changing lexicon of keywords and phrases that often have only a local, geographic context. This is illustrated in Figure FIGREF6 , which shows the Twitter profile descriptions of two verified deceased gang members. The profile of @OsoArrogantJoJo provides evidence that he belongs to a rival gang of the Black Disciples by #BDK, a hashtag that is only known to those involved with gang culture in Chicago. @PappyNotPapi's profile mentions #PBG and our investigations revealed that this hashtag is newly founded and stands for the Pooh Bear Gang, a gang that was formerly known as the Insane Cutthroat Gangsters. Given the very local, rapidly changing lexicon of gang members on social media, building a database of keywords, phrases, and other identifiers to find gang members nationally is not feasible. Instead, this study proposes heterogeneous sets of features derived not only from profile and tweet text but also from the emoji usage, profile images, and links to YouTube videos reflecting their music culture. A large set of gang member profiles, obtained through a careful data collection process, is compared against non-gang member profiles to find contrasting features. Experimental results show that using these sets of features, we can build a classifier that has a low false positive rate and a promising INLINEFORM0 -score of 0.7755. This paper is organized as follows. Section SECREF2 discusses the related literature and positions how this work differs from other related works. Section SECREF3 discusses the data collection, manual feature selection and our approach to identify gang member profiles. Section SECREF4 gives a detailed explanation for evaluation of the proposed method and the results in detail. Section SECREF5 concludes the work reported while discussing the future work planned. ### Related Work
Gang violence is a well studied social science topic dating back to 1927 BIBREF17 . However, the notions of “Cyber-” or “Internet banging”, which is defined as “the phenomenon of gang affiliates using social media sites to trade insults or make violent threats that lead to homicide or victimization” BIBREF7 , was only recently introduced BIBREF18 , BIBREF10 . Patton et al. introduced the concept of “Internet banging” and studied how social media is now being used as a tool for gang self-promotion and as a way for gang members to gain and maintain street credibility BIBREF7 . They also discussed the relationship between gang-related crime and hip-hop culture, giving examples on how hip-hop music shared on social media websites targeted at harassing rival gang members often ended up in real-world collisions among those gangs. Decker et al. and Patton et al. have also reported that street gangs perform Internet banging with social media posts of videos depicting their illegal behaviors, threats to rival gangs, and firearms BIBREF19 , BIBREF20 . The ability to take action on these discoveries is limited by the tools available to discover gang members on social media and to analyze the content they post BIBREF18 . Recent attempts to improve our abilities include a proposed architecture for a surveillance system that can learn the structure, function, and operation of gangs through what they post on social media BIBREF10 . However, the architecture requires a set of gang member profiles for input, thus assuming that they have already been discovered. Patton et al. BIBREF20 devised a method to automatically collect tweets from a group of gang members operating in Detroit, MI. However, their approach required the profile names of the gang members to be known beforehand, and data collection was localized to a single city in the country. This work builds upon existing methods to automatically discover gang member profiles on Twitter. This type of user profile classification problem has been explored in a diverse set of applications such as political affiliation BIBREF13 , ethnicity BIBREF13 , gender BIBREF15 , predicting brand loyalty BIBREF13 , and user occupations BIBREF16 . However, these approaches may utilize an abundance of positive examples in their training data, and only rely on a single feature type (typically, tweet text). Whereas most profile classifiers focus on a single type of feature (e.g. profile text), we consider the use of a variety of feature types, including emoji, YouTube links, and photo features. ### Discovering Gang Member Profiles
This section discusses the methodology we followed to study and classify the Twitter profiles of gang members automatically. It includes a semi-automatic data collection process to discover a large set of verifiable gang member profiles, an evaluation of the tweets of gang and non-gang member posts to identify promising features, and the deployment of multiple supervised learning algorithms to perform the classification. ### Data collection
Discovering gang member profiles on Twitter to build training and testing datasets is a challenging task. Past strategies to find these profiles were to search for keywords, phrases, and events that are known to be related to gang activity in a particular city a priori BIBREF10 , BIBREF20 . However, such approaches are unlikely to yield adequate data to train an automatic classifier since gang members from different geographic locations and cultures use local languages, location-specific hashtags, and share information related to activities in a local region BIBREF10 . Such region-specific tweets and profiles may be used to train a classifier to find gang members within a small region but not across the Twitterverse. To overcome these limitations, we adopted a semi-automatic workflow, illustrated in Figure FIGREF7 , to build a dataset of gang member profiles suitable for training a classifier. The steps of the workflow are: 1. Seed Term Discovery: Following the success of identifying gang member profiles from Chicago BIBREF10 , we began our data collection with discovering universal terms used by gang members. We first searched for profiles with hashtags for Chicago gangs noted in BIBREF10 , namely #BDK (Black Disciple Killers) and #GDK (Gangster Disciples Killers). Those profiles were analyzed and manually verified as explained in Step 3. Analysis of these profiles identified a small set of hashtags they all use in their profile descriptions. Searching Twitter profiles using those hashtags, we observed that gang members across the U.S. use them, thus we consider those terms to be location neutral. For example, gang members post #FreeDaGuys in their profile to support their fellow members who are in jail, #RIPDaGuys to convey the grieving for fallen gang members, and #FuckDaOpps to show their hatred towards police officers. We used these terms as keywords to discover Twitter profiles irrespective of geographical location. We used the Followerwonk Web service API and Twitter REST API to search Twitter profile descriptions by keywords #FreeDaGuys, #FreeMyNigga, #RIPDaGuys, and #FuckDaOpps. Since there are different informal ways people spell a word in social media, we also considered variations on the spelling of each keyword; for example, for #FreeDaGuys, we searched both #FreeDaGuys, and #FreeTheGuys. 2. Gang Affiliated Rappers' Twitter Profile Discovery: Finding profiles by a small set of keywords is unlikely to yield sufficient data. Thus, we sought additional gang member profiles with an observation from Patton et al. BIBREF7 that the influence of hip-hop music and culture on offline gang member activities can also be seen in their social media posts. We thus also consider the influence of hip-hop culture on Twitter by exploring the Twitter network of known gangster rappers who were murdered in 2015 due to gang-related incidents. We searched for these rapper profiles on Twitter and manually checked that the rapper was affiliated to a gang. 3. Manual verification of Twitter profiles: We verified each profile discovered manually by examining the profile picture, profile background image, recent tweets, and recent pictures posted by a user. During these checks, we searched for terms, activities, and symbols that we believed could be associated with a gang. For example, profiles whose image or background included guns in a threatening way, stacks of money, showing gang hand signs and gestures, and humans holding or posing with a gun, appeared likely to be from a gang member. Such images were often identified in profiles of users who submitted tweets that contain messages of support or sadness for prisoners or recently fallen gang members, or used a high volume of threatening and intimidating slang language. Only profiles where the images, words, and tweets all suggested gang affiliation were labeled as gang affiliates and added to our dataset. Although this manual verification does have a degree of subjectivity, in practice, the images and words used by gang members on social media are so pronounced that we believe any reasonable analyst would agree that they are gang members. We found that not all the profiles collected belonged to gang members; we observed relatives and followers of gang members posting the same hashtags as in Step 1 to convey similar feelings in their profile descriptions. 4. Using Retweets to discover more profiles: From the set of verified profiles, we explored their retweet and follower networks as a way to expand the dataset. We first considered authors of tweets which were retweeted by a gang member in our seed set. In Twitter, “retweeting” is a mechanism by which a user can share someone else's tweet to their follower audience. Assuming that a user only retweets things that they believe or their audience would be interested in, it may be reasonable to assume that gang members would only be interested in sharing what other gang members have to say, and hence, the authors of gang members' retweets could also be gang members. 5. Using Followers and Followees to discover more profiles: We analyzed followers and followees of our seed gang member profiles to find more gang member profiles. A Twitter user can follow other Twitter users so that the individual will be subscribed to their tweets as a follower and they will be able to start a private conversation by sending direct messages to the individual. Motivated by the sociological concept of homophily, which claims that individuals have a tendency to associate and bond with similar others, we hypothesized that the followers and followees of Twitter profiles from the seed set may also be gang members. Manual verification of Twitter profiles collected from retweets, followers, and followees of gang members showed that a majority of those profiles are non-gang members who are either family members, hip-hop artists, women or profiles with pornographic content. To ensure that our dataset is not biased towards a specific gang or geographic location, only a limited number of profiles were collected via retweets, followers and followees. Table TABREF8 summarizes the number of profiles manually verified as gang members from Twitter profiles collected in step 1, 2, 4 and 5. Altogether we collected 400 gang member's Twitter profiles. This is a large number compared to previous studies of gang member activities on social media that curated a maximum of 91 profiles BIBREF10 . Moreover, we believe the profiles collected represent a diverse set of gang members that are not biased toward a particular geographic area or lingo as our data collection process used location-independent terms proven to be used by gang members when they express themselves. ### Data analysis
We next explore differences between gang and non-gang member Twitter usage to find promising features for classifying profiles. For this purpose, profiles of non-gang members were collected from the Twitter Streaming API. We collected a random sample of tweets and the profiles of the users who authored the tweets in the random sample. We manually verified that all Twitter profiles collected in this approach belong to non-gang members. The profiles selected were then filtered by location to remove non-U.S. profiles by reverse geo-coding the location stated in their profile description by the Google Maps API. Profiles with location descriptions that were unspecified or did not relate to a location in the U.S. were discarded. We collected 2,000 non-gang member profiles in this manner. In addition, we added 865 manually verified non-gang member profiles collected using the location neutral keywords discussed in Section SECREF3 . Introducing these profiles, which have some characteristics of gang members (such as cursing frequently or cursing at law enforcement) but are not, captures local languages used by family/friends of gang members and ordinary people in a neighborhood where gangs operate. With the Twitter REST API, we collected the maximum number of most recent tweets that can be retrieved (3,200) along with profile descriptions and images (profile and cover photos) of every gang and non-gang member profile. The resulting dataset consists of 400 gang member Twitter profiles and 2,865 non-gang member Twitter profiles. The dataset has a total of 821,412 tweets from gang member profiles and 7,238,758 tweets from non-gang member profiles. Prior to analyzing any text content, we removed all of the seed words used to find gang member profiles, all stop words, and performed stemming across all tweets and profile descriptions. Figure FIGREF14 summarizes the words seen most often in the gang and non-gang members' tweets as clouds. They show a clear difference in language. For example, we note that gang members more frequently use curse words in comparison to ordinary users. Although cursing is frequent in tweets, they represent just 1.15% of all words used BIBREF21 . In contrast, we found 5.72% of all words posted by gang member accounts to be classified as a curse word, which is nearly five times more than the average curse word usage on Twitter. The clouds also reflect the fact that gang members often talk about drugs and money with terms such as smoke, high, hit, and money, while ordinary users hardly speak about finances and drugs. We also noticed that gang members talk about material things with terms such as got, money, make, real, need whereas ordinary users tend to vocalize their feelings with terms such as new, like, love, know, want, look, make, us. These differences make it clear that the individual words used by gang and non-gang members will be relevant features for gang profile classification. On Twitter, a user can give a self-description as a part of the user's profile. A comparison of the top 10 words in gang members' and non-gang members' Twitter profile descriptions is shown in Figure FIGREF21 . The first 10 words are the most frequently used words in non-gang members' profiles and the latter 10 words are the most frequently used words in gang members' profiles. Word comparison shows that gang members prefer to use curse words (nigga, fuck, shit) in their profile descriptions while non-gang members use words related to their feelings or interests (love, life, live, music, book). The terms rip and free which appear in approximately INLINEFORM0 of all gang member Twitter profiles, suggest that gang members use their profile descriptions as a space to grieve for their fallen or incarcerated gang members. The term gang in gang members' profile descriptions suggest that gang members like to self-identify themselves on Twitter. Such lexical features may therefore be of great importance for automatically identifying gang member profiles. We take counts of unigrams from gang and non-gang members' Twitter profile descriptions as classification features. It has been recognized that music is a key cultural component in an urban lifestyle and that gang members often want to emulate the scenarios and activities the music conveys BIBREF7 . Our analysis confirms that the influence of gangster rap is expressed in gang members' Twitter posts. We found that 51.25% of the gang members collected have a tweet that links to a YouTube video. Following these links, a simple keyword search for the terms gangsta and hip-hop in the YouTube video description found that 76.58% of the shared links are related to hip-hop music, gangster rap, and the culture that surrounds this music genre. Moreover, this high proportion is not driven by a small number of profiles that prolifically share YouTube links; eight YouTube links are shared on average by a gang member. Recognizing the frequency with which gang members post YouTube links on gangster rap and hip-hop, we consider the YouTube videos posted in a user's tweets as features for the classifier. In particular, for each YouTube video tweeted, we used the YouTube API to retrieve the video's description and its comments. Further analysis of YouTube data showed a difference between terms in gang members' YouTube data and non-gang members' YouTube data. For example, the top 5 terms (after stemming and stop word removal) used in YouTube videos shared by gang members are shit, like, nigga, fuck, lil while like, love, peopl, song, get are the top 5 terms in non-gang member video data. To represent a user profile based on their music interests, we generated a bag of words from the video descriptions and comments from all shared videos. Motivated by recent work involving the use of emojis by gang members BIBREF22 , we also studied if and how gang and non-gang members use emoji symbols in their tweets. Our analysis found that gang members have a penchant for using just a small set of emoji symbols that convey their anger and violent behavior through their tweets. Figure FIGREF24 illustrates the emoji distribution for the top 20 most frequent emojis used by gang member profiles in our dataset. The fuel pump emoji was the most frequently used emoji by the gang members, which is often used in the context of selling or consuming marijuana. The pistol emoji is the second most frequent in our dataset, which is often used with the guardsman emoji or the police cop emoji in an `emoji chain'. Figure FIGREF28 presents some prototypical `chaining' of emojis used by gang members. The chains may reflect their anger at law enforcement officers, as a cop emoji is often followed up with the emoji of a weapon, bomb, or explosion. We found that 32.25% of gang members in our dataset have chained together the police and the pistol emoji, compared to just 1.14% of non-gang members. Moreover, only 1.71% of non-gang members have used the hundred points emoji and pistol emoji together in tweets while 53% of gang members have used them. A variety of the angry face emoji such as devil face emoji and imp emoji were also common in gang member tweets. The frequency of each emoji symbol used across the set of user's tweets are thus considered as features for our classifier. In our profile verification process, we observed that most gang member profiles portray a context representative of gang culture. Some examples of these profile pictures are shown in Figure FIGREF32 , where the user holds or points weapons, is seen in a group fashion which displays a gangster culture, or is showing off graffiti, hand signs, tattoos and bulk cash. Descriptions of these images may thus empower our classifier. Thus, we translated profile images into features with the Clarifai web service. Clarifai offers a free API to query a deep learning system that tags images with a set of scored keywords that reflect what is seen in the image. We tagged the profile image and cover image for each profile using 20 tags identified by Clarifai. Figure FIGREF36 offers the 20 most often used tags applied to gang and non-gang member profiles. Since we take all the tags returned for an image, we see common words such as people and adult coming up in the top 20 tag set. However, gang member profile images were assigned unique tags such as trigger, bullet, worship while non-gang images were uniquely tagged with beach, seashore, dawn, wildlife, sand, pet. The set of tags returned by Clarifai were thus considered as features for the classifier. ### Learning algorithms
The unigrams of tweets, profile text, and linked YouTube video descriptions and comments, along with the distribution of emoji symbols and the profile image tags were used to train four different classification models: a Naive Bayes net, a Logistic Regression, a Random Forest, and a Support Vector Machine (SVM). These four models were chosen because they are known to perform well over text features, which is the dominant type of feature considered. The performance of the models are empirically compared to determine the most suitable classification technique for this problem. Data for the models are represented as a vector of term frequencies where the terms were collected from one or more feature sets described above. ### Evaluation
We next evaluate the performance of classifiers that use the above features to discover gang member profiles on Twitter. For this purpose, we use the training set discussed in Section SECREF3 with 400 gang member profiles (the `positive'/`gang' class) and 2,865 non-gang member profiles (the `negative'/`non-gang' class). We trained and evaluated the performance of the classifiers mentioned in Section SECREF31 under a 10-fold cross validation scheme. For each of the four learning algorithms, we consider variations involving only tweet text, emoji, profile, image, or music interest (YouTube comments and video description) features, and a final variant that considers all types of features together. The classifiers that use a single feature type were intended to help us study the quality of their predictive power by itself. When building these single-feature classifiers, we filtered the training dataset based on the availability of the single feature type in the training data. For example, we only used the twitter profiles that had at least a single emoji in their tweets to train classifiers that consider emoji features. We found 3,085 such profiles out of the 3,265 profiles in the training set. When all feature types were considered, we developed two different models: Because a Twitter profile may not have every feature type, Model(1) represents a practical scenario where not every Twitter profile contains every type of feature. In this model, the non-occurrence of a feature is represented by `zeroing out' the feature value during model training. Model(2) represents the ideal scenario where all profiles contain every feature type. For this model, we used 1,358 training instances (42% of all training instances), out of which 172 were gang members (43% of all gang members) and 1,186 were non-gang members (41% of all non-gang members). We used version 0.17.1 of scikit-learn machine learning library to implement the classifiers. For each 10-fold cross validation experiment, we report three evaluation metrics for the `gang' and `non-gang' classes, namely, the Precision = INLINEFORM0 , Recall = INLINEFORM1 , and INLINEFORM2 -score = INLINEFORM3 , where INLINEFORM4 is the number of true positives, INLINEFORM5 is the number of false positives, INLINEFORM6 is the number of true negatives, and INLINEFORM7 is the number of false negatives. We report these metrics for the positive `gang' and negative `non-gang' classes separately because of class imbalance in our dataset. ### Experimental results
Table TABREF37 presents the average precision, recall, and INLINEFORM0 -score over the 10 folds for the single-feature and combined feature classifiers. The table includes, in braces (`{ }'), the number of gang and non-gang profiles that contain a particular feature type, and hence the number of profiles used for the 10-fold cross validation. It is reasonable to expect that any Twitter profile is not that of a gang member, predicting a Twitter user as a non-gang member is much easier than predicting a Twitter user as a gang member. Moreover false positive classifications of the `gang' class may be detrimental to law enforcement investigations, which may go awry as they surveil an innocent person based on the classifier's suggestion. We thus believe that a small false positive rate of the `gang' class to be an especially important evaluation metric. We say that a classifier is `ideal' if it demonstrates high precision, recall, and INLINEFORM1 -score for the `gang' class while performing well on the `non-gang' class as well. The best performing classifier that considers single features is a Random Forest model over tweet features (T), with a reasonable INLINEFORM0 -score of 0.7229 for the `gang' class. It also features the highest INLINEFORM1 -score for the `non-gang' class (0.9671). Its strong performance is intuitive given the striking differences in language as shown in Figure FIGREF14 and discussed in Section UID22 . We also noted that music features offer promising results, with an INLINEFORM2 -score of 0.6505 with a Naive Bayes classifier, as well as emoji features with an INLINEFORM3 -score of 0.6067 also achieved by a Naive Bayes classifier. However, the use of profile data and image tags by themselves yield relatively poor INLINEFORM4 -scores no matter which classifier considered. There may be two reasons for this despite the differences we observed in Section SECREF17 . First, these two feature types did not generate a large number of specific features for learning. For example, descriptions are limited to just 160 characters per profile, leading to a limited number of unigrams (in our dataset, 10 on average) that can be used to train the classifiers. Second, the profile images were tagged by a third party Web service which is not specifically designed to identify gang hand signs, drugs and guns, which are often shared by gang members. This led to a small set of image tags in their profiles that were fairly generic, i.e., the image tags in Figure FIGREF36 such as `people', `man', and `adult'. Combining these diverse sets of features into a single classifier yields even better results. Our results for Model(1) show that the Random Forest achieves the highest INLINEFORM0 -scores for both `gang' (0.7364) and `non-gang' (0.9690) classes and yields the best precision of 0.8792, which corresponds to a low false positive rate when labeling a profile as a gang member. Despite the fact that it has lower positive recall compared to the second best performing classifier (a Random Forest trained over only tweet text features (T)), for this problem setting, we should be willing to increase the chance that a gang member will go unclassified if it means reducing the chance of applying a `gang' label to a non-gang member. When we tested Model(2), a Random Forrest classifier achieved an INLINEFORM1 -score of 0.7755 (improvement of 7.28% with respect to the best performing single feature type classifier (T)) for `gang' class with a precision of 0.8961 (improvement of 6.26% with respect to (T)) and a recall of 0.6994 (improvement of 9.26% with respect to (T)). Model(2) thus outperforms Model(1), and we expect its performance to improve with the availability of more training data with all feature types. px ### Evaluation Over Unseen Profiles
We also tested the trained classifiers using a set of Twitter profiles from a separate data collection process that may emulate the classifier's operation in a real-time setting. For this experiment, we captured real-time tweets from Los Angeles, CA and from ten South Side, Chicago neighborhoods that are known for gang-related activities BIBREF10 using the Twitter streaming API. We consider these areas with known gang presence on social media to ensure that some positive profiles would appear in our test set. We ultimately collected 24,162 Twitter profiles: 15,662 from Los Angeles, and 8,500 from Chicago. We populated data for each profile by using the 3,200 most recent tweets (the maximum that can be collected from Twitter's API) for each profile. Since the 24,162 profiles are far too many to label manually, we qualitatively study those profiles the classifier placed into the `gang' class. We used the training dataset to train our best performing random forest classifier (which use all feature types) and tested it on the test dataset. We then analyzed the Twitter profiles that our classifier labeled as belonging to the `gang' class. Each of those profiles had several features which overlap with gang members such as displaying hand signs and weapons in their profile images or in videos posted by them, gang names or gang-related hashtags in their profile descriptions, frequent use of curse words, and the use of terms such as “my homie" to refer to self-identified gang members. Representative tweets extracted from those profiles are depicted in Figure FIGREF41 . The most frequent words found in tweets from those profiles were shit, nigga, got, bitch, go, fuck etc. and their user profiles had terms such as free, artist, shit, fuck, freedagang, and ripthefallen. They had frequently used emojis such as face with tears of joy, hundred points symbol, fire, skull, money bag, and pistol. For some profiles, it was less obvious that the classifier correctly identified a gang member. Such profiles used the same emojis and curse words commonly found in gang members profiles, but their profile picture and tweet content was not indicative of a gang affiliation. In conclusion, we find that in a real-time-like setting, the classifier to be able to extract profiles with features that strongly suggest gang affiliation. Of course, these profiles demand further investigation and extensive evidence from other sources in order to draw a concrete conclusion, especially in the context of a law enforcement investigation. We refrain from reporting any profile names or specific details about the profiles labeled as a `gang' member to comply with the applicable IRB governing this human subject research. px ### Conclusion and Future Work
This paper presented an approach to address the problem of automatically identifying gang member profiles on Twitter. Despite the challenges in developing such automated systems, mainly due to difficulties in finding online gang member profiles for developing training datasets, we proposed an approach that uses features extracted from textual descriptions, emojis, images and videos shared on Twitter (textual features extracted from images, and videos). Exploratory analysis of these types of features revealed interesting, and sometimes striking differences in the ways gang and non-gang members use Twitter. Classifiers trained over features that highlight these differences, were evaluated under 10-fold cross validation. Our best classifier achieved a promising INLINEFORM0 -score of 0.7755 over the `gang' profiles when all types of features were considered. Future work will strengthen our training dataset by including more gang member Twitter profiles by searching for more location-independent keywords. We also plan to develop our own image classification system specifically designed to classify images found on gang member profiles. We would also like to experiment with building dictionaries that contain gang names to understand whether “having a gang name in the profile description” as a feature can improve our results. Finally, we would also like to study how can we further improve our classifier models using word embeddings BIBREF23 and social networks of known gang members. px ### Acknowledgement
We are thankful to Uday Kiran Yeda for helping us with data collection. We acknowledge partial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) award: CNS-1513721: “Context-Aware Harassment Detection on Social Media”, National Institutes of Health (NIH) award: MH105384-01A1: “Modeling Social Behavior for Healthcare Utilization in Depression” and Grant No. 2014-PS-PSN-00006 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Office. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice, NSF or NIH. px Fig. 1: Twitter profile descriptions of known gang members. Pursuant to an IRB governing human subject research, we are prohibited from revealing personally identifiable information in this paper. We only report Twitter handles that have already been revealed in widely reported publications and were not collected by the research team for this work. Fig. 2: Gang member dataset creation. TABLE I: Number of gang member profiles captured. Fig. 3: Comparison of words used in tweets. Fig. 4: Word usage in profile descriptions: gang vs non-gang. Fig. 6: Examples for gang members’ tweets with emojis. Fig. 5: Emoji usage distribution: gang vs non-gang. Fig. 7: Sample gang member profile images. Fig. 8: Image tags distribution: gang vs non-gang. TABLE II: Classification results based on 10-fold cross validation.
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32.25% of gang members in our dataset have chained together the police and the pistol emoji, compared to just 1.14% of non-gang members, only 1.71% of non-gang members have used the hundred points emoji and pistol emoji together in tweets while 53% of gang members have used them, gang members have a penchant for using just a small set of emoji symbols that convey their anger and violent behavior
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How better is proposed model compared to baselines?
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### Introduction
Slot Filling (SF) is the task of identifying the semantic concept expressed in natural language utterance. For instance, consider a request to edit an image expressed in natural language: “Remove the blue ball on the table and change the color of the wall to brown”. Here, the user asks for an "Action" (i.e., removing) on one “Object” (blue ball on the table) in the image and changing an “Attribute” (i.e., color) of the image to new “Value” (i.e., brown). Our goal in SF is to provide a sequence of labels for the given sentence to identify the semantic concept expressed in the given sentence. Prior work have shown that contextual information could be useful for SF. They utilize contextual information either in word level representation (i.e., via contextualize embedding e.g., BERT BIBREF0) or in the model computation graph (e.g., concatenating the context feature to the word feature BIBREF1). However, such methods fail to capture the explicit dependence between the context of the word and its label. Moreover, such limited use of contextual information (i.e., concatenation of the feature vector and context vector) in the model cannot model the interaction between the word representation and its context. In order to alleviate these issues, in this work, we propose a novel model to explicitly increase the predictability of the word label using its context and increasing the interactivity between word representations and its context. More specifically, in our model we use the context of the word to predict its label and by doing so our model learns label-aware context for each word in the sentence. In order to improve the interactivity between the word representation and its context, we increase the mutual information between the word representations and its context. In addition to these contributions, we also propose an auxiliary task to predict which labels are expressed in a given sentence. Our model is trained in a mutli-tasking framework. Our experiments on a SF dataset for identifying semantic concepts from natural language request to edit an image show the superiority of our model compared to previous baselines. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on the benchmark dataset by improving the F1 score by almost 2%, which corresponds to a 12.3% error rate reduction. ### Related Work
The task of Slot Filling is formulated as a sequence labeling problem. Deep learning has been extensively employed for this task (BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11). The prior work has mainly utilized the recurrent neural network as the encoder to extract features per word and Conditional Random Field (CRF) BIBREF12 as the decoder to generate the labels per word. Recently the work BIBREF1 shows that the global context of the sentence could be useful to enhance the performance of neural sequence labeling. In their approach, they use a separate sequential model to extract word features. Afterwards, using max pooling over the representations of the words, they obtain the sentence representations and concatenate it to the word embedding as the input to the main task encoder (i.e. the RNN model to perform sequence labeling). The benefit of using the global context along the word representation is 2-fold: 1) it enhance the representations of the word by the semantics of the entire sentence thus the word representation are more contextualized 2) The global view of the sentence would increase the model performance as it contains information about the entire sentence and this information might not be encoded in word representations due to long decencies. However, the simple concatenation of the global context and the word embeddings would not separately ensure these two benefits of the global context. In order to address this problem, we introduce a multi-task setting to separately ensure the aforementioned benefits of utilizing contextual information. In particular, to ensure the better contextualized representations of the words, the model is encourage to learn representations for the word which are consistent with its context. This is achieved via increasing the mutual information between the word representation and its context. To ensure the usefulness of the contextual information for the final task, we introduce two novel sub-tasks. The first one aims to employ the context of the word instead of the word representation to predict the label of the word. In the second sub-task, we use the global representation of the sentence to predict which labels exist in the given sentence in a multi-label classification setting. These two sub-tasks would encourage the contextual representations to be informative for both word level classification and sentence level classification. ### Model
Our model is trained in a multi-task setting in which the main task is slot filling to identify the best possible sequence of labels for the given sentence. In the first auxiliary task we aim to increase consistency between the word representation and its context. The second auxiliary task is to enhance task specific information in contextual information. In this section, we explain each of these tasks in more details. ### Model ::: Slot Filling
The input to the model is a sequence of words $x_1,x_2,...,x_N$. The goal is to assign each word one of the labels action, object, attribute, value or other. Following other methods for sequence labelling, we use the BIO encoding schema. In addition to the sequence of words, the part-of-speech (POS) tags and the dependency parse tree of the input are given to the model. The input word $x_i$ is represented by the concatenation of its pre-trained word embedding and its POS tag embedding, denoted by $e_i$. These representations are further abstracted using a 2-layer Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to obtain feature vector $h_i$. We use the dependency tree of the sentence to utilize the syntactical information about the input text. This information could be useful to identify the important words and their dependents in the sentence. In order to model the syntactic tree, we utilize Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) BIBREF13 over the dependency tree. This model learns the contextualized representations of the words such that the representation of each word is contextualized by its neighbors. We employ 2-layer GCN with $h_i$ as the initial representation for the node (i.e., word) $i$th. The representations of the $i$th node is an aggregation of the representations of its neighbors. Formally the hidden representations of the $i$th word in $l$th layer of GCN is obtained by: where $N(i)$ is the neighbors of the $i$th word in the dependency tree, $W_l$ is the weight matrix in $l$th layer and $deg(i)$ is the degree of the $i$th word in the dependency tree. The biases are omitted for brevity. The final representations of the GCN for $i$th word, $\hat{h}_i$, represent the structural features for that word. Afterwards, we concatenate the structural features $\hat{h}_i$ and sequential features $h_i$ to represent $i$th word by feature vector $h^{\prime }_i$: Finally in order to label each word in the sentence we employ a task specific 2-layer feed forward neural net followed by a logistic regression model to generate class scores $S_i$ for each word: where $W_{LR}, W_1$ and $W_2$ are trainable parameters and $S_i$ is a vector of size number of classes in which each dimension of it is the score for the corresponding class. Since the main task is sequence labeling we exploit Conditional Random Field (CRF) as the final layer to predict the sequence of labels for the given sentence. More specifically, class scores $S_i$ are fed into the CRF layer as emission scores to obtain the final labeling score: where $T$ is the trainable transition matrix and $\theta $ is the parameters of the model to generate emission scores $S_i$. Viterbi loss $L_{VB}$ is used as the final loss function to be optimized during training. In the inference time, the Viterbi decoder is employed to find the sequence of labels with highest score. ### Model ::: Consistency with Contextual Representation
In this sub-task we aim to increase the consistency of the word representation and its context. To obtain the context of each word we perform max pooling over the all words of the sentence excluding the word itself: where $h_i$ is the representation of the $i$th word from the Bi-LSTM. We aim to increase the consistency between vectors $h_i$ and $h^c_i$. One way to achieve this is by decreasing the distance between these two vectors. However, directly enforcing the word representation and its context to be close to each other would not be efficient as in long sentences the context might substantially differs from the word. So in order to make enough room for the model to represent the context of each word while it is consistent with the word representation, we employ an indirect method. We propose to maximize the mutual information (MI) between the word representation and its context in the loss function. In information theory, MI evaluates how much information we know about one random variable if the value of another variable is revealed. Formally, the mutual information between two random variable $X_1$ and $X_2$ is obtained by: Using this definition of MI, we can reformulate the MI equation as KL Divergence between the joint distribution $P_{X_1X_2}=P(X_1,X_2)$ and the product of marginal distributions $P_{X_1\bigotimes X_2}=P(X_1)P(X_2)$: Based on this understanding of MI, we can see that if the two random variables are dependent then the mutual information between them (i.e. the KL-Divergence in equation DISPLAY_FORM9) would be the highest. Consequently, if the representations $h_i$ and $h^c_i$ are encouraged to have large mutual information, we expect them to share more information. The mutual information would be introduced directly into the loss function for optimization. One issue with this approach is that the computation of the MI for such high dimensional continuous vectors as $h_i$ and $h^c_i$ is prohibitively expensive. In this work, we propose to address this issue by employing the mutual information neural estimation (MINE) in BIBREF14 that seeks to estimate the lower bound of the mutual information between the high dimensional vectors via adversarial training. To this goal, MINE attempts to compute the lower bound of the KL divergence between the joint and marginal distributions of the given high dimensional vectors/variables. In particular, MINE computes the lower bound of the Donsker-Varadhan representation of KL-Divergence: However, recently, it has been shown that other divergence metrics (i.e., the Jensen-Shannon divergence) could also be used for this purpose BIBREF15, BIBREF16, offering simpler methods to compute the lower bound for the MI. Consequently, following such methods, we apply the adversarial approach to obtain the MI lower bound via the binary cross entropy of a variable discriminator. This discriminator differentiates the variables that are sampled from the joint distribution from those that are sampled from product of the marginal distributions. In our case, the two variables are the word representation $h_i$ and context representation $h^c_i$. In order to sample from joint distributions, we simply concatenate $h_i$ and $h^c_i$ (i.e., the positive example). To sample from the product of the marginal distributions, we concatenate the representation $h_i$ with $h^c_j$ where $i\ne j$ (i.e., the negative example). These samples are fed into a 2-layer feed forward neural network $D$ (i.e., the discriminator) to perform a binary classification (i.e., coming from the joint distribution or the product of the marginal distributions). Finally, we use the following binary cross entropy loss to estimate the mutual information between $h_i$ and $h^c_i$ to add into the overall loss function: where $N$ is the length of the sentence and $[h,h^c_i]$ is the concatenation of the two vectors $h$ and $h^c_i$. This loss is added to the final loss function of the model. ### Model ::: Prediction by Contextual Information
In addition to increasing consistency between the word representation and its context representation, we aim to increase the task specific information in contextual representations. This is desirable as the main task is utilizing the word representation to predict its label. Since our model enforce the consistency between the word representation and its context, increasing the task specific information in contextual representations would help the model's final performance. In order to increase task-specific information in contextual representation, we train the model on two auxiliary tasks. The first one aims to use the context of each word to predict the label of that word and the goal of the second auxiliary task is to use the global context information to predict sentence level labels. We describe each of these tasks in more details in the following sections. ### Model ::: Prediction by Contextual Information ::: Predicting Word Label
In this sub-task we use the context representations of each word to predict its label. It will increase the information encoded in the context of the word about the label of the word. We use the same context vector $h^c_i$ for the $i$th word as described in the previous section. This vector is fed into a 2-layer feed forward neural network with a softmax layer at the end to output the probabilities for each class: Where $W_2$ and $W_1$ are trainable parameters. Biases are omitted for brevity. Finally we use the following cross-entropy loss function to be optimized during training: where $N$ is the length of the sentence and $l_i$ is the label of the $i$th word. ### Model ::: Prediction by Contextual Information ::: Predicting Sentence Labels
The word label prediction enforces the context of each word to contain information about its label but it would not ensure the contextual information to capture the sentence level patterns for expressing intent. In other words, the word level prediction lacks a general view about the entire sentence. In order to increase the general information about the sentence in the representation of the words, we aim to predict the labels existing in a sentence from the representations of its words. More specifically, we introduce a new sub-task to predict which labels exit in the given sentence (Note that sentences might have only a subset of the labels; e.g. only action and object). We formulate this task as a multi-class classification problem. Formally, given the sentence $X=x_1,x_2,...,x_N$ and label set $S=\lbrace action, attribute, object, value\rbrace $ our goal is to predict the vector $L^s=l^s_1,l^s_2,...,l^s_{|S|}$ where $l^s_i$ is one if the sentence $X$ contains $i$th label from the label set $S$ otherwise it is zero. First, we find representation of the sentence from the word representations. To this end, we use max pooling over all words of the sentence to obtain vector $H$: Afterwards, the vector $H$ is further abstracted by a 2-layer feed forward neural net with a sigmoid function at the end: where $W_2$ and $W_1$ are trainable parameters. Note that since this tasks is a multi-class classification the number of neurons at the final layer is equal to $|S|$. We optimize the following binary cross entropy loss function: where $l_k$ is one if the sentence contains the $k$th label otherwise it is zero. Finally, to train the model we optimize the following loss function: where $\alpha $, $\beta $ and $\gamma $ are hyper parameters to be tuned using development set performance. ### Experiments
In our experiments, we use Onsei Intent Slot dataset. Table TABREF21 shows the statics of this dataset. We use the following hyper parameters in our model: We set the word embedding and POS embedding to 768 and 30 respectively; The pre-trained BERT BIBREF17 embedding are used to initialize word embeddings; The hidden dimension of the Bi-LSTM, GCN and feed forward networks are 200; the hyper parameters $\alpha $, $\beta $ and $\gamma $ are all set to 0.1; We use Adam optimizer with learning rate 0.003 to train the model. We use micro-averaged F1 score on all labels as the evaluation metric. We compare our method with the models trained using Adobe internal NLU tool, Pytext BIBREF18 and Rasa BIBREF19 NLU tools. Table TABREF22 shows the results on Test set. Our model improves the F1 score by almost 2%, which corresponds to a 12.3% error rate reduction. This improvements proves the effectiveness of using contextual information for the task of slot filling. In order to analyze the contribution of the proposed sub-tasks we also evaluate the model when we remove one of the sub-task and retrain the model. The results are reported in Table TABREF23. This table shows that all sub-tasks are required for the model to have its best performance. Among all sub-tasks the word level prediction using the contextual information has the major contribution to the model performance. This fact shows that contextual information trained to be informative about the final sub-task is necessary to obtain the representations which could boost the final model performance. ### Conclusion & Future Work
In this work we introduce a new deep model for the task of Slot Filling. In a multi-task setting, our model increase the mutual information between word representations and its context, improve the label information in the context and predict which concepts are expressed in the given sentence. Our experiments on an image edit request corpus shows that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on this dataset. Table 1: Label Statistics Table 3: Performance of the model when the loss function of each sub-task has been removed from the final loss function. MI, WP and SP stand for Mutual Information, Word Prediction and Sentence Prediction respectively.
|
improves the F1 score by almost 2%, which corresponds to a 12.3% error rate reduction
|
What antibiotic was used in Mr. Rudolph for antibacterial prophylaxis during the ureterorenoscopy?
Choose the correct answer from the following options:
A. Cefalexin
B. Amoxicillin
C. Ampicillin/Sulbactam
D. Meropenem
E. Piperacillin/Tazobactam
|
### Patient Report 0
**Dear colleague, **
We would like to inform you about our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph, born
on 05/26/1954, who was under our care from 01/16/2019 to 01/17/2019.
**Diagnosis**: Suspected malignant mass at pyeloureteral junction/left
renal pelvis and suspicious paraaortic lymph nodes.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- Atrial fibrillation: Post-ablation in 2013
- pTCA stenting in 2010 for acute myocardial infarction
- Suspected soft tissue rheumatism, currently no complaints
- Laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 2012
- Tonsillectomy
- Obesity
**Procedure:** Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left with biopsy and
left DJ stent placement on 01/16/2019.
**Current Presentation:** Elective presentation for further endoscopic
evaluation of the unclear mass in the pyeloureteral junction area
involving the proximal ureter and renal pelvis. Additionally, abnormal
lymph nodes were observed in external imaging. The patient reports
occasional mild discomfort in the left upper abdomen.
**Physical Examination:** Soft abdomen, no pressure pain.
**CT Thorax (Plain) from 01/16/2019:**
Presence of axillary and mediastinal lymph nodes with borderline
enlarged lymph nodes ventral to the tracheal bifurcation (approximately
10 mm).
Calcification of aortic valves. Aortic and coronary sclerosis.
No suspicious lesions detected within the lungs. No pleural effusions.
No infiltrates.
History of cholecystectomy.
Known soft tissue density formation in the left renal hilum from the
previous examination.
The assessment of other upper abdominal organs that were visible and
could be evaluated natively was unremarkable.
No evidence of suspicious retrocrural lymph nodes. Vascular sclerosis.
**Skeletal Assessment:** Degenerative changes in the spine. No evidence
of suspicious lesions.
**Assessment:** No definitive evidence of metastatic lesions in the
lungs. Increased presence of mediastinal lymph nodes, some borderline
enlarged, ventral to the tracheal bifurcation. Differential diagnosis
includes nonspecific findings or lymph node metastases, which cannot be
excluded based solely on CT morphology.
**Main Diagnosis and Main Procedure from the Surgical Report:**
- Surgical Diagnosis: Unclear proximal ureter tumor on the left
- Unclear tumor in the left renal pelvis
- Surgical Procedure: Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left
- Biopsy of the left ureter
- Retrograde urography on the left
- DJ catheter placement on the left
- Diagnostic urethroscopy
**Procedure:**
The patient underwent a diagnostic ureterorenoscopy, which proceeded
without complications. During the procedure, a total of eight biopsies
were successfully obtained from the ureter for histological evaluation.
Cytological samples were also collected from both the ureter and renal
pelvis. Although there was a stenosing tumor present, endoscopic passage
into the renal pelvis was successfully accomplished.
Following the diagnostic procedure, a left-sided double-J catheter was
placed under radiographic control. Additionally, a urinary catheter was
inserted. It was observed that the initial urine output appeared
hemorrhagic, but it subsequently cleared to a normal coloration.
For post-procedural management, plans are in place for the DJ catheter
to be removed, the timing of which will be guided by improvements in the
color of the urine as well as the patient\'s overall clinical status. A
sonogram will be performed prior to discharge as part of routine
follow-up. Moreover, the patient has been scheduled for counseling to
address the significantly elevated PSA values noted in recent lab tests.
**Diagnosis:** Unclear proximal ureter tumor on the left. Unclear tumor
in the left renal pelvis
**Type of Surgery:**
- Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left
- Biopsy of the left ureter
- Retrograde urography on the left
- DJ catheter placement on the left
- Diagnostic urethroscopy
**Anesthesia Type:** Laryngeal mask
**Report:** Indication: Unclear mass in the left renal pelvis. Elective
diagnostic ureterorenoscopy for further assessment. Written consent is
obtained. The urine is sterile. The procedure is conducted under
antibacterial prophylaxis with Ampicillin/Sulbactam 3g.
1. Standard preparation, lithotomy position on the X-ray unit, sterile
scrubbing/disinfection, and sterile draping by nursing staff.
Verification and approval.
2. Anesthesiology and urology discussion. Surgery clearance. Antibiotic
administration.
3. Initial urethroscopy was unremarkable, with no signs of tumors.
4. Semi-rigid ureterorenoscopy with a 6.5/8.5 continuous-flow
ureterorenoscopy. Unremarkable ureterorenoscopy of the entire ureter
until just before the pyeloureteral junction, where a papillary
stenotic constriction was encountered, impeding further passage with
the endoscope. Cytology collection (20 mL) was performed. Retrograde
urography was conducted to visualize the proximal collecting system,
and biopsies were obtained from the accessible portions, with 8
biopsies taken using an access sheath. Even with flexible
Viperscope, further passage was not feasible.
5. A DJ catheter was inserted under radiographic guidance over a
guidewire. Collection of irrigation cytology (5 ml) from the renal
pelvis.
6. Insertion of a DJ catheter (7/28 Vortek) over the indwelling wire
and endoscope under radiographic control. Documentation of images.
7. Placement of a permanent catheter. Urine initially appeared bloody
but cleared rapidly.
**Conclusion:** Uncomplicated diagnostic ureterorenoscopy with biopsy of
the ureter (8 biopsies taken), cytology collection from the ureter and
renal pelvis, and endoscopic passage into the renal pelvis in the
presence of a stenosing tumor. DJ catheter placement on the left.
Endoscopic assessment of the urinary bladder and distal ureter revealed
no abnormalities. Follow-up steps:
- Removal of the urinary catheter based on urine appearance and
patient vigilance.
- Sonography before discharge.
- Further steps determined by histology.
- Recommend evaluation and clarification of the significantly elevated
PSA value.
**Internal Cytological Report Clinical Details: Sample Date: 01/16/2019
**
1. Left ureter (100 mL colorless, clear)
2. Left renal pelvis (50 mL brown) (Papanicolaou staining)
Both materials contain increased urinary sediment, along with
granulocytes, erythrocytes, and urothelial cells from various layers
with multi-nuclear surface cells. Material 1 also shows papillary
arrangements of urothelial cells, some of which have peripheral
hyperchromatic cell nuclei and altered nuclear-plasma ratios. Material 2
shows individual papillary urothelial cell arrangements with similar
nuclear quality, hyperchromasia, and eccentric placement within the
cytoplasm, as well as nuclear rounding. Numerous individual urothelial
cells are also present with significantly rounded and enlarged cell
nuclei, frequently in a peripheral location with hyperchromasia.
**Critical Findings Report:**
1. Detection of a papillary-structured urothelial population with
nuclear changes, which may be related to instrumentation. Malignant
urothelial proliferation cannot be definitively ruled out.
2. Abundant cell material with papillary and single atypical urothelia,
highly suspicious for urothelial carcinoma cells.
**Diagnostic Classification:** Suspicious
**Internal Histopathological Report**
**Clinical Details/Question:** Endoscopic suspicion of urothelial
carcinoma.
**Macroscopy:**
1. Left proximal ureter: Unfixed nephrectomy specimen measuring 9.2 x
6.5 x 5.2 cm with a maximum 4 cm wide perirenal fat tissue and
maximum 1 cm wide perihilar fat tissue. Also, a 5 cm long ureter,
max 1 cm hilar vessels, and a 2.1 x 1.3 x 0.8 cm adrenal gland at
the upper pole of the kidney. On the sections at the renal hilum,
there is a maximum 4.3 cm grayish induration. No clear infiltration
of vessels by the induration is visible macroscopically. No
connection between the induration and the adrenal gland. The minimal
distance from the induration to the specimen edge at the renal hilum
is focally \< 0.1 cm. Furthermore, the renal pelvis system is
dilated, and there is a maximum 0.4 cm grayish indurated nodule in
the perirenal fat tissue.
**Therapy and Progression:** After thorough preparation and patient
counseling, we successfully performed the above procedure on 01/16/2019
without complications. Intraoperatively, a stenotic process reaching the
proximal ureter was observed, preventing passage into the renal pelvis.
Cytology and biopsy were obtained, and a left DJ stent was placed. The
postoperative course was uneventful. We were able to remove the
transurethral catheter upon clearing of urine and discharged the patient
to your outpatient care.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request regular follow-up urological evaluations.
- Given the histological findings and highly suspicious radiological
findings for a malignant mass, we recommend performing an isotope
renogram to assess separate kidney function. An appointment has been
scheduled for 03/05/2019. We ask the patient to visit our
preoperative outpatient clinic on the same day to prepare for left
nephroureterectomy.
- The surgical procedure is scheduled for 03/20/2019.
- In case of acute urological symptoms, immediate reevaluation is
welcome at any time.
### Patient Report 1
**Dear colleague, **
We would like to report to you regarding our mutual patient Mr. Peter
Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954, who was under our care from 03/17/2019 to
04/01/2019.
**Diagnosis:** Urothelial carcinoma of the renal pelvis, high grade,
maximum size 4.3 cm. TNM Classification (8th edition, 2017): pT3, pN0
(0/11), M1 (ADR), Pn1, L1, V1.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- Atrial fibrillation: History of ablation in 2013
- History of pTCA stenting in 2010 due to acute myocardial infarction
- Suspected soft tissue rheumatism
- History of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 2012
- History of tonsillectomy
- Obesity
**Procedures:** Open left nephroureterectomy with lymphadenectomy on
03/18/2019.
**Histology: Critical Findings Report:**
[Renal pelvis carcinoma (left kidney):]{.underline} Extensive
infiltration of a high-grade urothelial carcinoma in the renal pelvis
with infiltration of the renal parenchyma and perihilar adipose tissue,
maximum size 4.3 cm (1.). In the included adrenal tissue, central
evidence of small carcinoma infiltrates, to be interpreted as distant
metastasis (M1) with no macroscopic evidence of direct infiltration and
central localization.
[Resection Status]{.underline}: Carcinoma-free resection margins of the
proximal left ureter and ureter with mild florid urocystitis at the
ureteral orifice. Margin-forming carcinoma infiltrates at the main
preparation hilar near the renal vein, with the cranial hilar resection
margins I and II being carcinoma-free.
[Nodal Status:]{.underline} Eleven metastasis-free lymph nodes in the
submissions as follows: 0/1 (2.), 0/3 (4.), 0/6 (5.), 0/1 (6.).
Final TNM Classification (8th edition, 2017): pT3, pN0(0/11), M1 (ADR),
Pn1, L1, V1.
**Current Presentation:** The patient was electively scheduled for the
above-mentioned procedure. The patient does not report any complaints in
the urological field.
**Physical Examination:** Abdomen is soft, no tenderness. Both renal
beds are free.
**Fast Track Report on 03/18/2019: **
**Microscopy:** Histologically, there are extensive infiltrations of a
carcinoma growing in large solid formations with focal necrosis and
highly pleomorphic cell nuclei. In block 1A, there is a section of a
urothelium-lined duct structure with a transition from normal epithelium
to highly atypical epithelium and invasive carcinoma infiltrates. Broad
infiltration into adjacent fat tissue and renal parenchyma is observed.
Focal perineural sheath infiltration.
**Critical Findings**: Left renal pelvis carcinoma: Extensive
infiltrates of high-grade urothelial carcinoma in the renal pelvis,
infiltrating the renal parenchyma and perihilar fat tissue, max 4.3 cm
(1.). No direct infiltration of the accompanying adrenal gland is found.
Isolated abnormal cells in the adrenal gland parenchyma, which will be
further characterized to exclude the smallest carcinoma extensions. An
update will be provided after the completion of investigations.
**Resection Status:** Carcinoma-free resection margins of the proximal
left ureter with mild florid urocystitis near the ureteral orifice.
Carcinoma-forming infiltrates on the main specimen hilus near the renal
vein, but postresected cranial hili I and II were free of carcinoma.
**Nodal status**: Eleven metastasis-free lymph nodes in the submissions
as follows: 0/1 (2nd.), 0/3 (4.), 0/6 (5.), 0/1 (6.).
TNM classification (8th edition 2017): pT3, pN0 (0/11), Pn1, L1, V1.
**Urinanalysis from 03/20/2019**
**Material: Urine, Midstream Collected on 10/13/2020 at 00:00**
- Antimicrobial Agents: Negative. No evidence of growth-inhibiting
substances in the sample material.
- Bacterial Count per ml: 1,000 - 10,000
- Assessment: Bacterial counts of 1000 CFU/mL or higher can be
clinically relevant, especially with corresponding clinical
symptoms, especially in pure cultures of uropathogenic
microorganisms from midstream urine or single-catheter urine, along
with concomitant leukocyturia.
- Epithelial Cells (microscopic): \<20 epithelial cells/μL
- Leukocytes (microscopic): \<20 leukocytes/μL
- Microorganisms (microscopic): \<20 microorganisms/μL
**Pathogen:** Citrobacter koseri
**Antibiogram:**
- Cefalexin: Susceptible (S) with a minimum inhibitory concentration
(MIC) of 8
- Ampicillin/Amoxicillin: Resistant (R) with MIC \>=32
- Amoxicillin+Clavulanic Acid: Susceptible (S) with MIC of 8
- Piperacillin+Tazobactam: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=4
- Cefotaxime: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=1
- Ceftazidime: Susceptible (S) with MIC of 0.25
- Cefepime: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.12
- Meropenem: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.25
- Ertapenem: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.5
- Cotrimoxazole: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=20
- Gentamicin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=1
- Ciprofloxacin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.25
- Levofloxacin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.12
- Fosfomycin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=16
**Therapy and Progression:** After thorough preparation and patient
education, we performed the above-mentioned procedure on 03/18/2019,
without complications. The postoperative course was uneventful except
for prolonged milky secretion from the indwelling wound drainage. Prior
to catheter removal, a single instillation of Mitomycin was
administered. Regular examinations were unremarkable. We discharged Mr.
Rudolph on 04/01/2019, in good general condition after removal of the
drainage, following an unremarkable final examination, for your esteemed
outpatient follow-up.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request regular follow-up urological appointments. The first one
should take place within one week after discharge.
- Based on the histopathological findings with evidence of a
metastasis in the adrenal tissue, we recommend the administration of
adjuvant chemotherapy with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. The patient wishes
for a local connection, which was initiated during the inpatient
stay.
- Anticoagulation: Following the recommendations of the current
guideline for prophylaxis of venous thromboembolism, we advise
continuing anticoagulation with low molecular weight heparins for a
total of 4 - 5 weeks post-operation after urological procedures in
the abdominal and pelvic area.
- With the current single kidney situation, we recommend regular
nephrological follow-up examinations.
- In case of acute urological complaints, immediate re-presentation
is, of course, welcome.
### Patient Report 2
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to inform you about our patient Mr. Peter Rudolph, born
on 05/26/1954, who was under treatment at our outpatient clinic on
04/20/2020.
**Diagnosis:** Newly hepatic and previously known adrenal metastasized,
locally advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis
(diagnosed in 03/19).
**Previous Diagnoses and Treatment:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis, pT3, pN0 (0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1,
V1, high-grade. 04 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy
with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- Newly emerged, progressively enlarging liver metastasis in Segment 6
and Segment 7, in relation to the previously known adrenal
metastasized and locally advanced urothelial carcinoma of the renal
pelvis, following left nephroureterectomy and four cycles of
adjuvant chemotherapy with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. Suspected
activation of a rheumatic disease.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown)
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presents electively with current
imaging in our uro-oncological outpatient clinic for treatment and
discussion of the further therapy plan.
**Medical History:** In March 2019, Mr. Rudolph underwent a
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis. Subsequently, four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin were performed due to the detection of locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma with primary metastasis to the left
adrenal gland. The chemotherapy was well-tolerated. In the summer, the
patient presented with abdominal pain, and subsequently, an extensive
psoas abscess was detected during our inpatient treatment. Planned
follow-up examinations have taken place since then, but the current
imaging now suggests a newly emerged hepatic metastasis.
**Therapy and Progression**: Mr. Rudolph is in a satisfactory general
condition. Bowel movements are unremarkable with 1-2 well-formed stools
per day. Urinary frequency is up to 5-6 times a day with one episode of
nocturia. There is no urinary hesitancy. Currently, the patient
complains of an activation of his previously unclarified rheumatic
disease. He describes increasing pain with swelling in the left distal
ankle more than the right. Additionally, the patient complains of
painful right knee, and a total endoprosthesis on this side was
apparently planned but postponed due to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, the patient reports pain in the distal and proximal
interphalangeal joints of both hands. Externally, the general
practitioner initiated a short-term cortisone pulse therapy with 3-day
intervals (initial dose 100mg) due to suspicion of soft tissue
rheumatism a week ago. Under this treatment, the pain has progressively
improved, and the patient is currently almost symptom-free. Otherwise,
there is a good social network, and no nursing care is required.
The urological findings indicate a newly emerged hepatic metastasis in
relation to the previously known adrenal metastasized, locally advanced
urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis, following
nephroureterectomy and four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. Due to the newly emerged metastasis within one
year after successful Cisplatin therapy, platinum resistance is
presumed. Therefore, the indication for initiating a second-line therapy
with the immune checkpoint inhibitor Pembrolizumab, Atezolizumab, or
Nivolumab now exists. A comprehensive explanation was provided, with a
particular focus on risks and side effects. Special attention was given
to the exacerbation of pre-existing rheumatic complaints, and it was
strongly advised that the patient consult a rheumatologist before
initiating systemic therapy with an immune checkpoint inhibitor. As the
patient is already well-connected to the outpatient oncologist and has a
long commute, the initiation of local therapy was discussed with the
patient. Telephonically, the patient has already been connected to the
mentioned practice. Therapy initiation is planned for this week and will
be communicated to the patient separately.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request the initiation of systemic therapy with an immune
checkpoint inhibitor (Pembrolizumab, Atezolizumab, or Nivolumab).
The first follow-up staging examination should take place after 4
cycles of therapy using CT of the chest/abdomen/pelvis.
- Prior to initiating systemic therapy, we recommend consultation with
a local rheumatologist for further evaluation of rheumatic symptoms.
- In particular, if systemic therapy with an immune checkpoint
inhibitor is initiated despite existing rheumatic symptoms, regular
follow-up and clinical monitoring should be closely observed.
- Regarding the externally initiated high-dose Prednisolone course, we
recommend a rapid tapering, so that after reaching a threshold dose
of 10mg/day, immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy can be initiated.
- In the event of acute complications or side effects, immediate
medical evaluation may be necessary. In particular, the need for
timely high-dose cortisone therapy with Prednisolone was emphasized
if it is an immune-associated side effect.
- If immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy is not feasible, the
discussion of re-induction with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin or alternative
therapy with Vinflunine as a second-line treatment should be
considered.
**Current Medication: **
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
------------------------- ------------ ---------------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0
Prednisolone (Prelone) 80 mg According to scheme
### Patient Report 3
**Dear colleague, **
We are reporting on our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954,
who was under our inpatient care from 11/04/2020 to 11/05/2020.
**Diagnosis**: Hepatic, lymphatic, and adrenal metastasized, locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis (diagnosed in
03/19).
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
<!-- -->
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD.
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy).
- Unclear thyroid nodule.
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown).
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus.
**Intervention**: CT-guided liver biopsy on 11/04/2020.
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presents electively in our
urological clinic for the aforementioned procedure. Under immunotherapy
with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d, there has been significant disease
progression. A CT-guided liver biopsy was initially discussed with Mr.
Rudolph for further therapy evaluation. At the time of admission, the
patient is in good general condition.
**Therapy and Progression:** Following appropriate patient information
and preparation, we performed the above procedure without complications.
Postoperatively, there were no complications. We were able to discharge
Mr. Rudolph in good general condition after unremarkable laboratory
checks on 11/05/2020.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request a follow-up visit with the outpatient urologist within 1
week of discharge for clinical monitoring.
- We recommend switching the systemic therapy to Vinflunine. The
patient can have this done locally through his outpatient urologist.
- Further sequencing will be conducted through our interdisciplinary
molecular tumor board, and the patient will be informed of this in
due course.
- In case of symptoms or complications (especially fever over 38.5°C,
chills, or flank pain), an immediate return to our clinic is welcome
at any time.
### Patient Report 4
**Dear colleague, **
We are providing you with an update on our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph,
born on 05/26/1954, who presented himself at our outpatient clinic on
06/29/2021.
**Diagnosis**: Hepatic, lymphatic, and adrenal metastasized, locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis (diagnosed in
03/19).
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis (pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade)
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Initial diagnosis of liver metastases in Segment 6 and
Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
- 10/20 - 06/21: Third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin (external),
resulting in hepatic progression
- 01/21: Molecular tumor board: no evidence of a molecular target
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
<!-- -->
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Soft tissue rheumatism
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown)
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presented to out outpatient clinic
on 06/29/2021, accompanied by his wife, in subjectively satisfactory
condition. Given the negative PDL1 status and FGFR mutation status
observed in our institution\'s molecular tumor board, Mr. Rudolph was
now presented to us for reevaluation and discussion of further
procedures.
**External CT Thorax dated 06/07/2021: **
**Findings:** The last relevant preliminary examination was conducted on
03/03/2021. Currently, well-ventilated lungs bilaterally without
tumor-typical findings or infiltrates. The bronchial system is clear. No
pathologically enlarged lymph nodes in the mediastinum, hilar region, or
axillae. Relatively pronounced atherosclerotic vascular calcifications,
otherwise unremarkable imaging of the major pulmonary and mediastinal
vessels. Normal dimensions of the cardiac chambers. No pericardial
effusion or pleural effusion. Thyroid and esophagus appear normal. No
osteolysis or spinal canal stenosis.
**Assessment**: Continued absence of thoracic metastases.
**External CT Abdomen dated 06/07/2021: **
**Findings:** Comparison with CT Abdomen dated 03/03/2021. Significant
progression of numerous, some large liver metastases in both liver
lobes. For example, a formerly 4.2 x 2.5 cm measuring metastasis
subcapsular in liver segment 7 has now increased to 5.8 x 3.6 cm. A
formerly 1.2 x 1.1 cm measuring metastasis in liver segment 4a has
increased to 3.3 x 2.4 cm. Portal vein and hepatic veins are properly
contrasted. Post-cholecystectomy status. Unremarkable adrenal glands.
Post-left nephrectomy. The right kidney is unremarkable. The spleen is
unremarkable. The pancreas appears normal. Diverticula of the sigmoid
and colon. No suspicious inguinal, iliac, retroperitoneal, or mesenteric
lymph nodes.
Assessment: Significant progression of numerous, some large liver
metastases. Otherwise, no organ metastases. No lymph node metastases.
Post-left nephrectomy.
**Assessment**: The urological examination findings indicate progressive
hepatic metastasized urothelial carcinoma originating from the left
renal pelvis, despite third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin. The
findings were thoroughly discussed in the urological-interdisciplinary
conference on 06/29/2021.
[Recommendations for further procedures include:]{.underline}
1. Chemotherapy with Gemcitabine and Paclitaxel.
2. A best-supportive-care strategy with symptom-oriented approach and
possible palliative medical support.
3. After approval, a targeted therapy with Enfortumab Vedotin could be
considered if further tumor-specific treatment is desired.
These recommendations were discussed with Mr. Rudolph and his wife
during an outpatient uro-oncology consultation. Mr. Rudolph demonstrated
adequate orientation regarding his medical condition, given the overall
limited therapeutic options. A final decision on one of the proposed
alternatives was not reached collectively, although Mr. Rudolph tended
towards a watchful waiting approach due to perceived significant side
effects from the previous third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin.
Therefore, we left the final recommendation open with a tendency towards
the best-supportive-care strategy. A local palliative medicine
outpatient connection was also recommended. According to the patient,
there is a living will and a power of attorney for healthcare decisions
in place.
We have already provided feedback to the attending oncologist by phone.
**Current Recommendations:**
- In the presence of apparent treatment fatigue in the patient, a
best-supportive-care strategy with a symptom-oriented approach and
potential initiation of chemotherapy with Gemcitabine and Paclitaxel
could be considered at the current time in an individualized
setting.
- We request the continuation of uro-oncological care by the attending
oncologist.
- After the medication Enfortumab-Vedotin is approved, a discussion of
this therapy can take place, depending on the patient\'s overall
condition and the desire for further tumor-specific treatment.
**Medication upon Discharge: **
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
------------------------- ------------ ---------------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0
Prednisolone (Prelone) 80 mg According to scheme
### Patient Report 5
**Dear colleague, **
We are reporting on the examination conducted on Mr. Rudolph, born on
05/26/1954 on 08/26/2021.
**Diagnosis**: Stenosis of the left subclavian artery
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d
<!-- -->
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Clinical Findings:**
[Fist Closure Test:]{.underline} Color Doppler sonography of the
shoulder-arm arteries: Bilateral triphasic flow in the subclavian
arteries. Bilateral triphasic flow in the brachial arteries, even with
arm elevation. Left vertebral artery shows orthograde flow, no flow
reversal during overhead work.
[Conclusion]{.underline}: Clinically and duplex sonographically, no
subclavian stenosis can be demonstrated.
Both hands are warm and rosy and show intact sensory-motor function. No
hand claudication or dizziness provoked during overhead work.
Pulse status: Bilateral palpable radial and ulnar arteries. Blood
pressure on the right 160 mmHg systolic, on the left 190 mmHg systolic.
Duplex: Bilateral subclavian arteries show triphasic flow. Bilateral
brachial arteries show triphasic flow, even with arm elevation. Left
vertebral artery demonstrates orthograde flow, with no flow reversal
during overhead work.
**Current Recommenations: **
The evaluation is performed to assess a potential left subclavian
stenosis with blood pressure side differences. Dizziness or arm
claudication, especially during overhead work, is denied.
### Patient Report 6
**Dear colleague, **
We report to you about Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954, who was in
our inpatient treatment from 02/22/2022 to 02/29/2022.
**Diagnosis**: Symptomatic incisional hernia in the area of the old
laparotomy scar (status post left nephroureterectomy in 03/19.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d
<!-- -->
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Operation:** Alloplastic Incisional Hernia Repair in intubation
anesthesia on 02/23/2022.
**Current Presentation:** The patient was admitted for elective surgery
after indications were assessed and preoperative preparation was
conducted in our clinic for the above-mentioned diagnosis.
**Therapy and Progression:** Following routine preoperative
preparations, comprehensive informed consent, and premedication, we
performed the aforementioned procedure on 02/23/2022 in uncomplicated
ITN. There were no intraoperative complications.
The postoperative inpatient course progressed normally with dry and
non-irritated wound conditions. The drainage was timely removed as the
drainage volume decreased. Full mobilization and intensive respiratory
therapy exercises were initiated on the first postoperative day. Regular
clinical and laboratory check-ups indicated a normal healing process.
The diet was well tolerated, and the wounds healed primarily. We
discharged Mr. Rudolph for further outpatient care on 02/29/2022.
**Histology**: Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar fibrosis.
Fibrolipomatous hernial sac with obstructed vessels. No evidence of
malignancy.
**Medication upon Admission:**
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
--------------------- ------------ ---------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
**Procedure:** From a surgical perspective, we request wound
inspections. To prevent recurrence, avoid lifting heavy objects (\>5 kg)
for the next 8-12 weeks. Please consistently wear the abdominal binder
during the wound healing period (14 days). Additionally, avoid excessive
abdominal pressure, especially during bowel movements.
**Surgical Report: **
**Diagnoses:**
- Extensive incisional hernia in the area of the transverse upper
abdominal laparotomy scar, with a history of: Left
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0, (0/11), M1 (ADR),
pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
**Type of Surgery:** Incisional Hernia Repair with Optilene Mesh (30 x
30 cm), Adhesiolysis of the intestine
**Anesthesia Type:** Intubation anesthesia
**Report**: **Indication**: Mr. Rudolph presents with an extensive
incisional hernia following a history of nephrectomy and pancreatic
resection for clear cell renal cell carcinoma. The indication for hernia
repair with mesh was made.
**Operation**: The procedure was performed with the patient in a supine
position and in ITN. Sterile preparation, draping, and perioperative
antibiotic prophylaxis with Ampicillin/Sulbactam 3g were administered.
Initially, a skin incision was made to the left of the existing
transverse upper abdominal laparotomy scar, and a sparing spindly
excision of the scar was performed. Dissection into the depth revealed
the first hernia sac. This sac was dissected free and opened. Further
lateral to the left, a very large additional hernia sac was found. This
one was also completely dissected free and opened. The two hernia
defects were connected only by a narrow isthmus of thinned abdominal
wall fascia, which was cut, and the two hernia defects were united.
Furthermore, another hernia sac was found laterally to the right in the
area of the scar. Thus, the scar was opened across its entire width by
extending the skin incision to the right. The right lateral hernia sac
was also dissected free and opened. Now, the hernia sacs were removed
one after the other (histology specimens). The epifascial adipose tissue
was then mobilized so that the abdominal wall fascia was exposed and
could serve as the base for the mesh to be placed. The three hernia
defects were then closed with a total of three continuous sutures using
Vicryl. This was done after the abdominal wall fascia was also dissected
free intra-abdominally, where the intestines or large mesh adhered to
the abdominal wall. After the hernia defects were now closed, the 30x30
cm Optilene mesh was introduced after thorough irrigation and careful
electrocoagulation for hemostasis. It was fixed tightly but without
tension at the edges with Ethibond sutures of size 0. Subsequently, a
Palisade suture was placed around the closed hernia defects using
Prolene size 0 in a continuous technique. Final irrigation and
hemostasis were performed. Four 12 Redon drains were placed in the
wound, led out, and sutured. Subcutaneous sutures were made with Vicryl
2-0. Skin sutures were placed with Nylon 3-0, followed by a sterile
wound compression dressing.
**Internal Histopathological Report**
**Macroscopy:**
- Skin spindle: Fixed. Skin spindle measuring 9 x 0.5 x 1.5 cm with a
centrally located, slightly raised, and indurated scar.
- Hernia sac I: Fixed. Cap-shaped serosal lamella measuring 8 x 7.5 x
2 cm with a bulging cord-like fibrosis. The serosa is smooth and
shiny.
- Hernia sac II: Fixed. A 15 x 3 x 0.5 cm large, reddish-livid serosal
specimen with focal indurations, petechial hemorrhages, and adhesion
strands. Multiple cross-sections embedded.
- Hernia sac III: Fixed. A 3.5 x 1 x 0.3 cm serosal lamella with
scarred fibrosis. Processing: Blocks: 4, H&E. Microscopy:
- Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar fibrosis of the adjacent
stroma. 2-4. Fibrolipomatous tissue, superficially peritonealized.
Markedly congested blood vessels.
**Critical Findings Report:** Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar
fibrosis. 2-4. Fibrolipomatous hernia sac tissue with congested blood
vessels. No evidence of malignancy.
### Patient Report 7
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to provide an update regarding Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on
05/26/1954, who presented to our surgical outpatient clinic on
03/04/2022.
**Diagnoses**: Status post umbilical hernia repair 10 days ago.
- Extensive incisional hernia in the area of the transverse upper
abdominal laparotomy scar, with a history of: Left
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0, (0/11), M1 (ADR),
pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
**Medical History:** In March 2019, Mr. Rudolph underwent a
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis. Subsequently, four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin were performed due to the detection of locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma with primary metastasis to the left
adrenal gland. The chemotherapy was well-tolerated overall. On
02/22/2022, Mr. Rudolph presented with an extensive incisional hernia
following a history of left nephroureterectomy. The indication for
hernia repair with mesh was made.
**Physical Examination**: Unremarkable scar, sutures in place.
**Current Recommendation**: Follow-up appointment scheduled for Thursday
(12th postoperative day) for suture removal and progress assessment.
|
Ampicillin/Sulbactam
|
What was the second phase of the natural disaster?
A. The falling rock that was giving way.
B. The dust clouds that were taking over.
C. The flock of refugees seeking safety.
D. Annoyingly loud noises that halted progress on rebuilding.
|
THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!
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A. The falling rock that was giving way.
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What theme would critiques 6 and 7 agree with?
A. beauty isn't everything
B. people will do anything for beauty
C. beauty is beneficial
D. beauty is in the eye of the beholder
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eBabe This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to "bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women." Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are "looking into" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other. 1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, "We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris "can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs," predict that his success will steer "the future of human breeding" toward "genetic engineering." 2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. "Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture," observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries "recessive" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow. 3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once "beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them," the rich will transform themselves into a "super-race" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, "It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder." But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into "genetic haves and have nots." 4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with "substantial financial resources" are fit to give his models' offspring "a financially secure and stable life." But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, "Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up." 5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' "angels" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? "There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth," he says. Annas concludes that since there's "no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise," only a "naive" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. "You don't want to see the models," he points out. "You want to see pictures of their parents." On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other. 6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty "shows healthiness and longevity." On his site, he writes, " 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful." Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much "medical screening" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, "None." 7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is "superficial" and conveys a "harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character." This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break. 8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to "success," since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over "character," critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are "beautiful, healthy and intelligent," he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions "Bimbo births." A fertility expert shrugs, "If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them." 9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's "unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of "taking advantage of couples trying to conceive" and exploiting "desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell." USA Today laments, "This is about human need. And human greed." 10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as "struggling actresses," reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, "I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse ." Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was "better than prostitution." Harris constantly refers to the donors as his "girls" and describes them like cattle--"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls." He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. "We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items," he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to "find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web." To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit. 11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at "adolescent boys." 12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. "Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs," one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction "just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?" 13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. "When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud," a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that "there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected," and "the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from." 14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, "That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples. 15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that "having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation." But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: "our genes." "The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site," Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself. 16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole "prejudice" in favor of beauty. "The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts," says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, "we should think about" whether to "accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them" or to transcend those prejudices. This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. "Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state," he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.
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A. beauty isn't everything
|
What is their baseline?
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### Introduction
India is a highly diverse multilingual country in the world. In India, people of different regions use their own regional speaking languages, which makes India a country having world's second highest number of languages. Human spoken languages in India belongs to several language families. Two main of those families are typically known as Indo-Aryan languages having 78.05 percentage Indian speakers BIBREF0 and Dravidian languages having 19.64 BIBREF0 percentage Indian speakers. Hindi and Gujarati are among constitutional languages of India having nearly 601,688,479 BIBREF0 Indian speakers almost 59 BIBREF0 percentage of total country population. Constitute of India under Article 343 offers English as second additional official language having only 226,449 BIBREF0 Indian speakers and nearly 0.02 percentages of total country population BIBREF0. Communication and information exchange among people is necessary for sharing knowledge, feelings, opinions, facts, and thoughts. Variation of English is used globally for human communication. The content available on the Internet is exceptionally dominated by English. Only 20 percent of the world population speaks in English, while in India it is only 0.02 BIBREF0. It is not possible to have a human translator in the country having this much language diversity. In order to bridge this vast language gap we need effective and accurate computational approaches, which require minimum human intervention. This task can be effectively done using machine translation. Machine Translation (MT) is described as a task of computationally translate human spoken or natural language text or speech from one language to another with minimum human intervention. Machine translation aims to generate translations which have the same meaning as a source sentence and grammatically correct in the target language. Initial work on MT started in early 1950s BIBREF1, and has advanced rapidly since the 1990s due to the availability of more computational capacity and training data. Then after, number of approaches have been proposed to achieve more and more accurate machine translation as, Rule-based translation, Knowledge-based translation, Corpus-based translation, Hybrid translation, and Statistical machine translation(SMT) BIBREF1. All the approaches have their own merits and demerits. Among these, SMT which is a subcategory of Corpus based translation, is widely used as it is able to produce better results compared to other previously available techniques. The usage of the Neural networks in machine translation become popular in recent years around the globe and the novel technique of machine translation with the usage of neural network is known as Neural Machine Translation or NMT. In recent years, many works has been carried out on NMT. Little has been done on Indian languages as well BIBREF1. We found the NMT approach on Indic languages is still a challenging task, especially on bilingual machine translation. In our past research work, we have worked on sequence-to-sequence model based machine translation system for Hindi languageBIBREF2. In this work, we have improved that model and applied for English-Gujarati language pair. We have developed a system that uses neural model based on Attention mechanism. Our proposed attention based NMT model is tested with evaluation matrices as BLEU, perplexity and TER. In section 2 overview of related work carried out in the domain of machine translation is described in brief, section 3 gives fundamentals of machine translation process with neural network using attention mechanism, section 4 gives a comparative analysis of various automatic evaluation matrices, section 5 introduce the proposed bilingual neural machine translation models, section 6 shows the implementation and generated results with our attention based NMT model is shown in section 7, conclusion of the paper is presented in section 8. ### Related work
The process of translating text from source language to target language automatically with machine without any external human intervention is generally referred as Machine Translation(MT). It will basically convert sequence of words from source language to another sequence of words in target language without altering meaning of source words. Initial work in the field of machine translation was conceived by researchers at IBM research laboratory in the early '50s. They have also provided a successful demonstration in 1956 for machine translation systemBIBREF1. But soon automatic language processing advisory committee of American government reported that machine translation task is infeasible to scale due to the amount of resource it requires. A new breakthrough in machine translation came only after 1979 where domain-specific translation system was implemented for weather bulletin translation from English to FrenchBIBREF3 BIBREF4. In the year 1991, researchers from IIT Kanpur has developed Angla Bharati-I machine translation system BIBREF5BIBREF6. It was a general purpose translation system with domain customization. It is specifically designed for translating English to Hindi. In the year of 1999, CDAC developed a machine translation system named MANTRA BIBREF5, that uses the transfer-based machine translation. The system is developed for working on English-Gujarati, English-Hindi, English-Bengali and English-Telugu data pairs. Later the system is upgraded to AnglaBharati-II BIBREF5BIBREF6 using a hybrid approach of machine translation in 2004. In AnglaBharati-II, the efficiency of the system is improved compared to AnglaBharati-I. ### Machine Translation
Machine translation can be stated as the process of translating source language into target language considering the grammatical structure of the source language. The 1990s was marked as the breakthrough of a fairly new approaches to challenge and eventually improve the already established methodologies. This approach of machine translation was based on generating insights from large amount of available parallel corpuses. Example based Machine Translation was first proposed in 1981, but was developed from about 1990 onwards BIBREF7. The core idea is to reuse existing translations for generating a new translationBIBREF8. ### Machine Translation ::: Statistical Machine Translation
Statistics based approach for machine translation does not utilize any traditional linguistic data. It basically works on the principle of probability. Here, the word in a source language corresponds to other similar word(s) in the given target language. However it requires a large corpus of reliable translations consisting in both source and target language sentences. This approach is similar to the methods of the IBM research group, which had initial success for speech recognition and Machine Translation in the early 1990s BIBREF7. ### Machine Translation ::: Rule-based Machine Translation
Normally all the languages used by humans for communication consist of certain amount of grammatical rules. If we are able to model these rules into a system, we can generate the natural fluent sentences in target language. Rule-based machine translation system tries to model the same approach for machine translation by mapping source and target language sentences using necessary rules. However to translate Indian languages large number of rules with different context are required BIBREF9. ### Machine Translation ::: Phrase-based Machine Translation
A phrase is a small group of words which have some special meaning. Phrase-based machine translation system contains a phrase table, which has a list of translated sentences between source and target language. In addition to that, it is having information about how we can rearrange translation of multiple phrases to generate a meaningful target language sentence. But, these types of machine translation systems were unable to produce human-like natural language sentences as it is not possible to have all combination of different phrase every time in modelBIBREF9. ### Machine Translation ::: Neural Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation is one of the most recent approaches of machine translation that use a neural network based on the conditional probability of translating a given source language input to a given target language output as shown in Figure FIGREF5. NMT is more appealing as it requires less knowledge related to the structure of source as well as target language. It has outperformed traditional MT models in large-scale translation tasks such as English to German and English to French BIBREF10. In recent years various architectures are proposed to achieve neural network based machine translation such as, simple encoder-decoder based model, RNN based model and LSTM model that learn problems with long-range temporal dependencies and the most advanced neural model for machine translation is Attention mechanism-based model. Recurrent models typically factor computation along the symbol positions of the input and output sequences. Aligning the positions to steps in computation time, they generate a sequence of hidden states $h_t$, as a function of the previous hidden state $h_t+1$ and the input for position $t$ BIBREF12. This inherently sequential nature of RNN makes impossible to apply parallelization within training examples. But for longer sequence lengths, it becomes critical as memory constraints limits batching across examplesBIBREF13. One of the major drawback of models that works on sequence-to-sequence model is that it is not able to generate words that are rarely encountered in input corpus. For solving this problem, attention mechanism can be applied in traditional sequence-to-sequence model. It allows modeling of dependencies without regard to their distance in the input or output. The concept of “attention" has gained popularity recently in training of neural networks, allowing models to learn alignments between different modalities, e.g., between image objects and agent actions in the dynamic control problem BIBREF13. As shown in Figure FIGREF6, it also provides context which will become helpful for generating more natural looking sentences including rare words. Recently, attentional NMT models have dominated the field of machine translation. They are pushing the boundary of translation performance by continuing new development in NMT architectures. ### Evaluation Matrices
We can compare the performance of any machine translation model by comparing it across various evaluation matrices. In this paper, the following evaluation matrices are used for estimating the performance of our model. ### Evaluation Matrices ::: Translation error rate
Translation error rate or TER measures the amount of editing it requires to match the human-generated output. It was designed for evaluating the output of machine translation avoiding the knowledge intensiveness of meaning-based approaches. This method provides more meaningful insights when there is a large number of reference sentences available in the dataset. We can find TER of any translated sentences using the following equation BIBREF14: ### Evaluation Matrices ::: Perplexity Matrix
Perplexity is a measure of language model performance based on average probability. Perplexity can be defined as the inverse probability of the sentences available in test data, normalized by the number of words in generated sentences. It can be calculated using following equation BIBREF15: ### Evaluation Matrices ::: BLEU
BLEU uses the basic concepts of n-gram precision to calculate similarity between reference and generated sentence. It correlates highly with human expert review as it uses the average score of all result in test dataset rather than providing result of each sentence. BLEU score can be computed using the following equation BIBREF16: ### Proposed System
As shown in Figure FIGREF13, our proposed model is divided into mainly three different parts. Encoder, Decoder and Attention mechanism. Our encoder has two LSTM layers with 128 units of LSTM cells. This encoder will output encoded word embedding vector. This embedding vector is provided as input to decoder. Decoder is also consist of two LSTM layers with 128 units of lstm cells. It will take encoded vector and produce the output using beam search method. Whenever any output is produced the value of hidden state is compared with all input states to derive weights for attention mechanism. Based on attention weights, context vector is calculated and it is given as additional input to decoder for generating context relevant translation based on previous outcomes. ### Implementation ::: Datasets
In order to work with neural networks we require large amount of training data. As neural networks are learning with experience, more the experience accurate the learning is. Wide range of work has been carried out for non Indian languages. So enough amount of parallel corpus is available like English-French, English German, etc. But on Indian languages most of corpus was available only for English-Hindi language pair. The only dataset available for Gujarati language is OPUSBIBREF17, which is a collection of translated texts from user manual of the open source software. So in order to create machine translation system that works on conversational level we have created our new dataset. The created "eng_guj_parallel_corpus" contains nearly 65000 sentences in parallel format. We have also made it available for all researchers as open source dataset and can be downloaded from https://github.com/shahparth123/eng_guj_parallel_corpus. It is collection of sentences describing the activity or scenes in both Gujarati and English language. ### Implementation ::: Experiment Setup
For our experiment we have used Google Cloud's n1-highmem-2 instance with Intel Xeon E5 processor, 13 GB of primary memory and Tesla K80(2496 CUDA Core) GPU with 12GB of GPU memory. For creating and training deep neural networks TensorFlow deep learning library is usedBIBREF18. ### Results and Discussion ::: Results
In our experiment we have trained our proposed neural machine translation model using "eng_guj_parallel_corpus" with 37000 epoch. Some of the results for proposed model is given in following Figure FIGREF17 and FIGREF18 : As seen in figures, in most of the cases our model produces comparable result with human translator. Result for BLEU score for our model and Google's Neural Machine Translation is compared in table TABREF19: ### Conclusion
The conventional machine translation approaches are fast and efficient enough in processing. They have been proven significant in delivering good accuracy with their limited scope of application. But, they are facing difficulties in generating a target sentence or corpus with human-like fluency. Neural machine translation has played a significant role to outperformed difficulties associated with conventional machine translation approaches. However, the NMT models widely used in recent years like Seq-2-Seq has given great accuracy in generating fluent target language. Though, on some real environmental situations, specifically in the case when the model is coming across rare words the accuracy is decreased dramatically. To overcome this limitation of recent NMT models, an Attention mechanism is equipped in the model that has improved the accuracy. We have achieved an average BLEU score of 59.73 on training corpus and 40.33 on test corpus from parallel English-Gujarati corpus having 65,000 sentences. Fig. 1: Converting source language into target language using sequence to sequence model [12] Fig. 2: Basic structure of attention mechanism [12] Fig. 3: Proposed system using Attention Mechanism TABLE I: Various evaluation matrix comparison of models
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Google's Neural Machine Translation
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How does this compare to contextual embedding methods?
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### Introduction
To model language, we must represent words. We can imagine representing every word with a binary one-hot vector corresponding to a dictionary position. But such a representation contains no valuable semantic information: distances between word vectors represent only differences in alphabetic ordering. Modern approaches, by contrast, learn to map words with similar meanings to nearby points in a vector space BIBREF0 , from large datasets such as Wikipedia. These learned word embeddings have become ubiquitous in predictive tasks. BIBREF1 recently proposed an alternative view, where words are represented by a whole probability distribution instead of a deterministic point vector. Specifically, they model each word by a Gaussian distribution, and learn its mean and covariance matrix from data. This approach generalizes any deterministic point embedding, which can be fully captured by the mean vector of the Gaussian distribution. Moreover, the full distribution provides much richer information than point estimates for characterizing words, representing probability mass and uncertainty across a set of semantics. However, since a Gaussian distribution can have only one mode, the learned uncertainty in this representation can be overly diffuse for words with multiple distinct meanings (polysemies), in order for the model to assign some density to any plausible semantics BIBREF1 . Moreover, the mean of the Gaussian can be pulled in many opposing directions, leading to a biased distribution that centers its mass mostly around one meaning while leaving the others not well represented. In this paper, we propose to represent each word with an expressive multimodal distribution, for multiple distinct meanings, entailment, heavy tailed uncertainty, and enhanced interpretability. For example, one mode of the word `bank' could overlap with distributions for words such as `finance' and `money', and another mode could overlap with the distributions for `river' and `creek'. It is our contention that such flexibility is critical for both qualitatively learning about the meanings of words, and for optimal performance on many predictive tasks. In particular, we model each word with a mixture of Gaussians (Section "Word Representation" ). We learn all the parameters of this mixture model using a maximum margin energy-based ranking objective BIBREF2 , BIBREF1 (Section "Discussion" ), where the energy function describes the affinity between a pair of words. For analytic tractability with Gaussian mixtures, we use the inner product between probability distributions in a Hilbert space, known as the expected likelihood kernel BIBREF3 , as our energy function (Section "Energy Function" ). Additionally, we propose transformations for numerical stability and initialization "Implementation" , resulting in a robust, straightforward, and scalable learning procedure, capable of training on a corpus with billions of words in days. We show that the model is able to automatically discover multiple meanings for words (Section "Word Representation"7 ), and significantly outperform other alternative methods across several tasks such as word similarity and entailment (Section "Word Similarity" , "Word Similarity for Polysemous Words" , "Word Entailment" ). We have made code available at http://github.com/benathi/word2gm, where we implement our model in Tensorflow tensorflow. ### Related Work
In the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in word vector representations. word2vec, arguably the most popular word embedding, uses continuous bag of words and skip-gram models, in conjunction with negative sampling for efficient conditional probability estimation BIBREF0 , BIBREF4 . Other popular approaches use feedforward BIBREF5 and recurrent neural network language models BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 to predict missing words in sentences, producing hidden layers that can act as word embeddings that encode semantic information. They employ conditional probability estimation techniques, including hierarchical softmax BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 and noise contrastive estimation BIBREF12 . A different approach to learning word embeddings is through factorization of word co-occurrence matrices such as GloVe embeddings BIBREF13 . The matrix factorization approach has been shown to have an implicit connection with skip-gram and negative sampling BIBREF14 . Bayesian matrix factorization where row and columns are modeled as Gaussians has been explored in BIBREF15 and provides a different probabilistic perspective of word embeddings. In exciting recent work, BIBREF1 propose a Gaussian distribution to model each word. Their approach is significantly more expressive than typical point embeddings, with the ability to represent concepts such as entailment, by having the distribution for one word (e.g. `music') encompass the distributions for sets of related words (`jazz' and `pop'). However, with a unimodal distribution, their approach cannot capture multiple distinct meanings, much like most deterministic approaches. Recent work has also proposed deterministic embeddings that can capture polysemies, for example through a cluster centroid of context vectors BIBREF16 , or an adapted skip-gram model with an EM algorithm to learn multiple latent representations per word BIBREF17 . BIBREF18 also extends skip-gram with multiple prototype embeddings where the number of senses per word is determined by a non-parametric approach. BIBREF19 learns topical embeddings based on latent topic models where each word is associated with multiple topics. Another related work by BIBREF20 models embeddings in infinite-dimensional space where each embedding can gradually represent incremental word sense if complex meanings are observed. Probabilistic word embeddings have only recently begun to be explored, and have so far shown great promise. In this paper, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first probabilistic word embedding that can capture multiple meanings. We use a Gaussian mixture model which allows for a highly expressive distributions over words. At the same time, we retain scalability and analytic tractability with an expected likelihood kernel energy function for training. The model and training procedure harmonize to learn descriptive representations of words, with superior performance on several benchmarks. ### Methodology
In this section, we introduce our Gaussian mixture (GM) model for word representations, and present a training method to learn the parameters of the Gaussian mixture. This method uses an energy-based maximum margin objective, where we wish to maximize the similarity of distributions of nearby words in sentences. We propose an energy function that compliments the GM model by retaining analytic tractability. We also provide critical practical details for numerical stability, hyperparameters, and initialization. ### Word Representation
We represent each word $w$ in a dictionary as a Gaussian mixture with $K$ components. Specifically, the distribution of $w$ , $f_w$ , is given by the density $$f_w(\vec{x}) &= \sum _{i=1}^K p_{w,i} \ \mathcal {N}\left[ \vec{x}; \vec{\mu }_{w,i} , \Sigma _{w,i} \right] \\
&= \sum _{i=1}^K \frac{p_{w,i} }{\sqrt{2 \pi | \Sigma _{w,i} | }} e^{-\frac{1}{2} (\vec{x} - \vec{\mu }_{w,i})^{\top } \Sigma _{w,i}^{-1} (\vec{x} - \vec{\mu }_{w,i})} \,, $$ (Eq. 2) where $\sum _{i=1}^K p_{w,i} = 1$ . The mean vectors $\vec{\mu }_{w,i}$ represent the location of the $i^{th}$ component of word $w$ , and are akin to the point embeddings provided by popular approaches like word2vec. $p_{w,i}$ represents the component probability (mixture weight), and $\Sigma _{w,i}$ is the component covariance matrix, containing uncertainty information. Our goal is to learn all of the model parameters $\vec{\mu }_{w,i}, p_{w,i}, \Sigma _{w,i}$ from a corpus of natural sentences to extract semantic information of words. Each Gaussian component's mean vector of word $w$ can represent one of the word's distinct meanings. For instance, one component of a polysemous word such as `rock' should represent the meaning related to `stone' or `pebbles', whereas another component should represent the meaning related to music such as `jazz' or `pop'. Figure 1 illustrates our word embedding model, and the difference between multimodal and unimodal representations, for words with multiple meanings. ### Skip-Gram
The training objective for learning $\theta = \lbrace \vec{\mu }_{w,i}, p_{w,i}, \Sigma _{w,i}\rbrace $ draws inspiration from the continuous skip-gram model BIBREF0 , where word embeddings are trained to maximize the probability of observing a word given another nearby word. This procedure follows the distributional hypothesis that words occurring in natural contexts tend to be semantically related. For instance, the words `jazz' and `music' tend to occur near one another more often than `jazz' and `cat'; hence, `jazz' and `music' are more likely to be related. The learned word representation contains useful semantic information and can be used to perform a variety of NLP tasks such as word similarity analysis, sentiment classification, modelling word analogies, or as a preprocessed input for complex system such as statistical machine translation. ### Energy-based Max-Margin Objective
Each sample in the objective consists of two pairs of words, $(w,c)$ and $(w,c^{\prime })$ . $w$ is sampled from a sentence in a corpus and $c$ is a nearby word within a context window of length $\ell $ . For instance, a word $w = $ `jazz' which occurs in the sentence `I listen to jazz music' has context words (`I', `listen', `to' , `music'). $c^{\prime }$ is a negative context word (e.g. `airplane') obtained from random sampling. The objective is to maximize the energy between words that occur near each other, $w$ and $c$ , and minimize the energy between $w$ and its negative context $c^{\prime }$ . This approach is similar to negative sampling BIBREF0 , BIBREF4 , which contrasts the dot product between positive context pairs with negative context pairs. The energy function is a measure of similarity between distributions and will be discussed in Section "Energy Function" . We use a max-margin ranking objective BIBREF2 , used for Gaussian embeddings in BIBREF1 , which pushes the similarity of a word and its positive context higher than that of its negative context by a margin $m$ : $$\nonumber L_\theta (w, c, c^{\prime }) = \max (0, \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \\
\nonumber m - \log E_\theta (w, c) + \log E_\theta (w, c^{\prime }) )$$ (Eq. 6) This objective can be minimized by mini-batch stochastic gradient descent with respect to the parameters $\theta = \lbrace \vec{\mu }_{w,i}, p_{w,i}, \Sigma _{w,i}\rbrace $ – the mean vectors, covariance matrices, and mixture weights – of our multimodal embedding in Eq. ( 2 ). We use a word sampling scheme similar to the implementation in word2vec BIBREF0 , BIBREF4 to balance the importance of frequent words and rare words. Frequent words such as `the', `a', `to' are not as meaningful as relatively less frequent words such as `dog', `love', `rock', and we are often more interested in learning the semantics of the less frequently observed words. We use subsampling to improve the performance of learning word vectors BIBREF4 . This technique discards word $w_i$ with probability $P(w_i) = 1 - \sqrt{t/f(w_i)}$ , where $f(w_i)$ is the frequency of word $w_i$ in the training corpus and $t$ is a frequency threshold. To generate negative context words, each word type $w_i$ is sampled according to a distribution $P_n(w_i) \propto U(w_i)^{3/4}$ which is a distorted version of the unigram distribution $U(w_i)$ that also serves to diminish the relative importance of frequent words. Both subsampling and the negative distribution choice are proven effective in word2vec training BIBREF4 . ### Energy Function
For vector representations of words, a usual choice for similarity measure (energy function) is a dot product between two vectors. Our word representations are distributions instead of point vectors and therefore need a measure that reflects not only the point similarity, but also the uncertainty. We propose to use the expected likelihood kernel, which is a generalization of an inner product between vectors to an inner product between distributions BIBREF3 . That is, $
E(f,g) = \int f(x) g(x) \ d x = \langle f, g \rangle _{L_2}
$ where $\langle \cdot , \cdot \rangle _{L_2} $ denotes the inner product in Hilbert space $L_2$ . We choose this form of energy since it can be evaluated in a closed form given our choice of probabilistic embedding in Eq. ( 2 ). For Gaussian mixtures $f,g$ representing the words $w_f, w_g$ , $f(x) = \sum _{i=1}^K p_i \mathcal {N}(x; \vec{\mu }_{f,i} , \Sigma _{f,i} ) $ and $g(x) = \sum _{i=1}^K q_i \mathcal {N}(x; \vec{\mu }_{g,i} , \Sigma _{g,i} )$ , $\sum _{i =1}^K p_i = 1 $ , and $\sum _{i =1}^K q_i = 1$ , we find (see Section "Derivation of Expected Likelihood Kernel" ) the log energy is $$
\log E_\theta (f,g) = \log \sum _{j=1}^K \sum _{i=1}^K p_i q_j e^{\xi _{i,j}}$$ (Eq. 9) where $$\nonumber \xi _{i,j} &\equiv \log \mathcal {N}(0; \vec{\mu }_{f,i} - \vec{\mu }_{g,j}, \Sigma _{f,i} + \Sigma _{g,j} ) \\ \nonumber &= - \frac{1}{2} \log \det ( \Sigma _{f,i} + \Sigma _{g,j} ) - \frac{D}{2} \log (2 \pi ) \\
- \frac{1}{2} & (\vec{\mu }_{f,i} - \vec{\mu }_{g,j} )^\top (\Sigma _{f,i} + \Sigma _{g,j} )^{-1} (\vec{\mu }_{f,i} - \vec{\mu }_{g,j} ) $$ (Eq. 10) We call the term $\xi _{i,j}$ partial (log) energy. Observe that this term captures the similarity between the $i^{th}$ meaning of word $w_f$ and the $j^{th}$ meaning of word $w_g$ . The total energy in Equation 9 is the sum of possible pairs of partial energies, weighted accordingly by the mixture probabilities $p_i$ and $q_j$ . The term $- (\vec{\mu }_{f,i} - \vec{\mu }_{g,j} )^\top (\Sigma _{f,i} + \Sigma _{g,j} )^{-1} (\vec{\mu }_{f,i} - \vec{\mu }_{g,j} ) $ in $\xi _{i,j}$ explains the difference in mean vectors of semantic pair $(w_f, i)$ and $(w_g, j)$ . If the semantic uncertainty (covariance) for both pairs are low, this term has more importance relative to other terms due to the inverse covariance scaling. We observe that the loss function $L_\theta $ in Section "Discussion" attains a low value when $E_\theta (w,c)$ is relatively high. High values of $E_\theta (w,c)$ can be achieved when the component means across different words $\vec{\mu }_{f,i}$ and $\vec{\mu }_{g,j}$ are close together (e.g., similar point representations). High energy can also be achieved by large values of $\Sigma _{f,i}$ and $\xi _{i,j}$0 , which washes out the importance of the mean vector difference. The term $\xi _{i,j}$1 serves as a regularizer that prevents the covariances from being pushed too high at the expense of learning a good mean embedding. At the beginning of training, $\xi _{i,j}$ roughly are on the same scale among all pairs $(i,j)$ 's. During this time, all components learn the signals from the word occurrences equally. As training progresses and the semantic representation of each mixture becomes more clear, there can be one term of $\xi _{i,j}$ 's that is predominantly higher than other terms, giving rise to a semantic pair that is most related. The negative KL divergence is another sensible choice of energy function, providing an asymmetric metric between word distributions. However, unlike the expected likelihood kernel, KL divergence does not have a closed form if the two distributions are Gaussian mixtures. ### Experiments
We have introduced a model for multi-prototype embeddings, which expressively captures word meanings with whole probability distributions. We show that our combination of energy and objective functions, proposed in Section "Skip-Gram" , enables one to learn interpretable multimodal distributions through unsupervised training, for describing words with multiple distinct meanings. By representing multiple distinct meanings, our model also reduces the unnecessarily large variance of a Gaussian embedding model, and has improved results on word entailment tasks. To learn the parameters of the proposed mixture model, we train on a concatenation of two datasets: UKWAC (2.5 billion tokens) and Wackypedia (1 billion tokens) BIBREF21 . We discard words that occur fewer than 100 times in the corpus, which results in a vocabulary size of $314,129$ words. Our word sampling scheme, described at the end of Section "Qualitative Evaluation" , is similar to that of word2vec with one negative context word for each positive context word. After training, we obtain learned parameters $\lbrace \vec{\mu }_{w,i}, \Sigma _{w,i}, p_i\rbrace _{i=1}^K$ for each word $w$ . We treat the mean vector $\vec{\mu }_{w,i}$ as the embedding of the $i^{\text{th}}$ mixture component with the covariance matrix $\Sigma _{w,i}$ representing its subtlety and uncertainty. We perform qualitative evaluation to show that our embeddings learn meaningful multi-prototype representations and compare to existing models using a quantitative evaluation on word similarity datasets and word entailment. We name our model as Word to Gaussian Mixture (w2gm) in constrast to Word to Gaussian (w2g) BIBREF1 . Unless stated otherwise, w2g refers to our implementation of w2gm model with one mixture component. ### Hyperparameters
Unless stated otherwise, we experiment with $K=2$ components for the w2gm model, but we have results and discussion of $K=3$ at the end of section 4.3. We primarily consider the spherical case for computational efficiency. We note that for diagonal or spherical covariances, the energy can be computed very efficiently since the matrix inversion would simply require $\mathcal {O}(d)$ computation instead of $\mathcal {O}(d^3)$ for a full matrix. Empirically, we have found diagonal covariance matrices become roughly spherical after training. Indeed, for these relatively high dimensional embeddings, there are sufficient degrees of freedom for the mean vectors to be learned such that the covariance matrices need not be asymmetric. Therefore, we perform all evaluations with spherical covariance models. Models used for evaluation have dimension $D=50$ and use context window $\ell = 10$ unless stated otherwise. We provide additional hyperparameters and training details in the supplementary material ( "Implementation" ). ### Similarity Measures
Since our word embeddings contain multiple vectors and uncertainty parameters per word, we use the following measures that generalizes similarity scores. These measures pick out the component pair with maximum similarity and therefore determine the meanings that are most relevant. A natural choice for a similarity score is the expected likelihood kernel, an inner product between distributions, which we discussed in Section "Energy Function" . This metric incorporates the uncertainty from the covariance matrices in addition to the similarity between the mean vectors. This metric measures the maximum similarity of mean vectors among all pairs of mixture components between distributions $f$ and $g$ . That is, $\displaystyle d(f,g) = \max _{i,j= 1, \hdots , K} \frac{ \langle \mathbf {\mu }_{f,i}, \mathbf {\mu }_{g,j} \rangle }{ ||\mathbf {\mu }_{f,i}|| \cdot || \mathbf {\mu }_{g,j} || }$ , which corresponds to matching the meanings of $f$ and $g$ that are the most similar. For a Gaussian embedding, maximum similarity reduces to the usual cosine similarity. Cosine similarity is popular for evaluating embeddings. However, our training objective directly involves the Euclidean distance in Eq. ( 10 ), as opposed to dot product of vectors such as in word2vec. Therefore, we also consider the Euclidean metric: $\displaystyle d(f,g) = \min _{i,j= 1, \hdots , K} [ || \mathbf {\mu }_{f,i} - \mathbf {\mu }_{g,j} || ] $ . ### Qualitative Evaluation
In Table 1 , we show examples of polysemous words and their nearest neighbors in the embedding space to demonstrate that our trained embeddings capture multiple word senses. For instance, a word such as `rock' that could mean either `stone' or `rock music' should have each of its meanings represented by a distinct Gaussian component. Our results for a mixture of two Gaussians model confirm this hypothesis, where we observe that the 0th component of `rock' being related to (`basalt', `boulders') and the 1st component being related to (`indie', `funk', `hip-hop'). Similarly, the word bank has its 0th component representing the river bank and the 1st component representing the financial bank. By contrast, in Table 1 (bottom), see that for Gaussian embeddings with one mixture component, nearest neighbors of polysemous words are predominantly related to a single meaning. For instance, `rock' mostly has neighbors related to rock music and `bank' mostly related to the financial bank. The alternative meanings of these polysemous words are not well represented in the embeddings. As a numerical example, the cosine similarity between `rock' and `stone' for the Gaussian representation of BIBREF1 is only $0.029$ , much lower than the cosine similarity $0.586$ between the 0th component of `rock' and `stone' in our multimodal representation. In cases where a word only has a single popular meaning, the mixture components can be fairly close; for instance, one component of `stone' is close to (`stones', `stonework', `slab') and the other to (`carving, `relic', `excavated'), which reflects subtle variations in meanings. In general, the mixture can give properties such as heavy tails and more interesting unimodal characterizations of uncertainty than could be described by a single Gaussian. We provide an interactive visualization as part of our code repository: https://github.com/benathi/word2gm#visualization that allows real-time queries of words' nearest neighbors (in the embeddings tab) for $K=1, 2, 3$ components. We use a notation similar to that of Table 1 , where a token w:i represents the component i of a word w. For instance, if in the $K=2$ link we search for bank:0, we obtain the nearest neighbors such as river:1, confluence:0, waterway:1, which indicates that the 0th component of `bank' has the meaning `river bank'. On the other hand, searching for bank:1 yields nearby words such as banking:1, banker:0, ATM:0, indicating that this component is close to the `financial bank'. We also have a visualization of a unimodal (w2g) for comparison in the $K=1$ link. In addition, the embedding link for our Gaussian mixture model with $K=3$ mixture components can learn three distinct meanings. For instance, each of the three components of `cell' is close to (`keypad', `digits'), (`incarcerated', `inmate') or (`tissue', `antibody'), indicating that the distribution captures the concept of `cellphone', `jail cell', or `biological cell', respectively. Due to the limited number of words with more than 2 meanings, our model with $K=3$ does not generally offer substantial performance differences to our model with $K=2$ ; hence, we do not further display $K=3$ results for compactness. ### Word Similarity
We evaluate our embeddings on several standard word similarity datasets, namely, SimLex BIBREF22 , WS or WordSim-353, WS-S (similarity), WS-R (relatedness) BIBREF23 , MEN BIBREF24 , MC BIBREF25 , RG BIBREF26 , YP BIBREF27 , MTurk(-287,-771) BIBREF28 , BIBREF29 , and RW BIBREF30 . Each dataset contains a list of word pairs with a human score of how related or similar the two words are. We calculate the Spearman correlation BIBREF31 between the labels and our scores generated by the embeddings. The Spearman correlation is a rank-based correlation measure that assesses how well the scores describe the true labels. The correlation results are shown in Table 2 using the scores generated from the expected likelihood kernel, maximum cosine similarity, and maximum Euclidean distance. We show the results of our Gaussian mixture model and compare the performance with that of word2vec and the original Gaussian embedding by BIBREF1 . We note that our model of a unimodal Gaussian embedding w2g also outperforms the original model, which differs in model hyperparameters and initialization, for most datasets. Our multi-prototype model w2gm also performs better than skip-gram or Gaussian embedding methods on many datasets, namely, WS, WS-R, MEN, MC, RG, YP, MT-287, RW. The maximum cosine similarity yields the best performance on most datasets; however, the minimum Euclidean distance is a better metric for the datasets MC and RW. These results are consistent for both the single-prototype and the multi-prototype models. We also compare out results on WordSim-353 with the multi-prototype embedding method by BIBREF16 and BIBREF18 , shown in Table 3 . We observe that our single-prototype model w2g is competitive compared to models by BIBREF16 , even without using a corpus with stop words removed. This could be due to the auto-calibration of importance via the covariance learning which decrease the importance of very frequent words such as `the', `to', `a', etc. Moreover, our multi-prototype model substantially outperforms the model of BIBREF16 and the MSSG model of BIBREF18 on the WordSim-353 dataset. ### Word Similarity for Polysemous Words
We use the dataset SCWS introduced by BIBREF16 , where word pairs are chosen to have variations in meanings of polysemous and homonymous words. We compare our method with multiprototype models by Huang BIBREF16 , Tian BIBREF17 , Chen BIBREF32 , and MSSG model by BIBREF18 . We note that Chen model uses an external lexical source WordNet that gives it an extra advantage. We use many metrics to calculate the scores for the Spearman correlation. MaxSim refers to the maximum cosine similarity. AveSim is the average of cosine similarities with respect to the component probabilities. In Table 4 , the model w2g performs the best among all single-prototype models for either 50 or 200 vector dimensions. Our model w2gm performs competitively compared to other multi-prototype models. In SCWS, the gain in flexibility in moving to a probability density approach appears to dominate over the effects of using a multi-prototype. In most other examples, we see w2gm surpass w2g, where the multi-prototype structure is just as important for good performance as the probabilistic representation. Note that other models also use AvgSimC metric which uses context information which can yield better correlation BIBREF16 , BIBREF32 . We report the numbers using AvgSim or MaxSim from the existing models which are more comparable to our performance with MaxSim. ### Reduction in Variance of Polysemous Words
One motivation for our Gaussian mixture embedding is to model word uncertainty more accurately than Gaussian embeddings, which can have overly large variances for polysemous words (in order to assign some mass to all of the distinct meanings). We see that our Gaussian mixture model does indeed reduce the variances of each component for such words. For instance, we observe that the word rock in w2g has much higher variance per dimension ( $e^{-1.8} \approx 1.65 $ ) compared to that of Gaussian components of rock in w2gm (which has variance of roughly $e^{-2.5} \approx 0.82$ ). We also see, in the next section, that w2gm has desirable quantitative behavior for word entailment. ### Word Entailment
We evaluate our embeddings on the word entailment dataset from BIBREF33 . The lexical entailment between words is denoted by $w_1 \models w_2$ which means that all instances of $w_1$ are $w_2$ . The entailment dataset contains positive pairs such as aircraft $\models $ vehicle and negative pairs such as aircraft $\lnot \models $ insect. We generate entailment scores of word pairs and find the best threshold, measured by Average Precision (AP) or F1 score, which identifies negative versus positive entailment. We use the maximum cosine similarity and the minimum KL divergence, $\displaystyle d(f,g) = \min _{i,j= 1, \hdots , K} KL(f || g)$ , for entailment scores. The minimum KL divergence is similar to the maximum cosine similarity, but also incorporates the embedding uncertainty. In addition, KL divergence is an asymmetric measure, which is more suitable for certain tasks such as word entailment where a relationship is unidirectional. For instance, $w_1 \models w_2$ does not imply $w_2 \models w_1$ . Indeed, aircraft $\models $ vehicle does not imply vehicle $\models $ aircraft, since all aircraft are vehicles but not all vehicles are aircraft. The difference between $KL(w_1 || w_2)$ versus $KL(w_2 || w_1)$ distinguishes which word distribution encompasses another distribution, as demonstrated in Figure 1 . Table 5 shows the results of our w2gm model versus the Gaussian embedding model w2g. We observe a trend for both models with window size 5 and 10 that the KL metric yields improvement (both AP and F1) over cosine similarity. In addition, w2gm generally outperforms w2g. The multi-prototype model estimates the meaning uncertainty better since it is no longer constrained to be unimodal, leading to better characterizations of entailment. On the other hand, the Gaussian embedding model suffers from overestimatating variances of polysemous words, which results in less informative word distributions and reduced entailment scores. ### Discussion
We introduced a model that represents words with expressive multimodal distributions formed from Gaussian mixtures. To learn the properties of each mixture, we proposed an analytic energy function for combination with a maximum margin objective. The resulting embeddings capture different semantics of polysemous words, uncertainty, and entailment, and also perform favorably on word similarity benchmarks. Elsewhere, latent probabilistic representations are proving to be exceptionally valuable, able to capture nuances such as face angles with variational autoencoders BIBREF34 or subtleties in painting strokes with the InfoGAN BIBREF35 . Moreover, classically deterministic deep learning architectures are actively being generalized to probabilistic deep models, for full predictive distributions instead of point estimates, and significantly more expressive representations BIBREF36 , BIBREF37 , BIBREF38 , BIBREF39 , BIBREF40 . Similarly, probabilistic word embeddings can capture a range of subtle meanings, and advance the state of the art. Multimodal word distributions naturally represent our belief that words do not have single precise meanings: indeed, the shape of a word distribution can express much more semantic information than any point representation. In the future, multimodal word distributions could open the doors to a new suite of applications in language modelling, where whole word distributions are used as inputs to new probabilistic LSTMs, or in decision functions where uncertainty matters. As part of this effort, we can explore different metrics between distributions, such as KL divergences, which would be a natural choice for order embeddings that model entailment properties. It would also be informative to explore inference over the number of components in mixture models for word distributions. Such an approach could potentially discover an unbounded number of distinct meanings for words, but also distribute the support of each word distribution to express highly nuanced meanings. Alternatively, we could imagine a dependent mixture model where the distributions over words are evolving with time and other covariates. One could also build new types of supervised language models, constructed to more fully leverage the rich information provided by word distributions. ### Acknowledgements
We thank NSF IIS-1563887 for support. ### Derivation of Expected Likelihood Kernel
We derive the form of expected likelihood kernel for Gaussian mixtures. Let $f,g$ be Gaussian mixture distributions representing the words $w_f, w_g$ . That is, $f(x) = \sum _{i=1}^K p_i \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{f,i} , \Sigma _{f,i} ) $ and $g(x) = \sum _{i=1}^K q_i \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{g,i} , \Sigma _{g,i} )$ , $\sum _{i =1}^K p_i = 1 $ , and $\sum _{i =1}^K q_i = 1$ . The expected likelihood kernel is given by $
E_\theta (f,g) &= \int \left( \sum _{i=1}^K p_i \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{f,i} , \Sigma _{f,i} ) \right) \cdot \\ & \left( \sum _{j=1}^K q_j \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{g,j} , \Sigma _{g,j} ) \right) \ d x \\
&= \sum _{i=1}^K \sum _{j=1}^K p_i q_j \int \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{f,i} , \Sigma _{f,i} ) \cdot \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _{g,j} , \Sigma _{g,j} ) \ d x \\
&= \sum _{i=1}^K \sum _{j=1}^K p_i q_j \mathcal {N}(0; \mu _{f,i} - \mu _{g,j} , \Sigma _{f,i} + \Sigma _{g,j} ) \\
&= \sum _{i=1}^K \sum _{j=1}^K p_i q_j e^{\xi _{i,j}}
$ where we note that $\int \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _i, \Sigma _i) \mathcal {N}(x; \mu _j, \Sigma _j) \ dx = \mathcal {N}(0, \mu _i - \mu _j , \Sigma _i + \Sigma _j)$ BIBREF1 and $\xi _{i,j}$ is the log partial energy, given by equation 10 . ### Implementation
In this section we discuss practical details for training the proposed model. We use a diagonal $\Sigma $ , in which case inverting the covariance matrix is trivial and computations are particularly efficient. Let $\mathbf {d}^f, \mathbf {d}^g$ denote the diagonal vectors of $\Sigma _f, \Sigma _g$ The expression for $\xi _{i,j}$ reduces to $
\xi _{i,j}
= - \frac{1}{2} \sum _{r=1}^D \log ( d^p_r + d^q_r)
\\ - \frac{1}{2} \sum \left[ (\mathbf {\mu }_{p,i} - \mathbf {\mu }_{q,j}) \circ \frac{1}{ \mathbf {d^p + d^q} } \circ (\mathbf {\mu }_{p, i} - \mathbf {\mu }_{q,j}) \right]
$ where $\circ $ denotes element-wise multiplication. The spherical case which we use in all our experiments is similar since we simply replace a vector $\mathbf {d}$ with a single value. We optimize $\log \mathbf {d}$ since each component of diagonal vector $\mathbf {d}$ is constrained to be positive. Similarly, we constrain the probability $p_i$ to be in $[0,1]$ and sum to 1 by optimizing over unconstrained scores $s_i \in (-\infty , \infty )$ and using a softmax function to convert the scores to probability $p_i = \frac{e^{s_i}}{\sum _{j=1}^K e^{s_j} }$ . The loss computation can be numerically unstable if elements of the diagonal covariances are very small, due to the term $ \log ( d^f_r + d^g_r) $ and $ \frac{1}{ \mathbf {d}^q + \mathbf {d}^p} $ . Therefore, we add a small constant $\epsilon = 10^{-4}$ so that $d^f_r + d^g_r$ and $ \mathbf {d}^q + \mathbf {d}^p $ becomes $d^f_r + d^g_r + \epsilon $ and $ \mathbf {d^q + d^p} + \epsilon $ . In addition, we observe that $\xi _{i,j}$ can be very small which would result in $e^{\xi _{i,j}} \approx 0$ up to machine precision. In order to stabilize the computation in eq. 9 , we compute its equivalent form $
\log E(f,g) = \xi _{i^{\prime },j^{\prime }} + \log \sum _{j=1}^K \sum _{i=1}^K p_i q_j e^{\xi _{i,j} - \xi _{i^{\prime },j^{\prime }}}
$ where $ \xi _{i^{\prime },j^{\prime }} = \max _{i,j} \xi _{i,j}$ . In the loss function $L_\theta $ , we use a margin $m= 1$ and a batch size of 128. We initialize the word embeddings with a uniform distribution over $[ -\sqrt{\frac{3}{D}}, \sqrt{\frac{3}{D}} ]$ so that the expectation of variance is 1 and the mean is zero BIBREF44 . We initialize each dimension of the diagonal matrix (or a single value for spherical case) with a constant value $v = 0.05$ . We also initialize the mixture scores $s_i$ to be 0 so that the initial probabilities are equal among all $K$ components. We use the threshold $t = 10^{-5}$ for negative sampling, which is the recommended value for word2vec skip-gram on large datasets. We also use a separate output embeddings in addition to input embeddings, similar to word2vec implementation BIBREF0 , BIBREF4 . That is, each word has two sets of distributions $q_{I}$ and $q_{O}$ , each of which is a Gaussian mixture. For a given pair of word and context $(w,c)$ , we use the input distribution $q_{I}$ for $w$ (input word) and the output distribution $q_{O}$ for context $c$ (output word). We optimize the parameters of both $q_{I}$ and $q_{O}$ and use the trained input distributions $q_{I}$ as our final word representations. We use mini-batch asynchronous gradient descent with Adagrad BIBREF41 which performs adaptive learning rate for each parameter. We also experiment with Adam BIBREF43 which corrects the bias in adaptive gradient update of Adagrad and is proven very popular for most recent neural network models. However, we found that it is much slower than Adagrad ( $\approx 10$ times). This is because the gradient computation of the model is relatively fast, so a complex gradient update algorithm such as Adam becomes the bottleneck in the optimization. Therefore, we choose to use Adagrad which allows us to better scale to large datasets. We use a linearly decreasing learning rate from $0.05$ to $0.00001$ . Figure 1: Top: A Gaussian Mixture embedding, where each component corresponds to a distinct meaning. Each Gaussian component is represented by an ellipsoid, whose center is specified by the mean vector and contour surface specified by the covariance matrix, reflecting subtleties in meaning and uncertainty. On the left, we show examples of Gaussian mixture distributions of words where Gaussian components are randomly initialized. After training, we see on the right that one component of the word ‘rock’ is closer to ‘stone’ and ‘basalt’, whereas the other component is closer to ‘jazz’ and ‘pop’. We also demonstrate the entailment concept where the distribution of the more general word ‘music’ encapsulates words such as ‘jazz’, ‘rock’, ‘pop’. Bottom: A Gaussian embedding model (Vilnis and McCallum, 2014). For words with multiple meanings, such as ‘rock’, the variance of the learned representation becomes unnecessarily large in order to assign some probability to both meanings. Moreover, the mean vector for such words can be pulled between two clusters, centering the mass of the distribution on a region which is far from certain meanings. Table 1: Nearest neighbors based on cosine similarity between the mean vectors of Gaussian components for Gaussian mixture embedding (top) (forK = 2) and Gaussian embedding (bottom). The notation w:i denotes the ith mixture component of the word w. Table 2: Spearman correlation for word similarity datasets. The models sg, w2g, w2gm denote word2vec skip-gram, Gaussian embedding, and Gaussian mixture embedding (K=2). The measures mc, el, me denote maximum cosine similarity, expected likelihood kernel, and minimum Euclidean distance. For each of w2g and w2gm, we underline the similarity metric with the best score. For each dataset, we boldface the score with the best performance across all models. The correlation scores for sg*, w2g* are taken from Vilnis and McCallum (2014) and correspond to cosine distance. Table 3: Spearman’s correlation (ρ) on WordSim353 datasets for our Word to Gaussian Mixture embeddings, as well as the multi-prototype embedding by Huang et al. (2012) and the MSSG model by Neelakantan et al. (2014). Huang* is trained using data with all stop words removed. All models have dimension D = 50 except for MSSG 300D with D = 300 which is still outperformed by our w2gm model. Table 4: Spearman’s correlation ρ on dataset SCWS. We show the results for single prototype (top) and multi-prototype (bottom). The suffix -(S,M) refers to single and multiple prototype models, respectively. Table 5: Entailment results for models w2g and w2gm with window size 5 and 10 for maximum cosine similarity and the maximum negative KL divergence. We calculate the best average precision and the best F1 score. In most cases, w2gm outperforms w2g for describing entailment.
|
represent each word with an expressive multimodal distribution, for multiple distinct meanings, entailment, heavy tailed uncertainty, and enhanced interpretability. For example, one mode of the word `bank' could overlap with distributions for words such as `finance' and `money', and another mode could overlap with the distributions for `river' and `creek'.
|
What are three main companies acquired by Pfizer mentioned in this 10K report?
|
Evidence 0:
Note 2. Acquisitions, Divestitures, Equity-Method Investments, Licensing Arrangements and Collaborative Arrangements
A. Acquisitions
Trillium
On November 17, 2021, we acquired all of the issued and outstanding common stock not already owned by Pfizer of Trillium, a clinical stage immuno-oncology company developing
therapies targeting cancer immune evasion pathways and specific cell targeting approaches, for a price of $18.50 per share in cash, for total consideration of $2.0 billion, net of cash
acquired. As a result, Trillium became our wholly owned subsidiary. We previously held a 2% ownership investment in Trillium. Trilliums lead program, TTI-622, is an investigational
fusion protein that is designed to block the inhibitory activity of CD47, a molecule that is overexpressed by a wide variety of tumors.
We accounted for the transaction as an asset acquisition since the lead asset, TTI-622, represented substantially all of the fair value of the gross assets acquired, which exclude cash
acquired. At the acquisition date, we recorded a $2.1 billion charge representing an acquired IPR&D asset with no alternative future use in Research and development expenses, of
which the $2.0 billion net cash consideration is presented as a cash outflow from operating activities. In connection with this acquisition, we recorded $256 million of assets acquired
primarily consisting of cash and investments. Liabilities assumed were approximately $81 million.
Array
On July 30, 2019, we acquired Array, a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of targeted small molecule
medicines to treat cancer and other diseases of high unmet need, for $48 per share in cash. The total fair value of the consideration transferred was $11.2 billion ($10.9 billion, net of
cash acquired). In addition, $157 million in payments to Array employees for the fair value of previously unvested stock options was recognized as post-closing compensation expense
and recorded in Restructuring charges and certain acquisition-related costs (see Note 3). We financed the majority of the transaction with debt and the balance with existing cash.
Evidence 1:
Therachon
On July 1, 2019, we acquired all the remaining shares of Therachon, a privately-held clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on rare diseases, with assets in development for
the treatment of achondroplasia, a genetic condition and the most common form of short-limb dwarfism, for $340 million upfront, plus potential milestone payments of up to $470
million contingent on the achievement of key milestones in the development and commercialization of the lead asset. We accounted for the transaction as an asset acquisition since
the lead asset represented substantially all the fair value of the gross assets acquired. The total fair value of the consideration transferred for Therachon was $322 million, which
consisted of $317 million of cash and our previous $5 million investment in Therachon. In connection with this asset acquisition, we recorded a charge of $337 million in Research and
development expenses.
|
Trillium, Array, and Therachon
|
Considering Mrs. Mayer's medications that were present in 2019 and 2021, which drug's dosing frequency was reduced in the second regimen, likely indicating a clinical improvement?
Choose the correct answer from the following options:
A. Aspirin
B. Simvastatin
C. Pantoprazole
D. Prednisolone
E. Acyclovir
|
### Patient Report 0
**Dear colleague, **
We report to you about Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on 01/12/1948, who
presented to our outpatient clinic on 07/13/19.
**Diagnoses:**
- BIRADS IV, recommended biopsy during breast diagnostics.
- Left breast carcinoma: iT1b; iN0; MX; ER: 12/12; PR: 2/12; Her-2:
neg; Ki67: 15%.
**Other Diagnoses: **
- Status post apoplexy
- Status post cataract surgery
- Status post right hip total hip replacement (THR)
- Pemphigus vulgaris under azathioprine therapy
- Osteoporosis
- Obesity with a BMI of 35
- Undergoing immunosuppressive therapy with prednisolone
**Family History:**
- Sister deceased at age 39 from breast cancer.
- Mother and grandmother (maternal and paternal) were diagnosed with
breast cancer.
**Medical History:** The CT thorax report indicates the presence of
inflammatory foci, warranting further follow-up. The relevant data was
documented and presented during the tumor conference. Subsequently, a
telephone conversation was conducted with the patient to discuss the
next steps.
**Tumor board decision from 07/13/2019:**
**Imaging: **
1) MRI examination detected a unifocal lesion on the left external
aspect, measuring approximately 2.4 cm in size.
2) CT scan (thorax/abdomen 07/12/2019) revealed a previously known
liver lesion, likely a hemangioma. No evidence of metastases was
identified. Nonspecific, small foci were observed in the lungs,
likely indicative of post-inflammatory changes.
**Recommendations:**
1. If no metastasis (M0): Fast-track BRCA testing is recommended.
2. If BRCA testing returns negative: Proceed with a selective excision
of the left breast after ultrasound-guided fine needle marking and
sentinel lymph node biopsy on the left side. Additionally, perform
Endopredict analysis on the surgical specimen.
**Current Medication: **
**Medication** **Dosage** **Route** **Frequency**
------------------------------- ------------ ----------- ---------------
Aspirin 100mg Oral 1-0-0
Simvastatin (Zocor) 40mg Oral 0-1-0
Haloperidol (Haldol) 100mg Oral ½-0-½
Zopiclone (Imovane) 7.5mg Oral 0-0-1
Trazodone (Desyrel) 100mg Oral 0-0-½-
Calcium Supplement (Caltrate) 500mg Oral 1-0-1
Nystatin (Bio-Statin) As advised Oral 1-1-1-1
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40mg Oral 1-0-0
Prednisolone (Prelone) 40mg Oral As advised
Tramadol/Naloxone (Ultram) 50/4mg Oral 1-0-1
Acyclovir (Zovirax) 800mg Oral 1-1-1
**Mammography and Tomosynthesis from 07/8/2019:**
[Findings]{.underline}**: **During the inspection and palpation, no
significant findings were noted on either side. Some areas with higher
mammographic density were observed, which slightly limited the
assessment. However, during the initial examination, a small
architectural irregularity was identified on the outer left side. This
irregularity appeared as a small, roundish compression measuring
approximately 6mm and was visible only in the medio-lateral oblique
image, with a nipple distance of 8cm. Apart from this discovery, there
were no other suspicious focal findings on either side. No clustered or
irregular microcalcifications were detected. Additionally, a long-term,
unchanged observation noted some asymmetry with denser breast tissue
present on both sides, particularly on the outer aspects. Sonographic
evaluation posed challenges due to the mixed echogenic glandular tissue.
As a possible corresponding feature to the questionable architectural
irregularity on the outer left side, a blurred, echo-poor area with a
vertical alignment measuring about 7x5mm was identified. Importantly, no
other suspicious focal findings were observed, and there was no evidence
of enlarged lymph nodes in the axilla on both sides.
[Assessment]{.underline}**:** The observed finding on the left side
presents an uncertain nature, categorized as BIRADS IVb. In contrast,
the finding on the right side appears benign, categorized as BIRADS II.
To gain a more conclusive understanding of the left-sided finding, we
recommend a histological assessment through a sonographically guided
high-speed punch biopsy. An appointment has been scheduled with the
patient to proceed with this biopsy and obtain a definitive
diagnosis.Formularbeginn
Formularende**Current Recommendations:**\
A fast-track decision will be made regarding tumor genetics, and the
patient will be notified of the appointment via telephone. The patient
should bring the pathology blocks from Fairview Clinic on the day of
blood collection for genetic testing, along with a referral for an
Endopredict test. A multidisciplinary team meeting will be convened
after the Endopredict test and genetic testing results are available. If
there is persistence or worsening of symptoms, we strongly advise the
patient to seek immediate re-evaluation. Additionally, outside of
regular office hours, the patient can seek assistance at the emergency
care unit in case of emergency.
**MRI from 07/11/2019:**
[Technique:]{.underline} Breast MRI (3T scanner) with dedicated mammary
surface coil:
[Findings:]{.underline} The overall contrast enhancement was observed
bilaterally to evaluate the Grade II findings. There was low to moderate
small-spotted contrast enhancement with slightly limited assessability.
The contrast dynamics revealed a patchy, confluent, blurred, and
elongated contrast enhancement, corresponding to the primary lesion,
which measured approximately 2.4 cm on the lower left exterior. Single
spicules were noted, and the lesion appeared hypointense in T1w imaging.
No suspicious focal findings with contrast enhancement were detected on
the right side. Small axillary lymph nodes were observed on the left
side, but they did not appear suspicious based on MR morphology.
Additionally, there were no suspicious lymph nodes on the right side.
[Assessment:]{.underline} An unifocal primary lesion measuring
approximately 2.4 cm in diameter was identified on the lower left
exterior. It exhibited patchy confluent enhancement and architectural
disturbance, with single spicules. No evidence of suspicious lymph nodes
was found. The left side is categorized as BIRADS 6, indicating a high
suspicion of malignancy, while the right side is categorized as BIRADS
2, indicating a benign finding.
### Patient Report 1
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to provide you with an update on the medical condition of
Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on 01/12/1948, who attended our outpatient clinic
on 08/02/2019.
**Diagnoses:**
- Vacuum-assisted biopsy-confirmed ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) of
the right breast (17mm)
- Histological grade G3, estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone
receptor (PR) negative.
- Postmenopausal for the past eight years.
- Previous surgical history includes an appendectomy.
- Allergies: Hay fever
**Current Presentation**: The patient sought consultation following a
confirmed diagnosis of DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma In Situ) in the right
breast, which was determined through a vacuum-assisted biopsy.
**Physical Examination**: Upon physical examination, there is evidence
of a post-intervention hematoma located in the upper right quadrant of
the right breast. However, the clip from the biopsy is not clearly
visible. A sonographic examination of the right axilla reveals no
abnormalities.
**Current Recommendations:**
- Imaging studies have been conducted.
- A case presentation is scheduled for our mammary conference
tomorrow.
- Subsequently, planning for surgery will commence, including the
evaluation of sentinel lymph nodes following a right mastectomy and
axillary lymph node dissection.
### Patient Report 2
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to provide an update regarding Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on
01/12/1948, who received outpatient care at our facility on 08/29/2019.
**Diagnoses:**
- Vacuum-assisted biopsy-confirmed ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) of
the right breast, measuring 17mm in size, classified as Grade 3, and
testing negative for estrogen receptors (ER) and progesterone
receptors (PR).
- Mrs. Mayer has been postmenopausal for eight years.
- Notable allergy: Hay fever
**Tumor Board Decision:** Mammography imaging revealed a clip associated
with a focal finding in the right breast adjacent to calcifications.
[Recommendation]{.underline}: Proceed with sentinel lymph node
evaluation after right mastectomy, including clip localization on the
right side.
**Current Presentation**: During the patient\'s recent outpatient visit,
an extensive pre-operative consultation was conducted. This discussion
covered the indications for the surgery, details of the surgical
process, potential alternative options, as well as general and specific
risks associated with the procedure. These risks included the
possibility of an aesthetically suboptimal outcome and the chance of
encountering an R1 situation. The patient did not have any further
questions and provided written consent for the procedure.
**Physical Examination:** Both breasts appear normal upon inspection and
palpation. The right axilla shows no abnormalities.
**Medical History:** Mrs. Linda Mayer presented to our clinic with a
vacuum biopsy-confirmed DCIS of the right breast for therapeutic
intervention. The decision for surgery was reached following a
comprehensive review by our interdisciplinary breast board. After an
extensive discussion of the procedure\'s scope, associated risks, and
alternative options, the patient provided informed consent for the
proposed surgery.
**Preoperative Procedure:** Sonographic and mammographic fine needle
marking of the remaining findings and the clip in the right breast.
**Surgical Report:** Team time-out conducted with colleagues of
anesthesia. Patient positioned in the supine position. Surgical site
disinfection and sterile draping. Marking of the incision site.
A semicircular incision was made laterally on the right breast.
Visualization and dissection along the marking wire towards the marked
finding. Excision of the marked findings, with a safety margin of
approximately 1-2 cm. The excised specimen measured approximately 4 x 5
x 3 cm. Markings using standard protocol (green thread cranially, blue
thread ventrally). The excised specimen was sent for preparation
radiography. Hemostasis was meticulously ensured. Insertion of a 10Ch
Blake drain into the segmental cavity, followed by suturing.
Verification of a blood-dry wound cavity. Preparation radiography
included the marked area and the marking wires. The excised material was
transferred to our pathology colleagues for histological examination.
Subdermal and intracutaneous sutures with Monocryl 3/0 in a continuous
manner. Application of Steristrips and dressing. Instruments, swabs, and
cloths were accounted for per the nurse\'s checklist. The patient was
correctly positioned throughout the operation. The anesthesiologic
course was without significant problems. A thorax compression bandage
was applied in the operating room as a preventive measure against
bleeding.
**Postoperative Procedure:** Pain management, thrombosis prophylaxis,
application of a pressure dressing, drainage under suction.
**Examinations:** **Digital Mammography performed on 08/29/2019**
[Clinical indication]{.underline}: DCIS right
[Question]{.underline}: Please send specimen + Mx-FNM
**Findings**: Sonographically guided wire marking of the maximum
microcalcification group measuring about 12 mm. Local hematoma cavity
and inset clip marking directly cranial to the finding. Stitch direction
from lateral to medial. The wire is positioned with the tip caudal to
the clip in close proximity to the microcalcification. Additional
marking of the focal localization on the skin. Documentation of the wire
course in two planes.
- Telephone discussion of findings with the surgeon.
- Preparation radiography and preparation sonography are recommended.
- Marking wire and suspicious focal findings centrally included in the
preparation.
- Intraoperative report of findings has been conveyed to the surgeon.
**Current Recommendations:**
- Scheduled for inpatient admission on ward 22 tomorrow.
- Right breast mastectomy with sentinel lymph node evaluation.
### Patient Report 3
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to update you on the clinical course of Mrs. Linda Mayer,
born on 01/12/1948, who was under our inpatient care from 08/30/2019 to
09/12/2019.
**Diagnosis:** Vacuum-assisted biopsy confirmed Ductal Carcinoma In Situ
(DCIS) in the right breast, measuring 17mm, Grade 3, ER/PR negative.
**Tumor Board Decision (07/13/2019):**
[Imaging:]{.underline} Clip identified in focal lesion in the right
breast, adjacent to calcifications.
[Recommendation]{.underline}**:** Spin Echo following fine-needle
localization with mammography-guided control of the clip in the right
breast.
[Subsequent Recommendation (08/27/2019):]{.underline} Radiation therapy
to the right breast. Regular follow-up is advised.
**Medical History:** Ms. Linda Mayer presented to our facility on
08/30/2019 for the aforementioned surgical procedure. After a
comprehensive discussion regarding the surgical plan, potential risks,
and possible complications, the patient consented to proceed. The
surgery was executed without complications on 09/01/2019. The
postoperative course was unremarkable, allowing for Ms. Mayer\'s
discharge on 09/12/2019 in stable condition and with no signs of wound
irritation.
**Histopathological Findings (09/01/2019):**
The resected segment from the right breast showed a maximum necrotic
zone of 1.6 cm with foreign body reaction, chronic resorptive
inflammation, fibrosis, and residual hemorrhage. These findings
primarily correspond to the pre-biopsy site. Surrounding this were areas
of DCIS with solid and cribriform growth patterns and comedonecrosis,
WHO Grade 3, Nuclear Grade 3, with a reconstructed extent of 3.5 cm.
Resection margins were as follows: ventral 0.15 cm, caudal 0.2 cm,
dorsal 0.4 cm, with remaining margins exceeding 0.5 cm. TNM
Classification (8th Edition, 2017): pTis (DCIS), R0, G3. Additional
immunohistochemical studies are underway to determine hormone receptor
status; a supplementary report will follow.
**Postoperative Plan:**
The patient was educated on standard postoperative care and the
importance of immediate re-evaluation for any persistent or worsening
symptoms. Radiation therapy to the right breast is planned, along with
regular follow-up appointments.
Should you have any questions or require further clarification, we are
readily available. For urgent concerns outside of regular office hours,
emergency care is available at the Emergency Department.
**Internal Histopathological Findings Report**
**Clinical Data:** DCIS in the right breast (17 mm), Grade 3, ER/PR
negative.
**Macroscopic Examination:**
The resected mammary segment from the right breast, marked with dual
threads and containing a fine-needle marker inserted ventro-laterally,
measures 4.5 x 5.5 x 3 cm (HxWxD) and weighs 35 grams. The specimen was
sectioned from medial to lateral into 14 lamellae. The cut surface
predominantly shows yellowish, lobulated mammary parenchyma with sparse
striated whitish glandular components. A DCIS-suspected area, up to 2.1
cm in size, is evident caudally and centro-ventrally (from lamellae
4-10), displaying both reddish-hemorrhagic and whitish-nodular
indurations. Minimal distances from the suspicious area to the resection
margins are as follows: cranial 2 cm, caudal 0.2 cm, dorsal 0.2 cm,
ventral 0.1 cm, medial 1.6 cm, lateral 2.5 cm. The suspect area was
completely embedded. Ink markings: green/cranial, yellow/caudal,
blue/ventral, black/dorsal.
**Microscopic Examination:**
Histological sections of the mammary parenchyma reveal fibro-lipomatous
stroma and glandular lobules with a two-layered epithelial lining. In
lamellae 3-6 and 11, solid and cribriform epithelial proliferations are
evident. Cells are cuboidal with variably enlarged, predominantly
moderately pleomorphic, round to oval nuclei. Comedo-like necroses are
occasionally observed in secondary lumina. Microscopic distances to the
deposition margins are consistent with the macroscopic findings. The
surrounding stroma in lamellae 6-9 shows extensive geographic adipose
tissue necrosis, multinucleated foreign body-type giant cells, foamy
cell macrophages, collagen fiber proliferation, and fresh hemorrhages.
**Supplemental Immunohistochemical Findings
(09/04/2019):** **Microscopy:** In the meantime, the material was
further processed as announced.
Here, the previously described intraductal epithelial growths, each with
negative staining reaction for the estrogen and progesterone receptor
(with regular external and internal control reaction).
**Critical Findings:**
Resected mammary segment with paracentral, max. 1.6 cm necrotic zone
with foreign body reaction, chronic resorptive. Chronic resorptive
inflammation, fibrosis, and hemorrhage remnants (primarily corresponding
to the pre-biopsy site), and surrounding portions of ductal carcinoma in
situ. Ductal carcinoma in situ, solid and rib-shaped growth type with
comedonecrosis, WHO grade 3, nuclear grade 3. The resection was locally
complete with the following Safety margins: ventral 0.15 cm, caudal 0.2
cm, dorsal 0.4 cm, and the remaining sedimentation margins more than 0.5
cm.
TNM classification (8th edition 2017): pTis (DCIS), R0, G3.
[Hormone receptor status:]{.underline}
- Estrogen receptor: negative (0%).
- Progesterone receptor: negative (0%).
### Patient Report 4
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to provide an update regarding Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on
01/12/1948, who received outpatient treatment on 27/09/2019.
**Diagnoses**: Left breast carcinoma; iT1c; iN0; MX; ER:12/12; PR:2/12;
Her-2: neg; Ki67:15%, BRCA 2 mutation.
**Other Diagnoses**:
- Hailey-Hailey disease - currently regressing under prednisolone.
- History of apoplexy in 2016 with no residuals
- Depressive episodes
- Right hip total hip replacement
- History of left adnexectomy in 1980 due to extrauterine pregnancy
- Tubal sterilization in 1988.
- Uterine curettage (Abrasio) in 2004
- Hysterectomy in 2005
**Allergies**: Hay fever
**Imaging**:
- CT revealed a cystic lesion in the liver, not suspicious for
metastasis. Granulomatous, post-inflammatory changes in the lung.
- An MRI of the left breast showed a unifocal lesion on the outer left
side with a 2.4 cm extension.
**Histology: **Gene score of 6.5, indicating a high-risk profile (pT2 or
pN1) if BRCA negative.
**Recommendation**: If BRCA negative, SE left mamma after ultrasound-FNM
with correlation in Mx and SLNB on the left.
**Current Presentation**: Mrs. Linda Mayer presented for pre-operative
evaluation for left mastectomy. BRCA testing confirmed a BRCA2 mutation,
warranting bilateral subcutaneous mastectomy and SLNB on the left.
Reconstruction with implants and mesh is planned, along with a breast
lift as requested by the patient.
**Macroscopy:**
**Left Subcutaneous Mastectomy (Blue/Ventral, Green/Cranial):**
- Specimen Size: 17 x 15 x 6 cm (Height x Width x Depth), Weight: 410
g
- Description: Dual filament-labeled subcutaneous mastectomy specimen
- Specimen Workup: 27 lamellae from lateral to medial
- Tumor-Suspect Area (Lamellae 17-21): Max. 1.6 cm, white dermal,
partly blurred
- Margins from Tumor Area: Ventral 0.1 cm, Caudal 1 cm, Dorsal 1.2 cm,
Cranial \> 5 cm, Lateral \> 5 cm, Medial \> 2 cm
- Remaining Mammary Parenchyma: Predominantly yellowish lipomatous
with focal nodular appearance
- Ink Markings: Cranial/Green, Caudal/Yellow, Ventral/Blue,
Dorsal/Black
- A: Lamella 17 - Covers dorsal and caudal
- B: Lamella 18 - Covers ventral
- C: Lamella 19 - Covers ventral
- D: Blade 21 - Covers ventral
- E: Lamella 20 - Reference cranial
- F: Lamella 16 - Immediately laterally following mammary
parenchyma
- G: Blade 22 - Reference immediately medial following mammary
tissue
- H: Lamella 12 - Central section
- I: Lamella 8 - Documented section top/outside
- J: Lamella 3 - Vestigial section below/outside
- K: Lamella 21 - White-nodular imposing area
- L: Lamella 8 - Further section below/outside with nodular area
- M: Lateral border lamella perpendicularly
- N: Medial border lamella perpendicular (Exemplary)
**Second Sentinel Lymph Node on the Left:**
- Specimen: Maximum of 6 cm of fat tissue resectate with 1 to 2 cm of
lymph nodes and smaller nodular indurations.
- A, B: One lymph node each divided
- C: Further nodular indurations
**Palpable Lymph Nodes Level I:**
- Specimen: One max. 4.5 cm large fat resectate with nodular
indurations up to 1.5 cm in size
- A: One nodular induration divided
- B: Further nodular indurated portions
**Right Subcutaneous Mastectomy:**
- Specimen: Double thread-labeled 450 g subcutaneous mastectomy
specimen
- Assumed Suture Markings: Blue (Ventral) and Green (Cranial)
- Dorsal Fascia Intact
- [Specimen Preparation:]{.underline} 16 lamellae from medial to
lateral
- Predominantly yellowish lobulated with streaky, beige, impinging
strands of tissue
- Isolated hemorrhages in the parenchyma
- Ink Markings: Green = Cranial, Yellow = Caudal, Blue = Ventral,
Black = Dorsal
<!-- -->
- A: Medial border lamella perpendicular (Exemplary)
- B: Lamella 5 with reference ventrally (below inside)
- C: Lamella 8 with reference ventrally (below inside)
- D: Lamella 6 with ventral and dorsal reference (upper inside)
- E: Blade 8 with ventral and dorsal cover (top inside)
- F: Blade 11 with cover dorsal and caudal (bottom outside)
- G: Blade 13 with dorsal cover (bottom outside)
- H: Blade 10 with ventral and dorsal cover (top outside)
- I: Lamella 14 with reference cranial and dorsal and bleeding in
(upper outer)
- J: Lateral border lamella perpendicular (Exemplary)
**Microscopy:**
1\) In the tumor-suspicious area, a blurred large fibrosis zone with
star-shaped extensions is visible. Intercalated are single-cell and
stranded epithelial cells with a high nuclear-cytoplasmic ratio. The
nuclei are monomorphic with finely dispersed chromatin, at most, very
isolated mitoses. Adjacent distended glandular ducts with a discohesive
cell proliferate with the same cytomorphology. Sporadically, preexistent
glandular ducts are sheared disc-like by the infiltrative tumor cells.
Samples from the nodular area of lamella 21 show areas of cell-poor
hyaline sclerosis with partly ectatically dilated glandular ducts.
2\) Second lymph node with partial infiltrates of the neoplasia described
above. The cells here are relatively densely packed. Somewhat increased
mitoses. In the lymph nodes, iron deposition is also in the sinus
histiocytes.
3\) Lymph nodes with partly sparse iron deposition. No epithelial foreign
infiltrates.
4\) Regular mammary gland parenchyma. No tumor infiltrates. Part of the
glandular ducts are slightly cystically dilated.
**Preliminary Critical Findings Report: **
Left breast carcinoma measuring max 1.6 cm diagnosed as moderately
differentiated invasive lobular carcinoma, B.R.E. score 6 (3+2+1, G2).
Presence of tumor-associated and peritumoral lobular carcinoma in situ.
Resection status indicates locally complete excision of both invasive
and non-invasive carcinoma; minimal margins as follows: ventral \<0.1
cm, caudal 0.2 cm, dorsal 0.8 cm, remaining margins ≥0.5 cm. Nodal
status reveals max 0.25 cm metastasis in 1/5 nodes, 0/2 additional
nodes, without extracapsular spread. Right mammary gland from
subcutaneous mastectomy shows tumor-free parenchyma.
**TNM classification (8th ed. 2017):** pT1c, pTis (LCIS), pN1a, G2, L0,
V0, Pn0, R0. Investigations to determine tumor biology were initiated.
Addendum follows.
**Supplementary findings on 10/07/2019**
Editing: immunohistochemistry:** **
Estrogen receptor, Progesterone receptor, Her2neu, MIB-1 (block 1D).
**Critical Findings Report:** Breast carcinoma on the left with a 1.6 cm
invasive lobular carcinoma, moderately differentiated, with a B.R.E.
score of 6 (3+2+1, G2). Additionally, tumor-associated and peritumoral
lobular carcinoma in situ are noted. Resection status confirms locally
complete excision of both invasive and non-invasive carcinomas; minimal
resection margins are ventral \<0.1 cm, caudal (LCIS) 0.2 cm, dorsal 0.8
cm, and all other margins ≥0.5 cm. Nodal assessment reveals a single
metastasis with a maximum dimension of 0.25 cm among 7 lymph nodes,
specifically found in 1/5 nodes, with no additional metastasis in 0/2
nodes and no extracapsular extension. Contralateral right mammary gland
from subcutaneous mastectomy is tumor-free.
Tumor biology of the invasive carcinoma demonstrates strong positive
estrogen receptor expression in 100% of tumor cells, strong positive
progesterone receptor expression in 1% of tumor cells, negative HER2/neu
status (Score 1+), and a Ki67 (MIB-1) proliferation index of 25%.
**TNM classification (8th Edition 2017):** pT1c, pTis (LCIS), pN1a (1/7
ECE-, sn), G2, L0, V0, Pn0, R0.
**Surgery Report (Vac Change + Irrigation)**: Indication for VAC change.
After a detailed explanation of the procedure, its risks, and
alternatives, the patient agrees to the proposed procedure.
The course of surgery: Proper positioning in a supine position. Removal
of the VAC sponge. A foul odor appears from the wound cavity. Careful
disinfection of the surgical area. Sterile draping. Detailed inspection
of the wound conditions. Wound debridement with removal of fibrin
coatings and freshening of the wound. Resection of necrotic material in
places with sharp spoon. Followed by extensive Irrigation of the entire
wound bed and wound edges using 1 l Polyhexanide solution. Renewed VAC
sponge application according to standard.
**Postoperative procedure**: Pain medication, thrombosis prophylaxis,
continuation of antibiotic therapy. In the case of abundant
Staphylococcus aureus and isolated Pseudomosas in the smear and still
clinical suspected infection, extension of antibiotic treatment to
Meropenem.
**Surgery Report: Implant Placement**
**Type of Surgery:** Implant placement and wound closure.
**Report:** After infection and VAC therapy, clean smears and planning
of reinsertion. Informed consent. Intraoperative consults: Anesthesia.
**Course of Surgery:** Team time out. Removal VAC sponge. Disinfection
and covering. Irrigation of the wound cavity with Serasept. Blust
irrigation. Fixation cranially and laterally with 4 fixation sutures
with Vircryl 2-0. Choice of trial implant. Temporary insertion. Control
in sitting and lying positions. Choice of the implant. Repeated
disinfection. Change of gloves. Insertion of the implant into the
pocket. Careful hemostasis. Insertion of a Blake drain into the wound
cavity. Suturing of the drainage. Subcutaneous sutures with Monocryl
3-0.
**Type of Surgery:** Prophylactic open Laparoscopy, extensive
adhesiolysis
**Type of Anesthesia:** ITN
**Report:** Patient presented for prophylactic right adnexectomy in the
course of hysterectomy and left adnexectomy due to genetic burden.
Intraoperatively, secondary wound closure was to be performed in the
case of a right mammary wound weeping more than one year
postoperatively. The patient agreed to the planned procedure in writing
after receiving detailed information about the extent, the risks, and
the alternatives.
**Course of the Operation:** Team time out with anesthesia colleagues.
Flat lithotomy positioning, disinfection, and sterile draping. Placement
of permanent transurethral catheter. Subumbilical incision and
dissection onto the fascia. Opening of the fascia and suturing of the
same. Exposure of the peritoneum and opening of the same. Insertion of
the 10-mm optic trocar. Insertion of three additional trocars into the
lower abdomen (left and center right, each 5mm; right 10mm). The
following situation is seen: when the camera is inserted from the
umbilical region, an extensive adhesion is seen. Only by changing the
camera to the right lower bay is extensive adhesiolysis possible. The
omentum is fused with the peritoneum and the serosa of the uterus. Upper
abdomen as far as visible inconspicuous.
After hysterectomy and adnexectomy on the left side, adnexa on the right
side atrophic and inconspicuous. The peritoneum is smooth as far as can
be seen.
Visualization of the right adnexa and the suspensory ligament of ovary.
Coagulation of the suspensory ligament of ovary ligament after
visualization of the ureter on the same side. Stepwise dissection of the
adnexa from the pelvic wall.
Recovery via endobag. Hemostasis. Inspection of the situs.
Removal of instrumentation under vision and draining of
pneumoperitoneum.
Closure of the abdominal fascia at the umbilicus and right lower
abdomen. Suturing of the skin with Monocryl 3/0. Compression bandage at
each trocar insertion site. Inspection of the right mamma. In the area
of the surgical scar laterally/externally, 2-3 small epithelium-lined
pore-like openings are visible; here, on pressure, discharge of rather
viscous/sebaceous, non-odorous, or purulent fluid. No dehiscence is
visible, suspected. fistula ducts to the implant cavity. After
consultation with the mamma surgeon, a two-stage procedure was planned
for the treatment of the fistula tracts. Correct positioning and
inconspicuous anesthesiological course. Instrumentation, swabs, and
cloths complete according to the operating room nurse. Postoperative
procedures include analgesia, mobilization, thrombosis prophylaxis, and
waiting for histology.
**Internal Histopathological Report**
[Clinical information/question]{.underline}: Fistula formation mammary
right. Dignity?
[Macroscopy]{.underline}**:** Skin spindle from scar mammary right: fix.
a 2.4 cm long, stranded skin-subcutaneous excidate. Lamellation and
complete embedding.
[Processing]{.underline}**:** 1 block, HE
[Microscopy]{.underline}**:** Histologic skin/subcutaneous
cross-sections with overlay by a multilayered keratinizing squamous
epithelium. The dermis with few inset regular skin adnexal structures,
sparse to moderately dense mononuclear-dominated inflammatory
infiltrates, and proliferation of cell-poor, fiber-rich collagenous
connective tissue.
**Critical Findings Report:**
Skin spindle on scar mamma right: skin/subcutaneous resectate with
fibrosis and chronic inflammation. To ensure that all findings are
recorded, the material will be further processed. A follow-up report
will follow.
[Microscopy]{.underline}**:** In the meantime, the material was further
processed as announced. The van Gieson stain showed extensive
proliferation of collagenous and, in some places elastic fibers. Also in
the additional immunohistochemical staining against no evidence of
atypical epithelial infiltrates.
**Lab results upon Discharge:**
**Parameter** **Results** **Reference Range**
-------------------------------- ------------- ---------------------
Sodium 141 mEq/L 132-146 mEq/L
Potassium 4.2 mEq/L 3.4-4.5 mEq/L
Creatinine 0.82 mg/dL 0.50-0.90 mg/dL
Estimated GFR (eGFR CKD-EPI) \>90 \-
Total Bilirubin 0.21 mg/dL \< 1.20 mg/dL
Albumin 4.09 g/dL 3.5-5.2 g/dL
CRP 7.8 mg/L \< 5.0 mg/L
Haptoglobin 108 mg/dL 30-200 mg/dL
Ferritin 24 µg/L 13-140 µg/L
ALT 24 U/L \< 31 U/L
AST 37 U/L \< 35 U/L
Gamma-GT 27 U/L 5-36 U/L
Lactate Dehydrogenase 244 U/L 135-214 U/L
25-OH-Vitamin D3 91.7 nmol/L 50.0-150.0 nmol/L
Hemoglobin 11.1 g/dL 12.0-15.6 g/dL
Hematocrit 40.0% 35.5-45.5%
Red Blood Cells 3.5 M/uL 3.9-5.2 M/uL
White Blood Cells 2.41 K/uL 3.90-10.50 K/uL
Platelets 142 K/uL 150-370 K/uL
MCV 73.0 fL 80.0-99.0 fL
MCH 23.9 pg 27.0-33.5 pg
MCHC 32.7 g/dL 31.5-36.0 g/dL
MPV 10.7 fL 7.0-12.0 fL
RDW-CV 14.8% 11.5-15.0%
Absolute Neutrophils 1.27 K/uL 1.50-7.70 K/uL
Absolute Immature Granulocytes 0.000 K/uL \< 0.050 K/uL
Absolute Lymphocytes 0.67 K/uL 1.10-4.50 K/uL
Absolute Monocytes 0.34 K/uL 0.10-0.90 K/uL
Absolute Eosinophils 0.09 K/uL 0.02-0.50 K/uL
Absolute Basophils 0.04 K/uL 0.00-0.20 K/uL
Free Hemoglobin 5.00 mg/dL \< 20.00 mg/dL
### Patient Report 5
**Dear colleague, **
We would like to provide an update on Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on
01/12/1948, who received inpatient care at our facility from 01/01/2021
to 01/14/2021.
**Diagnosis:** Hailey-Hailey disease.
- Upon admission, the patient was under treatment with Acitretin 25mg.
**Other Diagnoses**:
- History of apoplexy in 2016 with no residuals
- Depressive episodes
- Right hip total hip replacement
- History of left adnexectomy in 1980 die to extrauterine pregnancy
- Tubal sterilization in 1988.
- Uterine curettage in 2004
- Hysterectomy in 2005
**Medical History:** Mrs. Linda Mayer was referred to our hospital for
the management of Hailey-Hailey disease after assessment in our
outpatient clinic. She reported a worsening of painful skin erosions on
her neck and inner thighs over a span of approximately 3 weeks.
Itchiness was not reported. Prior attempts at treatment, including the
topical use of Fucicort, Prednisolone with Octenidine, and Polidocanol
gel, had provided limited relief. She denied any other physical
complaints, dyspnea, B symptoms, infections, or irregularities in stool
and micturition.
Her history revealed the initial onset of Hailey-Hailey disease,
initially presenting as itching followed by skin erosions, which
subsequently healed with scarring. The diagnosis was established at the
Fairview Clinic. Previous therapeutic interventions included systemic
cortisone shock therapy, as-needed application of Fucicort ointment, and
axillary laser therapy.
**Family History:**
- Father: Hailey-Hailey Disease (M. Hailey-Hailey)
- Mother and Sister: Breast carcinoma
**Psychosocial History:** Socially, Ms. Linda Mayer is described as a
retiree, having previously worked as a nurse.
**Physical Examination on Admission:**
Height: 16 cm, Body Weight: 80.0 kg, BMI: 29.7
**Physical Examination Findings:**
Generally stable condition with increased nutritional status. Her
consciousness was unremarkable, and cranial mobility was free. Ocular
mobility was regular, with prompt pupillary reflexes to accommodation
and light. She exhibited a normal heart rate, and cardiac and pulmonary
examinations were unremarkable. No heart murmurs were detected. Renal
bed and spine were not palpable. Further internal and orienting
neurological examinations revealed no pathological findings.
**Skin Findings on Admission:** Sharp erosions, approximately 10x10 cm
in size, with a livid-erythematous base, partly crusty, were observed on
the neck and proximal inner thighs.
In the axillary regions on both sides, there were marginal,
livid-erythematous, well-demarcated plaques interspersed with scarring
strands, more pronounced on the right side.
Skin type II.
Mucous membranes appeared normal. Dermographism was noted to be ruber.
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
------------------------------ ------------ -------------------------------
Prednisolone (Deltasone) 5 mg 1.5-0-0-0-0-0
Aspirin (Bayer) 100 mg 0-1-0-0-0-0
Simvastatin (Zocor) 40 mg 0-0-0-0-1
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 45.1 mg 1-0-0-0-0
Acitretin (Soriatane) 25 mg 1-0-0-0-0
Tetrabenazine (Xenazine) 111 mg 0.25-0.25-0.25-0.25-0.25-0.25
Letrozole (Femara) 2.5 mg 0-0-1-0
Risedronate Sodium (Actonel) 35 mg 1-0-0-0-0
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) 500 mg 0-1-0-1
Naloxone (Narcan) 8.8 mg 1-0-1-0
Eszopiclone (Lunesta) 7.5 mg 0-0-1-0
**Other Findings:** MRSA Smears:
- Nasal Smear: Normal flora, no MRSA.
- Throat Swab: Normal flora, no MRSA.
- Non-lesional Skin Smear: Normal flora.
- Lesional Skin Swab: Abundant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, abundant
Klebsiella oxytoca, and abundant Serratia sp., sensitive to
piperacillin-tazobactam.
**Therapy and Progression:** Mrs. Linda Mayer was admitted on 01/01/2021
as an inpatient for a refractory exacerbation of previously diagnosed
Hailey-Hailey disease. On admission, both bacteriological and
mycological smears were conducted, which indicated abundant levels of
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella oxytoca, and Serratia sp. Lab tests
showed a CRP level of 2.83 mg/dL and a leukocyte count of 8.8 G/L.
Initial topical therapy consisted of Zinc oxide ointment, Clotrimazole
paste, and Triamcinolone Acetonide shake lotion. Treatment was modified
on 01/04/2021 to include Clotrimazole (Lotrimin) paste in the mornings
and methylprednisolone emulsion in the evenings. Starting on 01/08,
eosin aqueous solution was introduced for application on the thighs,
serving antiseptic and drying purposes. A hydrophilic prednicarbate
cream at 0.25% concentration, combined with octenidine at 0.1%, was
applied to the neck and thighs twice daily, also starting on 01/08. For
showering, octenidine-based wash lotion was utilized. Additionally, Mrs.
Linda Mayer received an emulsifying ointment as part of her treatment.
### Patient Report 6
**Dear colleague, **
We are providing an update on our patient Mrs. Linda Mayer, born on
01/12/1948, who presented to our outpatient clinic on 09/22/2021.
**Diagnoses:** M. Hailey-Hailey
**Medical History:**
- Diagnosis of M. Hailey-Hailey at the Fairview Clinic
<!-- -->
- Treatment involved systemic steroid shock therapy, laser therapy,
and the initiation of Acitretin in October 2021, with no observed
improvement.
<!-- -->
- A dermabrasion procedure was scheduled on 03/18/2021, during a
previous inpatient admission.
- Acitretin 25mg has been administered daily, with favorable outcomes
noted when using Triamcinolone/Triclosan or Prednisolone +
Octenidine.
- A history of mastectomy with Vacuum-Assisted Closure (VAC) has
resulted in breast erosion.
**Skin Findings:**
- Erythematous and partially mottled lesions have been identified in
the axillary and inguinal regions, with some scarring observed in
the axillary area.
- On 04/28/2021, somewhat erosive plaques were noted in the inguinal
regions.
- As of 05/05/2021 discrete erosions are currently present on both
forearms.
**Current Recommendations:**
- Inpatient admission is scheduled for September 2021.
- The prescribed treatment plan includes topical prednicarbate
(Dermatop) 0.25% with Octenidine 0.1%, per NRF 11.145, in a 50g
container, to be applied once daily for 1-2 weeks.
- Hydrocortisone 5% in a suitable base, 200g, is to be applied daily.
- The regimen also includes prednicarbate (Dermatop) combined with
Octenidine.
- Acitretin will be continued temporarily.
- A follow-up appointment in the outpatient clinic is scheduled for
three months from now.
- Discontinuation of Acitretin.
- It is recommended to avoid the use of compresses on the erosions to
prevent constant trauma.
- Topical therapy with petrolatum-based wound ointment and sterile
compresses.
|
Prednisolone
|
How many followers did they analyze?
|
### Introduction
Sexual harassment is defined as "bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors." In fact, it is an ongoing problem in the U.S., especially within the higher education community. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSRVC), one in five women and one in sixteen men are sexually assaulted while they are attending college. In addition to the prevalence of campus sexual harassment, it has been shown to have detrimental effects on student's well-being, including health-related disorders and psychological distress BIBREF0, BIBREF1. However, these studies on college sexual misconduct usually collect data based on questionnaires from a small sample of the college population, which might not be sufficiently substantial to capture the big picture of sexual harassment risk of the entire student body. Alternatively, social media opens up new opportunities to gather a larger and more comprehensive amount of data and mitigate the risk of false or inaccurate narratives from the studied subjects. On October 15 of 2017, prominent Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano, by accusing Oscar-winning film producer, Harvey Weinstein, for multiple sexual impropriety attempts on herself and many other women in the film industry, ignited the "MeToo" trend on social media that called for women and men to share their own sexual harassment experience. According to CNN, over 1.7 million users had used the hash-tag in 85 countries. Benefiting from the tremendous amount of data supplied by this trend and the existing state-of-the-art semantic parser and generative statistical models, we propose a new approach to characterizing sexual harassment by mining the tweets from college users with the hash-tag #metoo on Twitter. Our main contributions are several folds. We investigate campus sexual harassment using a big-data approach by collecting data from Twitter. We employ traditional topic modeling and linear regression methods on a new dataset to highlight patterns of the ongoing troubling social behaviors at both institutional and individual levels. We propose a novel approach to combining domain-general deep semantic parsing and sentiment analysis to dissect personal narratives. ### Related Work
Previous works for sexual misconduct in academia and workplace dated back to last few decades, when researchers studied the existence, as well as psychometric and demographic insights regarding this social issue, based on survey and official data BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4. However, these methods of gathering data are limited in scale and might be influenced by the psychological and cognitive tendencies of respondents not to provide faithful answers BIBREF5. The ubiquity of social media has motivated various research on widely-debated social topics such as gang violence, hate code, or presidential election using Twitter data BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9. Recently, researchers have taken the earliest steps to understand sexual harassment using textual data on Twitter. Using machine learning techniques, Modrek and Chakalov (2019) built predictive models for the identification and categorization of lexical items pertaining to sexual abuse, while analysis on semantic contents remains untouched BIBREF10. Despite the absence of Twitter data, Field et al. (2019) did a study more related to ours as they approach to the subject geared more towards linguistics tasks such as event, entity and sentiment analysis BIBREF11. Their work on event-entity extraction and contextual sentiment analysis has provided many useful insights, which enable us to tap into the potential of our Twitter dataset. There are several novelties in our approach to the #MeToo problem. Our target population is restricted to college followers on Twitter, with the goal to explore people's sentiment towards the sexual harassment they experienced and its implication on the society's awareness and perception of the issue. Moreover, the focus on the sexual harassment reality in colleges calls for an analysis on the metadata of this demographics to reveal meaningful knowledge of their distinctive characteristics BIBREF12. ### Dataset ::: Data Collection
In this study, we limit the sample size to the followers identified as English speakers in the U.S. News Top 200 National Universities. We utilize the Jefferson-Henrique script, a web scraper designed for Twitter to retrieve a total of over 300,000 #MeToo tweets from October 15th, when Alyssa Milano posted the inceptive #MeToo tweet, to November 15th of 2017 to cover a period of a month when the trend was on the rise and attracting mass concerns. Since the lists of the followers of the studied colleges might overlap and many Twitter users tend to reiterate other's tweets, simply putting all the data collected together could create a major redundancy problem. We extract unique users and tweets from the combined result set to generate a dataset of about 60,000 unique tweets, pertaining to 51,104 unique users. ### Dataset ::: Text Preprocessing
We pre-process the Twitter textual data to ensure that its lexical items are to a high degree lexically comparable to those of natural language. This is done by performing sentiment-aware tokenization, spell correction, word normalization, segmentation (for splitting hashtags) and annotation. The implemented tokenizer with SentiWordnet corpus BIBREF13 is able to avoid splitting expressions or words that should be kept intact (as one token), and identify most emoticons, emojis, expressions such as dates, currencies, acronyms, censored words (e.g. s**t), etc. In addition, we perform modifications on the extracted tokens. For spelling correction, we compose a dictionary for the most commonly seen abbreviations, censored words and elongated words (for emphasis, e.g. "reallyyy"). The Viterbi algorithm is used for word segmentation, with word statistics (unigrams and bigrams) computed from the NLTK English Corpus to obtain the most probable segmentation posteriors from the unigrams and bigrams probabilities. Moreover, all texts are lower-cased, and URLs, emails and mentioned usernames are replaced with common designated tags so that they would not need to be annotated by the semantic parser. ### Dataset ::: College Metadata
The meta-statistics on the college demographics regarding enrollment, geographical location, private/public categorization and male-to-female ratio are obtained. Furthermore, we acquire the Campus Safety and Security Survey dataset from the official U.S. Department of Education website and use rape-related cases statistic as an attribute to complete the data for our linear regression model. The number of such reported cases by these 200 colleges in 2015 amounts to 2,939. ### Methodology ::: Regression Analysis
We examine other features regarding the characteristics of the studied colleges, which might be significant factors of sexual harassment. Four factual attributes pertaining to the 200 colleges are extracted from the U.S. News Statistics, which consists of Undergraduate Enrollment, Male/Female Ratio, Private/Public, and Region (Northeast, South, West, and Midwest). We also use the normalized rape-related cases count (number of cases reported per student enrolled) from the stated government resource as another attribute to examine the proximity of our dataset to the official one. This feature vector is then fitted in a linear regression to predict the normalized #metoo users count (number of unique users who posted #MeToo tweets per student enrolled) for each individual college. ### Methodology ::: Labeling Sexual Harassment
Per our topic modeling results, we decide to look deeper into the narratives of #MeToo users who reveal their personal stories. We examine 6,760 tweets from the most relevant topic of our LDA model, and categorize them based on the following metrics: harassment types (verbal, physical, and visual abuse) and context (peer-to-peer, school employee or work employer, and third-parties). These labels are based on definitions by the U.S. Dept. of Education BIBREF14. ### Methodology ::: Topic Modeling on #MeToo Tweets
In order to understand the latent topics of those #MeToo tweets for college followers, we first utilize Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to label universal topics demonstrated by the users. We determine the optimal topic number by selecting the one with the highest coherence score. Since certain words frequently appear in those #MeToo tweets (e.g., sexual harassment, men, women, story, etc.), we transform our corpus using TF-IDF, a term-weighting scheme that discounts the influence of common terms. ### Methodology ::: Semantic Parsing with TRIPS
Learning deep meaning representations, which enables the preservation of rich semantic content of entities, meaning ambiguity resolution and partial relational understanding of texts, is one of the challenges that the TRIPS parser BIBREF15 is tasked to tackle. This kind of meaning is represented by TRIPS Logical Form (LF), which is a graph-based representation that serves as the interface between structural analysis of text (i.e., parse) and the subsequent use of the information to produce knowledge. The LF graphs are obtained by using the semantic types, roles and rule-based relations defined by the TRIPS Ontology BIBREF15 at its core in combination with various linguistic techniques such as Dialogue Act Identification, Dependency Parsing, Named Entity Recognition, and Crowd-sourced Lexicon (Wordnet). Figure 1 illustrates an example of the TRIPS LF graph depicting the meaning of the sentence "He harassed me," where the event described though the speech act TELL (i.e. telling a story) is the verb predicate HARASS, which is caused by the agent HE and influences the affected (also called "theme" in traditional literature) ME. As seen from the previously discussed example, the action-agent-affected relational structure is applicable to even the simplest sentences used for storytelling, and it is in fact very common for humans to encounter in both spoken and written languages. This makes it well suited for event extraction from short texts, useful for analyzing tweets with Twitter's 280 character limit. Therefore, our implementation of TRIPS parser is particularly tailored for identifying the verb predicates in tweets and their corresponding agent-affected arguments (with $82.4\%$ F1 score), so that we can have a solid ground for further analysis. ### Methodology ::: Connotation Frames and Sentiment Analysis
In order to develop an interpretable analysis that focuses on sentiment scores pertaining to the entities and events mentioned in the narratives, as well as the perceptions of readers on such events, we draw from existing literature on connotation frames: a set of verbs annotated according to what they imply about semantically dependent entities. Connotation frames, first introduced by Rashkin, Singh, and Choi (2016), provides a framework for analyzing nuanced dimensions in text by combining polarity annotations with frame semantics (Fillmore 1982). More specifically, verbs are annotated across various dimensions and perspectives so that a verb might elicit a positive sentiment for its subject (i.e. sympathy) but imply a negative effect for its object. We target the sentiments towards the entities and verb predicates through a pre-collected set of 950 verbs that have been annotated for these traits, which can be more clearly demonstrated through the example "He harassed me.": ${Sentiment(\textrm {verb}) -}$: something negative happened to the writer. $Sentiment(\textrm {affected}) -$: the writer (affected) most likely feels negative about the event. $Perspective(\textrm {affected} \rightarrow \textrm {agent})-$: the writer most likely has negative feelings towards the agent as a result of the event. $Perspective(\textrm {reader} \rightarrow \textrm {affected})-$: the reader most likely view the agent as the antagonist. $Perspective(\textrm {affected} \rightarrow \textrm {affected})+$: the reader most likely feels sympathetic towards the writer. In addition to extracting sentiment scores from the pre-annotated corpus, we also need to predict sentiment scores of unknown verbs. To achieve this task, we rely on the 200-dimensional GloVe word embeddings BIBREF16, pretrained on their Twitter dataset, to compute the scores of the nearest neighboring synonyms contained in the annotated verb set and normalize their weighted sum to get the resulting sentiment (Equation 1). where $\mathcal {I}=\mathbf {1_{w \in \mathcal {A}}}$ is the indicator function for whether verb predicate $w$ is in the annotation set $\mathcal {A}$, $\gamma (w)$ is the set of nearest neighbors $e$'s of verb $w$. Because our predictive model computes event-entity sentiment scores and generates verb predicate knowledge simultaneously, it is sensitive to data initialization. Therefore, we train the model iteratively on a number of random initialization to achieve the best results. ### Experimental Results ::: Topical Themes of #MeToo Tweets
The results of LDA on #MeToo tweets of college users (Table 1) fall into the same pattern as the research of Modrek and Chakalov (2019), which suggests that a large portion of #MeToo tweets on Twitter focuses on sharing personal traumatic stories about sexual harassment BIBREF10. In fact, in our top 5 topics, Topics 1 and 5 mainly depict gruesome stories and childhood or college time experience. This finding seems to support the validity of the Twitter sample of Modrek and Chakalov (2019), where 11% discloses personal sexual harassment memories and 5.8% of them was in formative years BIBREF10. These users also shows multiple emotions toward this movement, such as compassion (topic 2), determination (topic 3), and hope (topic 4). We will further examine the emotion features in the latter results. ### Experimental Results ::: Regression Result
Observing the results of the linear regression in Table 2, we find the normalized governmental reported cases count and regional feature to be statistically significant on the sexual harassment rate in the Twitter data ($p-value<0.05$). Specifically, the change in the number of reported cases constitutes a considerable change in the number of #MeToo users on Twitter as p-value is extremely small at $5.7e-13$. This corresponds to the research by Napolitano (2014) regarding the "Yes means yes" movement in higher education institutes in recent years, as even with some limitations and inconsistency, the sexual assault reporting system is gradually becoming more rigorous BIBREF17. Meanwhile, attending colleges in the Northeast, West and South regions increases the possibility of posting about sexual harassment (positive coefficients), over the Midwest region. This finding is interesting and warrants further scrutiny. ### Experimental Results ::: Event-Entity Sentiment Analysis
We discover that approximately half of users who detailed their sexual harassment experiences with the #MeToo hashtag suffered from physical aggression. Also, more than half of them claimed to encounter the perpetrators outside the college and work environment. The sentimental score for the affected entities and the verb of cases pertaining to faculty are strictly negative, suggesting that academic personnel's actions might be described as more damaging to the students' mental health. This finding resonates a recent research by Cantapulo et al. regarding the potential hazard of sexual harassment conducts by university faculties using data from federal investigation and relevant social science literature BIBREF18. Furthermore, many in this group tend to mention their respective age, typically between 5 and 20 (24% of the studied subset). This observation reveals an alarming number of child and teenager sexual abuse, indicating that although college students are not as prone to sexual harassment from their peers and teachers, they might still be traumatized by their childhood experiences. In addition, although verbal abuse experiences accounts for a large proportion of the tweets, it is challenging to gain sentiment insights into them, as the majority of them contains insinuations and sarcasms regarding sexual harassment. This explains why the sentiment scores of the events and entities are very close to neutral. ### Experimental Results ::: Limitations and Ethical Implications
Our dataset is taken from only a sample of a specific set of colleges, and different samples might yield different results. Our method of identifying college students is simple, and might not reflect the whole student population. Furthermore, the majority of posts on Twitter are short texts (under 50 words). This factor, according to previous research, might hamper the performance of the LDA results, despite the use of the TF-IDF scheme BIBREF19. Furthermore, while the main goal of this paper is to shed lights to the ongoing problems in the academia and contribute to the future sociological study using big data analysis, our dataset might be misused for detrimental purposes. Also, data regarding sexual harassment is sensitive in nature, and might have unanticipated effects on those addressed users. ### Conclusion
In this study, we discover a novel correlation between the number of college users who participate in the #MeToo movement and the number of official reported cases from the government data. This is a positive sign suggesting that the higher education system is moving into a right direction to effectively utilize Title IV, a portion of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which requests colleges to submit their sexual misconduct reports to the officials and protect the victims. In addition, we capture several geographic and behavioral characteristics of the #MeToo users related to sexual assault such as region, reaction and narrative content following the trend, as well as sentiment and social interactions, some of which are supported by various literature on sexual harassment. Importantly, our semantic analysis reveals interesting patterns of the assaulting cases. We believe our methodologies on defining these #MeToo users and their features will be applicable to further studies on this and other alarming social issues. Furthermore, we find that the social media-driven approach is highly useful in facilitating crime-related sociology research on a large scale and spectrum. Moreover, since social networks appeal to a broad audience, especially those outside academia, studies using these resources are highly useful for raising awareness in the community on concurrent social problems. Last but not least, many other aspects of the text data from social media, which could provide many interesting insights on sexual harassment, remain largely untouched. In the future, we intend to explore more sophisticated language features and implement more supervised models with advanced neural network parsing and classification. We believe that with our current dataset, an extension to take advantage of cutting-edge linguistic techniques will be the next step to address the previously unanswered questions and uncover deeper meanings of the tweets on sexual harassment. Figure 1: The meaning representation of the example sentence ”He harassed me.” in TRIPS LF, the Ontology types of the words are indicated by ”:*” and the role-argument relations between them are denoted by named arcs. Table 1: Top 5 topics from all #MeToo Tweets from 51,104 college followers. Table 2: Linear regression results. Table 3: Semantic sentiment results.
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51,104
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Explain Mia’s reasons for referring to herself as “hell on wheels.” What is an example of this?
A. Mia is fast. An example of this is when Mia rode Ninc away from the free breeders as fast as she could.
B. Mia is frightened. An example of this is when she was approached by Horst and his gang for the second time, which scared her to the point of losing control of her mission.
C. Mia is mean. An example of this is when she refused to agree to partner up with Jimmy after they returned from their mission.
D. Mia is tough. An example of this is when she was able to strong arm her way out of trouble with Horst and his gang.
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DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN BY ALEXEI PANSHIN The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the ramp. There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An intelligent runt like me. He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get together when we get down?" I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went back to his place without saying anything. My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the meantime, I've got brains as a consolation. After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps. We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot. Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that crack about being a snob. The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council. I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that wasn't in public. It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really, because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month. Planets make me feel wretched. The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere and little grubby things just looking for you to crawl on. If you can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still smarting from the slap I'd given him. In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see Jimmy—if he would get back alive. It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive. Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to keep the population steady. I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes. Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the bad moment any longer. The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird, and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last. II The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in thirty gone. I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others. The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces, though not with that meatball Jimmy D. No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting. I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to look forward to. In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky. On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't identify. One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have draft animals. The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight, as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that could have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses. We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere. I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures alive. They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded along. I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me. He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That was why I kept riding. He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head? There be escaped Losels in these woods." I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though. Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say anything. It seemed smart. "Where be you from?" he asked. I pointed to the road behind us. "And where be you going?" I pointed ahead. No other way to go. He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and Daddy, who should know better. We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd better ride on from here with us. For protection." He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit with him. One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been watching us all the while. He called to the hard man. "He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at all. We mought as well throw him back again." The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed. The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us to Forton for protection." I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I said, "I don't think so." What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and reached for the rifle in his saddle boot. I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he didn't want to be fried. I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground." They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions. When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go." They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling tones said, "Look here, kid...." "Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It surprised me. I didn't think I sounded that mean. I decided he just didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot. After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road. I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels. III When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it, nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time. My face must have been like that as I rode along the road. The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work. But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or something. I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back. Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received a jolt that sickened me. By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to a gallop. I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it. But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the clocks tick on this planet. But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and four children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I closed my eyes until it passed. The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have been eight billion people. But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came. I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me. What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the Council should know. For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt really frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head. I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's smart and brains I needed. How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method. For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody? Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think of was to find a library, but that might be a job. I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what had gone wrong. I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal. The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry. The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours. Not too different, but not ours. One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that takes an advanced technology to build. I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof. I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man, his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father came and pulled him away. The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these kids. Isn't that horrible? About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never seen before. When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go, so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness, it seemed just right. It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home. I wished for the same for myself. The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I couldn't see far into the dark. A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're not." Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now what they used the high-walled pen for. I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take leave. I never got the chance. I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my shoulder and I was swung around. "Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast. I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from behind and pinned my arms to my side. I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet and dragged me off. When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and I'll hurt you." That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said. The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him. "No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what we can use." The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his bunch. But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under my jacket. Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away with it." He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of trouble. So don't give me a hard time." He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering. "The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or something stuffy like that. He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I knew I'd goofed. "Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving you your freedom." "Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my jacket. "Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats in jail in Forton." I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him. He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what this be for." He held out my pickup signal. Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said. I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand that over to me." Horst made a disgusted sound. "Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over." I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton." "I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on." I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good enough," to the others who'd come up behind me. I felt like a fool. Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it until it cracked and fell apart. Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk." I said calmly, "You big louse." It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my face and then nothing. Brains are no good if you don't use them.
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D. Mia is tough. An example of this is when she was able to strong arm her way out of trouble with Horst and his gang.
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What isn't true about A Civil Action?
A. it is weaker than the book at times
B. the actors portray the character emotions well
C. the protagonists win at the end of the film
D. Beatrice and Grace were financially impacted because of the film
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War and Pieces No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line , Terrence Malick's return to cinema after 20 years. I've sat through it twice and am still trying to sort out my responses, which run from awe to mockery and back. Like Saving Private Ryan , the picture wallops you in the gut with brilliant, splattery battle montages and Goyaesque images of hell on earth. But Malick, a certified intellectual and the Pynchonesque figure who directed Badlands and Days of Heaven in the 1970s and then disappeared, is in a different philosophical universe from Steven Spielberg. Post-carnage, his sundry characters philosophize about their experiences in drowsy, runic voice-overs that come at you like slow bean balls: "Why does nature vie with itself? ... Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power but two?" Or "This great evil: Where's it come from? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us, robbin' us of life and light?" First you get walloped with viscera, then you get beaned by blather. Those existential speculations don't derive from the screenplay's source, an archetypal but otherwise down-to-earth 1962 novel by James Jones (who also wrote From Here to Eternity ) about the American invasion of the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. They're central to Malick's vision of the story, however, and not specious. In the combat genre, the phrase "war is hell" usually means nothing more than that it's a bummer to lose a limb or two, or to see your buddy get his head blown off. A true work of art owes us more than literal horrors, and Malick obliges by making his theater of war the setting for nothing less than a meditation on the existence of God. He tells the story solemnly, in three parts, with a big-deal cast (Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Cusack) and a few other major stars (John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney) dropping by for cameos. After an Edenic prelude, in which a boyishly idealistic absent without leave soldier, Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel), swims with native youths to the accompaniment of a heavenly children's choir, the first part sees the arrival of the Allied forces on the island, introduces the principal characters (none of whom amounts to a genuine protagonist), and lays out the movie's geographical and philosophical terrain. The centerpiece--the fighting--goes on for over an hour and features the most frantic and harrowing sequences, chiefly the company's initially unsuccessful frontal assault on a Japanese hilltop bunker. The coda lasts nearly 40 minutes and is mostly talk and cleanup, the rhythms growing more relaxed until a final, incongruous spasm of violence--whereupon the surviving soldiers pack their gear and motor off to another South Pacific battle. In the final shot, a twisted tree grows on the waterline of the beach, the cycle of life beginning anew. The Thin Red Line has a curious sound-scape, as the noise of battle frequently recedes to make room for interior monologues and Hans Zimmer's bump-bump, minimalist New Age music. Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) talks to his curvy, redheaded wife, viewed in deliriously sensual flashbacks. ("Love: Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us?") Lt. Col. Tall (Nolte), a borderline lunatic passed over one too many times for promotion and itching to win a battle no matter what the human cost, worries groggily about how his men perceive him. The dreamer Witt poses folksy questions about whether we're all a part of one big soul. If the movie has a spine, it's his off-and-on dialogue with Sgt. Welsh (Penn), who's increasingly irritated by the private's beatific, almost Billy Budd-like optimism. Says Welsh, "In this world, a man himself is nothin', and there ain't no world but this one." Replies Witt, high cheekbones glinting, "I seen another world." At first it seems as if Witt will indeed be Billy Budd to Welsh's vindictive Claggart. But if Witt is ultimately an ethereal martyr, Welsh turns out to be a Bogart-like romantic who can't stop feeling pain in the face of an absent God. He speaks the movie's epitaph, "Darkness and light, strife and love: Are they the workings of one mind, the feature of the same face? O my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made, all things shining." Malick puts a lot of shining things on the screen: soldiers, natives, parrots, bats, rodents, visions of Eden by way of National Geographic and of the Fall by way of Alpo. Malick's conception of consciousness distributes it among the animate and inanimate alike; almost every object is held up for rapturous contemplation. I could cite hundreds of images: A soldier in a rocking boat hovers over a letter he's writing, which is crammed from top to bottom and side to side with script. (You don't know the man, but you can feel in an instant his need to cram everything in.) A small, white-bearded Melanesian man strolls nonchalantly past a platoon of tensely trudging grunts who can't believe they're encountering this instead of a hail of Japanese bullets. Two shots bring down the first pair of soldiers to advance on the hill; a second later, the sun plays mystically over the tall, yellow grass that has swallowed their bodies. John Toll's camera rushes in on a captured Japanese garrison: One Japanese soldier shrieks; another, skeletal, laughs and laughs; a third weeps over a dying comrade. The face of a Japanese soldier encased in earth speaks from the dead, "Are you righteous? Know that I was, too." Whether or not these pearllike epiphanies are strung is another matter. Malick throws out his overarching theme--is nature two-sided, at war with itself?--in the first few minutes but, for all his startling juxtapositions, he never dramatizes it with anything approaching the clarity of, say, Brian De Palma's Casualties of War (1989). Besides the dialogue between Welsh and Witt, The Thin Red Line 's other organizing story involves a wrenching tug of war between Nolte's ambition-crazed Tall and Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas), who refuses an order to send his men on what will surely be a suicidal--and futile--assault on a bunker. But matters of cause and effect don't really interest Malick. Individual acts of conscience can and do save lives, and heroism can win a war or a battle, he acknowledges. But Staros is ultimately sent packing, and Malick never bothers to trace the effect of his action on the Guadalcanal operation. In fact, the entire battle seems to take place in a crazed void. Tall quotes Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn" and orders a meaningless bombardment to "buck the men up--it'll look like the Japs are catching hell." Soldiers shoot at hazy figures, unsure whether they're Japanese or American. Men collide, blow themselves in half with their own mishandled grenades, stab themselves frantically with morphine needles, shove cigarettes up their noses to keep the stench of the dying and the dead at bay. A tiny bird, mortally wounded, flutters in the grass. Malick is convincing--at times overwhelming--on the subject of chaos. It's when he tries to ruminate on order that he gets gummed up, retreating to one of his gaseous multiple mouthpieces: "Where is it that we were together? Who is it that I lived with? Walked with? The brother. ... The friend. ... One mind." I think I'd have an easier time with Malick's metaphysical speculations if I had a sense of some concomitant geopolitical ones--central to any larger musings on forces of nature as viewed through the prism of war. Couldn't it be that the German and Japanese fascist orders were profoundly anti-natural, and that the Allies' cause was part of a violent but natural correction? You don't have to buy into Spielberg's Lincolnesque pieties in Saving Private Ryan to believe that there's a difference between World War II and Vietnam (or, for that matter, World War II and the invasion of Grenada or our spats with Iraq). While he was at Harvard, Malick might have peeled himself off the lap of his pointy-headed mentor, Stanley Cavell, the philosopher and film theorist, and checked out a few of Michael Waltzer's lectures on just and unjust wars. Maybe then he'd view Guadalcanal not in an absurdist vacuum (the soldiers come, they kill and are killed, they leave) but in the larger context of a war that was among the most rational (in its aims, if not its methods) fought in the last several centuries. For all his visionary filmmaking, Malick's Zen neutrality sometimes seems like a cultivated--and pretentious--brand of fatuousness. John Travolta's empty nightclub impersonation of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors (1998) had one positive result: It gave him a jump-start on Jan Schlichtmann, the reckless personal injury lawyer at the center of A Civil Action . Travolta's Schlichtmann is much more redolent of Clinton: slick and selfish and corrupt in lots of ways but basically on the side of the angels, too proud and arrogant to change tactics when all is certainly lost. Schlichtmann pursued--and more or less blew--a civil liability case against the corporate giants Beatrice and W.R. Grace over the allegedly carcinogenic water supply of Woburn, Mass. Boston writer Jonathan Harr, in the book the movie is based on, went beyond the poison in the Woburn wells to evoke (stopping just short of libel) the poison of the civil courts, where platoons of overpaid corporate lawyers can drive opponents with pockets less deep and psyches less stable into bankruptcy and hysteria. Director Steven Zaillian's version doesn't capture the mounting rage that one experiences while reading Harr's book, or even the juicy legal machinations that Francis Ford Coppola giddily manipulated in his underrated adaptation of John Grisham's The Rainmaker (1997). But A Civil Action is a sturdy piece of work, an old-fashioned conversion narrative with some high-tech zip. Schlichtmann doesn't take this "orphan" case--brought by the parents of several children who died of leukemia--because he wants to do good but because he figures that Grace and Beatrice will fork over huge sums of money to keep the parents from testifying publicly about their children's last days. He might succeed, too, if it weren't for Jerome Facher (Robert Duvall), the Beatrice lawyer who knows how to keep Schlichtmann shadowboxing while his small firm's financial resources dwindle to nothing. Zaillian is at his most assured when he cuts back and forth between Facher's Harvard Law School lectures on what not to do in court and Schlichtmann's fumbling prosecution. The sequence has the extra dimension of good journalism: It dramatizes and comments simultaneously. Plus, it gives Duvall a splendid platform for impish understatement. (Duvall has become more fun to watch than just about anyone in movies.) Elsewhere, Zaillian takes a more surface approach, sticking to legal minutiae and rarely digging for the deeper evil. As in his Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), the outcome of every scene is predictable, but how Zaillian gets from beat to beat is surprisingly fresh. He also gets sterling bit performances from Sydney Pollack as the spookily sanguine Grace CEO, William H. Macy as Schlichtmann's rabbity accountant, and Kathleen Quinlan as the mother of one of the victims. Quinlan knows that when you're playing a woman who has lost a child you don't need to emote--you reveal the emotion by trying not to emote. To the families involved in the Woburn tragedy, the real climax of this story isn't the downbeat ending of the book or the sleight of hand, "let's call the Environmental Protection Agency," upbeat ending of the movie. The climax is the publication of a book that takes the plaintiffs' side and that remains on the best-seller list in hardcover and paperback for years. The climax is the movie starring John Travolta. Beatrice and Grace made out OK legally, but some of us will never use their products again without thinking about Travolta losing his shirt in the name of those wasted-away little kids.
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C. the protagonists win at the end of the film
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Why did the Treasury Department want Orison McCall to apply for a job at the William Howard Taft National Bank and Trust Company?
A. To gather information about their unusual people and banking practices.
B. To do an official audit of the bank’s books.
C. To provide the bank employees with training.
D. To read text into a microphone.
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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.
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A. To gather information about their unusual people and banking practices.
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What proxies for data annotation were used in previous datasets?
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### Introduction
Digital media enables fast sharing of information, including various forms of false or deceptive information. Hence, besides bringing the obvious advantage of broadening information access for everyone, digital media can also be misused for campaigns that spread disinformation about specific events, or campaigns that are targeted at specific individuals or governments. Disinformation, in this case, refers to intentionally misleading content BIBREF0. A prominent case of a disinformation campaign are the efforts of the Russian government to control information during the Russia-Ukraine crisis BIBREF1. One of the most important events during the crisis was the crash of Malaysian Airlines (MH17) flight on July 17, 2014. The plane crashed on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over Ukrainian territory, causing the death of 298 civilians. The event immediately led to the circulation of competing narratives about who was responsible for the crash (see Section SECREF2), with the two most prominent narratives being that the plane was either shot down by the Ukrainian military, or by Russian separatists in Ukraine supported by the Russian government BIBREF2. The latter theory was confirmed by findings of an international investigation team. In this work, information that opposes these findings by promoting other theories about the crash is considered disinformation. When studying disinformation, however, it is important to acknowledge that our fact checkers (in this case the international investigation team) may be wrong, which is why we focus on both of the narratives in our study. MH17 is a highly important case in the context of international relations, because the tragedy has not only increased Western, political pressure against Russia, but may also continue putting the government's global image at stake. In 2020, at least four individuals connected to the Russian separatist movement will face murder charges for their involvement in the MH17 crash BIBREF3, which is why one can expect the waves of disinformation about MH17 to continue spreading. The purpose of this work is to develop an approach that may help both practitioners and scholars of political science, international relations and political communication to detect and measure the scope of MH17-related disinformation. Several studies analyse the framing of the crash and the spread of (dis)information about the event in terms of pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian framing. These studies analyse information based on manually labeled content, such as television transcripts BIBREF2 or tweets BIBREF4, BIBREF5. Restricting the analysis to manually labeled content ensures a high quality of annotations, but prohibits analysis from being extended to the full amount of available data. Another widely used method for classifying misleading content is to use distant annotations, for example to classify a tweet based on the domain of a URL that is shared by the tweet, or a hashtag that is contained in the tweet BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8. Often, this approach treats content from uncredible sources as misleading (e.g. misinformation, disinformation or fake news). This methods enables researchers to scale up the number of observations without having to evaluate the fact value of each piece of content from low-quality sources. However, the approach fails to address an important issue: Not all content from uncredible sources is necessarily misleading or false and not all content from credible sources is true. As often emphasized in the propaganda literature, established media outlets too are vulnerable to state-driven disinformation campaigns, even if they are regarded as credible sources BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11. In order to scale annotations that go beyond metadata to larger datasets, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can be used to automatically label text content. For example, several works developed classifiers for annotating text content with frame labels that can subsequently be used for large-scale content analysis BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF14, BIBREF15, BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19. Similarly, automatically labeling attitudes expressed in text BIBREF20, BIBREF21, BIBREF22, BIBREF23 can aid the analysis of disinformation and misinformation spread BIBREF24. In this work, we examine to which extent such classifiers can be used to detect pro-Russian framing related to the MH17 crash, and to which extent classifier predictions can be relied on for analysing information flow on Twitter. ### Introduction ::: MH17 Related (Dis-)Information Flow on Twitter
We focus our classification efforts on a Twitter dataset introduced in BIBREF4, that was collected to investigate the flow of MH17-related information on Twitter, focusing on the question who is distributing (dis-)information. In their analysis, the authors found that citizens are active distributors, which contradicts the widely adopted view that the information campaign is only driven by the state and that citizens do not have an active role. To arrive at this conclusion, the authors manually labeled a subset of the tweets in the dataset with pro-Russian/pro-Ukrainian frames and build a retweet network, which has Twitter users as nodes and edges between two nodes if a retweet occurred between the two associated users. An edge was considered as polarized (either pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian), if at least one retweet between the two users connected by the edge was pro-Russian/pro-Ukrainian. Then, the amount of polarized edges between users with different profiles (e.g. citizen, journalist, state organ) was computed. Labeling more data via automatic classification (or computer-assisted annotation) of tweets could serve an analysis as the one presented in BIBREF4 in two ways. First, more edges could be labeled. Second, edges could be labeled with higher precision, i.e. by taking more tweets comprised by the edge into account. For example, one could decide to only label an edge as polarized if at least half of the retweets between the users were pro-Ukrainian/pro-Russian. ### Introduction ::: Contributions
We evaluate different classifiers that predict frames for unlabeled tweets in BIBREF4's dataset, in order to increase the number of polarized edges in the retweet network derived from the data. This is challenging due to a skewed data distribution and the small amount of training data for the pro-Russian class. We try to combat the data sparsity using a data augmentation approach, but have to report a negative result as we find that data augmentation in this particular case does not improve classification results. While our best neural classifier clearly outperforms a hashtag-based baseline, generating high quality predictions for the pro-Russian class is difficult: In order to make predictions at a precision level of 80%, recall has to be decreased to 23%. Finally, we examine the applicability of the classifier for finding new polarized edges in a retweet network and show how, with manual filtering, the number of pro-Russian edges can be increased by 29%. We make our code, trained models and predictions publicly available. ### Competing Narratives about the MH17 Crash
We briefly summarize the timeline around the crash of MH17 and some of the dominant narratives present in the dataset. On July 17, 2014, the MH17 flight crashed over Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine. The region was at that time part of an armed conflict between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military, one of the unrests following the Ukrainian revolution and the annexation of Crimea by the Russian government. The territory in which the plane fell down was controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Right after the crash, two main narratives were propagated: Western media claimed that the plane was shot down by pro-Russian separatists, whereas the Russian government claimed that the Ukrainian military was responsible. Two organisations were tasked with investigating the causes of the crash, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT). Their final reports were released in October 2015 and September 2016, respectively, and conclude that the plane had been shot down by a missile launched by a BUK surface-to-air system. The BUK was stationed in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists when the missile was launched, and had been transported there from Russia and returned to Russia after the incident. These findings are denied by the Russian government until now. There are several other crash-related reports that are frequently mentioned throughout the dataset. One is a report by Almaz-Antey, the Russian company that manufactured the BUK, which rejects the DSB findings based on mismatch of technical evidence. Several reports backing up the Dutch findings were released by the investigative journalism website Bellingcat. The crash also sparked the circulation of several alternative theories, many of them promoted in Russian media BIBREF2, e.g. that the plane was downed by Ukrainian SU25 military jets, that the plane attack was meant to hit Putin’s plane that was allegedly traveling the same route earlier that day, and that the bodies found in the plane had already been dead before the crash. ### Dataset
For our classification experiments, we use the MH17 Twitter dataset introduced by BIBREF4, a dataset collected in order to study the flow of (dis)information about the MH17 plane crash on Twitter. It contains tweets collected based on keyword search that were posted between July 17, 2014 (the day of the plane crash) and December 9, 2016. BIBREF4 provide annotations for a subset of the English tweets contained in the dataset. A tweet is annotated with one of three classes that indicate the framing of the tweet with respect to responsibility for the plane crash. A tweet can either be pro-Russian (Ukrainian authorities, NATO or EU countries are explicitly or implicitly held responsible, or the tweet states that Russia is not responsible), pro-Ukrainian (the Russian Federation or Russian separatists in Ukraine are explicitly or implicitly held responsible, or the tweet states that Ukraine is not responsible) or neutral (neither Ukraine nor Russia or any others are blamed). Example tweets for each category can be found in Table TABREF9. These examples illustrate that the framing annotations do not reflect general polarity, but polarity with respect to responsibility to the crash. For example, even though the last example in the table is in general pro-Ukrainian, as it displays the separatists in a bad light, the tweet does not focus on responsibility for the crash. Hence the it is labeled as neutral. Table TABREF8 shows the label distribution of the annotated portion of the data as well as the total amount of original tweets, and original tweets plus their retweets/duplicates in the network. A retweet is a repost of another user's original tweet, indicated by a specific syntax (RT @username: ). We consider as duplicate a tweet with text that is identical to an original tweet after preprocessing (see Section SECREF18). For our classification experiments, we exclusively consider original tweets, but model predictions can then be propagated to retweets and duplicates. ### Classification Models
For our classification experiments, we compare three classifiers, a hashtag-based baseline, a logistic regression classifier and a convolutional neural network (CNN). ### Classification Models ::: Hashtag-Based Baseline
Hashtags are often used as a means to assess the content of a tweet BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF27. We identify hashtags indicative of a class in the annotated dataset using the pointwise mutual information (pmi) between a hashtag $hs$ and a class $c$, which is defined as We then predict the class for unseen tweets as the class that has the highest pmi score for the hashtags contained in the tweet. Tweets without hashtag (5% of the tweets in the development set) or with multiple hashtags leading to conflicting predictions (5% of the tweets in the development set) are labeled randomly. We refer to to this baseline as hs_pmi. ### Classification Models ::: Logistic Regression Classifier
As non-neural baseline we use a logistic regression model. We compute input representations for tweets as the average over pre-trained word embedding vectors for all words in the tweet. We use fasttext embeddings BIBREF28 that were pre-trained on Wikipedia. ### Classification Models ::: Convolutional Neural Network Classifier
As neural classification model, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) BIBREF29, which has previously shown good results for tweet classification BIBREF30, BIBREF27. The model performs 1d convolutions over a sequence of word embeddings. We use the same pre-trained fasttext embeddings as for the logistic regression model. We use a model with one convolutional layer and a relu activation function, and one max pooling layer. The number of filters is 100 and the filter size is set to 4. ### Experimental Setup
We evaluate the classification models using 10-fold cross validation, i.e. we produce 10 different datasplits by randomly sampling 60% of the data for training, 20% for development and 20% for testing. For each fold, we train each of the models described in Section SECREF4 on the training set and measure performance on the test set. For the CNN and LogReg models, we upsample the training examples such that each class has as many instances as the largest class (Neutral). The final reported scores are averages over the 10 splits. ### Experimental Setup ::: Tweet Preprocessing
Before embedding the tweets, we replace urls, retweet syntax (RT @user_name: ) and @mentions (@user_name) by placeholders. We lowercase all text and tokenize sentences using the StandfordNLP pipeline BIBREF31. If a tweet contains multiple sentences, these are concatenated. Finally, we remove all tokens that contain non-alphanumeric symbols (except for dashes and hashtags) and strip the hashtags from each token, in order to increase the number of words that are represented by a pre-trained word embedding. ### Experimental Setup ::: Evaluation Metrics
We report performance as F1-scores, which is the harmonic mean between precision and recall. As the class distribution is highly skewed and we are mainly interested in accurately classifying the classes with low support (pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian), we report macro-averages over the classes. In addition to F1-scores, we report the area under the precision-recall curve (AUC). We compute an AUC score for each class by converting the classification task into a one-vs-all classification task. ### Results
The results of our classification experiments are presented in Table TABREF21. Figure FIGREF22 shows the per-class precision-recall curves for the LogReg and CNN models as well as the confusion matrices between classes. ### Results ::: Comparison Between Models
We observe that the hashtag baseline performs poorly and does not improve over the random baseline. The CNN classifier outperforms the baselines as well as the LogReg model. It shows the highest improvement over the LogReg for the pro-Russian class. Looking at the confusion matrices, we observe that for the LogReg model, the fraction of True Positives is equal between the pro-Russian and the pro-Ukrainian class. The CNN model produces a higher amount of correct predictions for the pro-Ukrainian than for the pro-Russian class. The absolute number of pro-Russian True Positives is lower for the CNN, but so is in return the amount of misclassifications between the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian class. ### Results ::: Per-Class Performance
With respect to the per class performance, we observe a similar trend across models, which is that the models perform best for the neutral class, whereas performance is lower for the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian classes. All models perform worst on the pro-Russian class, which might be due to the fact that it is the class with the fewest instances in the dataset. Considering these results, we conclude that the CNN is the best performing model and also the classifier that best serves our goals, as we want to produce accurate predictions for the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian class without confusing between them. Even though the CNN can improve over the other models, the classification performance for the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian class is rather low. One obvious reason for this might be the small amount of training data, in particular for the pro-Russian class. In the following, we briefly report a negative result on an attempt to combat the data sparseness with cross-lingual transfer. We then perform an error analysis on the CNN classifications to shed light on the difficulties of the task. ### Data Augmentation Experiments using Cross-Lingual Transfer
The annotations in the MH17 dataset are highly imbalanced, with as few as 512 annotated examples for the pro-Russian class. As the annotated examples were sampled from the dataset at random, we assume that there are only few tweets with pro-Russian stance in the dataset. This observation is in line with studies that showed that the amount of disinformation on Twitter is in fact small BIBREF6, BIBREF8. In order to find more pro-Russian training examples, we turn to a resource that we expect to contain large amounts of pro-Russian (dis)information. The Elections integrity dataset was released by Twitter in 2018 and contains the tweets and account information for 3,841 accounts that are believed to be Russian trolls financed by the Russian government. While most tweets posted after late 2014 are in English language and focus on topics around the US elections, the earlier tweets in the dataset are primarily in Russian language and focus on the Ukraine crisis BIBREF33. One feature of the dataset observed by BIBREF33 is that several hashtags show high peakedness BIBREF34, i.e. they are posted with high frequency but only during short intervals, while others are persistent during time. We find two hashtags in the Elections integrity dataset with high peakedness that were exclusively posted within 2 days after the MH17 crash and that seem to be pro-Russian in the context of responsibility for the MH17 crash: russian #КиевСкажиПравду (Kiew tell the truth) and russian #Киевсбилбоинг (Kiew made the plane go down). We collect all tweets with these two hashtags, resulting in 9,809 Russian tweets that we try to use as additional training data for the pro-Russian class in the MH17 dataset. We experiment with cross-lingual transfer by embedding tweets via aligned English and Russian word embeddings. However, so far results for the cross-lingual models do not improve over the CNN model trained on only English data. This might be due to the fact that the additional Russian tweets rather contain a general pro-Russian frame than specifically talking about the crash, but needs further investigation. ### Error Analysis
In order to integrate automatically labeled examples into a network analysis that studies the flow of polarized information in the network, we need to produce high precision predictions for the pro-Russian and the pro-Ukrainian class. Polarized tweets that are incorrectly classified as neutral will hurt an analysis much less than neutral tweets that are erroneously classified as pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian. However, the worst type of confusion is between the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian class. In order to gain insights into why these confusions happen, we manually inspect incorrectly predicted examples that are confused between the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian class. We analyse the misclassifications in the development set of all 10 runs, which results in 73 False Positives of pro-Ukrainian tweets being classified as pro-Russian (referred to as pro-Russian False Positives), and 88 False Positives of pro-Russian tweets being classified as pro-Ukrainian (referred to as pro-Ukrainian False Positives). We can identify three main cases for which the model produces an error: the correct class can be directly inferred from the text content easily, even without background knowledge the correct class can be inferred from the text content, given that event-specific knowledge is provided the correct class can be inferred from the text content if the text is interpreted correctly For the pro-Russian False Positives, we find that 42% of the errors are category I and II errors, respectively, and 15% of category III. For the pro-Ukrainian False Positives, we find 48% category I errors, 33% category II errors and and 13% category III errors. Table TABREF28 presents examples for each of the error categories in both sets which we will discuss in the following. ### Error Analysis ::: Category I Errors
Category I errors could easily be classified by humans following the annotation guidelines (see Section SECREF3). One difficulty can be seen in example f). Even though no background knowledge is needed to interpret the content, interpretation is difficult because of the convoluted syntax of the tweet. For the other examples it is unclear why the model would have difficulties with classifying them. ### Error Analysis ::: Category II Errors
Category II errors can only be classified with event-specific background knowledge. Examples g), i) and k) relate to the theory that a Ukrainian SU25 fighter jet shot down the plane in air. Correct interpretation of these tweets depends on knowledge about the SU25 fighter jet. In order to correctly interpret example j) as pro-Russian, it has to be known that the bellingcat report is pro-Ukrainian. Example l) relates to the theory that the shoot down was a false flag operation run by Western countries and the bodies in the plane were already dead before the crash. In order to correctly interpret example m), the identity of Kolomoisky has to be known. He is an anti-separatist Ukrainian billionaire, hence his involvement points to the Ukrainian government being responsible for the crash. ### Error Analysis ::: Category III Errors
Category III errors occur for examples that can only be classified by correctly interpreting the tweet authors' intention. Interpretation is difficult due to phenomena such as irony as in examples n) and o). While the irony is indicated in example n) through the use of the hashtag #LOL, there is no explicit indication in example o). Interpretation of example q) is conditioned on world knowledge as well as the understanding of the speakers beliefs. Example r) is pro-Russian as it questions the validity of the assumption AC360 is making, but we only know that because we know that the assumption is absurd. Example s) requires to evaluate that the speaker thinks people on site are trusted more than people at home. From the error analysis, we conclude that category I errors need further investigation, as here the model makes mistakes on seemingly easy instances. This might be due to the model not being able to correctly represent Twitter specific language or unknown words, such as Eukraine in example e). Category II and III errors are harder to avoid and could be improved by applying reasoning BIBREF36 or irony detection methods BIBREF37. ### Integrating Automatic Predictions into the Retweet Network
Finally, we apply the CNN classifier to label new edges in BIBREF4's retweet network, which is shown in Figure FIGREF35. The retweet network is a graph that contains users as nodes and an edge between two users if the users are retweeting each other. In order to track the flow of polarized information, BIBREF4 label an edge as polarized if at least one tweet contained in the edge was manually annotated as pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian. While the network shows a clear polarization, only a small subset of the edges present in the network are labeled (see Table TABREF38). Automatic polarity prediction of tweets can help the analysis in two ways. Either, we can label a previously unlabeled edge, or we can verify/confirm the manual labeling of an edge, by labeling additional tweets that are comprised in the edge. ### Integrating Automatic Predictions into the Retweet Network ::: Predicting Polarized Edges
In order to get high precision predictions for unlabeled tweets, we choose the probability thresholds for predicting a pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian tweet such that the classifier would achieve 80% precision on the test splits (recall at this precision level is 23%). Table TABREF38 shows the amount of polarized edges we can predict at this precision level. Upon manual inspection, we however find that the quality of predictions is lower than estimated. Hence, we manually re-annotate the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian predictions according to the official annotation guidelines used by BIBREF4. This way, we can label 77 new pro-Russian edges by looking at 415 tweets, which means that 19% of the candidates are hits. For the pro-Ukrainian class, we can label 110 new edges by looking at 611 tweets (18% hits). Hence even though the quality of the classifier predictions is too low to be integrated into the network analysis right away, the classifier drastically facilitates the annotation process for human annotators compared to annotating unfiltered tweets (from the original labels we infer that for unfiltered tweets, only 6% are hits for the pro-Russian class, and 11% for the pro-Ukrainian class). ### Conclusion
In this work, we investigated the usefulness of text classifiers to detect pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian framing in tweets related to the MH17 crash, and to which extent classifier predictions can be relied on for producing high quality annotations. From our classification experiments, we conclude that the real-world applicability of text classifiers for labeling polarized tweets in a retweet network is restricted to pre-filtering tweets for manual annotation. However, if used as a filter, the classifier can significantly speed up the annotation process, making large-scale content analysis more feasible. ### Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The research was carried out as part of the ‘Digital Disinformation’ project, which was directed by Rebecca Adler-Nissen and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (project number CF16-0012). Table 1: Label distribution and dataset sizes. Tweets are considered original if their preprocessed text is unique. All tweets comprise original tweets, retweets and duplicates. Table 2: Example tweets for each of the three classes. Table 3: Classification results on the English MH17 dataset measured as F1 and area under the precision-recall curve (AUC). Figure 1: Confusion matrices for the CNN (left) and the logistic regression model (right). The y-axis shows the true label while the x-axis shows the model prediction. Table 4: Examples for the different error categories. Error category I are cases where the correct class can easily be inferred from the text. For error category II, the correct class can be inferred from the text with event-specific knowledge. For error category III, it is necessary to resolve humour/satire in order to infer the intended meaning that the speaker wants to communicate. Figure 2: The left plot shows the original k10 retweet network as computed by Golovchenko et al. (2018) together with the new edges that were added after manually re-annotating the classifier predictions. The right plot only visualizes the new edges that we could add by filtering the classifier predictions. Pro-Russian edges are colored in red, pro-Ukrainian edges are colored in dark blue and neutral edges are colored in grey. Both plots were made using The Force Atlas 2 layout in gephi (Bastian et al., 2009). Table 5: Number of labeled edges in the k10 network before and after augmentation with predicted labels. Candidates are previously unlabeled edges for which the model makes a confident prediction. The total number of edges in the network is 24,602.
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widely used method for classifying misleading content is to use distant annotations, for example to classify a tweet based on the domain of a URL that is shared by the tweet, or a hashtag that is contained in the tweet, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can be used to automatically label text content
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Which word doesn't describe the cadets?
A. cautious
B. naïve
C. embellishers
D. young
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Spawning Ground By LESTER DEL REY They weren't human. They were something more—and something less—they were, in short, humanity's hopes for survival! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The Starship Pandora creaked and groaned as her landing pads settled unevenly in the mucky surface of the ugly world outside. She seemed to be restless to end her fool's errand here, two hundred light years from the waiting hordes on Earth. Straining metal plates twanged and echoed through her hallways. Captain Gwayne cursed and rolled over, reaching for his boots. He was a big, rawboned man, barely forty; but ten years of responsibility had pressed down his shoulders and put age-feigning hollows under his reddened eyes. The starlanes between Earth and her potential colonies were rough on the men who traveled them now. He shuffled toward the control room, grumbling at the heavy gravity. Lieutenant Jane Corey looked up, nodding a blonde head at him as he moved toward the ever-waiting pot of murky coffee. "Morning, Bob. You need a shave." "Yeah." He swallowed the hot coffee without tasting it, then ran a hand across the dark stubble on his chin. It could wait. "Anything new during the night?" "About a dozen blobs held something like a convention a little ways north of us. They broke up about an hour ago and streaked off into the clouds." The blobs were a peculiarity of this planet about which nobody knew anything. They looked like overgrown fireballs, but seemed to have an almost sentient curiosity about anything moving on the ground. "And our two cadets sneaked out again. Barker followed them, but lost them in the murk. I've kept a signal going to guide them back." Gwayne swore softly to himself. Earth couldn't turn out enough starmen in the schools, so promising kids were being shipped out for training as cadets on their twelfth birthday. The two he'd drawn, Kaufman and Pinelli, seemed to be totally devoid of any sense of caution. Of course there was no obvious need for caution here. The blobs hadn't seemed dangerous, and the local animals were apparently all herbivorous and harmless. They were ugly enough, looking like insects in spite of their internal skeletons, with anywhere from four to twelve legs each on their segmented bodies. None acted like dangerous beasts. But something had happened to the exploration party fifteen years back, and to the more recent ship under Hennessy that was sent to check up. He turned to the port to stare out at the planet. The Sol-type sun must be rising, since there was a dim light. But the thick clouds that wrapped the entire world diffused its rays into a haze. For a change, it wasn't raining, though the ground was covered by thick swirls of fog. In the distance, the tops of shrubs that made a scrub forest glowed yellow-green. Motions around them suggested a herd of feeding animals. Details were impossible to see through the haze. Even the deep gorge where they'd found Hennessy's carefully buried ship was completely hidden by the fog. There were three of the blobs dancing about over the grazing animals now, as they often seemed to do. Gwayne stared at them for a minute, trying to read sense into the things. If he had time to study them.... But there was no time. Earth had ordered him to detour here, after leaving his load of deep-sleep stored colonists on Official World 71, to check on any sign of Hennessy. He'd been here a week longer than he should have stayed already. If there was no sign in another day or so of what had happened to the men who'd deserted their ship and its equipment, he'd have to report back. He would have left before, if a recent landslip hadn't exposed enough of the buried ship for his metal locators to spot from the air by luck. It had obviously been hidden deep enough to foil the detectors originally. "Bob!" Jane Corey's voice cut through his pondering. "Bob, there are the kids!" Before he could swing to follow her pointing finger, movement caught his eye. The blobs had left the herd. Now the three were streaking at fantastic speed to a spot near the ship, to hover excitedly above something that moved there. He saw the two cadets then, heading back to the waiting ship, just beyond the movement he'd seen through the mist. Whatever was making the fog swirl must have reached higher ground. Something began to heave upwards. It was too far to see clearly, but Gwayne grabbed the microphone, yelling into the radio toward the cadets. They must have seen whatever it was just as the call reached them. Young Kaufman grabbed at Pinelli, and they swung around together. Then the mists cleared. Under the dancing blobs, a horde of things was heading for the cadets. Shaggy heads, brute bodies vaguely man-like! One seemed to be almost eight feet tall, leading the others directly toward the spacesuited cadets. Some of the horde were carrying spears or sticks. There was a momentary halt, and then the leader lifted one arm, as if motioning the others forward. "Get the jeeps out!" Gwayne yelled at Jane. He yanked the door of the little officers' lift open and jabbed the down button. It was agonizingly slow, but faster than climbing down. He ripped the door back at the exit deck. Men were dashing in, stumbling around in confusion. But someone was taking over now—one of the crew women. The jeeps were lining up. One, at the front, was stuttering into life, and Gwayne dashed for it as the exit port slid back. There was no time for suits or helmets. The air on the planet was irritating and vile smelling, but it could be breathed. He leaped to the seat, to see that the driver was Doctor Barker. At a gesture, the jeep rolled down the ramp, grinding its gears into second as it picked up speed. The other two followed. There was no sign of the cadets at first. Then Gwayne spotted them; surrounded by the menacing horde. Seen from here, the things looked horrible in a travesty of manhood. The huge leader suddenly waved and pointed toward the jeeps that were racing toward him. He made a fantastic leap backwards. Others swung about, two of them grabbing up the cadets. The jeep was doing twenty miles an hour now, but the horde began to increase the distance, in spite of the load of the two struggling boys! The creatures dived downward into lower ground, beginning to disappear into the mists. "Follow the blobs," Gwayne yelled. He realized now he'd been a fool to leave his suit; the radio would have let him keep in contact with the kids. But it was too late to go back. The blobs danced after the horde. Barker bounced the jeep downward into a gorge. Somewhere the man had learned to drive superlatively; but he had to slow as the fog thickened lower down. Then it cleared to show the mob of creatures doubling back on their own trail to confuse the pursuers. There was no time to stop. The jeep plowed through them. Gwayne had a glimpse of five-foot bodies tumbling out of the way. Monstrously coarse faces were half hidden by thick hair. A spear crunched against the windshield from behind, and Gwayne caught it before it could foul the steering wheel. It had a wickedly beautiful point of stone. The creatures vanished as Barker fought to turn to follow them. The other jeeps were coming up, by the sound of their motors, but too late to help. They'd have to get to the group with the cadets in a hurry or the horde would all vanish in the uneven ground, hidden by the fog. A blob dropped down, almost touching Gwayne. He threw up an instinctive hand. There was a tingling as the creature seemed to pass around it. It lifted a few inches and drifted off. Abruptly, Barker's foot ground at the brake. Gwayne jolted forward against the windshield, just as he made out the form of the eight-foot leader. The thing was standing directly ahead of him, a cadet on each shoulder. The wheels locked and the jeep slid protestingly forward. The creature leaped back. But Gwayne was out of the jeep before it stopped, diving for the figure. It dropped the boys with a surprised grunt. The arms were thin and grotesque below the massively distorted shoulders, but amazingly strong. Gwayne felt them wrench at him as his hands locked on the thick throat. A stench of alien flesh was in his nose as the thing fell backwards. Doc Barker had hit it seconds after the captain's attack. Its head hit rocky ground with a dull, heavy sound, and it collapsed. Gwayne eased back slowly, but it made no further move, though it was still breathing. Another jeep had drawn up, and men were examining the cadets. Pinelli was either laughing or crying, and Kaufman was trying to break free to kick at the monster. But neither had been harmed. The two were loaded onto a jeep while men helped Barker and Gwayne stow the bound monster on another before heading back. "No sign of skull fracture. My God, what a tough brute!" Barker shook his own head, as if feeling the shock of the monster's landing. "I hope so," Gwayne told him. "I want that thing to live—and you're detailed to save it and revive it. Find out if it can make sign language or draw pictures. I want to know what happened to Hennessy and why that ship was buried against detection. This thing may be the answer." Barker nodded grimly. "I'll try, though I can't risk drugs on an alien metabolism." He sucked in on the cigarette he'd dug out, then spat sickly. Smoke and this air made a foul combination. "Bob, it still makes no sense. We've scoured this planet by infra-red, and there was no sign of native villages or culture. We should have found some." "Troglodytes, maybe," Gwayne guessed. "Anyhow, send for me when you get anything. I've got to get this ship back to Earth. We're overstaying our time here already." The reports from the cadets were satisfactory enough. They'd been picked up and carried, but no harm had been done them. Now they were busy being little heroes. Gwayne sentenced them to quarters as soon as he could, knowing their stories would only get wilder and less informative with retelling. If they could get any story from the captured creature, they might save time and be better off than trying to dig through Hennessy's ship. That was almost certainly spoorless by now. The only possible answer seemed to be that the exploring expedition and Hennessy's rescue group had been overcome by the aliens. It was an answer, but it left a lot of questions. How could the primitives have gotten to the men inside Hennessy's ship? Why was its fuel dumped? Only men would have known how to do that. And who told these creatures that a space ship's metal finders could be fooled by a little more than a hundred feet of solid rock? They'd buried the ship cunningly, and only the accidental slippage had undone their work. Maybe there would never be a full answer, but he had to find something—and find it fast. Earth needed every world she could make remotely habitable, or mankind was probably doomed to extinction. The race had blundered safely through its discovery of atomic weapons into a peace that had lasted two hundred years. It had managed to prevent an interplanetary war with the Venus colonists. It had found a drive that led to the stars, and hadn't even found intelligent life there to be dangerous on the few worlds that had cultures of their own. But forty years ago, observations from beyond the Solar System had finally proved that the sun was going to go nova. It wouldn't be much of an explosion, as such things go—but it would render the whole Solar System uninhabitable for millenia. To survive, man had to colonize. And there were no worlds perfect for him, as Earth had been. The explorers went out in desperation to find what they could; the terraforming teams did what they could. And then the big starships began filling worlds with colonists, carried in deep sleep to conserve space. Almost eighty worlds. The nearest a four month journey from Earth and four more months back. In another ten years, the sun would explode, leaving man only on the footholds he was trying to dig among other solar systems. Maybe some of the strange worlds would let men spread his seed again. Maybe none would be spawning grounds for mankind in spite of the efforts. Each was precious as a haven for the race. If this world could be used, it would be nearer than most. If not, as it now seemed, no more time could be wasted here. Primitives could be overcome, maybe. It would be ruthless and unfair to strip them of their world, but the first law was survival. But how could primitives do what these must have done? He studied the spear he had salvaged. It was on a staff made of cemented bits of smaller wood from the scrub growth, skillfully laminated. The point was of delicately chipped flint, done as no human hand had been able to do for centuries. "Beautiful primitive work," he muttered. Jane pulled the coffee cup away from her lips and snorted. "You can see a lot more of it out there," she suggested. He went to the port and glanced out. About sixty of the things were squatting in the clearing fog, holding lances and staring at the ship. They were perhaps a thousand yards away, waiting patiently. For what? For the return of their leader—or for something that would give the ship to them? Gwayne grabbed the phone and called Barker. "How's the captive coming?" Barker's voice sounded odd. "Physically fine. You can see him. But—" Gwayne dropped the phone and headed for the little sick bay. He swore at Doc for not calling him at once, and then at himself for not checking up sooner. Then he stopped at the sound of voices. There was the end of a question from Barker and a thick, harsh growling sound that lifted the hair along the nape of Gwayne's neck. Barker seemed to understand, and was making a comment as the captain dashed in. The captive was sitting on the bunk, unbound and oddly unmenacing. The thick features were relaxed and yet somehow intent. He seemed to make some kind of a salute as he saw Gwayne enter, and his eyes burned up unerringly toward the device on the officer's cap. "Haarroo, Cabbaan!" the thing said. "Captain Gwayne, may I present your former friend, Captain Hennessy?" Barker said. There was a grin on the doctor's lips, but his face was taut with strain. The creature nodded slowly and drew something from the thick hair on its head. It was the golden comet of a captain. "He never meant to hurt the kids—just to talk to them," Barker cut in quickly. "I've got some of the story. He's changed. He can't talk very well. Says they've had to change the language around to make the sounds fit, and he's forgotten how to use what normal English he can. But it gets easier as you listen. It's Hennessy, all right. I'm certain." Gwayne had his own ideas on that. It was easy for an alien to seize on the gold ornament of a captive earthman, even to learn a little English, maybe. But Hennessy had been his friend. "How many barmaids in the Cheshire Cat? How many pups did your oldest kid's dog have? How many were brown?" The lips contorted into something vaguely like a smile, and the curiously shaped fingers that could handle no human-designed equipment spread out. Three. Seven. Zero. The answers were right. By the time the session was over, Gwayne had begun to understand the twisted speech from inhuman vocal cords better. But the story took a long time telling. When it was finished, Gwayne and Barker sat for long minutes in silence. Finally Gwayne drew a shuddering breath and stood up. "Is it possible, Doc?" "No," Barker said flatly. He spread his hands and grimaced. "No. Not by what I know. But it happened. I've looked at a few tissues under the microscope. The changes are there. It's hard to believe about their kids. Adults in eight years, but they stay shorter. It can't be a hereditary change—the things that affect the body don't change the germ plasm. But in this case, what changed Hennessy is real, so maybe the fact that the change is passed on is as real as he claims." Gwayne led the former Hennessy to the exit. The waiting blobs dropped down to touch the monstrous man, then leaped up again. The crowd of monsters began moving forward toward their leader. A few were almost as tall as Hennessy, but most were not more than five feet high. The kids of the exploring party.... Back in the control room, Gwayne found the emergency release levers, set the combinations and pressed the studs. There was a hiss and gurgle as the great tanks of fuel discharged their contents out onto the ground where no ingenuity could ever recover it to bring life to the ship again. He'd have to tell the men and women of the crew later, after he'd had time to organize things and present it all in a way they could accept, however much they might hate it at first. But there was no putting off giving the gist of it to Jane. "It was the blobs," he summarized it. "They seem to be amused by men. They don't require anything from us, but they like us around. Hennessy doesn't know why. They can change our cells, adapt us. Before men came, all life here had twelve legs. Now they're changing that, as we've seen. "And they don't have to be close to do it. We've all been outside the hull. It doesn't show yet—but we're changed. In another month, Earth food would kill us. We've got to stay here. We'll bury the ships deeper this time, and Earth won't find us. They can't risk trying a colony where three ships vanish, so we'll just disappear. And they'll never know." Nobody would know. Their children—odd children who matured in eight years—would be primitive savages in three generations. The Earth tools would be useless, impossible for the hands so radically changed. Nothing from the ship would last. Books could never be read by the new eyes. And in time, Earth wouldn't even be a memory to this world. She was silent a long time, staring out of the port toward what must now be her home. Then she sighed. "You'll need practice, but the others don't know you as well as I do, Bob. I guess we can fix it so they'll believe it all. And it's too late now. But we haven't really been changed yet, have we?" "No," he admitted. Damn his voice! He'd never been good at lying. "No. They have to touch us. I've been touched, but the rest could go back." She nodded. He waited for the condemnation, but there was only puzzlement in her face. "Why?" And then, before he could answer, her own intelligence gave her the same answer he had found for himself. "The spawning ground!" It was the only thing they could do. Earth needed a place to plant her seed, but no world other than Earth could ever be trusted to preserve that seed for generation after generation. Some worlds already were becoming uncertain. Here, though, the blobs had adapted men to the alien world instead of men having to adapt the whole planet to their needs. Here, the strange children of man's race could grow, develop and begin the long trek back to civilization. The gadgets would be lost for a time. But perhaps some of the attitudes of civilized man would remain to make the next rise to culture a better one. "We're needed here," he told her, his voice pleading for the understanding he couldn't yet fully give himself. "These people need as rich a set of bloodlines as possible to give the new race strength. The fifty men and women on this ship will be needed to start them with a decent chance. We can't go to Earth, where nobody would believe or accept the idea—or even let us come back. We have to stay here." She smiled then and moved toward him, groping for his strength. "Be fruitful," she whispered. "Be fruitful and spawn and replenish an earth." "No," he told her. "Replenish the stars." But she was no longer listening, and that part of his idea could wait. Some day, though, their children would find a way to the starlanes again, looking for other worlds. With the blobs to help them, they could adapt to most worlds. The unchanged spirit would lead them through all space, and the changing bodies would claim worlds beyond numbering. Some day, the whole universe would be a spawning ground for the children of men!
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A. cautious
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What is the difference in findings of Buck et al? It looks like the same conclusion was mentioned in Buck et al..
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### Introduction
BIBREF0 propose a reinforcement learning framework for question answering, called active question answering (ActiveQA), that aims to improve answering by systematically perturbing input questions (cf. BIBREF1 ). Figure 1 depicts the generic agent-environment framework. The agent (AQA) interacts with the environment (E) in order to answer a question ( $q_0$ ). The environment includes a question answering system (Q&A), and emits observations and rewards. A state $s_t$ at time $t$ is the sequence of observations and previous actions generated starting from $q_0$ : $s_t=x_0,u_0,x_1,\ldots ,u_{t-1},x_t$ , where $x_i$ includes the question asked ( $q_{i}$ ), the corresponding answer returned by the QA system ( $a_i$ ), and possibly additional information such as features or auxiliary tasks. The agent includes an action scoring component (U), which produced and action $u_t$ by deciding whether to submit a new question to the environment or to return a final answer. Formally, $u_t\in \mathcal {Q}\cup \mathcal {A}$ , where $s_t$0 is the set of all possible questions, and $s_t$1 is the set of all possible answers. The agent relies on a question reformulation system (QR), that provides candidate follow up questions, and on an answer ranking system (AR), which scores the answers contained in $s_t$2 . Each answer returned is assigned a reward. The objective is to maximize the expected reward over a set of questions. BIBREF0 present a simplified version of this system with three core components: a question reformulator, an off-the-shelf black box QA system, and a candidate answer selection model. The question reformulator is trained with policy gradient BIBREF2 to optimize the F1 score of the answers returned by the QA system to the question reformulations in place of the original question. The reformulator is implemented as a sequence-to-sequence model of the kind used for machine translation BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . When generating question reformulations, the action-space is equal to the size of the vocabulary, typically $16k$ sentence pieces. Due to this large number of actions we warm start the reformulation policy with a monolingual sequence-to-sequence model that performs generic paraphrasing. This model is trained using the zero-shot translation technique BIBREF5 on a large multilingual parallel corpus BIBREF6 , followed by regular supervised learning on a smaller monolingual corpus of questions BIBREF7 . The reformulation and selection models form a trainable agent that seeks the best answers from the QA system. The reformulator proposes $N$ versions $q_i$ of the input question $q_0$ and passes them to the environment, which provides $N$ corresponding answers, $a_i$ . The selection model scores each triple $(q_0,q_i,a_i)$ and returns the top-scoring candidate. Crucially, the agent may only query the environment with natural language questions. Thus, ActiveQA involves a machine-machine communication process inspired by the human-machine communication that takes place when users interact with digital services during information seeking tasks. For example, while searching for information on a search engine users tend to adopt a keyword-like `queryese' style of questioning. The AQA agent proves effective at reformulating questions on SearchQA BIBREF8 , a large dataset of complex questions from the Jeopardy! game. For this task BiDAF is chosen for the environment BIBREF9 , a deep network built for QA which has produced state-of-the-art results. Compared to a QA system that forms the environment using only the original questions, AQA outperforms this baseline by a wide margin, 11.4% absolute F1, thereby reducing the gap between machine (BiDAF) and human performance by 66%. Here we perform a qualitative analysis of this communication process to better understand what kind of language the agent has learned. We find that while optimizing its reformulations to adapt to the language of the QA system, AQA diverges from well structured language in favour of less fluent, but more effective, classic information retrieval (IR) query operations. These include term re-weighting (tf-idf), expansion and morphological simplification/stemming. We hypothesize that the explanation of this behaviour is that current machine comprehension tasks primarily require ranking of short textual snippets, thus incentivizing relevance more than deep language understanding. ### Analysis of the Agent's Language
We analyze input questions and reformulations on the $12k$ example development partition of the SearchQA dataset. Our goal is to gain insights on how the agent's language evolves during training via policy gradient. It is important to note that in the SearchQA dataset the original Jeopardy! clues have been preprocessed by lower-casing and stop word removal. The resulting preprocessed clues that form the sources (inputs) for the sequence-to-sequence reformulation model resemble more keyword-based search queries than grammatical questions. For example, the clue Gandhi was deeply influenced by this count who wrote "War and Peace" is simplified to gandhi deeply influenced count wrote war peace. ### The Language of SearchQA Questions
Figure 2 summarizes statistics of the questions and rewrites which may shed some light on how the language changes. The (preprocessed) SearchQA questions contain 9.6 words on average. They contain few repeated terms, computed as the mean term frequency (TF) per question. The average is 1.03, but for most of the queries TF is 1.0, i.e. no repetitions. We also compute the median document frequency (DF) per query, where a document is the context from which the answer is selected. DF gives a measure of how informative the question terms are. ### The Language of the Base NMT Model
We first consider the top hypothesis generated by the pre-trained NMT reformulation system, before reinforcement learning (Base-NMT). This system is trained with full supervision, using a large multilingual and a small monolingual dataset. The Base-NMT rewrites differ greatly from their sources. They are shorter, 6.3 words on average, and have even fewer repeated terms (1.01). Interestingly, these reformulations are mostly syntactically well-formed questions. For example, the clue above becomes Who influenced count wrote war?. Base-NMT improves structural language quality by properly reinserting dropped function words and wh-phrases. We also verified the increased fluency by using a large language model and found that the Base-NMT rewrites are 50% more likely than the original questions. The bottom right hand plot in Figure 2 summarizes the language model distributions (LM WordLogP). The plot shows the average per-token language model negative log probabilities; a lower score indicates greater fluency. Although the distributions overlap to a great extent due to the large variance across questions, the differences in means are significant. While more fluent, the Base-NMT rewrites involve rarer terms, as indicated by the decrease in DF. This is probably due to a domain mismatch between SearchQA and the NMT training corpus. ### The Language of the AQA Agent
We next consider the top hypothesis generated by the AQA question reformulator (AQA-QR) after the policy gradient training. The AQA-QR rewrites are those whose corresponding answers are evaluated as AQA Top Hyp. in BIBREF0 . Note, these single rewrites alone outperform the original SearchQA queries by a small margin (+2% on test). We analyze the top hypothesis instead of the final output of the full AQA agent to avoid confounding effects from the answer selection step. These rewrites look different from both the Base-NMT and the SearchQA ones. For the example above AQA-QR's top hypothesis is What is name gandhi gandhi influence wrote peace peace?. Surprisingly, 99.8% start with the prefix What is name. The second most frequent is What country is (81 times), followed by What is is (70) and What state (14). This is puzzling as it happens only for 9 Base-NMT rewrites, and never in the original SearchQA questions. We speculate it might be related to the fact that virtually all answers involve names, of named entities (Micronesia) or generic concepts (pizza). AQA-QR's rewrites are visibly less fluent than both the SearchQA and the Base-MT counterparts. In terms of language model probability they are less likely than both SearchQA and Base-NMT. However, they have more repeated terms (1.2 average TF), are significantly longer (11.9) than the Base-NMT initialization and contain more informative context terms (lower DF) than SearchQA questions. Additionally, AQA-QR's reformulations contain morphological variants in 12.5% of cases. The number of questions that contain multiple tokens with the same stem doubles from SearchQA to AQA-QR. Singular forms are preferred over plurals. Morphological simplification is useful because it increases the chance that a word variant in the question matches the context. ### Conclusions: Rediscovering IR?
Recently, BIBREF10 trained chatbots that negotiate via language utterances in order to complete a task. They report that the agent's language diverges from human language if there is no incentive for fluency in the reward function. Our findings seem related. The fact that the questions reformulated by AQA do not resemble natural language is not due to the keyword-like SearchQA input questions, because Base-NMT is capable of producing fluent questions from the same input. AQA learns to re-weight terms by focusing on informative (lower DF) terms while increasing term frequency (TF) via duplication. At the same time it learns to modify surface forms in ways akin to stemming and morphological analysis. Some of the techniques seem to adapt also to the specific properties of current deep QA architectures such as character-based modelling and attention. Sometimes AQA learns to generate semantically nonsensical, novel, surface term variants; e.g., it might transform the adjective dense to densey. The only justification for this is that such forms can be still exploited by the character-based BiDAF question encoder. Finally, repetitions can directly increase the chances of alignment in the attention components. We hypothesize that there is no incentive for the model to use human language due to the nature of the task. AQA learns to ask BiDAF questions by optimizing a language that increases the likelihood of BiDAF extracting the right answer. BIBREF11 argue that reading comprehension systems are not capable of significant language understanding and fail easily in adversarial settings. We suspect that current machine comprehension tasks involve mostly simple pattern matching and relevance modelling. As a consequence deep QA systems behave as sophisticated ranking systems trained to sort snippets of text from the context. As such, they resemble document retrieval systems which incentivizes the (re-)discovery of IR techniques that have been successful for decades BIBREF12 . Figure 1: An agent-environment framework for Active Question Answering. Figure 2: Boxplot summaries of the statistics collected for all types of questions. Two-sample t-tests performed on all pairs in each box confirm that the differences in means are significant p < 10−3.
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AQA diverges from well structured language in favour of less fluent, but more effective, classic information retrieval (IR) query operations
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Who does the author seem to appreciate the most in Meet Joe Black?
A. Martin Brest
B. Bo Goldman
C. Brad Pitt
D. Claire Forlani
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Warrior Queens Elizabeth is a lurid paraphrase of the old Groucho Marx line about Doris Day: "I knew the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin." As the movie tells it, she was a sylvan, redheaded princess (Cate Blanchett) given to gamboling with her fella (Joseph Fiennes) between periods of internment in the Tower of London on charges of conspiring to overthrow her half-sister, the heatedly Catholic Queen Mary (Kathy Burke). The daughter of the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and therefore dubbed a bastard by the papists, the Protestant Elizabeth ascends the throne to find the air still thick with smoke from roasted heretics, a team of skulking Catholics plotting her assassination, and a council of advisers (lords, bishops, sundry old boys) who snigger openly at the prospect of taking orders from a woman. Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. (Her French suitor enjoys wearing dresses.) After skulls are smashed, throats slit, and bosoms skewered in the name of Christ, Elizabeth decides to: a) "unsex" herself and become a symbol--the Virgin Queen, married only to England; and b) entertain dissenting opinions exclusively from those whose heads are affixed to spikes. You can't be both a queenly queen and a womanly woman, says the script (by Michael Hirst)--at least not in 1554. (The director, Shekhar Kapur, made the same point in his grim 1994 Indian epic The Bandit Queen , against a backdrop of scrubby plains along the Ganges.) Is this feminist take historically accurate? Probably, although the evidence suggests that Elizabeth had developed a head for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions about How Things Work in a barbarous state. That said, the movie's approach makes for juicy melodrama. The tone of Elizabeth comes nearer to the nihilistic relish of Jacobeans such as John Ford and John Webster than to the more sorrowful horror of the Elizabethan dramatists Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. It's even closer to a Jacobean drama of our own age: The Godfather (1972), which it emulates by cutting back-and-forth between queen and courtiers in prayer and the roundup and slaughter of Catholics on their privies, in bed with their mistresses, and so on. Their severed heads look on, wide-eyed, as Elizabeth directs her hair to be shorn--images of her girlhood flashing by as her locks rain down--and then walks weightily to her throne, now a chalk-faced gorgon. With all due respect to Blanchett, Bette Davis, and Glenda Jackson, my favorite Elizabeth I remains Miranda Richardson's capricious, baby-talking psychopath on the BBC comedy Blackadder II . (Casting about for a new lord high executioner, she mews to Rowan Atkinson, "There are thousands of Catholics simply dying to have their heads sneaked off --and there's no one to organize it.") But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety. Gradually expunging all empathy from her moist, pink eyes and permitting her visage to ossify, she gives this carnival of carnage an awe-inspiring center. A more subversive sort of queen is on display in Velvet Goldmine , Todd Haynes' musical fantasia on the early '70s era of "glam" or "glitter" rock. Here the monarch is a David Bowie-esque singer called Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and his spidery, space-age alter ego, Maxwell Demon. The movie opens with a spaceship depositing an infant Oscar Wilde on the stoop of a Dublin townhouse. Then it skips ahead to track a jade pin (it signifies hedonistic liberation) from the custody of a young Wilde to a swishy fringe creature called Jack Fairy to the regal Slade, a bisexual superstar who carries the news to all the young dudes. After that, we're in an Orwellian 1984 that's presided over by a vaguely fascist president and by arena rockers who serve as propagandists for a repressively conformist state. Whatever happened to Brian Slade, the glitter kids, the visionary exhibitionists and gleeful poseurs? Borrowing its framework from Citizen Kane , the movie follows a reporter (Christian Bale) assigned to reconstruct Slade's life and solve the mystery of his whereabouts. Whatever you make of Velvet Goldmine (opinions have ranged from rapturous to casually dismissive), it's like no other musical ever made. It's determinedly swirling, discursive, elliptical. Now the story is told by an omniscient narrator, now a TV reporter, now a participant. Now it's flashing back, now forward. Every other line of dialogue is a cue for one of its dazzling numbers, largely covers of songs by Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, and T. Rex. The narrative is a challenge to keep up with, but then, great artists often invent their own syntax. In the '80s, Haynes employed Barbie dolls to depict the rise and wasting away from anorexia of the singer Karen Carpenter. Lucky audiences who caught Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (it was shelved when Richard Carpenter served the producers with an order to cease and desist exhibition) began by laughing at this elaborately posed, soft-rock femme, only to discover by the climax that the cultural forces that were eating at her (and that kept her from eating) had grown heartbreakingly palpable. Poison (1991), Haynes' Genêt-inspired exploration of transgression, didn't overcome its own artiness. But Safe (1995), the story of a Reagan-era housewife (Julianne Moore) convinced that her environment is poisoning her, is an entrancing meditation on the power of culture to crush the individual. Despite its ironic detachment, the film draws you into its heroine's sickly state: Breathing oxygen from a canister inside a high-tech igloo, she dwindles to nearly nothing, the modern incarnation of the Incredible Shrinking Man. (It was partly my passion for Haynes' films that led me to accept a job offer from his indefatigable producer Christine Vachon last year to collaborate on a nuts-and-bolts book about producing, Shooting To Kill . So my review of Velvet Goldmine --like my review of Vachon's other recent release, Happiness --should be read as the work of a partisan. But not a blind partisan.) In Velvet Goldmine , Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please. The core of the movie turns out not to be the Bowie figure but the journalist, Arthur Stuart, who was a witness to the events he's now reconstructing. Bale is such an expressive performer that Stuart's remembrance of things past attains a Proustian intensity. To him, Slade was a sexual messiah. I've never seen a more vivid distillation of rock's allure than the scene in which he reverently opens the new Brian Slade album--its centerfold image is a lithe, naked, green-tinged Maxwell Demon--slips the vinyl out of its paper jacket and, after gingerly setting the LP on the turntable, props a chair under the doorknob to keep the uncomprehending world at bay. But if Haynes wants Velvet Goldmine to be an anthem to the principles Bowie once embodied--the embrace of artifice and the smashing of conventional sexual roles--he also wants to portray the rocker as a hollow opportunist who abandoned glam and bisexuality for the life of a corporate superstar, throwing in his lot with the forces of repression. That's a lot to cover. An actor of stature might have bridged these two impulses, but the beautiful, brazenly slim-hipped Rhys-Meyers doesn't make his lines sound as if he's thinking them up on the spot, and Slade's self-destructive passion for Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), the film's fuzzy, sweet Iggy Pop figure, seems less an emotional imperative than a thematic one. A case can be made that Velvet Goldmine isn't fully filled in, and that Haynes, who has never shaken off his background as a semiotics major, has made a movie that's all signifiers. I sometimes found myself wishing he would let the picture catch its breath, that the performers would stop coming at me in stroboscopic flashes. But then I'd be swept up in the sinuous motion of his filmmaking, in the elation of watching point of view passed like a baton from hand to hand, in the liberating force of his language and soundtrack. Velvet Goldmine might seem like a collection of baubles, but those baubles are strung. Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A. Pitt plays two roles in this seven course schlockfest. He's (briefly) a slick but wholesome yuppie and then (interminably) Death, who takes over the young man's body when he's thumped by a couple of cars in the movie's most promising moment. Bleached so blond that he looks like an irradiated android, Pitt expels all expression from his face and all tone from his voice. He speaks very, very slowly. The stunt half-works, at least until he's supposed to undergo an inner transformation and acquire human emotions--whereupon his face remains just as blank. Pitt's conception of the role is an idée fixe by someone who doesn't appear to have an idée in his head. Martin Brest, the director, is known for shooting a ton of footage and then "finding" his films in the editing room. What do you suppose he "found" when he scrutinized these miles of celluloid with Pitt doing nothing and taking his sweet time doing it? The first adaptation of this story (originally a play) was the 1934 Death Takes a Holiday , which came in at a perky 78 minutes. A conceit this fragile needs to whiz along to keep our disbelief in suspension, but Meet Joe Black grinds on for three hours (longer than either Beloved or Saving Private Ryan ), and Pitt acts as if he has leased the screen by the year. Anthony Hopkins plays the zillionaire communications baron whom Death enlists in the hope of understanding the human condition--an odd choice for a tour guide, since most people's condition doesn't involve personal helicopters, sprawling mansions on Long Island Sound, or Manhattan apartments that sport Olympic-size swimming pools. Four screenwriters, among them the great Bo Goldman ( Melvin and Howard , 1980; Shoot the Moon , 1982), labored on this moldy script, which features characters who ask questions that begin "Am I to understand that ...?" and a corporate villain who directs another character to "wake up and smell the thorns." It apparently never occurred to even one of these overpaid scribes to eliminate Hopkins' rueful realization that he'd "never write the great American novel"--no kidding, given his flagrantly Welsh accent. Actually, Hopkins gives this humanistic magnate considerable weight, so that whether or not Death takes him before he can stop to smell the roses and make amends to his neglected children becomes a matter of some suspense. The rest of the cast works with equal fortitude, especially Jeffrey Tambor (Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show ) as Hopkins' milksop son-in-law and Marcia Gay Harden as his party planning, perpetually wilting elder daughter. As the younger daughter, the dark eyed, spaghetti thin Claire Forlani has to carry the picture's bathos on her exquisite shoulders. Her tremulous thoroughbred act wears thin, but it's hardly her fault: She has to emote like mad opposite a black pit of death--or is that the Black Death of Pitt?
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D. Claire Forlani
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What makes Dole different from the other candidates?
A. Dole had significant financial backing from the fruit company of the same name
B. She's more conservative than the others
C. She's more sympathetic to the voters because of her upbringing
D. A certain part of her identity might make her sympathetic to the voters in a way that would not work for the other candidates
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Republican Shakeout This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. Elizabeth Dole Playback 1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked "the top three." Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race ("win, place, and show") and noting that "no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a "solid third" and a place among the leaders by crossing the "double-digit" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: "The other seven candidates could not crack double digits." 2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that "the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that." The Boston Globe called Dole "the winner of this contest-within-the-contest." Dole touted her "victory" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's "real winner." 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been "outspent by millions of dollars." Her spokesman told reporters that "on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes." Reporters love an underdog. "From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole," concluded Time . 4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her "surprisingly" strong third. "Dole Revived," the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, "There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner." Playbook 1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, "we finished close to second," Dole told reporters Saturday night. "This is going to become a two-person race." The press agreed. "Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second," recalled the Post . Instead, "he finished closer to Dole than to Bush." 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed "to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States." 3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to "women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in." Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence "that she can attract new voters to the GOP." Gary Bauer Playback 1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., "bronze medal," "win, place, and show"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached "the first rung of candidates" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the "breakout candidate." While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--"leading the rest of the pack"--or at least distinguished him from the "losers." 2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial "contest-within-the-contest." His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer "did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan," and therefore "can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right," establishing himself as "one of the winners," the "three or four" candidates who "got their tickets punched" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished. 3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself "the conservative in a two-man race" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. "Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right," the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, "he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing." 4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. "I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator," Bauer argued on Late Edition . "I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place." Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer "overcame his own financial disadvantages" and joined Dole as the two surviving "Have-Not candidates." Playbook 1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself "the son of a maintenance man." On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer "is becoming the populist in the race," noting that Bauer's supporters "love the fact that he was the son of a janitor." 3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the "Reagan" candidate against "Bush-Gore" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. John McCain Playback 1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. "If you're going to be taken seriously," Brit Hume asked him, "don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames "meaningless." His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show "a pretty smart move" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength. 2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, "almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party." The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa "years and months." McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: "You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you." For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. "Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in," concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating. 3. Viability. "Once the dust has settled from the straw poll," McCain regally announced, "I will review the new political landscape" and begin "engaging the other Republican candidates." Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush. 4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a "fund-raiser," "a sham and a joke" in which campaigns spent "millions" to "buy" votes. "My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests," he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. Playbook 1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't "real votes." "We'll have real votes in New Hampshire," McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . "That's where real people are motivated to vote." On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on "the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina." 2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has "taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa." On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might "have to do something dramatic," such as "make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' " This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. "I've taken a lot of unpopular positions," he conceded on Fox News Sunday . 3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan. So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.
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D. A certain part of her identity might make her sympathetic to the voters in a way that would not work for the other candidates
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How is Relation network used to infer causality at segment level?
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### Introduction
Automatic text causality mining is a critical but difficult task because causality is thought to play an essential role in human cognition when making decisions BIBREF0. Thus, automatic text causality has been studied extensively in a wide range of areas, such as industry BIBREF1, physics BIBREF2 and healthcare BIBREF3, etc. A tool to automatically scour the plethora of textual content on the web and extract meaningful causal relations could help us construct causal chains to unveil previously unknown relationships between events BIBREF4 and accelerates the discovery of the intrinsic logic of the events BIBREF5. Many research efforts have been made to mine causality from text corpus with complex sentence structures in the books or newspapers. In Causal-TimeBank BIBREF6 authors introduced "CLINK" and "C-SIGNAL" tag to mark events causal relation and causal signals respectively based on specific templates (e.g., "A happened because of B"). Q. Do et al. BIBREF7 collected 25 newswire articles from CNN in 2010 and released event causality dataset that provides relatively dense causal annotations. Recently, Q. Do et al. improved the annotation method and implemented joint reasoning for causal and temporal relations BIBREF8. However, the volume of textual data in the wild, e.g., on the web, is much larger than that in books and newspapers. With the help of mobile technologies, people tend to express personal opinions and record memorable moments on the web, which have become a rich source of causality, consequently. There is a huge demand to investigate an approach for mining both explicit and implicit causality from web text. Despite the success of existing studies on extracting explicit causality, there are few reasons why most existing works cannot be directly applied into causality mining on the web text where a large number of implicit causality cases exist. First, most public datasets for causality mining are collected from books and newspaper where the language expressions are more formal and less diverse than the textual data on the web. Second, it would make the perception of causality incomplete because the existing works mainly focus on explicit causal relations that are expressed by intra-sentence or inter-sentence connectives, without considering ambiguous and implicit cases. Implicit commonsense causality can be expressed by a simple sentence structure without any connectives: for example, "got wet" is the cause of "fever" in Example 1 has no connectives assisting detect causality, while there are explicit connectives (i.e. "since" and "result") in Example 2 to benefit complex causality detection. Example 1 I got wet during the day and came home with a fever at night. Example 2 Since computers merely execute the instructions they are given, bugs are nearly always the result of programmer error or an oversight made in the program's design. Normally, causality mining is divided into two sequential tasks: causality detection and cause-effect pair extraction. When dealing with large-scale web text, detecting causalities by specific classifiers with relational reasoning capacity is a pre-step of extracting cause-effect pairs. The performance of causality mining largely depends on how well the detection is performed. In this paper, we mainly focus on the detection step. This procedure can overcome the weakness of manual templates that hardly cover the linguistic variations of explicit causality expressions. It could help build a causality dataset with various expressions for extraction, which results in much less model complexity. Most existing works on causality detection have two common limitations. First, utilizing linguistic methods, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and syntax dependency parsing, to get handcrafted features is labor-intensive and takes ample time. Zhao et al. BIBREF9 divided causal connectives into different classes as a new category feature based on the similarity of the syntactic dependency structure within causality sentences. Also, the proposed model copes with the interaction between the category feature and other frequently-used features such as contextual features, syntactic features, and position features. However, these extracted features hardly capture a wide variety of causality expressions. The algorithms that used the NLP toolkits to extract the features can pass on the errors caused by the toolkits. Hidey and McKeown BIBREF10 incorporated world knowledge, such as FrameNet, WordNet, and VerbNet, to measure the correlations between words and segments while the method barely handles those words which never appear in the learning phase. Second, the quality of extracting co-occurrence by pre-defined patterns is influenced by ambiguous connectives, such as "subsequently" and "force." As seen in Table TABREF4, "consequently" is observed in either causal examples or non-causal examples. Luo et al. BIBREF11 leveraged causal pairs extracted by a set of pre-defined patterns to form CausalNet where the weight of a causality pair is a frequency of causality co-occurrence. Unfortunately, due to the volume of their corpus, there was no further analysis of sentences syntactic dependency. To some extent, this restricts the performance of causal pairs detection. To address the above problems, we propose a Multi-level Causality Detection Network (MCDN) for causality detection based on the following observations: 1) methods based on end-to-end deep neural networks could reduce the labor cost on feature engineering and relief errors propagation from the existing toolkits; 2) causality is a complicated relation, which calls for multi-level analysis, including parsing each word with its context firstly and inferring causality via the segments on both sides of the connectives secondly. Therefore, at the word level, we integrate word, position, and segment embeddings to encode the input sentence, followed by feeding it into stacked Transformer blocks, which have been widely used in various NLP tasks BIBREF12, BIBREF13. In our research, the Transformer could pay attention to cause and effect entities, and capture long-distance dependency across connectives in the meantime. With this end-to-end module, we combine local context and long-distance dependency to acquire a semantic representation at the word level. Thus, we can relax the first limitation (i.e. feature engineering and accumulated errors). At the segment level, to inference the case and effect near the AltLex, we split the sentence into three segments on the ground of "segment before AltLex", "AltLex" and "segment after AltLex". To solve the second limitation, we propose a novel causality inference module, namely Self Causal Relation Network (SCRN). Due to the characteristics of the dataset, the input of SCRN is a single sentence. This is different from Relation Networks in other areas. The feature maps of segments are constructed into four pair-wise groups that are concatenated with a sentence representation respectively. Our intuition is if the sentence can be expressed as "B-AltLex-A", we could inference these segments in pairs to identify: 1) the semantic relation of "B-AltLex" and "AltLex-A"; 2) the cause-effect relation between "B-A" or "A-B". Then the segment-level representation is inferred by two non-linear layers. Finally, we combine word-level with segment-level representations to obtain the detection result. In general, our model MCDN has a simple architecture but effective reasoning potential for causality detection. The contributions can be summarized as three-fold: We introduce the task of mining causality from web text that is conducted into detection and extraction step. Utilizing detection instead of specific templates is a new direction and can provide a rich diversity of causality text with low-noise data for the subsequent extraction step and upstream applications. We propose a neural model MCDN to tackle the problem at the word and segment levels without any feature engineering. MCDN contains a relational reasoning module named Self Causal Relation Network (SCRN) to infer the causal relations within sentences. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have conducted extensive experiments on a publicly available dataset. The experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement over baseline methods, including many state-of-the-art text classification models, which illustrates detecting causality is a complex task. The detection not only requires multi-level information but also needs more reasoning capability than the text classification. ### Related Work ::: Causality Relation
Causality mining is a fundamental task with abundant upstream applications. Early works utilize Bayesian network BIBREF14, BIBREF15, syntactic constraint BIBREF16, and dependency structure BIBREF17 to extract cause-effect pairs. Nevertheless, they could hardly summarize moderate patterns and rules to avoid overfitting. Further studies incorporate world knowledge that provides a supplement to lexico-syntax analysis. Generalizing nouns to their hypernyms in WordNet and each verb to its class in VerbNet BIBREF18, BIBREF19 eliminates the negative effect of lexical variations and discover frequent patterns of cause-effect pairs. As is well known, the implicit expressions of causality are more frequent. J.-H. Oh et al. BIBREF20 exploited cue words and sequence labeling by CRFs and selected the most relevant causality expressions as complements to implicitly expressed causality. However, the method requires retrieval and ranking from enormous web texts. From natural properties perspective, causality describes relations between regularly correlated events or phenomena. Constructing a cause-effect network or graph could help discover co-occurrence patterns and evolution rules of causation BIBREF3, BIBREF19. Therefore, Zhao et al. BIBREF21 conducted causality reasoning on the heterogeneous network to extract implicit relations cross sentences and find new causal relations. Our work is similar to previous works on detecting causalities BIBREF10, BIBREF18. The difference is we do not incorporate knowledge bases they used. We propose a neural-based multi-level model to tackle the problem without any feature engineering. Oh et al. BIBREF20 proposed a multi-column convolutional neural network with causality-attention (CA-MCNN) to enhance MCNNs with the causality-attention based question and answer passage, which is not in coincidence with our task. In compared with CA-MCNN, the multi-head self-attention within the Transformer block we used at the word level is more effective, and the SCRN at the segment level augments the reasoning ability of our model. ### Related Work ::: Relation Networks
Relation Networks (RNs) is initially a simple plug-and-play module to solve Visual-QA problems that fundamentally hinge on relational reasoning BIBREF22. RNs can effectively couple with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to reduce overall network complexity. We gain a general ability to reason about the relations between entities and their properties. Original RNs can only perform single step inference such as $A \rightarrow B$ rather than $A \rightarrow B \rightarrow C$. For tasks that require complex multi-step of relational reasoning, Palm et al. BIBREF23 introduced the recurrent relational network that operates on a graph representation of objects. Pavez et al. BIBREF24 added complex reasoning ability to Memory Networks with RNs, which reduced its computational complexity from quadratic to linear. However, their tasks remain text QA and visual QA. In this paper, it's the first time that RNs is applied to relation extraction as proposed SCRN. ### Preliminary Statement ::: Linguistic Background
This section describes the linguistic background of causal relation and the AltLexes dataset, which we used. It's a commonly held belief that causality can be expressed explicitly and implicitly using various propositions. In the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) BIBREF25, over $12\%$ of explicit discourse connectives are marked as causal such as "hence", "as a result" and "consequently", as are nearly $26\%$ of implicit discourse relationships. In addition to these, there exists a type of implicit connectives in PDTB named AltLex (Alternative lexicalization) has been capable of indicating causal relations, which is an open class of markers and potentially infinite. The definition of AltLex was extended with an open class of markers that occur within a sentence in BIBREF10. The following are examples widespread in the new AltLexes set but are not contained in PDTB explicit connectives. The word "made" with many meanings here is used to express causality. Moreover, the expression of causality in the second example is somewhat obscure. Ambiguous causal verbs, e.g. The flood made many houses to collapse. Partial prepositional phrases, e.g. They have made l4 self-driving car with the idea of a new neural network. According to our statistics in the parallel data constructed in BIBREF10, there are 1144 AltLexes indicate causal, and 7647 AltLexes indicates non-causal. Meanwhile, their intersection has 144 AltLexes, which is $12.6\%$ of causal sets and $1.8\%$ of non-causal sets. In conclusion, ambiguous connectives and implicit expressions are frequently observed in the AltLexes dataset. Methods based on statistical learning with manual patterns have demerits to build a reliable model in such contexts. However, with the abstraction and reasoning capacity, our model MCDN can be well adapted to these situations. ### Preliminary Statement ::: Notations and Definitions
For a given Wikipedia sentence $S$, it is assumed that it has $n$ tokens. $S = \lbrace s_1, s_2, ... , s_{n-1}, s_n \rbrace $ where $s_i$ is a filtered token at position $i$. We use $L$ refers to the AltLex, $BL$ refers to the segment before the AltLex and $AL$ refers to the segment after the AltLex. Our objective is to generate a sentence-level prediction $\hat{y}$ of which the label is $y$ as Equation DISPLAY_FORM12. The proposed model MCDN is shown in Figure FIGREF15. We will detail each component in the rest of this section. It's worth noting that Hidey and McKeown BIBREF10 utilized English Wikipedia and Simple Wikipedia sentence pair to create a parallel corpus feature but still took one sentence as input each time. Unlike this approach, MCDN only leverages the input sentence for causal inference. ### Methods
In this section, we elaborate the MCDN, a multi-level neural network-based approach with Transformer blocks at the word level and SCRN at the segment level for causality detection, which is primarily targeted at ambiguous and implicit relations. ### Methods ::: Input Representation
Our input representation is able to incorporate multi-source information into one token sequence. Inspired by BIBREF12, the representation of each token in the input sentence is constructed by summing the corresponding word, position, and segment embeddings. Unlike the previous work, BERT, the segment embeddings here indicate the $BL$, $L$ and $AL$ segment in each sentence. As shown in Fig. FIGREF10, first, we adopt a word2vec toolkit to pretrain word embeddings with $d_{word}$ dimension on the English Wikipedia dump. Next, we utilize positional embeddings to map the positional information because our model has no recurrent architecture at the word level. Similarly, we use segment embeddings to involve more linguistic details. $d_{pos}$ and $d_{seg}$ is the dimension of positional embeddings and segment embeddings, respectively. By sum the three embeddings, finally, we get a new representation $x_i \in \mathbb {R}^d$ for token $s_i$ where $d = d_{word} = d_{pos} = d_{seg}$. The representation $x_i$ could provide basic features for high-level modules. ### Methods ::: Word Level
There are two sub-layers in the Transformer block: self-attention and feed-forward networks. For stability and superior performance, we add a layer normalization after the residual connection for each of the sub-layers. Self-Attention. In this paper, we employ scaled multi-head self-attention, which has many merits compared with RNN and CNN. Firstly, the "receptive field" of each token can be extended to the whole sequence without long distance dependency diffusion. And any significant token would be assigned a high weight. Secondly, dot-product and multi-head can be optimized for parallelism separately, which is more efficient than RNN. Finally, multi-head model aggregates information from different representation sub-spaces. For scaled self-attention, given the input matrix of $n$ query vectors $Q \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$, keys $K \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$ and values $V \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$, computing the output attention score as: We take the input vector matrix $X \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$ as queries, keys, and values matrix and linearly project them $h$ times respectively. Formally, for $i$-$th$ head ${\rm H_i}$ it is formulated as below: Where the learned projections are matrices $W_i^Q \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d /h}$, $W_i^K \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d /h}$, $W_i^V \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d /h}$. Finally, we concatenate each head and map them to the output space with $W_{MH} \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d}$: Feed-forward Networks. We apply feed-forward networks after the self-attention sub-layer. It consists of two linear layers and a ReLU activation between them. Note that $x$ is the output of the previous layer: where $W_1 \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d_f}$ and $W_2 \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d_f}$. We set $d_f = 4d$ in our experiments. The Transformer block is stacked $N$ times, of which the final output $wl\_{rep}$ is regarded as the representation of the sentence at the word level. We aim to deal the word with its fine-grained local context and coarse-grained global long-distance dependency information. Thus, our word-level module could acquire not only lexico-syntax knowledge that manual patterns hardly cover but also lexical semantics among the words. ### Methods ::: Segment Level
We propose a novel approach to infer causality within sentences at the segment level. The model is named as Self Causal Relation Network (SCRN) due to it focuses on the causal relation intra-sentence compared with previous studies of RNs. Dealing with segments. The core idea of Relation Networks is operating on objects. In our task, the sentence is split into three segments $BL$, $L$, and $AL$ according to the position of AltLex. Then the input representations of these segments can be formulated as $X_{BL} \in \mathbb {R}^{T_{BL} \times d}$, $X_{L} \in \mathbb {R}^{T_{L} \times d}$ and $X_{AL} \in \mathbb {R}^{T_{AL} \times d}$ where $T_{BL}$, $T_{L}$, and $T_{AL}$ are the length of tokens in each segment. Due to the difference of segment lengths, we use a three-column CNN (TC-CNN) to parse $X_{BL}$, $X_{L}$, and $X_{AL}$ into a set of objects. Particularly the representations here only employ word embeddings and segment embeddings because the TC-CNN could capture the position information. Unlike [25], TC-CNN convolves them through a 1D convolutional layer to $k$ feature maps of size $T_{BL} \times 1$, $T_{L} \times 1$, and $T_{AL} \times 1$, where $k$ is the sum of kernels. The model exploits multi-scale kernels (with varying window size) to obtain multi-scale features. As seen in Fig. FIGREF15, the feature maps of each segment are rescaled into a k-dimension vector by the max pooling layer after convolution. Finally, we produce a set of objects for SCRN: Dealing with the sentence. The input representation $X$ of the sentence pass through a bidirectional-GRU (bi-GRU) with $d_g$-dimension hidden units, and the final state $\gamma \in \mathbb {R}^{2d_g}$ of the bi-GRU is concatenated to each object-pair. SCRN. We construct four object-pairs concatenated with $\gamma $. Let $\#$ denote the pair-wise operation. For causality candidates, $BL\#L$ and $L\#AL$ indicate the relation between cause-effect and AltLex, while $BL\#AL$ and $AL\#BL$ inference the direction of causality. The object-pairs matrix $OP \in \mathbb {R}^{4 \times (2k + 2d_g)}$ is shown as follows: Here ";" is a concatenation operation for the object vectors. Consequently, we modify the SCRN architecture in a mathematical formulation and obtain the final output $sl\_{rep} \in \mathbb {R}^{4d_g}$ at the segment level: In general, the model transforms the segments into object-pairs by the TC-CNN and passes sentence through bi-GRU to obtain the global representation. Then we integrate object-pairs with global representation and make a pair-wise inference to detect the relationship among the segments. Ablation studies show that the proposed SCRN at the segment level has the capacity for relational reasoning and promotes the result significantly. ### Methods ::: Causality Detection
Our model MCDN identifies causality of each sentence based on the output $wl\_{rep}$ at the word level and $sl\_{rep}$ at the segment level. The two outputs are concatenated as a unified representation $uni\_{rep} = [wl\_{rep}; sl\_{rep}] \in \mathbb {R}^{d + 4d_g}$. In this task, we use a 2-layer FFN consisting of $d_g$ units which have a ReLU activation and is followed by a softmax function to make the prediction: In the AltLexes dataset, the number of non-causal examples is over seven times the number of causal examples, and this leads to an extremely sample imbalance problem. If we adopt cross-entropy (CE) as model loss function, the performance would be unsatisfactory. Moreover, the difficulty in detecting each sample is different. For example, the sentence contains an ambiguous AltLex such as "make" is harder to infer than that contains "cause". Consequently, we need to assign a soft weight to a causal and non-causal loss to make the model pay more attention to those examples which are difficult to identify. Motivated by the works BIBREF26, we introduce the focal loss to improve normal cross entropy loss function. The focal loss $L_{fl}$ is formulated as the objective function with the balance weight hyperparameter $\alpha $ and the tunable focusing hyperparameter $\beta \ge 0$. For optimization, we use the Adam optimizer BIBREF27 with $\beta _1 = 0.9$, $\beta _2 = 0.999$, $\epsilon = 1e^{-8}$ and clip the gradients norm. ### Experiment
In this section, we are interested in investigating the performance of MCDN that integrates Transformer blocks with SCRN and whether it is essential to incorporate inference ability in the sentence-level causality detection task. ### Experiment ::: Experiment Settings
Dataset. We use the AltLexes dataset to evaluate the proposed approach. The detailed statistical information about the dataset is listed in Table TABREF30. The Bootstrapped set is generated using new AltLexes to identify additional ones based on the Training set, which increased causal examples by about 65 percent. In our experiment, we train MCDN on the Training set and Bootstrapped set separately and finetune hyperparameters on the validation set. The golden annotated set is used as the test set. Hyperparameters. We set the initial learning rate to $1e^{-4}$ then decreased half when the F1-score has stopped increasing more than two epochs. The batch size in this experiment is 32, and the epoch size is 20. To avoid overfitting, we employ two types of regularization during training: 1) dropout for the sums of the embeddings, the outputs of each bi-GRU layer except the last, each layer in FFN and residual dropout for Transformer blocks BIBREF12; 2) $L_2$ regularization for all trainable parameters. The dropout rate is set to 0.5 and the regularization coefficient is $3e^{-4}$. In self-attention module, we set the stack time of Transformer blocks $N=4$ and the number of attention heads $h=4$. In SCRN, the window sizes of TC-CNN kernels are 2, 3, 4 while the sum of kernel $k=150$. We use a 2-layer bi-GRU with 64 units in each direction. As for the focal loss, we set $\alpha =0.75, \beta =4$. Evaluation Metrics. Different evaluation metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are adapted to compare MCDN with the baseline methods. To understand our model comprehensively, we employ both Area under Receiver Operator Curve (AUROC) and Area under Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) to evaluate its sensitivity and specificity, especially under the situation that causality is relatively sparse in the web text. ### Experiment ::: Baseline Methods
In this section, we elaborate on 10 baseline methods. The first five methods are the most common class (MCC), $KLD$, $LS \cup KLD$, $LS \cup KLD \cup CONN$, and $KLD \cup LS \cup LS_{inter}$. $KLD$, $LS$, and $CONN$ represent KL-divergence score, lexical semantic feature, and categorical feature respectively. These methods are used as baselines in Hidey et al.'s work. $KLD$ and $LS \cup KLD$ acquire the best accuracy and precision on the Training set. $LS \cup KLD \cup CONN$ and $KLD \cup LS \cup LS_{inter}$ are the best systems with the highest recall and F1-score respectively. The next five are the most commonly used methods in text classification. They are TextCNN, TextRNN, SASE, DPCNN, and BERT. In our experiment, we reproduced all of them except BERT. For BERT, we use the public released pre-trained language model (base). and fine-tuned it on each dataset. The detailed information about these baselines is listed as follows: TextCNNBIBREF28 used here has a convolution layer, the window sizes of which are 2, 3, 4 and each have 50 kernels. Then we apply max-overtime-pooling and 2-layer FFN with ReLU activation. The dropout rate is 0.5 and $L-2$ regularization coefficient is $3e^{-4}$. TextRNN uses a bidirectional GRU the same as sentence encoder in SCRN and use max pooling across all GRU hidden states to get the sentence embedding vector, then use a 2-layer FFN to output the result. Dropout rate and $L_2$ regularization coefficient is the same as TextCNN. SASE BIBREF29 uses a 2-D matrix to represent the sentence embedding with a self-attention mechanism and a particular regularization term for the model. It's an effective sentence level embedding method. DPCNN BIBREF30 is a low-complexity word-level deep CNN model for sentiment classification and topic categorization. It can make down-sampling without increasing the number of features maps which enables the efficient representation of long-range associations. BERT BIBREF13 presented state-of-the-art results in a wide variety of NLP tasks, which is a pre-trained deep language representation model based on Transformer and Masked Language Model. BERT is inspired by transfer learning in the computer vision field, pre-training a neural network model on a known task, for instance, ImageNet, and then performing fine-tuning on a new purpose-specific task. It's worth noting that due to data imbalance and for comparison in the same situation, we also used focal loss in the above methods to acquire the best performance. ### Experiment ::: Results
Table TABREF30 shows the detection results from the two datasets of our model and competing methods. Firstly, we can see that MCDN remarkably outperforms all other models when trained on both datasets. Although MCDN doesn't obtain the highest precision, it increases F1-score by 10.2% and 3% compared with the existing best systems $LS \cup KLD \cup CONN$ and $KLD \cup LS \cup LS_{inter}$. Furthermore, $KLD$ feature based SVM yields the highest precision on the Training set, though poor recall and F1-score, because it focuses on the substitutability of connectives while the parallel examples usually have the same connective that would be estimated as false negatives. It is remarkable that MCDN is more robust on the original Training set and Bootstrapped set while the feature-based linear SVM and neural network-based approaches presented a considerable difference and got gain even more than 20 on F1-score. Secondly, deep methods tend to acquire balanced precision and recall score except for BERT and MCDN whose recall is significantly higher than precision on Bootstrapped set. Besides, F1-score of both BERT and MCDN is beyond 80 on the Bootstrapped dataset. All the results above suggest that the neural network is more powerful than the traditional co-occurrence and world knowledge-based methods on this task, as we expected. MCDN has learned various semantic representations of causal relations from word level and been able to inference causality from segment level supported by concise and effective SCRN. Furthermore, the deep classification methods we employed don't perform as well as MCDN which demonstrates causality detection is a much complex task that requires considerable relational reasoning capacity compared with text classification, although both can be generalized to classification problems. TABLE I Examples of ambiguous AltLexes in the parallel data. Fig. 1. MCDN input representation. The input embedding is the sum of the word embeddings, the position embeddings, and the segmentation embeddings. Fig. 2. The architecture of MCDN. The input sentence is split into words and segments separately and fed into the input representation layer. The left part is the word level stacked Transformer blocks and the right part is the segment level SCRN. TABLE II Details of the AltLex dataset. TABLE III Results for the causality detection task. TABLE IV Ablation Study. TABLE V Top-5 frequently appeared AltLexes in the test set. TABLE VI Performance of Different Word Embeddings. TABLE VII Scalability on the Constructed Corpus.
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we integrate object-pairs with global representation and make a pair-wise inference to detect the relationship among the segments
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The speaker sometimes writes in gibberish. Why is this?
A. Glmpauszn sometimes forgets his own words.
B. It's when there are no words for whatever alien equivalent he means.
C. It's a gag. Whoever is writing this is doing so throw off the reader.
D. The person writing is incapable of replicating it.
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A Gleeb for Earth By CHARLES SHAFHAUSER Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Not to be or not to not be ... that was the not-question for the invader of the not-world. Dear Editor: My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody, everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, "Why didn't you warn us?" I could not go to the police because they are not too friendly to me because of some of my guests who frankly are stew bums. Also they might think I was on booze, too, or maybe the hops, and get my license revoked. I run a strictly legit hotel even though some of my guests might be down on their luck now and then. What really got me mixed up in this was the mysterious disappearance of two of my guests. They both took a powder last Wednesday morning. Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias, I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know. And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were the letters I told you about. Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame. Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him. In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the mirror. Only the frame! What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says. India, China, England, everywhere. My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place, the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never touch junk, not even aspirin. Yours very truly, Ivan Smernda Bombay, India June 8 Mr. Joe Binkle Plaza Ritz Arms New York City Dear Joe: Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection, for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I, Glmpauszn, will be born. Today I hang in our newly developed not-pod just within the mirror gateway, torn with the agony that we calculated must go with such tremendous wavelength fluctuations. I have attuned myself to a fetus within the body of a not-woman in the not-world. Already I am static and for hours have looked into this weird extension of the Universe with fear and trepidation. As soon as my stasis was achieved, I tried to contact you, but got no response. What could have diminished your powers of articulate wave interaction to make you incapable of receiving my messages and returning them? My wave went out to yours and found it, barely pulsing and surrounded with an impregnable chimera. Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what the not-world calls "mail" till we meet. For this purpose I must utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you. Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time. I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we return again. The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it. Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact location, for the not-people might have access to the information. I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational likeness. I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in order that I might destroy the not-people completely. All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision. Gezsltrysk, what a task! Farewell till later. Glmpauszn Wichita, Kansas June 13 Dear Joe: Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you, I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my birth. Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me. As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally, since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up their hands and left. I learned the following day that the opposite component of my not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born. When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36 not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind. He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of speech. Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world. "Poppa," I said. This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the room. They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth, she fell down heavily. She made a distinct thump on the floor. This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched, but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings! I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats. But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself and it's his nature never to flatter anyone. From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we learned otherwise, while they never have. New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could have happened to your vibrations? Glmpauszn Albuquerque, New Mexico June 15 Dear Joe: I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time. My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he has done. My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent. In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out. Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here. As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ... my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire the stuff needed for the destruction of these people. Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient mechanism I inhabit. I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions. It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up and all about me at the beauty. Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not let yourself believe they do. This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here. Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped. The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told myself. But they were. I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened. "He was stark naked," the girl with the sneakers said. A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her. "Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of this area." "But—" "No more buck-bathing, Lizzy," the officer ordered. "No more speeches in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him." That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty, pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I must feel each, become accustomed to it. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe. What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write you with more enlightenment. Glmpauszn Moscow, Idaho June 17 Dear Joe: I received your first communication today. It baffles me. Do you greet me in the proper fringe-zone manner? No. Do you express joy, hope, pride, helpfulness at my arrival? No. You ask me for a loan of five bucks! It took me some time, culling my information catalog to come up with the correct variant of the slang term "buck." Is it possible that you are powerless even to provide yourself with the wherewithal to live in this inferior world? A reminder, please. You and I—I in particular—are now engaged in a struggle to free our world from the terrible, maiming intrusions of this not-world. Through many long gleebs, our people have lived a semi-terrorized existence while errant vibrations from this world ripped across the closely joined vibration flux, whose individual fluctuations make up our sentient population. Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples. While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer, more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world. They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily, causing them much agony and fright. The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one of them at the first opportunity to see for myself. Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked them up while examining the "slang" portion of my information catalog which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short, get hep. As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice. Glmpauszn Des Moines, Iowa June 19 Dear Joe: Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need. Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here "revolting" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that day, I assure you. Glmpauszn Boise, Idaho July 15 Dear Joe: A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last. Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known quaintly in this tongue as a "hooker of red-eye." Ha! I've mastered even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me again. I feel much better now. You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to. Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle, I experience a tickle. This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have. I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours. Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for the love of it. Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have failed. This alcohol is taking effect now. Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports! I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry. Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming. By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh? I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one simply must persevere, I always say. Glmpauszn Penobscot, Maine July 20 Dear Joe: Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body. There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his vibrations. I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal. I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration. We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the money in her bare feet! Then we kissed. Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love. I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself quickly. Now in all the motion pictures—true representations of life and love in this world—the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses. This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn, wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear? I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted. Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I had not found love. I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left. I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive? I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a gin mixture. I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation. Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe, you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately. Glmpauszn Sacramento, Calif. July 25 Dear Joe: All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance things. Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again because she said yes immediately. The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these people really are to our world. The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I was too busy with the redhead to notice. Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white, shapeless cascade of light. Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, "Grandma Lucy!" Then I really took notice. Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku was open and his btgrimms were down. Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the redhead. Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become invisible any more. I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly. Quickly! Glmpauszn Florence, Italy September 10 Dear Joe: This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds. I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not aware of the nature of my activities. I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best customer. "But why, sir?" he asked plaintively. I was baffled. What could I tell him? "Don't you like the rooms?" he persisted. "Isn't the service good?" "It's the rooms," I told him. "They're—they're—" "They're what?" he wanted to know. "They're not safe." "Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is...." At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol. "See?" I screamed. "Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!" He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die. Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like the not-men, curse them. Glmpauszn Rochester, New York September 25 Dear Joe: I have it! It is done! In spite of the alcohol, in spite of Blgftury's niggling criticism, I have succeeded. I now have developed a form of mold, somewhat similar to the antibiotics of this world, that, transmitted to the human organism, will cause a disease whose end will be swift and fatal. First the brain will dissolve and then the body will fall apart. Nothing in this world can stop the spread of it once it is loose. Absolutely nothing. We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators. You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live. In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can we, Joe? And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have hgutry before the ghjdksla! Glmpauszn Dear Editor: These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a gleeb?
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B. It's when there are no words for whatever alien equivalent he means.
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Central theme of the story? Unrestrained allows for greater success and creativity and progress?
A. When children are allowed to challenge authority, the possibilities for havoc aren't as extreme as adults assume they will be
B. When children are allowed to control a group, the possibilities for destruction are higher than in a controlled, rulebound environment
C. When children are allowed to follow their dreams, the possibilities for failure are more amplified than in a practical, realistic environment
D. When children are allowed to embrace creativity, the possibilities for innovation are higher than in a rigid, standardized environment
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Fallout is, of course, always disastrous— one way or another JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT BY WILLIAM LEE ILLUSTRATED BY SCHOENHERR "What would you think," I asked Marjorie over supper, "if I should undertake to lead a junior achievement group this summer?" She pondered it while she went to the kitchen to bring in the dessert. It was dried apricot pie, and very tasty, I might add. "Why, Donald," she said, "it could be quite interesting, if I understand what a junior achievement group is. What gave you the idea?" "It wasn't my idea, really," I admitted. "Mr. McCormack called me to the office today, and told me that some of the children in the lower grades wanted to start one. They need adult guidance of course, and one of the group suggested my name." I should explain, perhaps, that I teach a course in general science in our Ridgeville Junior High School, and another in general physics in the Senior High School. It's a privilege which I'm sure many educators must envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our new school is a fine one, and our academic standards are high. On the other hand, the fathers of most of my students work for the Commission and a constant awareness of the Commission and its work pervades the town. It is an uneasy privilege then, at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned brand of science to these children of a new age. "That's very nice," said Marjorie. "What does a junior achievement group do?" "It has the purpose," I told her, "of teaching the members something about commerce and industry. They manufacture simple compositions like polishing waxes and sell them from door-to-door. Some groups have built up tidy little bank accounts which are available for later educational expenses." "Gracious, you wouldn't have to sell from door-to-door, would you?" "Of course not. I'd just tell the kids how to do it." Marjorie put back her head and laughed, and I was forced to join her, for we both recognize that my understanding and "feel" for commercial matters—if I may use that expression—is almost nonexistent. "Oh, all right," I said, "laugh at my commercial aspirations. But don't worry about it, really. Mr. McCormack said we could get Mr. Wells from Commercial Department to help out if he was needed. There is one problem, though. Mr. McCormack is going to put up fifty dollars to buy any raw materials wanted and he rather suggested that I might advance another fifty. The question is, could we do it?" Marjorie did mental arithmetic. "Yes," she said, "yes, if it's something you'd like to do." We've had to watch such things rather closely for the last ten—no, eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville, fifty-odd miles to the south, we had our home almost paid for, when the accident occurred. It was in the path of the heaviest fallout, and we couldn't have kept on living there even if the town had stayed. When Ridgeville moved to its present site, so, of course, did we, which meant starting mortgage payments all over again. Thus it was that on a Wednesday morning about three weeks later, I was sitting at one end of a plank picnic table with five boys and girls lined up along the sides. This was to be our headquarters and factory for the summer—a roomy unused barn belonging to the parents of one of the group members, Tommy Miller. "O.K.," I said, "let's relax. You don't need to treat me as a teacher, you know. I stopped being a school teacher when the final grades went in last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My job here is only to advise, and I'm going to do that as little as possible. You're going to decide what to do, and if it's safe and legal and possible to do with the starting capital we have, I'll go along with it and help in any way I can. This is your meeting." Mr. McCormack had told me, and in some detail, about the youngsters I'd be dealing with. The three who were sitting to my left were the ones who had proposed the group in the first place. Doris Enright was a grave young lady of ten years, who might, I thought, be quite a beauty in a few more years, but was at the moment rather angular—all shoulders and elbows. Peter Cope, Jr. and Hilary Matlack were skinny kids, too. The three were of an age and were all tall for ten-year-olds. I had the impression during that first meeting that they looked rather alike, but this wasn't so. Their features were quite different. Perhaps from association, for they were close friends, they had just come to have a certain similarity of restrained gesture and of modulated voice. And they were all tanned by sun and wind to a degree that made their eyes seem light and their teeth startlingly white. The two on my right were cast in a different mold. Mary McCready was a big husky redhead of twelve, with a face full of freckles and an infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller, a few months younger, was just an average, extroverted, well adjusted youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted and butch-barbered. The group exchanged looks to see who would lead off, and Peter Cope seemed to be elected. "Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior achievement group is a bunch of kids who get together to manufacture and sell things, and maybe make some money." "Is that what you want to do," I asked, "make money?" "Why not?" Tommy asked. "There's something wrong with making money?" "Well, sure, I suppose we want to," said Hilary. "We'll need some money to do the things we want to do later." "And what sort of things would you like to make and sell?" I asked. The usual products, of course, with these junior achievement efforts, are chemical specialties that can be made safely and that people will buy and use without misgivings—solvent to free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had told me, though, that I might find these youngsters a bit more ambitious. "The Miller boy and Mary McCready," he had said, "have exceptionally high IQ's—around one forty or one fifty. The other three are hard to classify. They have some of the attributes of exceptional pupils, but much of the time they seem to have little interest in their studies. The junior achievement idea has sparked their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just what they need." Mary said, "Why don't we make a freckle remover? I'd be our first customer." "The thing to do," Tommy offered, "is to figure out what people in Ridgeville want to buy, then sell it to them." "I'd like to make something by powder metallurgy techniques," said Pete. He fixed me with a challenging eye. "You should be able to make ball bearings by molding, then densify them by electroplating." "And all we'd need is a hydraulic press," I told him, "which, on a guess, might cost ten thousand dollars. Let's think of something easier." Pete mulled it over and nodded reluctantly. "Then maybe something in the electronics field. A hi-fi sub-assembly of some kind." "How about a new detergent?" Hilary put in. "Like the liquid dishwashing detergents?" I asked. He was scornful. "No, they're formulations—you know, mixtures. That's cookbook chemistry. I mean a brand new synthetic detergent. I've got an idea for one that ought to be good even in the hard water we've got around here." "Well, now," I said, "organic synthesis sounds like another operation calling for capital investment. If we should keep the achievement group going for several summers, it might be possible later on to carry out a safe synthesis of some sort. You're Dr. Matlack's son, aren't you? Been dipping into your father's library?" "Some," said Hilary, "and I've got a home laboratory." "How about you, Doris?" I prompted. "Do you have a special field of interest?" "No." She shook her head in mock despondency. "I'm not very technical. Just sort of miscellaneous. But if the group wanted to raise some mice, I'd be willing to turn over a project I've had going at home." "You could sell mice?" Tommy demanded incredulously. "Mice," I echoed, then sat back and thought about it. "Are they a pure strain? One of the recognized laboratory strains? Healthy mice of the right strain," I explained to Tommy, "might be sold to laboratories. I have an idea the Commission buys a supply every month." "No," said Doris, "these aren't laboratory mice. They're fancy ones. I got the first four pairs from a pet shop in Denver, but they're red—sort of chipmunk color, you know. I've carried them through seventeen generations of careful selection." "Well, now," I admitted, "the market for red mice might be rather limited. Why don't you consider making an after-shave lotion? Denatured alcohol, glycerine, water, a little color and perfume. You could buy some bottles and have some labels printed. You'd be in business before you knew it." There was a pause, then Tommy inquired, "How do you sell it?" "Door-to-door." He made a face. "Never build up any volume. Unless it did something extra. You say we'd put color in it. How about enough color to leave your face looking tanned. Men won't use cosmetics and junk, but if they didn't have to admit it, they might like the shave lotion." Hilary had been deep in thought. He said suddenly, "Gosh, I think I know how to make a—what do you want to call it—a before-shave lotion." "What would that be?" I asked. "You'd use it before you shaved." "I suppose there might be people who'd prefer to use it beforehand," I conceded. "There will be people," he said darkly, and subsided. Mrs. Miller came out to the barn after a while, bringing a bucket of soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves of bread and ingredients for a variety of sandwiches. The parents had agreed to underwrite lunches at the barn and Betty Miller philosophically assumed the role of commissary officer. She paused only to say hello and to ask how we were progressing with our organization meeting. I'd forgotten all about organization, and that, according to all the articles I had perused, is most important to such groups. It's standard practice for every member of the group to be a company officer. Of course a young boy who doesn't know any better, may wind up a sales manager. Over the sandwiches, then, I suggested nominating company officers, but they seemed not to be interested. Peter Cope waved it off by remarking that they'd each do what came naturally. On the other hand, they pondered at some length about a name for the organization, without reaching any conclusions, so we returned to the problem of what to make. It was Mary, finally, who advanced the thought of kites. At first there was little enthusiasm, then Peter said, "You know, we could work up something new. Has anybody ever seen a kite made like a wind sock?" Nobody had. Pete drew figures in the air with his hands. "How about the hole at the small end?" "I'll make one tonight," said Doris, "and think about the small end. It'll work out all right." I wished that the youngsters weren't starting out by inventing a new article to manufacture, and risking an almost certain disappointment, but to hold my guidance to the minimum, I said nothing, knowing that later I could help them redesign it along standard lines. At supper I reviewed the day's happenings with Marjorie and tried to recall all of the ideas which had been propounded. Most of them were impractical, of course, for a group of children to attempt, but several of them appeared quite attractive. Tommy, for example, wanted to put tooth powder into tablets that one would chew before brushing the teeth. He thought there should be two colors in the same bottle—orange for morning and blue for night, the blue ones designed to leave the mouth alkaline at bed time. Pete wanted to make a combination nail and wood screw. You'd drive it in with a hammer up to the threaded part, then send it home with a few turns of a screwdriver. Hilary, reluctantly forsaking his ideas on detergents, suggested we make black plastic discs, like poker chips but thinner and as cheap as possible, to scatter on a snowy sidewalk where they would pick up extra heat from the sun and melt the snow more rapidly. Afterward one would sweep up and collect the discs. Doris added to this that if you could make the discs light enough to float, they might be colored white and spread on the surface of a reservoir to reduce evaporation. These latter ideas had made unknowing use of some basic physics, and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few minutes into the role of teacher and told them a little bit about the laws of radiation and absorption of heat. "My," said Marjorie, "they're really smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller does sound like a born salesman. Somehow I don't think you're going to have to call in Mr. Wells." I do feel just a little embarrassed about the kite, even now. The fact that it flew surprised me. That it flew so confoundedly well was humiliating. Four of them were at the barn when I arrived next morning; or rather on the rise of ground just beyond it, and the kite hung motionless and almost out of sight in the pale sky. I stood and watched for a moment, then they saw me. "Hello, Mr. Henderson," Mary said, and proffered the cord which was wound on a fishing reel. I played the kite up and down for a few minutes, then reeled it in. It was, almost exactly, a wind sock, but the hole at the small end was shaped—by wire—into the general form of a kidney bean. It was beautifully made, and had a sort of professional look about it. "It flies too well," Mary told Doris. "A kite ought to get caught in a tree sometimes." "You're right," Doris agreed. "Let's see it." She gave the wire at the small end the slightest of twists. "There, it ought to swoop." Sure enough, in the moderate breeze of that morning, the kite swooped and yawed to Mary's entire satisfaction. As we trailed back to the barn I asked Doris, "How did you know that flattening the lower edge of the hole would create instability?" She looked doubtful. "Why it would have to, wouldn't it? It changed the pattern of air pressures." She glanced at me quickly. "Of course, I tried a lot of different shapes while I was making it." "Naturally," I said, and let it go at that. "Where's Tommy?" "He stopped off at the bank," Pete Cope told me, "to borrow some money. We'll want to buy materials to make some of these kites." "But I said yesterday that Mr. McCormack and I were going to advance some cash to get started." "Oh, sure, but don't you think it would be better to borrow from a bank? More businesslike?" "Doubtless," I said, "but banks generally want some security." I would have gone on and explained matters further, except that Tommy walked in and handed me a pocket check book. "I got two hundred and fifty," he volunteered—not without a hint of complacency in his voice. "It didn't take long, but they sure made it out a big deal. Half the guys in the bank had to be called in to listen to the proposition. The account's in your name, Mr. Henderson, and you'll have to make out the checks. And they want you to stop in at the bank and give them a specimen signature. Oh, yes, and cosign the note." My heart sank. I'd never had any dealings with banks except in the matter of mortgages, and bank people make me most uneasy. To say nothing of finding myself responsible for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar note—over two weeks salary. I made a mental vow to sign very few checks. "So then I stopped by at Apex Stationers," Tommy went on, "and ordered some paper and envelopes. We hadn't picked a name yesterday, but I figured what's to lose, and picked one. Ridge Industries, how's that?" Everybody nodded. "Just three lines on the letterhead," he explained. "Ridge Industries—Ridgeville—Montana." I got my voice back and said, "Engraved, I trust." "Well, sure," he replied. "You can't afford to look chintzy." My appetite was not at its best that evening, and Marjorie recognized that something was concerning me, but she asked no questions, and I only told her about the success of the kite, and the youngsters embarking on a shopping trip for paper, glue and wood splints. There was no use in both of us worrying. On Friday we all got down to work, and presently had a regular production line under way; stapling the wood splints, then wetting them with a resin solution and shaping them over a mandrel to stiffen, cutting the plastic film around a pattern, assembling and hanging the finished kites from an overhead beam until the cement had set. Pete Cope had located a big roll of red plastic film from somewhere, and it made a wonderful-looking kite. Happily, I didn't know what the film cost until the first kites were sold. By Wednesday of the following week we had almost three hundred kites finished and packed into flat cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't care if I never saw another. Tommy, who by mutual consent, was our authority on sales, didn't want to sell any until we had, as he put it, enough to meet the demand, but this quantity seemed to satisfy him. He said he would sell them the next week and Mary McCready, with a fine burst of confidence, asked him in all seriousness to be sure to hold out a dozen. Three other things occurred that day, two of which I knew about immediately. Mary brought a portable typewriter from home and spent part of the afternoon banging away at what seemed to me, since I use two fingers only, a very creditable speed. And Hilary brought in a bottle of his new detergent. It was a syrupy yellow liquid with a nice collar of suds. He'd been busy in his home laboratory after all, it seemed. "What is it?" I asked. "You never told us." Hilary grinned. "Lauryl benzyl phosphonic acid, dipotassium salt, in 20% solution." "Goodness." I protested, "it's been twenty-five years since my last course in chemistry. Perhaps if I saw the formula—." He gave me a singularly adult smile and jotted down a scrawl of symbols and lines. It meant little to me. "Is it good?" For answer he seized the ice bucket, now empty of its soda bottles, trickled in a few drops from the bottle and swished the contents. Foam mounted to the rim and spilled over. "And that's our best grade of Ridgeville water," he pointed out. "Hardest in the country." The third event of Wednesday came to my ears on Thursday morning. I was a little late arriving at the barn, and was taken a bit aback to find the roadway leading to it rather full of parked automobiles, and the barn itself rather full of people, including two policemen. Our Ridgeville police are quite young men, but in uniform they still look ominous and I was relieved to see that they were laughing and evidently enjoying themselves. "Well, now," I demanded, in my best classroom voice. "What is all this?" "Are you Henderson?" the larger policeman asked. "I am indeed," I said, and a flash bulb went off. A young lady grasped my arm. "Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come outside where it's quieter and tell me all about it." "Perhaps," I countered, "somebody should tell me." "You mean you don't know, honestly? Oh, it's fabulous. Best story I've had for ages. It'll make the city papers." She led me around the corner of the barn to a spot of comparative quiet. "You didn't know that one of your junior whatsisnames poured detergent in the Memorial Fountain basin last night?" I shook my head numbly. "It was priceless. Just before rush hour. Suds built up in the basin and overflowed, and down the library steps and covered the whole street. And the funniest part was they kept right on coming. You couldn't imagine so much suds coming from that little pool of water. There was a three-block traffic jam and Harry got us some marvelous pictures—men rolling up their trousers to wade across the street. And this morning," she chortled, "somebody phoned in an anonymous tip to the police—of course it was the same boy that did it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here we are. And we just saw a demonstration of that fabulous kite and saw all those simply captivating mice." "Mice?" "Yes, of course. Who would ever have thought you could breed mice with those cute furry tails?" Well, after a while things quieted down. They had to. The police left after sobering up long enough to give me a serious warning against letting such a thing happen again. Mr. Miller, who had come home to see what all the excitement was, went back to work and Mrs. Miller went back to the house and the reporter and photographer drifted off to file their story, or whatever it is they do. Tommy was jubilant. "Did you hear what she said? It'll make the city papers. I wish we had a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can you make some more of that stuff? And Doris, how many mice do you have?" Those mice! I have always kept my enthusiasm for rodents within bounds, but I must admit they were charming little beasts, with tails as bushy as miniature squirrels. "How many generations?" I asked Doris. "Seventeen. No, eighteen, now. Want to see the genetic charts?" I won't try to explain it as she did to me, but it was quite evident that the new mice were breeding true. Presently we asked Betty Miller to come back down to the barn for a conference. She listened and asked questions. At last she said, "Well, all right, if you promise me they can't get out of their cages. But heaven knows what you'll do when fall comes. They won't live in an unheated barn and you can't bring them into the house." "We'll be out of the mouse business by then," Doris predicted. "Every pet shop in the country will have them and they'll be down to nothing apiece." Doris was right, of course, in spite of our efforts to protect the market. Anyhow that ushered in our cage building phase, and for the next week—with a few interruptions—we built cages, hundreds of them, a good many for breeding, but mostly for shipping. It was rather regrettable that, after the Courier gave us most of the third page, including photographs, we rarely had a day without a few visitors. Many of them wanted to buy mice or kites, but Tommy refused to sell any mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint those who wanted kites. The Supermarket took all we had—except a dozen—and at a dollar fifty each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather frightened me, but he set the value of the mice at ten dollars a pair and got it without any arguments. Our beautiful stationery arrived, and we had some invoice forms printed up in a hurry—not engraved, for a wonder. It was on Tuesday—following the Thursday—that a lanky young man disentangled himself from his car and strolled into the barn. I looked up from the floor where I was tacking squares of screening onto wooden frames. "Hi," he said. "You're Donald Henderson, right? My name is McCord—Jeff McCord—and I work in the Patent Section at the Commission's downtown office. My boss sent me over here, but if he hadn't, I think I'd have come anyway. What are you doing to get patent protection on Ridge Industries' new developments?" I got my back unkinked and dusted off my knees. "Well, now," I said, "I've been wondering whether something shouldn't be done, but I know very little about such matters—." "Exactly," he broke in, "we guessed that might be the case, and there are three patent men in our office who'd like to chip in and contribute some time. Partly for the kicks and partly because we think you may have some things worth protecting. How about it? You worry about the filing and final fees. That's sixty bucks per brainstorm. We'll worry about everything else." "What's to lose," Tommy interjected. And so we acquired a patent attorney, several of them, in fact. The day that our application on the kite design went to Washington, Mary wrote a dozen toy manufacturers scattered from New York to Los Angeles, sent a kite to each one and offered to license the design. Result, one licensee with a thousand dollar advance against next season's royalties. It was a rainy morning about three weeks later that I arrived at the barn. Jeff McCord was there, and the whole team except Tommy. Jeff lowered his feet from the picnic table and said, "Hi." "Hi yourself," I told him. "You look pleased." "I am," he replied, "in a cautious legal sense, of course. Hilary and I were just going over the situation on his phosphonate detergent. I've spent the last three nights studying the patent literature and a few standard texts touching on phosphonates. There are a zillion patents on synthetic detergents and a good round fifty on phosphonates, but it looks"—he held up a long admonitory hand—"it just looks as though we had a clear spot. If we do get protection, you've got a real salable property." "That's fine, Mr. McCord," Hilary said, "but it's not very important." "No?" Jeff tilted an inquiring eyebrow at me, and I handed him a small bottle. He opened and sniffed at it gingerly. "What gives?" "Before-shave lotion," Hilary told him. "You've shaved this morning, but try some anyway." Jeff looked momentarily dubious, then puddled some in his palm and moistened his jaw line. "Smells good," he noted, "and feels nice and cool. Now what?" "Wipe your face." Jeff located a handkerchief and wiped, looked at the cloth, wiped again, and stared. "What is it?" "A whisker stiffener. It makes each hair brittle enough to break off right at the surface of your skin." "So I perceive. What is it?" "Oh, just a mixture of stuff. Cookbook chemistry. Cysteine thiolactone and a fat-soluble magnesium compound." "I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And do your whiskers grow back the next day?" "Right on schedule," I said. McCord unfolded his length and stood staring out into the rain. Presently he said, "Henderson, Hilary and I are heading for my office. We can work there better than here, and if we're going to break the hearts of the razor industry, there's no better time to start than now." When they had driven off I turned and said, "Let's talk a while. We can always clean mouse cages later. Where's Tommy?" "Oh, he stopped at the bank to get a loan." "What on earth for? We have over six thousand in the account." "Well," Peter said, looking a little embarrassed, "we were planning to buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris put some embroidery on that scheme of mine for making ball bearings." He grabbed a sheet of paper. "Look, we make a roller bearing, this shape only it's a permanent magnet. Then you see—." And he was off. "What did they do today, dear?" Marge asked as she refilled my coffee cup. "Thanks," I said. "Let's see, it was a big day. We picked out a hydraulic press, Doris read us the first chapter of the book she's starting, and we found a place over a garage on Fourth Street that we can rent for winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is starting action to get the company incorporated." "Winter quarters," Marge repeated. "You mean you're going to try to keep the group going after school starts?" "Why not? The kids can sail through their courses without thinking about them, and actually they won't put in more than a few hours a week during the school year." "Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?" "Child labor nothing. They're the employers. Jeff McCord and I will be the only employees—just at first, anyway." Marge choked on something. "Did you say you'd be an employee?" "Sure," I told her. "They've offered me a small share of the company, and I'd be crazy to turn it down. After all, what's to lose?" Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction July 1962. 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.
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D. When children are allowed to embrace creativity, the possibilities for innovation are higher than in a rigid, standardized environment
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Why does the Captain resist marrying Wanda?
A. Because she is sixteen.
B. Because she carries a doll around with her.
C. Because she is the daughter of a crewman.
D. Because she is dim-witted.
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VOYAGE TO FAR N'JURD By KRIS NEVILLE Illustrated by MACK [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine April 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They would never live to see the trip's end. So they made a few changes in their way of life—and many in their way of death! I "I don't see why we have to be here," a crewman said. "He ain't liable to say anything." "He shore better," the man in front of him said loudly. "Be still," his wife said. "People's lookin' at ya." "I don't care a smidgen," he said, "if en they ayre." "Please," she said. "Joanne Marie," he said, "you know that when I aims ta do somethin', I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk...." "Here comes the priest. Now, be still." The man looked up. "So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit." The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, "I'll bet he's gonna tell us it's gonna be another postponement." "Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer." "Now, dear," said Joanne Marie, "the captain can hear ya, if you're gonna talk so loud." "I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'." "You tell 'im!" someone said from two rows behind him. The captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade. Nestir, the priest, was dressed out in the full ceremonial costume of office. His high, strapless boots glistened with polish. His fez perched jauntily on his shiny, shaven head. The baldness was symbolic of diligent mental application to abstruse points of doctrine. Cotian exentiati pablum re overum est : "Grass grows not in the middle of a busy thoroughfare." The baldness was the result of the diligent application of an effective depilatory. His blood-red cloak had been freshly cleaned for the occasion, and it rustled around him in silky sibilants. "Men," he said. And then, more loudly, "Men!" The hiss and sputter of conversation guttered away. "Men," he said. "The other evening," he said, "—Gelday it was, to be exact—one of the crew came to me with a complaint." "Well, I'll be damned," Joanne Marie's husband said loudly. Nestir cleared his throat. "It was about the Casting Off. That's why I called you all together today." He stared away, at a point over the head and to the rear of the audience. "It puts me in mind of the parable of the six Vergios." Joanne Marie's husband sighed deeply. "Three, you will recall, were wise. When Prophet was at Meizque, they came to him and said, 'Prophet, we are afflicted. We have great sores upon our bodies.' The Prophet looked at them and did see that it was true. Then he blessed them and took out His knife and lay open their sores. For which the three wise Vergios were passing grateful. And within the last week, they were dead of infection. But three were foolish and hid their sores; and these three did live." The captain rubbed his nose. " Calex i pundendem hoy , my children. 'Secrecy makes for a long life,' as it says in the Jarcon ." Nestir tugged behind him at his cloak. "I want you all to remember that little story. I want you all to take it away from here with you and think about it, tonight, in the privacy of your cabins. "And like the three wise Vergios who went to the Prophet, one of the crewmen came to me. He came to me, and he said: 'Father, I am weary of sailing.' "Yes, he said, 'I am weary of sailing.' "Now, don't you think I don't know that. Every one of you—every blessed one of you—is weary of sailing. I know that as well as I know my own name, yes. "But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,' I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of sailing.' "And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'" The little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the audience. "God damn, hit's about time!" Joanne Marie's husband said. Nestir cleared his throat again. "Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant," said Nestir. "I knowed there was a catch to hit," Joanne Marie's husband said. "I know you will have many questions; yes, I know you will have—ah, ah—well, many questions. You are thinking: 'What kind of a Festival can we have here on this ship?' You are thinking: 'What a fine thing—ah, what a good thing, that is—ah, how nice it would be to have the Casting Off at home, among friends.'" Nestir waved his hands. "Well, I just want to tell you: I come from Koltah. And you know that Koltah never let any city state outdo her in a Festival, uh-huh. "The arena in Koltah is the greatest arena in the whole system. We have as many as sixty thousand accepted applicants. All of them together in the arena is a—uh, uh, well—a sight to behold. People come from all over to behold it. I never will forget the Festival at which my father was accepted. He.... "Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any anywhere. "And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the real high point of your whole life!" Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to himself. Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in the front row that had very cute ankles. While they were still cheering and stomping and otherwise expressing their enthusiasm and approval, Nestir walked off the speaker's platform and into the officer's corridor. He wiped his forehead indecorously on the hem of his cloak and felt quite relieved that the announcement was over with and the public speaking done. II Dinner that evening was a gala occasion aboard the ship. The steward ordered the holiday feast prepared in celebration of Nestir's announcement. And, for the officers, he broke out of the special cellar the last case allotment for Crew One of the delicate Colta Barauche ('94). He ordered the messman to put a bottle of it to the right of each plate. The captain came down from his stateroom after the meal had begun. He nodded curtly to the officers when he entered the mess hall, walked directly to his place at the head of the table, sat down and morosely began to work the cork out of his wine bottle with his teeth. "You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way," the third mate cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year. The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine. "Very probably," he said sadly. "I don't think hit'll do hit," the first mate said. "He hain't shook hard enough to matter." The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips—then, suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to Nestir. "I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?" The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his plate. "It has ramifications," he said. When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little sigh of disapproval. "Well, what do you think your decision will be, Father?" the steward asked. Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat. "Hummmm," he said. "It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a core point, the principle of casta cum mae stotiti ." The first mate nodded sagely. "The intent, of course, could actually be—ah— sub mailloux ; and in that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't the time. I'll have to decide something." "He had a very pretty wife," the third mate said. "Yes, very." Nestir agreed. "But as I was saying, if it could be proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be that no stigma would be attached." He speared his meat and chewed it thoughtfully. "But it wasn't at all bloody," the wife of the second mate said. "I scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast." Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of wine. "The problem, my dear Helen," he said, "is one of intent. To raise the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly he died as miserable a death as anyone could desire." "Yes," said the second mate's wife. "I remember that. I read about it in the newspapers." "But it was a case of obvious intent ," continued Nestir, "and therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by hastening to his Reward." Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened. "That," he said to Nestir, "my dear Father, is the cardinal point of the whole game, y'know." He scratched the back of his left hand. "Duty. And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of how we go, but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And that's equally important." "The Synod of Cathau—" Nestir began. "Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod of Cathau! Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy, y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing." He scratched the back of his right hand. The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence following the captain's outburst. "You don't need to worry about your Casting Off, Captain. You can leave that to me. I assure you, I have in mind a most ingenious method." The captain was not visibly cheered; he was still brooding about the sad absence of a sense of duty on the part of Nestir. "I will welcome it," he said, "at the proper time, sir. And I certainly hope—" His eyes swept the table. "I certainly hope to be Cast Off by an officer. It would be very humiliating, y'know, to have a crew member do it." "Oh, very," said the steward. "I don't know," the second mate's wife said, "whether you better count on my husband or not. I have my own plans for him." "This problem of Carstar interests me," the third mate said. "Did I ever tell you about my wife? She strangled our second baby." "He was a very annoying child," his wife said. "He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway," the third mate said. "Puny baby." "That," said Nestir, "is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all. Yours is a question of saliex y cuminzund ." The first mate nodded. "It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the strangler." "Captain," the steward said, "you really must let me give you some of that salve." "That's very kind of you, but I...." "No bother at all," the steward said. "As I see it," Nestir said, "if the intent was the natural maternal instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then...." "Oh, not at all," the third mate's wife said. "I did it to make him stop crying." "Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward." "I certainly hope so," the third mate said. "Jane worries about it all the time." "I do not," Jane contradicted. "Now, honey, you know you do so." At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the table toward the captain, "Well?" he asked. The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. "You were right, of course." The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. "There, I told you so." The first mate shrugged. "I never do say nothin' right," he said. "I hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival." "Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty," the captain reprimanded him mildly. "Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die uv old age." "Nonsense," said the steward. "We don't want anything of the sort. After all, someone has to orient the new crew." "Quite right," said the captain. "You ought to be proud." The first mate slammed his napkin in the middle of his food and stalked out of the mess hall. "Quite touchy today," Nestir observed. "By the way," the third mate said. "Wanda gave me a petition to give to you, Father." "Wanda?" "Yes. She's sixteen, now." "Wanda who?" the steward asked. "Wanda Miller, the bosun's daughter." "I know her," Helen said. "She's the oldest child on the ship, and she wants you to sign her adult petition so she can be in the Festival, Father." "She's so young...." "Sixteen, Father." "After all, one must have done some duty," the captain said. "He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the Wives," Jane said. Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. "Well, I'll look at her record," he said. "It's an idea," the second mate said. "Otherwise, we'll be short one woman." "There wouldn't be one short if he had brought a wife," the first mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain. "Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know, because you have to stay with your husband." "All right, so I am. But it's true. And if Carstar hadn't been killed, there would have been two short." She shot a wicked glance at Nestir. "Why don't you and him share a woman—" "Martha!" "Although the Prophet knows what woman in her right mind would consent to...." "Well," said Nestir hesitantly. "Listen," the third mate said, "the second's right. If you don't sign it, someone will have to do without a woman." Nestir blushed. "I'll look it over very carefully, but you must realize that the priestcraft...." "Actually, in a way, it would be her duty to, you see. Think of it like that: as her way to do her duty." "She's too young for you, dear," Jane said to her husband. "Oh, I don't know," the steward said. "Sometimes they're the best, I hear." III The third mate, whose name was Harry, stood before the mirror combing his hair. He had been combing his hair for the last fifteen minutes. "I suppose the crew is celebrating?" his wife said. "I suppose." She stood up and walked over to the dresser. Absently she began to finger the articles on it. "You really shouldn't have told them about little Glenn tonight." "Pish-tush." "No, Harry. I mean it. Helen looked at me strangely all through dinner. She has three children, you know." "You're imagining things." "But she does have three children." "I mean about her looking at you." "Oh." Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking. "I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.'" "But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You didn't really mean to choke him that hard." "But still ... it ... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I wasn't doing my duty. You know." "No," he said. "That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what the priest said." He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat. "Harry?" "Yes?" "I don't think all that is necessary just to go on duty." "Probably not." She walked to the bed and sat down. "Harry?" "Yes, dear?" "Don't you really think she's awful young?" "Huh-uh." "I mean, why don't you pick someone else? Like Mary? She's awful sweet. I'll bet she'd be better." "Probably." "She's a lot of fun." He brushed at his hair again. "Who do you want, Jane?" "Oh, I don't know." She looked down at her legs, raised them up from the floor and held them out in front of her. "I think I'd kind of like Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me." "I'll mention it to him." "Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet." "Sure, honey." He looked down at his watch. "Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?" "Uh-huh." "I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget." "Honey! You don't think for a minute that...." "No, dear. I know you wouldn't. But just don't , I mean." He walked over and kissed her forehead and patted her cheek. "Course not," he said, comfortingly. He left her sitting on the bed and strolled down the officers' corridor, whistling. He made a mental note to have the bosun send some of the crew in tomorrow to wash down these bulkheads. They needed it. In one corner a spider spun its silver web. He jogged up the companionway, turned left and felt the air as fresh as spring when he stepped under the great ventilator. And beneath it lay one of the crew. He kicked the man several times in the ribs until he came to consciousness. "Can't sleep here, my man," Harry explained. "Awww. Go way an' le' me 'lone, huh?" "Here. Here." He pulled the fellow erect and slapped him in the face briskly. "This is the officers' corridor." "Oh? Ish it? Schorry. Shore schorry, shir. So schorry." Harry assisted him to the crew's corridor where he sank to the floor and relapsed once more into a profound slumber. Harry continued on to the control room. When he entered it, the second mate was yawning. "Hi, John. Sleepy?" "Uh-huh. You're early." "Don't mind, do you?" "No ... Quiet tonight. Had to cut the motors an hour ago. Control technician passed out." "Oh?" The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. "Can't blow the ship up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty." He blew a smoke ring. "Might even bar him from the Festival." "Yeah," said Harry, "the captain's funny that way." The second mate blew another smoke ring. "Well," Harry said. "Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?" "If Nestir lets me." "Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?" Harry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder. "Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir." He shrugged. "I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer." "Aw, that's all right," John said. "Don't really matter. Say. By the way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well...." "Look. How about telling me another time?" "Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?" "I'm kind of expecting Wanda." "Oh. Sure. I should have known you weren't here early for nothing. In that case, I better be shoving off. Luck." "Thanks. See you at breakfast." "Right-o." After the second mate left, Harry walked over to the control panel. The jet lights were dead. He picked up the intercom and switched over the engine call bell. "'Lo," he said into the microphone. "This is the bridge.... Oh, hi, Barney. Harry.... Have you got a sober control technician down there yet...? Fine. We'll start the jets again. If the captain comes in now—well, you know how he is.... Okay, thanks. Night." He replaced the microphone. He reached over and threw the forward firing lever. The jet lights came on and the ship began to brake acceleration again. Having done that, he switched on the space viewer. The steady buzz of the equipment warming sounded in his ears. Wanda would be sure to want to look at the stars. She was simple minded. "Hello." He swiveled around. "Oh, hello, Wanda, honey." "Hello, Haireee. Are you glad little ol' me could come, huh?" "Sure am." "Me, too. Can I look at the—oh. It's already on." "Uh-huh. Look. Wanda." "Hum?" "I talked to Nestir today." "Goody. What did he say, huh? I can be an adult and get to play in the Festival, can I?" "I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?" "Them stars shore are purty." "Wanda, listen to me." "I'm a-listenin', Haireee." "You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you if you want to be an adult." In Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a conference. "No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that," Nestir said. The captain said, "Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain." Nestir shook his head. "The crew and the officers will participate together in the Festival. I will not put the officers' corridor off limits, and—Oh! Yes? Come in!" The door opened. "Father?" "Yes, my son? Come in." "Thank you, Father. Good morning, Captain, sir." "Sit down, my son. Now, Captain, as I was saying: no segregation. It's contrary to the spirit, if not the wording, of the Jarcon ." "But Father! A crewman! In the officers' corridor! Think!" "Before the Prophet, we are all equal. I'm sorry, Captain. Now on Koltah, we practiced it with very good results, and...." "I say, really—" "Father?" said the crewman who had just entered. "Yes, my son. In one moment. Now, Captain. As I have been explaining: The arena method has advantages. In Koltah we always used it. But here—due to the—ah—exigencies of deep space—I feel convinced that a departure from normal procedure is warranted. It is not without precedent. Such things were fairly common, in astoli tavoro , up until centralization, three hundred years before Allth. Indeed, in my home city—Koltah—in the year of the seventh plague, a most unusual expedient was adopted. It seems...." "You're perfectly correct, of course," the captain said. "That's just what I wanted to see you about, Father," the crewman said. "Now, in my city state of Ni, for the Festivals, we...." "Shut up," said the captain softly. "Yes, sir." "Now, as I was saying, Captain, when the methods used in...." "If you'll excuse me, Father, I really should return to duty," said the crewman. "Quite all right, my son. Close the door after you." "I must say, fellow, your sense of duty is commendable." "Well, uh, thank you, sir. And thank you, Father, for your time." "Quite all right, my son. That's what I'm here for. Come in as often as you like." The crewman closed the door after him. He had been gone only a moment, scarcely time for Nestir to get properly launched on his account, when Harry, the third mate, knocked on the door and was admitted. "Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here." Then, to the priest: "I'll come back later, Father." "Nonsense," said the captain. "Come in." "Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private business." "I have to be toddling along," said the captain. "But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about...." "I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee," the captain said. "I'll call you when I'm through," said Harry. The captain left the room. "It's about Wanda, Father," said the third mate. The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. "Ah, yes. The young girl." "Well, I mean, it's not only about Wanda," said Harry. "You see, my wife, Jane, that is...." "Yes?" said the priest. He took his pen out of the holder. "I think, with the proper ... ah ... you know. What I mean is, I think she might look with favor on you in the Changing of the Wives, if I said a few well chosen words in your behalf." "That is very flattering, my son." He returned the pen to the holder. "Such bounty, as it says in the Jarcon , is cull tensio ." "And with your permission, Father...." "Ah...." "She's a very pretty woman." "Ah.... Quite so." "Well, about Wanda. I really shouldn't mention this. But Father, if we are short one woman...." "Hummmm." "I mean, the girls might think a man gets rusty." "I see what you mean." Nestir blinked his eyes. "It wouldn't be fair, all things considered." He stood up. "I may tell you, my son, that, in thinking this matter over last night, I decided that Wanda—ah—Miller, yes, has had sufficient duty to merit participation in the Festival." "Justice is a priestly virtue," Harry said. "And you really think your wife would...?" "Oh, yes, Father." "Well, ahem. But...." "Yes, Father?" " Ad dulce verboten. " "Uh?" "That is to say, in order for a woman to join in the ritual of the Changing of the Wives, she must, ahem, be married." "I never thought of that," said the third mate disconsolately. "I think that can be arranged, however," said Nestir. "If you go by the mess hall on your way out, please tell the captain we can continue our discussion at his pleasure." IV "Sit down, Captain," said Nestir, when the captain entered. "No. Over there, in the comfortable chair. There. Are you comfortable, Captain?" "Of course I am." "Good. I have a question to ask you, Captain." "I say?" Nestir rubbed his bald head. "Sir," he said by way of preamble, "I know you have the greatest sensibility in questions of duty." "That's quite so, y'know. I pride myself upon it, if I do say so." "Exactly. Argot y calpex. No sacrifice is too great." "True; true." "Well, then, say the first day of Wenslaus, that would be—ah, a Zentahday—I may depend upon you to wed Wanda Miller, the bosun's daughter, yes?" "No," said the captain. "Come now, sir. I realize she is the daughter of a crewman, but—" "Father," said the captain, "did I ever tell you about the time I led an expeditionary force against Zelthalta?" "I don't believe you have." "Then I will tell you. Came about this way. I was given command of fifty-three thousand Barains. Savage devils. Uncivilized, but fine fighters. I was to march them ninety-seven miles across the desert that...." "Captain! I fear I must be very severe with you. I will be forced to announce in the mess hall this evening that you have refused to do your duty when it was plainly and properly called to your attention." "Very well, Father," the captain said after several minutes. "I will do it." He was trembling slightly. That morning was to be the time of the captain's wedding. He had insisted that it be done in privacy. For the ceremony, he refused to make the slightest change in his everyday uniform; nor would he consent to Nestir's suggestion that he carry a nosegay of hydroponic flowers. He had intended, after the ceremony, to go about his duty as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened; but after it was done with, the vast indignity of it came home to him even more poignantly than he had imagined it would. Without a word, he left the priest's stateroom and walked slowly, ponderously, with great dignity, to his own. It was a very fine stateroom. The finest, but for Nestir's, in the whole ship. The velvet and gold drapes (his single esthetic joy) were scented with exotic perfume. The carpet was an inch and a half thick. He walked through his office without breaking his stride. The bed was large and fluffy. An unbroken expanse of white coverlette jutting out from the far bulkhead. It looked as soft as feather down. Without even a sigh, he threw himself upon the bed and lay very, very quiet. His left leg was suspended in the air, intersecting, at the thigh, the plane of the coverlet at forty-five degrees; the number of degrees remained stiffly, unrelaxingly forty-five. Only after a long, long time did he roll over on his back and then it was merely to stare fixedly at the ceiling. It is entirely possible that he would have lain there until Doomsday had not his introspection been, around noon, interrupted by an apologetic tap on the door. "Come in," he whispered, hoping she would not hear him and go away. But she heard him. "Husband," Wanda said simply. She closed the door behind her and stood staring at him. "Madam," he said, "I hope you will have the kindness not to refer to me by that indecent appelation a second time." "Gee. You say the cutest things. I'm awful glad you had to marry me, huh." The captain stood up, adjusted his coat and his shoulders, and walked across the room to the dressing table. He opened the left-hand drawer, removed a bottle, poured himself half a water-glass full and drank it off. "Ah," he said. He returned to the bed and sat down. "Can'tcha even say hello ta little ol' me, huh?" she asked. "Hello," he said. "Madam, sit down. I intend to give you an instructive lecture in the natural order of...." "Huh?" "Ah," he said. "Quite true, of course." She walked over to the chair and sat down. "I don't like them," she said. "Them cloth things over there." "Those, Madam," he said, "are priceless drapes I had imported from the province of San Xalthan. They have a long, strange history. "About three thousand years ago, a family by the name of Soong was forced to flee from the city of Xan because the eldest son of the family had become involved in a conspiracy against the illustrious King Fod. As the Soong family was traveling...." "I don't like 'em anyway," said Wanda. "Madam," said the captain, "kindly bring me that." "This?" "Yes. Thank you." He took the doll from her. He got up again, walked to the chest of drawers, searched around for a penknife. Finally he located it under a stack of socks.
|
C. Because she is the daughter of a crewman.
|
We need to calculate a reasonable approximation (or exact number if possible) of a financial metric. Basing your judgment by information plainly provided in the statement of income, what is Nike's three year average of cost of goods sold as a % of revenue from FY2016 to FY2018? Answer in units of percents and round to one decimal place.
|
Evidence 0:
Table of Contents
NIKE, Inc. Consolidated Statements of Income
Year Ended May 31,
(In millions, except per share data)
2018
2017
2016
Revenues
$
36,397
$
34,350 $
32,376
Cost of sales
20,441
19,038
17,405
Gross profit
15,956
15,312
14,971
Demand creation expense
3,577
3,341
3,278
Operating overhead expense
7,934
7,222
7,191
Total selling and administrative expense
11,511
10,563
10,469
Interest expense (income), net
54
59
19
Other expense (income), net
66
(196)
(140)
Income before income taxes
4,325
4,886
4,623
Income tax expense
2,392
646
863
NET INCOME
$
1,933
$
4,240 $
3,760
Earnings per common share:
Basic
$
1.19
$
2.56 $
2.21
Diluted
$
1.17
$
2.51 $
2.16
Dividends declared per common share
$
0.78
$
0.70 $
0.62
The accompanying Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements are an integral part of this statement.
44
|
55.1%
|
What language do they look at?
|
### Introduction
Quickly making sense of large amounts of linguistic data is an important application of language technology. For example, after the 2011 Japanese tsunami, natural language processing was used to quickly filter social media streams for messages about the safety of individuals, and to populate a person finder database BIBREF0. Japanese text is high-resource, but there are many cases where it would be useful to make sense of speech in low-resource languages. For example, in Uganda, as in many parts of the world, the primary source of news is local radio stations, which broadcast in many languages. A pilot study from the United Nations Global Pulse Lab identified these radio stations as a potentially useful source of information about a variety of urgent topics related to refugees, small-scale disasters, disease outbreaks, and healthcare BIBREF1. With many radio broadcasts coming in simultaneously, even simple classification of speech for known topics would be helpful to decision-makers working on humanitarian projects. Recent research has shown that it is possible train direct Speech-to-text Translation (ST) systems from speech paired only with translations BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4. Since no transcription is required, this could be useful in very low-resource settings, even for languages with no writing systems. In realistic low-resource settings where only a few hours of training data is available, these systems produce poor translations BIBREF5, but it has long been recognized that there are good uses for bad translations BIBREF6. Could classifying the original speech be one of those uses? We answer this question affirmatively: using ST to translate speech to text, we then classify by topic using supervised models (Figure FIGREF1). We test our method on a corpus of conversational Spanish speech paired with English text translations. Using an ST model trained on 20 hours of Spanish-English data, we are able to predict topics correctly 71% of the time. With even worse ST, we can still predict topics with an accuracy of 61%. ### Methods ::: Speech-to-text translation.
We use the method of BIBREF5 to train neural sequence-to-sequence Spanish-English ST models. As in that study, before training ST, we pre-train the models using English ASR data from the Switchboard Telephone speech corpus BIBREF7, which consists of around 300 hours of English speech and transcripts. This was reported to substantially improve translation quality when the training set for ST was only tens of hours. ### Methods ::: Topic modeling and classification.
To classify the translated documents, we first need a set of topic labels, which were not already available for our dataset. So, we initially discover a set of topics from the target-language training text using a topic model. To classify the translations of the test data, we choose the most probable topic according to the learned topic model. To train our topic model, we use Nonnegative Matrix Factorization BIBREF8, BIBREF9. ### Experimental Setup ::: Data.
We use the Fisher Spanish speech corpus BIBREF11, which consists of 819 phone calls, with an average duration of 12 minutes, amounting to a total of 160 hours of data. We discard the associated transcripts and pair the speech with English translations BIBREF12, BIBREF13. To simulate a low-resource scenario, we sampled 90 calls (20h) of data (train20h) to train both ST and topic models, reserving 450 calls (100h) to evaluate topic models (eval100h). Our experiments required ST models of varying quality, so we also trained models with decreasing amounts of data: ST-10h, ST-5h, and ST-2.5h are trained on 10, 5, and 2.5 hours of data respectively, sampled from train20h. To evaluate ST only, we use the designated Fisher test set, as in previous work. ### Experimental Setup ::: Fine-grained topic analysis.
In the Fisher protocol, callers were prompted with one of 25 possible topics. It would seem appealing to use the prompts as topic labels, but we observed that many conversations quickly departed from the initial prompt and meandered from topic to topic. For example, one call starts: “Ok today's topic is marriage or we can talk about anything else...”. Within minutes, the topic shifts to jobs: “I'm working oh I do tattoos.” To isolate different topics within a single call, we split each call into 1 minute long segments to use as `documents'. This gives us 1K training and 5.5K test segments, but leaves us with no human-annotated topic labels for them. Obtaining gold topic labels for our data would require substantial manual annotation, so we instead use the human translations from the 1K (train20h) training set utterances to train the NMF topic model with scikit-learn BIBREF14, and then use this model to infer topics on the evaluation set. These silver topics act as an oracle: they tell us what a topic model would infer if it had perfect translations. NMF and model hyperparameters are described in Appendix SECREF7. To evaluate our ST models, we apply our ST model to test audio, and then predict topics from the translations using the NMF model trained on the human translations of the training data (Figure FIGREF1). To report accuracy we compare the predicted labels and silver labels, i.e., we ask whether the topic inferred from our predicted translation (ST) agrees with one inferred from a gold translation (human). ### Results ::: Spanish-English ST.
To put our topic modeling results in context, we first report ST results. Figure FIGREF9 plots the BLEU scores on the Fisher test set and on eval100h for Spanish-English ST models. The scores are very similar for both sets when computed using a single human reference; scores are 8 points higher on the Fisher test set if all 4 of its available references are used. The state-of-the-art BLEU score on the Fisher test set is 47.3 (using 4 references), reported by BIBREF3, who trained an ST model on the entire 160 hours of data in the Fisher training corpus. By contrast, 20 hour model (ST-20h) achieves a BLEU score of 18.1. Examining the translations (Table TABREF10), we see that while they are mediocre, they contain words that might enable correct topic classification. ### Results ::: Topic Modeling on training data.
Turning to our main task of classification, we first review the set of topics discovered from the human translations of train20h (Table TABREF13). We explored different numbers of topics, and chose 10 after reviewing the results. We assigned a name to each topic after manually reviewing the most informative terms; for topics with less coherent sets of informative terms, we include misc in their names. We argued above that the silver labels are sensible for evaluation despite not always matching the assigned call topic prompts, since they indicate what an automatic topic classifier would predict given correct translations and they capture finer-grained changes in topic. Table TABREF14 shows a few examples where the silver labels differ from the assigned call topic prompts. In the first example, the topic model was arguably incorrect, failing to pick up the prompt juries, and instead focusing on the other words, predicting intro-misc. But in the other examples, the topic model is reasonable, in fact correctly identifying the topic in the third example where the transcripts indicate that the annotation was wrong (specifying the topic prompt as music). The topic model also classifies a large proportion of discussions as intro-misc (typically at the start of the call) and family-misc (often where the callers stray from their assigned topic). Our analysis also supports our observation that discussed topics stray from the prompted topic in most speech segments. For example, among segments in the 17 training data calls with the prompt religion, only 36% have the silver label religion, and the most frequently assigned label is family-misc with 46%. Further details are in Appendix SECREF9. ### Results ::: Topic classification on test data
Now we turn to our main experiment. For each of the audio utterances in eval100h, we have four ST model translations: ST-2.5h, 5h, 10h, 20h (in increasing order of quality). We feed each of these into the topic model from Table TABREF13 to get the topic distribution and use the highest scoring topic as the predicted label. Figure FIGREF16 compares the frequencies of the silver labels with the predictions from the ST-20h model. The family-misc topic is predicted most often—almost 50% of the time. This is reasonable since this topic includes words associated with small talk. Other topics such as music, religion and welfare also occur with a high enough frequency to allow for a reasonable evaluation. Figure FIGREF17 shows the accuracy for all ST models, treating the silver topic labels as the correct topics. We use the family-misc topic as a majority class naive baseline, giving an accuracy of 49.6%. We observe that ST models trained on 10 hours or more of data outperform the naive-baseline by more than 10% absolute, with ST-20h scoring 71.8% and ST-10h scoring 61.6%. Those trained on less than 5 hours of data score close to or below that of the naive baseline: 51% for ST-5h and 48% for ST-2.5h. Since topics vary in frequency, we look at label-specific accuracy to see if the ST models are simply predicting frequent topics correctly. Figure FIGREF18 shows a normalized confusion matrix for the ST-20h model. Each row sums to 100%, representing the distribution of predicted topics for any given silver topic, so the numbers on the diagonal can be interpreted as the topic-wise recall. For example, a prediction of music recalls 88% of the relevant speech segments. We see that the model has an recall of more than 50% for all 10 topics, making it quite effective for our motivating task. The family-misc topic (capturing small-talk) is often predicted when other silver topics are present, with e.g. 23% of the silver dating topics predicted as family-misc. ### Related work
We have shown that even low-quality ST can be useful for speech classification. Previous work has also looked at speech analysis without high-quality ASR. In a task quite related to ours, BIBREF15 showed how to cluster speech segments in a completely unsupervised way. In contrast, we learn to classify speech using supervision, but what is important about our result is it shows that a small amount of supervision goes a long way. A slightly different approach to quickly analysing speech is the established task of Keyword spotting BIBREF16, BIBREF17, which simply asks whether any of a specific set of keywords appears in each segment. Recent studies have extended the early work to end-to-end keyword spotting BIBREF18, BIBREF19 and to semantic keyword retrieval, where non-exact but relevant keyword matches are retrieved BIBREF20, BIBREF21, BIBREF22. In all these studies, the query and search languages are the same, while we consider the cross-lingual case. There has been some limited work on cross-lingual keyword spotting BIBREF23, where ASR is cascaded with text-based cross-lingual retrieval. Some recent studies have attempted to use vision as a complementary modality to do cross-lingual retrieval BIBREF24, BIBREF25. But cross-lingual topic classification for speech has not been considered elsewhere, as far as we know. ### Conclusions and future work
Our results show that poor speech translation can still be useful for speech classification in low-resource settings. By varying the amount of training data, we found that translations with a BLEU score as low as 13 are still able to correctly classify 61% of the speech segments. Cross-lingual topic modeling may be useful when the target language is high-resource. Here, we learned target topics just from the 20 hours of translations, but in future work, we could use a larger text corpus in the high-resource language to learn a more general topic model covering a wider set of topics, and/or combine it with keyword lists curated for specific scenarios like disaster recovery BIBREF26. ### Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by a James S McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award and a Google faculty research award. We thank Ida Szubert, Marco Damonte, and Clara Vania for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. ### Using NMF for topic modeling
We now describe how we learn topics using NMF. Given a set of text documents as input, the model will output (1) for each document, a distribution over the selected number of topics (henceforth, the document-topic distribution), and (2) for each topic, a distribution over the set of unique terms in the text (henceforth, the topic-term distribution). ### Using NMF for topic modeling ::: Text processing
Our training set (train20h) has 1080 English sentences. We start by generating a tf-idf representation for each of these. The English text contains 170K tokens and 6K terms (vocabulary size). As we are looking for topics which are coarse-level categories, we do not use the entire vocabulary, but instead focus only on the high importance terms. We lowercase the English translations and remove all punctuation, and stopwords. We further remove the terms occurring in more than 10% of the documents and those which occur in less than 2 documents, keeping only the 1000 most frequent out of the remaining. After preprocessing the training set, we have a feature matrix $V$ with dimensions $1080\times 1000$, where each row is a document, and each column represents the tf-idf scores over the 1000 selected terms. The feature matrix will be sparse as only a few terms would occur in a document, and will also be non-negative as tf-idf values are greater than or equal to 0. ### Using NMF for topic modeling ::: Learning topics
NMF is a matrix factorization method, which given the matrix $V$, factorizes it into two matrices: $W$ with dimensions $1080\times t$ (long-narrow), and $H$ with dimensions $t\times 1000$ (short-wide), where $t$ is a hyper-parameter. Figure FIGREF21 shows this decomposition when $t$ is set to 10. In the context of topic modeling, $t$ is the number of topics we want to learn; $W$ is the document-topic distribution, where for each document (row) the column with the highest value is the most-likely topic; and $H$ is the topic-term distribution, where each row is a topic, and the columns with the highest values are terms most relevant to it. The values for $W$ and $H$ are numerically approximated using a multiplicative update rule BIBREF27, with the Frobenius norm of the reconstruction error as the objective function. In this work, we use the machine-learning toolkit scikit-learn BIBREF14 for feature extraction, and to perform NMF, using default values as described at scikit-learn.org. ### Using NMF for topic modeling ::: Making topic predictions
Using our topic-term distribution matrix $H$, we can now make topic predictions for new text input. Our evaluation set (eval100h) has 5376 English sentences. For each of these, we have the gold text, and also the ST model output. We preprocess and represent these using the same procedure as before (SECREF19) giving us the feature matrix $V^{^{\prime }}_{gold}$ for gold, and $V^{^{\prime }}_{ST}$ for ST output, each with dimensions $5376\times 1000$. Our goal is to learn the document-topic distributions $W^{^{\prime }}_{gold}$ and $W^{^{\prime }}_{ST}$, where: The values for each $W^{^{\prime }}$ matrix are again numerically approximated using the same objective function as before, but keeping $H$ fixed. ### Using NMF for topic modeling ::: Silver labels and evaluation
We use the highest scoring topic for each document as the prediction. The silver labels are therefore computed as $argmax(W^{^{\prime }}_{gold})$, and for ST as $argmax(W^{^{\prime }}_{ST})$. We can now compute the accuracy over these two sets of predictions. ### Fisher corpus: assigned topics
Figure FIGREF24 shows the topics assigned to callers in the Fisher speech corpus. Some topic prompts overlap, for example, music-preference asks callers to discuss what kind of music they like to listen to, and music-social-message asks them to discuss the social impact of music. For both these topics, we would expect the text to contain similar terms. Similarly the topics cellphones-usage, tech-devices and telemarketing-spam also overlap. Such differences might be difficult for an unsupervised topic modeling algorithm to pick up. Table TABREF25 shows the topics learned by NMF by using human English translations from the entire 160 hours of training data as input, when the number of topics is set to 25. We observe that some new topics are found that were not discovered by the 20hr/10-topic model and that match the assigned topic prompts, such as juries and housing. However, there are also several incoherent topics, and we don't find a major improvement over the topics learned by just using 20 hours of training data, with the number of topics set to 10. ### Tracking topic drift over conversations
To measure how often speakers stray from assigned topic prompts, we take a closer look at the calls in train20h with the assigned prompt of religion. This is the most frequently assigned prompt in the Fisher dataset (17 calls in train20h). We also select this topic for further analysis as it contains terms which are strongly indicative, such as god, bible, etc. and should be relatively easier for our topic model to detect. Figure FIGREF26 shows the trend of discussion topics over time. Overall, only 36% of the total dialog segments in these calls have the silver label religion, and the most frequently assigned label is family-misc with 46%. We observe that the first segment is often labeled as intro-misc, around 70% of the time, which is expected as speakers begin by introducing themselves. Figure FIGREF26 shows that a similar trend emerges for calls assigned the prompt music (14 calls in train20h). Silver labels for music account for 45% of the call segments and family-misc for around 38%. Figure 1: Spanish speech is translated to English text, and a classifier then predicts its topic. Figure 2: BLEU scores for Spanish-English ST models computed on Fisher test set, using all 4 human references available, and using only 1 reference, and on eval100h, for which we have only 1 human reference. Table 1: Examples of Spanish audio shown as Spanish text. An ST system translates the audio into English text, and we give the human reference. Our task is to predict the topic of discussion in the audio, which are potentially signaled by the underlined words. Table 3: Example audio utterances from eval100h. We show a part of the human translation here. Assigned is the topic assigned to speakers in the current call to prompt discussion. Silver is topic inferred by feeding the human translation through the topic model. Table 2: Topics discovered using human translated text from train20h, with manually-assigned topic names. Figure 3: Distribution of topics predicted for the 5K audio utterances in eval100h. silver labels are predicted using human translations. The ST model has been trained on 20 hours of Spanish-English data. Figure 4: Accuracy of topic prediction using ST model output. The naive baseline is calculated using majority class prediction, which is the topic family-misc. Figure 5: Confusion matrix for ST model trained on 20 hours of Spanish-English data. Each cell represents the percentage of the silver topic labels predicted as the x-axis label, with each row summing to 100%. Figure 6: Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. V is the document-term matrix, where d is each document; N is the number of documents; w1 to w1000 are the terms selected as features; and t1 to t10 are the topics. Table 4: Topics discovered using human translated text from the full 160hr Fisher training set. We set the number of topics to 25. We assign the topic names manually, and use — where the topic clustering is not very clear. Figure 7: Topics assigned to callers in the Fisher dataset, as a percentage of the 819 calls. Figure 8: Tracking silver labels over time for calls where the assigned prompt is religion. Total of 17 calls in train20h. Figure 9: Tracking silver labels over time for calls where the assigned prompt is music. Total of 14 calls in train20h.
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Spanish
|
Where is Pete?
A. On the second ship with the larger group of people.
B. Back on his home planet, having sent his robot designs to the colony.
C. Somewhere on the planet's surface, having died by the hand of his own creation.
D. Hidden somewhere on the planet trying to escape the robot attacks.
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SURVIVAL TACTICS By AL SEVCIK ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK The robots were built to serve Man; to do his work, see to his comforts, make smooth his way. Then the robots figured out an additional service—putting Man out of his misery. There was a sudden crash that hung sharply in the air, as if a tree had been hit by lightning some distance away. Then another. Alan stopped, puzzled. Two more blasts, quickly together, and the sound of a scream faintly. Frowning, worrying about the sounds, Alan momentarily forgot to watch his step until his foot suddenly plunged into an ant hill, throwing him to the jungle floor. "Damn!" He cursed again, for the tenth time, and stood uncertainly in the dimness. From tall, moss-shrouded trees, wrist-thick vines hung quietly, scraping the spongy ground like the tentacles of some monstrous tree-bound octopus. Fitful little plants grew straggly in the shadows of the mossy trunks, forming a dense underbrush that made walking difficult. At midday some few of the blue sun's rays filtered through to the jungle floor, but now, late afternoon on the planet, the shadows were long and gloomy. Alan peered around him at the vine-draped shadows, listening to the soft rustlings and faint twig-snappings of life in the jungle. Two short, popping sounds echoed across the stillness, drowned out almost immediately and silenced by an explosive crash. Alan started, "Blaster fighting! But it can't be!" Suddenly anxious, he slashed a hurried X in one of the trees to mark his position then turned to follow a line of similar marks back through the jungle. He tried to run, but vines blocked his way and woody shrubs caught at his legs, tripping him and holding him back. Then, through the trees he saw the clearing of the camp site, the temporary home for the scout ship and the eleven men who, with Alan, were the only humans on the jungle planet, Waiamea. Stepping through the low shrubbery at the edge of the site, he looked across the open area to the two temporary structures, the camp headquarters where the power supplies and the computer were; and the sleeping quarters. Beyond, nose high, stood the silver scout ship that had brought the advance exploratory party of scientists and technicians to Waiamea three days before. Except for a few of the killer robots rolling slowly around the camp site on their quiet treads, there was no one about. "So, they've finally got those things working." Alan smiled slightly. "Guess that means I owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda for sure. Anybody who can build a robot that hunts by homing in on animals' mind impulses ..." He stepped forward just as a roar of blue flame dissolved the branches of a tree, barely above his head. Without pausing to think, Alan leaped back, and fell sprawling over a bush just as one of the robots rolled silently up from the right, lowering its blaster barrel to aim directly at his head. Alan froze. "My God, Pete built those things wrong!" Suddenly a screeching whirlwind of claws and teeth hurled itself from the smoldering branches and crashed against the robot, clawing insanely at the antenna and blaster barrel. With an awkward jerk the robot swung around and fired its blaster, completely dissolving the lower half of the cat creature which had clung across the barrel. But the back pressure of the cat's body overloaded the discharge circuits. The robot started to shake, then clicked sharply as an overload relay snapped and shorted the blaster cells. The killer turned and rolled back towards the camp, leaving Alan alone. Shakily, Alan crawled a few feet back into the undergrowth where he could lie and watch the camp, but not himself be seen. Though visibility didn't make any difference to the robots, he felt safer, somehow, hidden. He knew now what the shooting sounds had been and why there hadn't been anyone around the camp site. A charred blob lying in the grass of the clearing confirmed his hypothesis. His stomach felt sick. "I suppose," he muttered to himself, "that Pete assembled these robots in a batch and then activated them all at once, probably never living to realize that they're tuned to pick up human brain waves, too. Damn! Damn!" His eyes blurred and he slammed his fist into the soft earth. When he raised his eyes again the jungle was perceptibly darker. Stealthy rustlings in the shadows grew louder with the setting sun. Branches snapped unaccountably in the trees overhead and every now and then leaves or a twig fell softly to the ground, close to where he lay. Reaching into his jacket, Alan fingered his pocket blaster. He pulled it out and held it in his right hand. "This pop gun wouldn't even singe a robot, but it just might stop one of those pumas." They said the blast with your name on it would find you anywhere. This looked like Alan's blast. Slowly Alan looked around, sizing up his situation. Behind him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly. He shuddered. "Not a very healthy spot to spend the night. On the other hand, I certainly can't get to the camp with a pack of mind-activated mechanical killers running around. If I can just hold out until morning, when the big ship arrives ... The big ship! Good Lord, Peggy!" He turned white; oily sweat punctuated his forehead. Peggy, arriving tomorrow with the other colonists, the wives and kids! The metal killers, tuned to blast any living flesh, would murder them the instant they stepped from the ship! A pretty girl, Peggy, the girl he'd married just three weeks ago. He still couldn't believe it. It was crazy, he supposed, to marry a girl and then take off for an unknown planet, with her to follow, to try to create a home in a jungle clearing. Crazy maybe, but Peggy and her green eyes that changed color with the light, with her soft brown hair, and her happy smile, had ended thirty years of loneliness and had, at last, given him a reason for living. "Not to be killed!" Alan unclenched his fists and wiped his palms, bloody where his fingernails had dug into the flesh. There was a slight creak above him like the protesting of a branch too heavily laden. Blaster ready, Alan rolled over onto his back. In the movement, his elbow struck the top of a small earthy mound and he was instantly engulfed in a swarm of locust-like insects that beat disgustingly against his eyes and mouth. "Fagh!" Waving his arms before his face he jumped up and backwards, away from the bugs. As he did so, a dark shapeless thing plopped from the trees onto the spot where he had been lying stretched out. Then, like an ambient fungus, it slithered off into the jungle undergrowth. For a split second the jungle stood frozen in a brilliant blue flash, followed by the sharp report of a blaster. Then another. Alan whirled, startled. The planet's double moon had risen and he could see a robot rolling slowly across the clearing in his general direction, blasting indiscriminately at whatever mind impulses came within its pickup range, birds, insects, anything. Six or seven others also left the camp headquarters area and headed for the jungle, each to a slightly different spot. Apparently the robot hadn't sensed him yet, but Alan didn't know what the effective range of its pickup devices was. He began to slide back into the jungle. Minutes later, looking back he saw that the machine, though several hundred yards away, had altered its course and was now headed directly for him. His stomach tightened. Panic. The dank, musty smell of the jungle seemed for an instant to thicken and choke in his throat. Then he thought of the big ship landing in the morning, settling down slowly after a lonely two-week voyage. He thought of a brown-haired girl crowding with the others to the gangway, eager to embrace the new planet, and the next instant a charred nothing, unrecognizable, the victim of a design error or a misplaced wire in a machine. "I have to try," he said aloud. "I have to try." He moved into the blackness. Powerful as a small tank, the killer robot was equipped to crush, slash, and burn its way through undergrowth. Nevertheless, it was slowed by the larger trees and the thick, clinging vines, and Alan found that he could manage to keep ahead of it, barely out of blaster range. Only, the robot didn't get tired. Alan did. The twin moons cast pale, deceptive shadows that wavered and danced across the jungle floor, hiding debris that tripped him and often sent him sprawling into the dark. Sharp-edged growths tore at his face and clothes, and insects attracted by the blood matted against his pants and shirt. Behind, the robot crashed imperturbably after him, lighting the night with fitful blaster flashes as some winged or legged life came within its range. There was movement also, in the darkness beside him, scrapings and rustlings and an occasional low, throaty sound like an angry cat. Alan's fingers tensed on his pocket blaster. Swift shadowy forms moved quickly in the shrubs and the growling became suddenly louder. He fired twice, blindly, into the undergrowth. Sharp screams punctuated the electric blue discharge as a pack of small feline creatures leaped snarling and clawing back into the night. Mentally, Alan tried to figure the charge remaining in his blaster. There wouldn't be much. "Enough for a few more shots, maybe. Why the devil didn't I load in fresh cells this morning!" The robot crashed on, louder now, gaining on the tired human. Legs aching and bruised, stinging from insect bites, Alan tried to force himself to run holding his hands in front of him like a child in the dark. His foot tripped on a barely visible insect hill and a winged swarm exploded around him. Startled, Alan jerked sideways, crashing his head against a tree. He clutched at the bark for a second, dazed, then his knees buckled. His blaster fell into the shadows. The robot crashed loudly behind him now. Without stopping to think, Alan fumbled along the ground after his gun, straining his eyes in the darkness. He found it just a couple of feet to one side, against the base of a small bush. Just as his fingers closed upon the barrel his other hand slipped into something sticky that splashed over his forearm. He screamed in pain and leaped back, trying frantically to wipe the clinging, burning blackness off his arm. Patches of black scraped off onto branches and vines, but the rest spread slowly over his arm as agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh being ripped away layer by layer. Almost blinded by pain, whimpering, Alan stumbled forward. Sharp muscle spasms shot from his shoulder across his back and chest. Tears streamed across his cheeks. A blue arc slashed at the trees a mere hundred yards behind. He screamed at the blast. "Damn you, Pete! Damn your robots! Damn, damn ... Oh, Peggy!" He stepped into emptiness. Coolness. Wet. Slowly, washed by the water, the pain began to fall away. He wanted to lie there forever in the dark, cool, wetness. For ever, and ever, and ... The air thundered. In the dim light he could see the banks of the stream, higher than a man, muddy and loose. Growing right to the edge of the banks, the jungle reached out with hairy, disjointed arms as if to snag even the dirty little stream that passed so timidly through its domain. Alan, lying in the mud of the stream bed, felt the earth shake as the heavy little robot rolled slowly and inexorably towards him. "The Lord High Executioner," he thought, "in battle dress." He tried to stand but his legs were almost too weak and his arm felt numb. "I'll drown him," he said aloud. "I'll drown the Lord High Executioner." He laughed. Then his mind cleared. He remembered where he was. Alan trembled. For the first time in his life he understood what it was to live, because for the first time he realized that he would sometime die. In other times and circumstances he might put it off for a while, for months or years, but eventually, as now, he would have to watch, still and helpless, while death came creeping. Then, at thirty, Alan became a man. "Dammit, no law says I have to flame-out now !" He forced himself to rise, forced his legs to stand, struggling painfully in the shin-deep ooze. He worked his way to the bank and began to dig frenziedly, chest high, about two feet below the edge. His arm where the black thing had been was swollen and tender, but he forced his hands to dig, dig, dig, cursing and crying to hide the pain, and biting his lips, ignoring the salty taste of blood. The soft earth crumbled under his hands until he had a small cave about three feet deep in the bank. Beyond that the soil was held too tightly by the roots from above and he had to stop. The air crackled blue and a tree crashed heavily past Alan into the stream. Above him on the bank, silhouetting against the moons, the killer robot stopped and its blaster swivelled slowly down. Frantically, Alan hugged the bank as a shaft of pure electricity arced over him, sliced into the water, and exploded in a cloud of steam. The robot shook for a second, its blaster muzzle lifted erratically and for an instant it seemed almost out of control, then it quieted and the muzzle again pointed down. Pressing with all his might, Alan slid slowly along the bank inches at a time, away from the machine above. Its muzzle turned to follow him but the edge of the bank blocked its aim. Grinding forward a couple of feet, slightly overhanging the bank, the robot fired again. For a split second Alan seemed engulfed in flame; the heat of hell singed his head and back, and mud boiled in the bank by his arm. Again the robot trembled. It jerked forward a foot and its blaster swung slightly away. But only for a moment. Then the gun swung back again. Suddenly, as if sensing something wrong, its tracks slammed into reverse. It stood poised for a second, its treads spinning crazily as the earth collapsed underneath it, where Alan had dug, then it fell with a heavy splash into the mud, ten feet from where Alan stood. Without hesitation Alan threw himself across the blaster housing, frantically locking his arms around the barrel as the robot's treads churned furiously in the sticky mud, causing it to buck and plunge like a Brahma bull. The treads stopped and the blaster jerked upwards wrenching Alan's arms, then slammed down. Then the whole housing whirled around and around, tilting alternately up and down like a steel-skinned water monster trying to dislodge a tenacious crab, while Alan, arms and legs wrapped tightly around the blaster barrel and housing, pressed fiercely against the robot's metal skin. Slowly, trying to anticipate and shift his weight with the spinning plunges, Alan worked his hand down to his right hip. He fumbled for the sheath clipped to his belt, found it, and extracted a stubby hunting knife. Sweat and blood in his eyes, hardly able to move on the wildly swinging turret, he felt down the sides to the thin crack between the revolving housing and the stationary portion of the robot. With a quick prayer he jammed in the knife blade—and was whipped headlong into the mud as the turret literally snapped to a stop. The earth, jungle and moons spun in a pinwheeled blur, slowed, and settled to their proper places. Standing in the sticky, sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed the robot apprehensively. Half buried in mud, it stood quiet in the shadowy light except for an occasional, almost spasmodic jerk of its blaster barrel. For the first time that night Alan allowed himself a slight smile. "A blade in the old gear box, eh? How does that feel, boy?" He turned. "Well, I'd better get out of here before the knife slips or the monster cooks up some more tricks with whatever it's got for a brain." Digging little footholds in the soft bank, he climbed up and stood once again in the rustling jungle darkness. "I wonder," he thought, "how Pete could cram enough brain into one of those things to make it hunt and track so perfectly." He tried to visualize the computing circuits needed for the operation of its tracking mechanism alone. "There just isn't room for the electronics. You'd need a computer as big as the one at camp headquarters." In the distance the sky blazed as a blaster roared in the jungle. Then Alan heard the approaching robot, crunching and snapping its way through the undergrowth like an onrushing forest fire. He froze. "Good Lord! They communicate with each other! The one I jammed must be calling others to help." He began to move along the bank, away from the crashing sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes widened. "Of course! Radio! I'll bet anything they're automatically controlled by the camp computer. That's where their brain is!" He paused. "Then, if that were put out of commission ..." He jerked away from the bank and half ran, half pulled himself through the undergrowth towards the camp. Trees exploded to his left as another robot fired in his direction, too far away to be effective but churning towards him through the blackness. Alan changed direction slightly to follow a line between the two robots coming up from either side, behind him. His eyes were well accustomed to the dark now, and he managed to dodge most of the shadowy vines and branches before they could snag or trip him. Even so, he stumbled in the wiry underbrush and his legs were a mass of stinging slashes from ankle to thigh. The crashing rumble of the killer robots shook the night behind him, nearer sometimes, then falling slightly back, but following constantly, more unshakable than bloodhounds because a man can sometimes cover a scent, but no man can stop his thoughts. Intermittently, like photographers' strobes, blue flashes would light the jungle about him. Then, for seconds afterwards his eyes would see dancing streaks of yellow and sharp multi-colored pinwheels that alternately shrunk and expanded as if in a surrealist's nightmare. Alan would have to pause and squeeze his eyelids tight shut before he could see again, and the robots would move a little closer. To his right the trees silhouetted briefly against brilliance as a third robot slowly moved up in the distance. Without thinking, Alan turned slightly to the left, then froze in momentary panic. "I should be at the camp now. Damn, what direction am I going?" He tried to think back, to visualize the twists and turns he'd taken in the jungle. "All I need is to get lost." He pictured the camp computer with no one to stop it, automatically sending its robots in wider and wider forays, slowly wiping every trace of life from the planet. Technologically advanced machines doing the job for which they were built, completely, thoroughly, without feeling, and without human masters to separate sense from futility. Finally parts would wear out, circuits would short, and one by one the killers would crunch to a halt. A few birds would still fly then, but a unique animal life, rare in the universe, would exist no more. And the bones of children, eager girls, and their men would also lie, beside a rusty hulk, beneath the alien sun. "Peggy!" As if in answer, a tree beside him breathed fire, then exploded. In the brief flash of the blaster shot, Alan saw the steel glint of a robot only a hundred yards away, much nearer than he had thought. "Thank heaven for trees!" He stepped back, felt his foot catch in something, clutched futilely at some leaves and fell heavily. Pain danced up his leg as he grabbed his ankle. Quickly he felt the throbbing flesh. "Damn the rotten luck, anyway!" He blinked the pain tears from his eyes and looked up—into a robot's blaster, jutting out of the foliage, thirty yards away. Instinctively, in one motion Alan grabbed his pocket blaster and fired. To his amazement the robot jerked back, its gun wobbled and started to tilt away. Then, getting itself under control, it swung back again to face Alan. He fired again, and again the robot reacted. It seemed familiar somehow. Then he remembered the robot on the river bank, jiggling and swaying for seconds after each shot. "Of course!" He cursed himself for missing the obvious. "The blaster static blanks out radio transmission from the computer for a few seconds. They even do it to themselves!" Firing intermittently, he pulled himself upright and hobbled ahead through the bush. The robot shook spasmodically with each shot, its gun tilted upward at an awkward angle. Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw stars, real stars brilliant in the night sky, and half dragging his swelling leg he stumbled out of the jungle into the camp clearing. Ahead, across fifty yards of grass stood the headquarters building, housing the robot-controlling computer. Still firing at short intervals he started across the clearing, gritting his teeth at every step. Straining every muscle in spite of the agonizing pain, Alan forced himself to a limping run across the uneven ground, carefully avoiding the insect hills that jutted up through the grass. From the corner of his eye he saw another of the robots standing shakily in the dark edge of the jungle waiting, it seemed, for his small blaster to run dry. "Be damned! You can't win now!" Alan yelled between blaster shots, almost irrational from the pain that ripped jaggedly through his leg. Then it happened. A few feet from the building's door his blaster quit. A click. A faint hiss when he frantically jerked the trigger again and again, and the spent cells released themselves from the device, falling in the grass at his feet. He dropped the useless gun. "No!" He threw himself on the ground as a new robot suddenly appeared around the edge of the building a few feet away, aimed, and fired. Air burned over Alan's back and ozone tingled in his nostrils. Blinding itself for a few seconds with its own blaster static, the robot paused momentarily, jiggling in place. In this instant, Alan jammed his hands into an insect hill and hurled the pile of dirt and insects directly at the robot's antenna. In a flash, hundreds of the winged things erupted angrily from the hole in a swarming cloud, each part of which was a speck of life transmitting mental energy to the robot's pickup devices. Confused by the sudden dispersion of mind impulses, the robot fired erratically as Alan crouched and raced painfully for the door. It fired again, closer, as he fumbled with the lock release. Jagged bits of plastic and stone ripped past him, torn loose by the blast. Frantically, Alan slammed open the door as the robot, sensing him strongly now, aimed point blank. He saw nothing, his mind thought of nothing but the red-clad safety switch mounted beside the computer. Time stopped. There was nothing else in the world. He half-jumped, half-fell towards it, slowly, in tenths of seconds that seemed measured out in years. The universe went black. Later. Brilliance pressed upon his eyes. Then pain returned, a multi-hurting thing that crawled through his body and dragged ragged tentacles across his brain. He moaned. A voice spoke hollowly in the distance. "He's waking. Call his wife." Alan opened his eyes in a white room; a white light hung over his head. Beside him, looking down with a rueful smile, stood a young man wearing space medical insignia. "Yes," he acknowledged the question in Alan's eyes, "you hit the switch. That was three days ago. When you're up again we'd all like to thank you." Suddenly a sobbing-laughing green-eyed girl was pressed tightly against him. Neither of them spoke. They couldn't. There was too much to say. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories October 1958. 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.
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C. Somewhere on the planet's surface, having died by the hand of his own creation.
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Which isn't something the guard did?
A. help him carry the atomic generator to the time machine
B. help him find the atomic generator
C. hand him the patent and other helpful information
D. give him time to take it out of the building
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... and it comes out here By LESTER DEL REY Illustrated by DON SIBLEY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with ... everything has a beginning and an end. But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so! No, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have ... or do ... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this. Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will. Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years. You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago. Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter. Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. You sense things. So I'll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this. So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but you'll want to go along. I'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button, and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn't protected, though. You start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no there . You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are. You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening and you don't try it again. Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. "So this is the fourth dimension?" you ask. Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak. "Not exactly," I try to explain. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. Don't ask me. I didn't invent the machine and I don't understand it." "But...." I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer. Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't think about that then, either. I'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. "Where are we getting our air?" you ask. "Or why don't we lose it?" "No place for it to go," I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still. Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the machine, just as I do. I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels comfortable. "I'm staying here," I tell you. "This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming back with you." You nod, remembering I've told you about it. "What century is this, anyway?" I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. "As near as I can guess, it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an interstellar civilization." You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor. This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs, and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open. "What about the time machine?" you ask. "Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe." We get in the elevator, and I say "first" to it. It gives out a coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says "first" back at us. It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. "You go that way. Don't worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum, grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you." You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream. You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later, you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off. You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at them, realizing for the first time that things have changed. Steij:neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri. The signs are very quiet and dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains, and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign that announces: Trav:l Biwrou—F:rst-Clas Twrz—Marz, Viin*s, and x: Trouj:n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz! But there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get the hang of the spelling they use, though. Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you. Why should they? You wouldn't care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin suit; you'd figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well, people don't change much. You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might be papers on tapes. "Where can I find the Museum of Science?" "Downayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss," he tells you. Around you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don't know. You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface of the walk: Miuzi:m *v Syens . There's an arrow pointing and you turn left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the information that it is the museum. You go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other guard. What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather pleasant. "Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice." "Thanks," you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce guards as polite as that. "I—I'm told I should investigate your display of atomic generators." He beams at that. "Of course." The gate is swung to behind you, but obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a lock. "Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though. Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period. Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our oldest tapes." You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny toward you. "Souvenir," it announces in a well-modulated voice. "This is a typical gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child, press the red button for the number of stones you desire." You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then there is one labeled Wep:nz , filled with everything from a crossbow to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil, marked Fynal Hand Arm . Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big place that bears a sign, Mad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez . By that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it. You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order, and the latest one, marked 2147—Rincs Dyn*pat: , is about the size of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier, but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically final form. You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation, and full patent application. They state that it has all major refinements, operating on any fuel, producing electricity at any desired voltage up to five million, any chosen cyclic rate from direct current to one thousand megacycles, and any amperage up to one thousand, its maximum power output being fifty kilowatts, limited by the current-carrying capacity of the outputs. They also mention that the operating principle is still being investigated, and that only such refinements as better alloys and the addition of magnetric and nucleatric current outlets have been added since the original. So you go to the end and look over the thing. It's simply a square box with a huge plug on each side, and a set of vernier controls on top, plus a little hole marked, in old-style spelling, Drop BBs or wire here . Apparently that's the way it's fueled. It's about one foot on each side. "Nice," the guard says over your shoulder. "It finally wore out one of the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever. Like to have me tell you about it?" "Not particularly," you begin, and then realize bad manners might be conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls something out of his pocket and stares at it. "Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?" You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge it, either. You work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect. And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed. Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing. You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be carried. You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact, if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered, after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say. Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing happens, though. You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street. Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see. There's another yell behind you. Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you dart past. The street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting heavier at every step. Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop. "You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow," the cop says. "There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let me grab you a taxi." Reaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake your head and come up for air. "I—I left my money home," you begin. The cop nods. "Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me." He reaches out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. "Sir, an emergency request. Would you help this gentleman?" The pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. "How far?" You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him. Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming at you both. That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there before you. And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck. "You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications," he says. "They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and we'll pick it up." You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction and heads back to the museum. You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator. There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there. You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were. Then there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in, gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light. You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine. You've located it. You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one beside it and you finally decide on that. Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating it. Your finger touches the red button. You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe. It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with some pencil marks over them—"Press these to return to yourself 30 years"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't because there is only one of you this time. Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in your own back yard. You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement, land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then, you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic generator and taking it inside. It isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals. But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice something. Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again. And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of the makeshift job you've just done. But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and that the date of the patent application is 1951. It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the future and bring it back to the past—your present—so that it can be put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be the inventor. And you do it in a time machine which you bring back to yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to yourself.... Who invented what? And who built which? Before long, your riches from the generator are piling in. Little kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed history and made atomic power so common that no nation could hope to be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one—after some of the worst times in history for a few years. Your name eventually becomes as common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital letter. But you're thinking of the puzzle. You can't find any answer. One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you. But now.... Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left. Let's go.
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A. help him carry the atomic generator to the time machine
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Which is true about the various types of local currency?
A. They are used in addition to the national currency, not as a replacement
B. They often try to replace the national currency to varying levels of success
C. Only some of them are considered legal by the national government
D. They are too hard to spend and thus the national currencies are always favored
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New money: Do local currencies actually work? It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. "Can you imagine having the face of Billy Connolly on our local currency? Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?" Inventing an alternative to sterling might sound far-fetched, even illegal. But it's not that strange. In the UK we think of the pound like fish think about water, which is to say not at all. It might never have occurred to many of us that there are other types of exchange that can stand in for ragged bank notes tucked away in pockets, or other objects that can stand in for those notes. Not every country is so lucky. In crisis-hit Greece, where the euro can be hard to come by, businesses and citizens have turned to bartering using a points system where goods like pianos, pot and pans can be exchanged for security services or loaned farming equipment. In India last year, desperate people burned sacks of illegal cash after the government withdrew two high-denomination notes as part of a crackdown on corruption. Hoarders woke up to discover the banknotes under their mattresses were suddenly worthless. The pound has been trading at its lowest level since 1985 since the UK voted to leave the European Union and there are fears that it could dip further as Brexit ensues. Timebanks, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and digital inventions like bitcoin can provide alternative ways for people to pay for goods and services when mainstream currencies hit crises. But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency. "At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. McCann is a long-time advocate of alternative means of exchange. He is behind the ScotPound, a proposal for a new national currency for Scotland that emerged after the referendum on Scottish independence. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence. Today, he's preaching to the converted. Alex Walker, the chairman of the 250-person Ekopia community in Northern Scotland, listens at the back. The Eko has been the main means of buying everything from beer to bananas in Ekopia since Walker founded it 20 years ago. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. She runs the Clacks Youth Timebank, a scheme where 12- to 15-year-olds can earn credit for volunteering. Taking notes up front is Ailie Rutherford, one of the people who organised the meeting. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. "I don't see any reason why we shouldn't invent our own currency and play with it," she says. Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011. The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. This year the Brixton Pound got its own cashpoint, from where people can withdraw local banknotes bearing colourful images of local heroes, like David Bowie and secret Agent Violette Szabo, to spend in over 150 local shops. It can also be used by residents to pay council tax and by employers to pay wages. No two local currencies are exactly the same. But the Brixton Pound and other recent schemes follow the example ten years ago of the Totnes Pound, a 'complementary currency': that is, one supplementing the national currency. As fears for financial stability took hold during the recession, complementary currencies grew in popularity. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Proponents say complementary currencies boost spending in smaller geographical areas, which can have environmental benefits as businesses cut transport distances to deal with local suppliers. Detractors say they have no real economic impact and work only as a game for the middle classes, who can afford to buy from independent shops rather than chains. In Britain, there are now schemes in Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and Exeter. Hull has its own local digital currency that can be earned from volunteering and used to pay council tax. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. Glasgow could be next. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work? "People don't understand money," Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, says over the phone. Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation. "[People] think they put money into a bank and someone else takes it out. What they don't understand is that banks have the power to create money. We've given the power to create money to private corporations and people don't understand that we can have it back," she says. In Stroud, suspicion of the local currency among local businesses became a barrier to success. Scott-Cato said traders refused to join the scheme because they were "running a business", as though putting the community first and placing the needs of others as equivalent to their own was in itself bad business practice, or as though they were somehow being disloyal to sterling. The Bristol Pound (£B) entered into circulation in September 2012. By June 2015, 1m £B had been issued, with £B700,000 of that still in circulation. In a population of some 450,000 people, that's the equivalent of each Bristolian carrying less than £B2 in change in their pocket. "The small scale is a problem and a strength," says Stephen Clarke, chief financial officer of the Bristol Pound. "The benefit comes from the fact that local currencies are trusted organisations: we're a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee." That means assets owned by the the Bristol Pound have to be used for the good of the community, rather than purely for profit. Without enough currency in circulation, it ceases to work. Scott-Cato says Stroud's size meant meant the Stroud Pound was never viable: "We couldn't get the velocity of circulation right, which contrasts with the Bristol Pound." Clarke also says the small scale of local currencies means they are "always scrabbling around looking for money". One way founders of the Bristol Pound have addressed his is by setting up an umbrella organisation, the Guild of Independent Currencies, to share information between local currencies in the UK and help new organisations. "At the moment we're all reinventing the wheel every time," Clarke says. Technology might also have a solution. Peter Ferry, a commercial director, travels to Glasgow to tell those working on the Glasgow Pound that that his company Wallet has come up with a way to use the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to make it easier for people to use multiple types of currency. "There might be many currencies around the country that people want to use. We need to make it simple for them to do that and also to make it simple to earn these currencies in many ways," he says. Size doesn't always matter. Sometimes, the smallest places – like Totnes and the Ekopia community – are best able to support complementary currencies because the people who live there are engaged with their local economy in a meaningful way. "Bristol is seen as a quirky, individualistic kind of place," Clarke says. "When we first produced the Bristol Pound note, people were really proud of it. It got through to people not just sat around coffee shops. I'm not sure a London Pound would work, because people identify with their local area in London rather than the city as a whole." Bristol Pound users don't have high incomes necessarily, but surveys show they are engaged with their local community and they have a higher educational attainment than average. In the years since the financial crisis, as local authority budgets have shrunk, some areas have relied heavily on engaged communities to fill in gaps in public services. By contrast, deprived areas where people cannot afford time and money to put into their community have become more deprived, making them even harder for local currencies to reach. "It is difficult to get into more disadvantaged areas," Stephen Clarke says. "We have a ten-year life expectancy gap between different parts of the city. When you go to disadvantaged areas with the Bristol Pound hat on you realise there aren't independent shops there, there's an Aldi and Lidl and that's it." More than a third of children grow up in poverty in Glasgow. A Glasgow Pound might struggle to get poorer families to buy into a local currency that ties them to shopping at more expensive, independent shops, rather than getting deals at big supermarket chains. When Scott-Cato and her colleagues wrote about the experience of setting up the Stroud Pound, they said it was telling that complementary currencies have been accused of being a game for middle-class people, rather than a genuine economic solution. Perhaps for that reason, experts like Duncan McCann have stopped thinking of complementary currencies as a one-size-fits-all solution. He said they can function as a kind of 'gateway drug' to introduce people to a new way of thinking about money. "That is especially for those who use it, but also for those who just become aware of it," he says. Ciaran Mundy, CEO of the Bristol Pound, says it is important to think of the systemic impact rather than looking for targeted treatment of symptoms of economic deprivation. "Poverty has many causes," he says. "One of these is how the economy is structured in terms of how money flows out of poor areas due to high dependence on larger national and international companies paying lower wages and using offshore accounts to hide the money from the tax man." Nothing is tying Glasgow to existing models for complementary currencies. But during the first meeting about setting up the Glasgow Pound, the workshop shows just how hard it would be to invent a new system that works for everyone. Each table is handed a wad of Post-it notes and a piece of white paper. A table leader asks everyone to write on the Post-its what they want the Glasgow Pound to achieve. Elbowing teacups out the way, people get to work. They scrawl a dizzying number of proposals, from keeping more wealth in the local area to empowering people who feel cut out of the national economy, or to moving towards land reform and saving the environment. Team leaders try to assemble these ideas in themes to report back to the room. On one table, Duncan McCann encourages people to urge businesses to do things they have never done before. "One of the goals should be to move businesses from where they are today into the future," he says. After years of researc,h McCann believes the only way complementary currencies can create real value for local economies is if they make transactions happen that wouldn't otherwise have taken place. "They need to create additional spending power. This is this what the local currencies, despite all their good points, fail to do," McCann says. Every time a Brixton Pound transaction is made, 1.5 per cent goes into a Brixton Fund. This is used to give micro-grants of between a few hundred and £2000 to local projects and community groups. "We aim to target projects that aren't large enough to apply for more formal grant funding," says Lucy Çava, project manager at the Brixton Pound. "We see this as part of community building – linking the Brixton Pound user with community groups, so both groups become more visible to each other through the currency and fund. This is particularly important in Brixton because of the gentrification debates which are very salient round there," Çava says. Meanwhile, the people behind the Bristol Pound are readying a mutual credit network called Bristol Prospects. Through this network, businesses in Bristol can exchange credit in the form of loans that are neutralised within the network, helping one another to grow without relying on the high rates of commercial lenders. Once operational, loans offered through the Prospects network will have negative interest, so that businesses are encouraged to pass credit on as quickly as possible. "That's the plan," says Clarke, "because it's rather like a hot potato: people will want to pass it on." "We know from research that a number of small businesses in Bristol are struggling to get money on reasonable terms," says Clarke, "and that banks are not interested in smaller loans to businesses. So we think there is a strength in the Bristol Pound network to start something like this that is linked, but separate." Duncan McCann, with all his experience, knows that challenge is worthwhile. "As people we have a right to make credit and loan money. We mustn't forget that. We mustn't leave that to corporations and the state," he says. This article is part of a series on local economies Hazel is documenting at farnearer.org, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation Illustration by PureSolution/Shutterstock This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.
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A. They are used in addition to the national currency, not as a replacement
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where does the data come from?
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### Introduction
Traditionally, a word is represented as a sparse vector indicating the word itself (one-hot vector) or the context of the word (distributional vector). However, both the one-hot notation and distributional notation suffer from data sparseness since dimensions of the word vector do not interact with each other. Distributed word representation addresses the data sparseness problem by constructing a dense vector of a fixed length, wherein contexts are shared (or distributed) across dimensions. Distributed word representation is known to improve the performance of many NLP applications such as machine translation BIBREF0 and sentiment analysis BIBREF1 to name a few. The task to learn a distributed representation is called representation learning. However, evaluating the quality of learned distributed word representation itself is not straightforward. In language modeling, perplexity or cross-entropy is widely accepted as a de facto standard for intrinsic evaluation. In contrast, distributed word representations include the additive (or compositional) property of the vectors, which cannot be assessed by perplexity. Moreover, perplexity makes little use of infrequent words; thus, it is not appropriate for evaluating distributed presentations that try to represent them. Therefore, a word similarity task and/or a word analogy task are generally used to evaluate distributed word representations in the NLP literature. The former judges whether distributed word representations improve modeling contexts, and the latter estimates how well the learned representations achieve the additive property. However, such resources other than for English (e.g., Japanese) seldom exist. In addition, most of these datasets comprise high-frequency nouns so that they tend not to include other parts of speech. Hence, previous data fail to evaluate word representations of other parts of speech, including content words such as verbs and adjectives. To address the problem of the lack of a dataset for evaluating Japanese distributed word representations, we propose to build a Japanese dataset for the word similarity task. The main contributions of our work are as follows: ### Related Work
In general, distributed word representations are evaluated using a word similarity task. For instance, WordSim353 2002:PSC:503104.503110, MC BIBREF2 , RG BIBREF3 , and SCWS Huang:2012:IWR:2390524.2390645 have been used to evaluate word similarities in English. Moreover, baker-reichart-korhonen:2014:EMNLP2014 built a verb similarity dataset (VSD) based on WordSim353 because there was no dataset of verbs in the word-similarity task. Recently, SimVerb-3500 was introduced to evaluate human understanding of verb meaning Gerz:2016:EMNLP. It provides human ratings for the similarity of 3,500 verb pairs so that it enables robust evaluation of distributed representation for verbs. However, most of these datasets include English words only. There has been no Japanese dataset for the word-similarity task. Apart from English, WordSim353 and SimLex-999 Hill:2015:CL have been translated and rescored in other languages: German, Italian and Russian Leviant:2015:arXiv. SimLex-999 has also been translated and rescored in Hebrew and Croatian Mrksic:2017:TACL. SimLex-999 explicitly targets at similarity rather than relatedness and includes adjective, noun and verb pairs. However, this dataset contains only frequent words. In addition, the distributed representation of words is generally learned using only word-level information. Consequently, the distributed representation for low-frequency words and unknown words cannot be learned well with conventional models. However, low-frequency words and unknown words are often comprise high-frequency morphemes (e.g., unkingly INLINEFORM0 un + king + ly). Some previous studies take advantage of the morphological information to provide a suitable representation for low-frequency words and unknown words BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 . Morphological information is particularly important for Japanese since Japanese is an agglutinative language. ### Construction of a Japanese Word Similarity Dataset
What makes a pair of words similar? Most of the previous datasets do not concretely define the similarity of word pairs. The difference in the similarity of word pairs originates from each annotator's mind, resulting in different scales of a word. Thus, we propose to use an example-based approach (Table TABREF9 ) to control the variance of the similarity ratings. We remove the context of word when we extracted the word. So, we consider that an ambiguous word has high variance of the similarity, but we can get low variance of the similarity when the word is monosemous. For this study, we constructed a Japanese word similarity dataset. We followed the procedure used to construct the Stanford Rare Word Similarity Dataset (RW) Luong-etal:conll13:morpho. We extracted Japanese word pairs from the Evaluation Dataset of Japanese Lexical Simplification kodaira. It targeted content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). It included 10 contexts about target words annotated with their lexical substitutions and rankings. Figure FIGREF1 shows an example of the dataset. A word in square brackets in the text is represented as a target word of simplification. A target word is not only recorded in the lemma form but also in the conjugated form. We built a Japanese similarity dataset from this dataset using the following procedure. ### Comparison to Other Datasets
Table TABREF17 shows how several resources vary. WordSim353 comprises high-frequency words and so the variance tends to be low. In contrast, RW includes low-frequency words, unknown words, and complex words composed of several morphemes; thus, the variance is large. VSD has many polysemous words, which increase the variance. Despite the fact that our dataset, similar to the VSD and RW datasets, contains low-frequency and ambiguous words, its variance is 3.00. The variance level is low compared with the other corpora. We considered that the examples of the similarity in the task request reduced the variance level. We did not expect SCWS to have the largest variance in the datasets shown in Table TABREF17 because it gave the context to annotators during annotation. At the beginning, we thought the context would serve to remove the ambiguity and clarify the meaning of word; however after looking into the dataset, we determined that the construction procedure used several extraordinary annotators. It is crucial to filter insincere annotators and provide straightforward instructions to improve the quality of the similarity annotation like we did. To gain better similarity, each dataset should utilize the reliability score to exclude extraordinary annotators. For example, for SCWS, an annotator rating the similarity of pair of “CD” and “aglow” assigned a rating of 10. We assumed it was a typo or misunderstanding regarding the words. To address this problem, such an annotation should be removed before calculating the true similarity. All the datasets except for RW simply calculated the average of the similarity, but datasets created using crowdsourcing should consider the reliability of the annotator. ### Analysis
We present examples of a pair with high variance of similarity as shown below: (e.g., a pairing of “fastUTF8min（速い）” and “earlyUTF8min（早い）”.) Although they are similar in meaning with respect to the time, they have nothing in common with respect to speed; Annotator A assigned a rating of 10, but Annotator B assigned a rating of 1. Another example, the pairing of “be eagerUTF8min（懇願する）” and “requestUTF8min（頼む）”. Even though the act indicated by the two verbs is the same, there are some cases where they express different degrees of feeling. Compared with “request”, “eager” indicates a stronger feeling. There were two annotators who emphasized the similarity of the act itself rather than the different degrees of feeling, and vice versa. In this case, Annotator A assigned a rating of 9, but Annotator B assigned a rating of 2. Although it was necessary to distinguish similarity and semantic relatedness BIBREF7 and we asked annotators to rate the pairs based on semantic similarity, it was not straightforward to put paraphrase candidates onto a single scale considering all the attributes of the words. This limitation might be relaxed if we would ask annotators to refer to a thesaurus or an ontology such as Japanese Lexicon GoiTaikei:1997. (e.g., a pairing of “sloganUTF8min（スローガン）” and “sloganUTF8min（標語）”.) In Japanese, we can write a word using hiragana, katakana, or kanji characters; however because hiragana and katakana represent only the pronunciation of a word, annotators might think of different words. In this case, Annotator A assigned a rating of 8, but Annotator B assigned a rating of 0. Similarly, we confirmed the same thing in other parts of speech. Especially, nouns can have several word pairs with different spellings, which results in their IAA became too low compared to other parts of speech. (e.g., a pairing of “oftenUTF8min（しばしば）” and “frequentlyUTF8min（しきりに）”.) We confirmed that the variance becomes larger among adverbs expressing frequency. This is due to the difference in the frequency of words that annotators imagines. In this case, Annotator A assigned a rating of 9, but Annotator B assigned a rating of 0. Similarly, we confirmed the same thing among adverbs expressing time. ### Conclusion
In this study, we constructed the first Japanese word similarity dataset. It contains various parts of speech and includes rare words in addition to common words. Crowdsourced annotators assigned similarity to word pairs during the word similarity task. We gave examples of similarity in the task request sent to annotators, so that we reduced the variance of each word pair. However, we did not restrict the attributes of words, such as the level of feeling, during annotation. Error analysis revealed that the notion of similarity should be carefully defined when constructing a similarity dataset. As a future work, we plan to construct a word analogy dataset in Japanese by translating an English dataset to Japanese. We hope that a Japanese database will facilitate research in Japanese distributed representations. ### Language Resource References
lrec lrec2018 Figure 1: An example of the dataset from a previous study (Kodaira et al., 2016). Table 1: The number of parts of speech classified into each frequency. Table 2: Example of the degree of similarity when we requested annotation at Lancers. Table 3: Inter-annotator agreements of each POS. Table 4: Examples of verb pairs in our dataset. The similarity rating is the average of the ratings from ten annotators. Table 5: Variance of each dataset.
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Evaluation Dataset of Japanese Lexical Simplification kodaira
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How are proof scores calculated?
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### Introduction
Recent advancements in deep learning intensified the long-standing interests in integrating symbolic reasoning with connectionist models BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . The attraction of said integration stems from the complementing properties of these systems. Symbolic reasoning models offer interpretability, efficient generalisation from a small number of examples, and the ability to leverage knowledge provided by an expert. However, these systems are unable to handle ambiguous and noisy high-dimensional data such as sensory inputs BIBREF5 . On the other hand, representation learning models exhibit robustness to noise and ambiguity, can learn task-specific representations, and achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of tasks BIBREF6 . However, being universal function approximators, these models require vast amounts of training data and are treated as non-interpretable black boxes. One way of integrating the symbolic and sub-symbolic models is by continuously relaxing discrete operations and implementing them in a connectionist framework. Recent approaches in this direction focused on learning algorithmic behaviour without the explicit symbolic representations of a program BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , and consequently with it BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 . In the inductive logic programming setting, two new models, NTP BIBREF0 and Differentiable Inductive Logic Programming ( $\partial $ ILP) BIBREF16 successfully combined the interpretability and data efficiency of a logic programming system with the expressiveness and robustness of neural networks. In this paper, we focus on the NTP model proposed by BIBREF0 . Akin to recent neural-symbolic models, NTP rely on a continuous relaxation of a discrete algorithm, operating over the sub-symbolic representations. In this case, the algorithm is an analogue to Prolog's backward chaining with a relaxed unification operator. The backward chaining algorithm constructs neural networks, which model continuously relaxed proof paths using sub-symbolic representations. These representations are learned end-to-end by maximising the proof scores of facts in the KB, while minimising the score of facts not in the KB, in a link prediction setting BIBREF17 . However, while the symbolic unification checks whether two terms can represent the same structure, the relaxed unification measures the similarity between their sub-symbolic representations. This continuous relaxation is at the crux of NTP' inability to scale to large datasets. During both training and inference, NTP need to compute all possible proof trees needed for proving a query, relying on the continuous unification of the query with all the rules and facts in the KB. This procedure quickly becomes infeasible for large datasets, as the number of nodes of the resulting computation graph grows exponentially. Our insight is that we can radically reduce the computational complexity of inference and learning by generating only the most promising proof paths. In particular, we show that the problem of finding the facts in the KB that best explain a query can be reduced to a $k$ -nearest neighbour problem, for which efficient exact and approximate solutions exist BIBREF18 . This enables us to apply NTP to previously unreachable real-world datasets, such as WordNet. ### Background
In NTP, the neural network structure is built recursively, and its construction is defined in terms of modules similarly to dynamic neural module networks BIBREF19 . Each module, given a goal, a KB, and a current proof state as inputs, produces a list of new proof states, where the proof states are neural networks representing partial proof success scores. Unification Module. In backward chaining, unification between two atoms is used for checking whether they can represent the same structure. In discrete unification, non-variable symbols are checked for equality, and the proof fails if the symbols differ. In NTP, rather than comparing symbols, their embedding representations are compared by means of a RBF kernel. This allows matching different symbols with similar semantics, such as matching relations like ${grandFatherOf}$ and ${grandpaOf}$ . Given a proof state $= (_, _)$ , where $_$ and $_$ denote a substitution set and a proof score, respectively, unification is computed as follows: 1. unify(, , ) = 2. unify(, G, ) = 3. unify(H, , ) = 4. unify(h::H, g::G, ) = unify(H,G,') with ' = (', ') where: '= {ll {h/g} if hV {g/h} if gV, hV otherwise } '= ( , { ll k(h:, g:) if hV, gV 1 otherwise } ) where $_{h:}$ and $_{g:}$ denote the embedding representations of $h$ and $g$ , respectively. OR Module. This module attempts to apply rules in a KB. The name of this module stems from the fact that a KB can be seen as a large disjunction of rules and facts. In backward chaining reasoning systems, the OR module is used for unifying a goal with all facts and rules in a KB: if the goal unifies with the head of the rule, then a series of goals is derived from the body of such a rule. In NTP, we calculate the similarity between the rule and the facts via the unify operator. Upon calculating the continuous unification scores, OR calls AND to prove all sub-goals in the body of the rule. or(G, d, ) = ' | ' and(B, d, unify(H, G, )), H :– B AND Module. This module is used for proving a conjunction of sub-goals derived from a rule body. It first applies substitutions to the first atom, which is afterwards proven by calling the OR module. Remaining sub-goals are proven by recursively calling the AND module. 1. and(_, _, ) = 2. and(_, 0, _) = 3. and(, _, ) = 4. and(G:G, d, ) = ” | ”and(G, d, '), ' or(substitute(G, ), d-1, ) For further details on NTPs and the particular implementation of these modules, see BIBREF0 After building all the proof states, NTPs define the final success score of proving a query as an $$ over all the generated valid proof scores (neural networks). Assume a KB $\mathcal {K}$ , composed of $|\mathcal {K}|$ facts and no rules, for brevity. Note that $|\mathcal {K}|$ can be impractical within the scope of NTP. For instance, Freebase BIBREF20 is composed of approximately 637 million facts, while YAGO3 BIBREF21 is composed by approximately 9 million facts. Given a query $g \triangleq [{grandpaOf}, {abe}, {bart}]$ , NTP compares its embedding representation – given by the embedding vectors of ${grandpaOf}$ , ${abe}$ , and ${bart}$ – with the representation of each of the $|\mathcal {K}|$ facts. The resulting proof score of $g$ is given by: $$
\begin{aligned}
\max _{f \in \mathcal {K}} & \; {unify}_(g, [f_{p}, f_{s}, f_{o}], (\emptyset , )) \\
& = \max _{f \in \mathcal {K}} \; \min \big \lbrace
,
\operatorname{k}(_{\scriptsize {grandpaOf}:}, _{f_{p}:}),\\
&\qquad \qquad \qquad \operatorname{k}(_{{abe}:}, _{f_{s}:}),
\operatorname{k}(_{{bart}:}, _{f_{o}:})
\big \rbrace ,
\end{aligned}$$ (Eq. 3) where $f \triangleq [f_{p}, f_{s}, f_{o}]$ is a fact in $\mathcal {K}$ denoting a relationship of type $f_{p}$ between $f_{s}$ and $f_{o}$ , $_{s:}$ is the embedding representation of a symbol $s$ , $$ denotes the initial proof score, and $\operatorname{k}({}\cdot {}, {}\cdot {})$ denotes the RBF kernel. Note that the maximum proof score is given by the fact $f \in \mathcal {K}$ that maximises the similarity between its components and the goal $\mathcal {K}$0 : solving the maximisation problem in eq:inference can be equivalently stated as a nearest neighbour search problem. In this work, we use ANNS during the forward pass for considering only the most promising proof paths during the construction of the neural network. ### Nearest Neighbourhood Search
From ex:inference, we can see that the inference problem can be reduced to a nearest neighbour search problem. Given a query $g$ , the problem is finding the fact(s) in $\mathcal {K}$ that maximise the unification score. This represents a computational bottleneck, since it is very costly to find the exact nearest neighbour in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces, due to the curse of dimensionality BIBREF22 . Exact methods are rarely more efficient than brute-force linear scan methods when the dimensionality is high BIBREF23 , BIBREF24 . A practical solution consists in ANNS algorithms, which relax the condition of the exact search by allowing a small number of mistakes. Several families of ANNS algorithms exist, such as LSH BIBREF25 , PQ BIBREF26 , and PG BIBREF27 . In this work we use HNSW BIBREF24 , BIBREF28 , a graph-based incremental ANNS structure which can offer much better logarithmic complexity scaling in comparison with other approaches. ### Related Work
Many machine learning methods rely on efficient nearest neighbour search for solving specific sub-problems. Given the computational complexity of nearest neighbour search, approximate methods, driven by advanced index structures, hash or even graph-based approaches are used to speed up the bottleneck of costly comparison. ANNS algorithms have been used to speed up various sorts of machine learning models, including mixture model clustering BIBREF29 , case-based reasoning BIBREF30 to Gaussian process regression BIBREF31 , among others. Similarly to this work, BIBREF32 also rely on approximate nearest neighbours to speed up Memory-Augmented neural networks. Similarly to our work, they apply ANNS to query the external memory (in our case the KB memory) for $k$ closest words. They present drastic savings in speed and memory usage. Though as of this moment, our speed savings are not as drastic, the memory savings we achieve are sufficient so that we can train on WordNet, a dataset previously considered out of reach of NTP. ### Experiments
We compared results obtained by our model, which we refer to as NTP 2.0, with those obtained by the original NTP proposed by BIBREF0 . Results on several smaller datasets – namely Countries, Nations, Kinship, and UMLS – are shown in tab:results. When unifying goals with facts in the KB, for each goal, we use ANNS for retrieving the $k$ most similar (in embedding space) facts, and use those for computing the final proof scores. We report results for $k = 1$ , as we did not notice sensible differences for $k \in \lbrace 2, 5, 10 \rbrace $ . However, we noticed sensible improvements in the case of Countries, and an overall decrease in performance in UMLS. A possible explanation is that ANNS (with $k = 1$ ), due to its inherently approximate nature, does not always retrieve the closest fact(s) exactly. This behaviour may be a problem in some datasets where exact nearest neighbour search is crucial for correctly answering queries. We also evaluated NTP 2.0 on WordNet BIBREF33 , a KB encoding lexical knowledge about the English language. In particular, we use the WordNet used by BIBREF34 for their experiments. This dataset is significantly larger than the other datasets used by BIBREF0 – it is composed by 38.696 entities, 11 relations, and the training set is composed by 112,581 facts. In WordNet, the accuracies on the validation and test sets were 65.29% and 65.72%, respectively – which is on par with the Distance Model, a Neural Link Predictor discussed by BIBREF34 , which achieves a test accuracy of 68.3%. However, we did not consider a full hyper-parameter sweep, and did not regularise the model using Neural Link Predictors, which sensibly improves NTP' predictive accuracy BIBREF0 . A subset of the induced rules is shown in tab:rules. ### Conclusions
We proposed a way to sensibly scale up NTP by reducing parts of their inference steps to ANNS problems, for which very efficient and scalable solutions exist in the literature. Figure 1. A visual depiction of the NTP’ recursive computation graph construction, applied to a toy KB (top left). Dash-separated rectangles denote proof states (left: substitutions, right: proof score -generating neural network). All the non-FAIL proof states are aggregated to obtain the final proof success (depicted in Figure 2). Colours and indices on arrows correspond to the respective KB rule application. Figure 2. Depiction of the proof aggregation for the computation graph presented in Figure 1. Proof states resulting from the computation graph construction are all aggregated to obtain the final success score of proving a query. Table 1. AUC-PR results on Countries and MRR and HITS@m on Kinship, Nations, and UMLS. Table 2. Rules induced on WordNet, with a confidence above 0.5.
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'= ( , { ll k(h:, g:) if hV, gV
1 otherwise } )
where $_{h:}$ and $_{g:}$ denote the embedding representations of $h$ and $g$ , respectively.
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How do they confirm their model working well on out-of-vocabulary problems?
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### Introduction
Recently, character composition models have shown great success in many NLP tasks, mainly because of their robustness in dealing with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words by capturing sub-word informations. Among the character composition models, bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) models and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely applied in many tasks, e.g. part-of-speech (POS) tagging BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , named entity recognition BIBREF2 , language modeling BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , machine translation BIBREF5 and dependency parsing BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 . In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art general-purpose tagger that uses CNNs both to compose word representations from characters and to encode context information for tagging. We show that the CNN model is more capable than the LSTM model for both functions, and more stable for unseen or unnormalized words, which is the main benefit of character composition models. Yu:2017 compared the performance of CNN and LSTM as character composition model for dependency parsing, and concluded that CNN performs better than LSTM. In this paper, we show that this is also the case for POS tagging. Furthermore, we extend the scope to morphological tagging and supertagging, in which the tag set is much larger and long-distance dependencies between words are more important. In these three tagging tasks, we compare our tagger with the bilstm-aux tagger BIBREF1 and the CRF-based morphological tagger MarMot BIBREF8 . The CNN tagger shows robust performance accross the three tasks, and achieves the highest average accuracy in all tasks. It (significantly) outperforms LSTM in morphological tagging, and outperforms both baselines in supertagging by a large margin. To test the robustness of the taggers against the OOV problem, we also conduct experiments using artificially constructed unnormalized text by corrupting words in the normal dev set. Again, the CNN tagger outperforms the two baselines by a very large margin. Therefore we conclude that our CNN tagger is a robust state-of-the-art general-purpose tagger that can effectively compose word representation from characters and encode context information. ### Model
Our proposed CNN tagger has two main components: the character composition model and the context encoding model. Both components are essentially CNN models, capturing different levels of information: the first CNN captures morphological information from character n-grams, the second one captures contextual information from word n-grams. Figure FIGREF2 shows a diagram of both models of the tagger. ### Character Composition Model
The character composition model is similar to Yu:2017, where several convolution filters are used to capture character n-grams of different sizes. The outputs of each convolution filter are fed through a max pooling layer, and the pooling outputs are concatenated to represent the word. ### Context Encoding Model
The context encoding model captures the context information of the target word by scanning through the word representations of its context window. The word representation could be only word embeddings ( INLINEFORM0 ), only composed vectors ( INLINEFORM1 ) or the concatenation of both ( INLINEFORM2 ) A context window consists of N words to both sides of the target word and the target word itself. To indicate the target word, we concatenate a binary feature to each of the word representations with 1 indicating the target and 0 otherwise, similar to Vu:2016. Additional to the binary feature, we also concatenate a position embedding to encode the relative position of each context word, similar to Gehring:2017. ### Hyper-parameters
For the character composition model, we take a fixed input size of 32 characters for each word, with padding on both sides or cutting from the middle if needed. We apply four convolution filters with sizes of 3, 5, 7, and 9. Each filter has an output channel of 25 dimensions, thus the composed vector is 100-dimensional. We apply Gaussian noise with standard deviation of 0.1 is applied on the composed vector during training. For the context encoding model, we take a context window of 15 (7 words to both sides of the target word) as input and predict the tag of the target word. We also apply four convolution filters with sizes of 2, 3, 4 and 5, each filter is stacked by another filter with the same size, and the output has 128 dimensions, thus the context representation is 512-dimensional. We apply one 512-dimensional hidden layer with ReLU non-linearity before the prediction layer. We apply dropout with probability of 0.1 after the hidden layer during training. The model is trained with averaged stochastic gradient descent with a learning rate of 0.1, momentum of 0.9 and mini-batch size of 100. We apply L2 regularization with a rate of INLINEFORM0 on all the parameters of the network except the embeddings. ### Data
We use treebanks from version 1.2 of Universal Dependencies (UD), and in the case of several treebanks for one language, we only use the canonical treebank. There are in total 22 treebanks, as in Plank:2016. Each treebank splits into train, dev, and test sets, we use the dev sets for early stop, and test on the test sets. ### Tasks
We evaluate our method on three tagging tasks: POS tagging (Pos), morphological tagging (Morph) and supertagging (Stag). For POS tagging we use Universal POS tags, which is an extension of Petrov:2012. The universal tag set tries to capture the “universal” properties of words and facilitate cross-lingual learning. Therefore the tag set is very coarse and leaves out most of the language-specific properties to morphological features. Morphological tags encode the language-specific morphological features of the words, e.g., number, gender, case. They are represented in the UD treebanks as one string which contains several key-value pairs of morphological features. Supertags BIBREF9 are tags that encode more syntactic information than standard POS tags, e.g. the head direction or the subcategorization frame. We use dependency-based supertags BIBREF10 which are extracted from the dependency treebanks. Adding such tags into feature models of statistical dependency parsers significantly improves their performance BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 . Supertags can be designed with different levels of granularity. We use the standard Model 1 from Ouchi:2014, where each tag consists of head direction, dependency label and dependent direction. Even with the basic supertag model, the Stag task is more difficult than Pos and Morph because it generally requires taking long-distance dependencies between words into consideration. We select these tasks as examples for tagging applications because they differ strongly in tag set sizes. Generally, the Pos set sizes for all the languages are no more than 17 and Stag set sizes are around 200. When treating morphological features as a string (i.e. not splitting into key-value pairs), the sizes of the Morph tag sets range from about 100 up to 2000. ### Setups
As baselines to our models, we take the two state-of-the-art taggers MarMot (denoted as CRF) and bilstm-aux (denoted as LSTM). We train the taggers with the recommended hyper-parameters from the documentation. To ensure a fair comparison (especially between LSTM and CNN), we generally treat the three tasks equally, and do not apply task-specific tuning on them, i.e., using the same features and same model hyper-parameters in each single task. Also, we do not use any pre-trained word embeddings. For the LSTM tagger, we use the recommended hyper-parameters in the documentation including 64-dimensional word embeddings ( INLINEFORM0 ) and 100-dimensional composed vectors ( INLINEFORM1 ). We train the INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 and INLINEFORM4 models as in Plank:2016. We train the CNN taggers with the same dimensionalities for word representations. For the CRF tagger, we predict Pos and Morph jointly as in the standard setting for MarMot, which performs much better than with separate predictions, as shown in Mueller:2013 and in our preliminary experiments. Also, it splits the morphological tags into key-value pairs, whereas the neural taggers treat the whole string as a tag. We predict Stag as a separate task. ### Results
The test results for the three tasks are shown in Table TABREF17 in three groups. The first group of seven columns are the results for Pos, where both LSTM and CNN have three variations of input features: word only ( INLINEFORM0 ), character only ( INLINEFORM1 ) and both ( INLINEFORM2 ). For Morph and Stag, we only use the INLINEFORM3 setting for both LSTM and CNN. On macro-average, three taggers perform close in the Pos task, with the CNN tagger being slightly better. In the Morph task, CNN is again slightly ahead of CRF, while LSTM is about 2 points behind. In the Stag task, CNN outperforms both taggers by a large margin: 2 points higher than LSTM and 8 points higher than CRF. While considering the input features of the LSTM and CNN taggers, both taggers perform close with only INLINEFORM0 as input, which suggests that the two taggers are comparable in encoding context for tagging Pos. However, with only INLINEFORM1 , CNN performs much better than LSTM (95.54 vs. 92.61), and close to INLINEFORM2 (96.18). Also, INLINEFORM3 consistently outperforms INLINEFORM4 for all languages. This suggests that the CNN model alone is capable of learning most of the information that the word-level model can learn, while the LSTM model is not. The more interesting cases are Morph and Stag, where CNN performs much higher than LSTM. We hypothesize three possible reasons to explain the considerably large difference. First, the LSTM tagger may be more sensitive to hyper-parameters and requires task specific tuning. We use the same setting which is tuned for the Pos task, thus it underperforms in the other tasks. Second, the LSTM tagger may not deal well with large tag sets. The tag set size for Morph are larger than Pos in orders of magnitudes, especially for Czech, Basque, Finnish and Slovene, all of which have more than 1000 distinct Morph tags in the training data, and the LSTM performs poorly on these languages. Third, the LSTM has theoretically unlimited access to all the tokens in the sentence, but in practice it might not learn the context as good as the CNN. In the LSTM model, the information of long-distance contexts will gradually fade away during the recurrence, whereas in the CNN model, all words are treated equally as long as they are in the context window. Therefore the LSTM underperforms in the Stag task, where the information from long-distance context is more important. ### Unnormalized Text
It is a common scenario to use a model trained with news data to process text from social media, which could include intentional or unintentional misspellings. Unfortunately, we do not have social media data to test the taggers. However, we design an experiment to simulate unnormalized text, by systematically editing the words in the dev sets with three operations: insertion, deletion and substitution. For example, if we modify a word abcdef at position 2 (0-based), the modified words would be abxcdef, abdef, and abxdef, where x is a random character from the alphabet of the language. For each operation, we create a group of modified dev sets, where all words longer than two characters are edited by the operation with a probability of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, or 1. For each language, we use the models trained on the normal training sets and predict Pos for the three groups of modified dev set. The average accuracies are shown in Figure FIGREF19 . Generally, all models suffer from the increasing degrees of unnormalized texts, but CNN always suffers the least. In the extreme case where almost all words are unnormalized, CNN performs 4 to 8 points higher than LSTM and 4 to 11 points higher than CRF. This suggests that the CNN is more robust to misspelt words. While looking into the specific cases of misspelling, CNN is more sensitive to insertion and deletion, while CRF and LSTM are more sensitive to substitution. ### Conclusion
In this paper, we propose a general-purpose tagger that uses two CNNs for both character composition and context encoding. On the universal dependency treebanks (v1.2), the tagger achieves state-of-the-art results for POS tagging and morphological tagging, and to the best of our knowledge, it also performs best for supertagging. The tagger works well across different tagging tasks without tuning the hyper-parameters, and it is also robust against unnormalized text. Figure 1: Diagram of the CNN tagger. Table 1: Tagging accuracies of the three taggers in the three tasks on the test set of UD-1.2, the highest accuracy for each task on each language is marked in bold face. Figure 2: POS tagging accuracies on the dev set with the three modifications of different degrees.
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conduct experiments using artificially constructed unnormalized text by corrupting words in the normal dev set
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What was the author's purpose on including a section about Hatcher's feedings?
A. To give insight on Hatcher's personality.
B. To show that McCray will have to feed like Hatcher if he does not return to Jodrell Bank because there is no human food where he is.
C. To further elaborate how different Hatcher and his kind are from a human.
D. To show how grotesque his feeding process is.
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THE FIVE HELLS OF ORION BY FREDERICK POHL Out in the great gas cloud of the Orion Nebula McCray found an ally—and a foe! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared. As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. It was only a personal quaintness; he had done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel and Saiph ... it happened. The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes and a number of inconvenient sizes. McCray tripped over something that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered hollowly. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it. McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out. Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not quite utter silence. Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as still as he could, listening; it remained elusive. Probably it was only an illusion. But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud. It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in exasperation: "If I could only see !" He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough, not at all resilient. A flickering halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor. It was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the light? And what were these other things in the room? Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes. It was like having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set—or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing suit? It was slightly reassuring, McCray thought, to find that most of the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair—why, he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old enough to go to school. But what were they doing here? Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light. But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral"—the color of aged driftwood or unbleached cloth. Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had. McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his courage flowed back when he could see again. He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being shaken up and—he admitted it—scared damn near witless, he did not seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship? He allowed that thought to seep into his mind. Suppose there had been an accident to the Jodrell Bank . He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a cooling brain. McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for. It held a radio. He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he said, "calling the Jodrell Bank ." No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling Jodrell Bank . "Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please." But there was no answer. Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. If there was no answer, he was a good long way from anywhere. Of course, the thing might not be operating. He reached for the microphone again— He cried aloud. The pinkish lights went out. He was in the dark again, worse dark than before. For before the light had gone, McCray had seen what had escaped his eyes before. The suit and the microphone were clear enough in the pinkish glimmer; but the hand—his own hand, cupped to hold the microphone—he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting moment of study, his chest. McCray could not see any part of his own body at all. II Someone else could. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food. Suppose you call him "Hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.") Hatcher was not exactly male, because his race had no true males; but it did have females and he was certainly not that. Hatcher did not in any way look like a human being, but they had features in common. If Hatcher and McCray had somehow managed to strike up an acquaintance, they might have got along very well. Hatcher, like McCray, was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. Both enjoyed games—McCray baseball, poker and three-dimensional chess; Hatcher a number of sports which defy human description. Both held positions of some importance—considering their ages—in the affairs of their respective worlds. Physically they were nothing alike. Hatcher was a three-foot, hard-shelled sphere of jelly. He had "arms" and "legs," but they were not organically attached to "himself." They were snakelike things which obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes curl; but they did not touch him directly. Indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of Inverse Squares. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. His members, disposed about the room where he had sent them on various errands, quivered and shook a little; yet they were the calmest limbs in the room; the members of the other team workers were in a state of violent commotion. The probe team had had a shock. "Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from Earth. After a long moment he turned his senses from the Earthman. "Incredible—but it's true enough," he said. "I'd better report. Watch him," he added, but that was surely unnecessary. Their job was to watch McCray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as Herrell McCray. Hatcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all probes would be in permanent session. They admitted him at once. Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report: "The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his enclosure. His method of doing so was to put his own members in physical contact with the various objects in the enclosure. After observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him. "This appeared to work well for a time. He seemed relatively undisturbed. However, he then reverted to physical-contact, manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had provided for him. "He then began to vibrate the atmosphere by means of resonating organs in his breathing passage. "Simultaneously, the object he was holding, attached to the artificial skin, was discovered to be generating paranormal forces." The supervising council rocked with excitement. "You're sure?" demanded one of the councilmen. "Yes, sir. The staff is preparing a technical description of the forces now, but I can say that they are electromagnetic vibrations modulating a carrier wave of very high speed, and in turn modulated by the vibrations of the atmosphere caused by the subject's own breathing." "Fantastic," breathed the councillor, in a tone of dawning hope. "How about communicating with him, Hatcher? Any progress?" "Well ... not much, sir. He suddenly panicked. We don't know why; but we thought we'd better pull back and let him recover for a while." The council conferred among itself for a moment, Hatcher waiting. It was not really a waste of time for him; with the organs he had left in the probe-team room, he was in fairly close touch with what was going on—knew that McCray was once again fumbling among the objects in the dark, knew that the team-members had tried illuminating the room for him briefly and again produced the rising panic. Still, Hatcher fretted. He wanted to get back. "Stop fidgeting," commanded the council leader abruptly. "Hatcher, you are to establish communication at once." "But, sir...." Hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly; he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture with. "We've done everything we dare. We've made the place homey for him—" actually, what he said was more like, we've warmed the biophysical nuances of his enclosure —"and tried to guess his needs; and we're frightening him half to death. We can't go faster. This creature is in no way similar to us, you know. He relies on paranormal forces—heat, light, kinetic energy—for his life. His chemistry is not ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is closer to the inanimate rocks of a sea-bottom than to ourselves." "Understood, Hatcher. In your first report you stated these creatures were intelligent." "Yes, sir. But not in our way." "But in a way, and you must learn that way. I know." One lobster-claw shaped member drifted close to the councillor's body and raised itself in an admonitory gesture. "You want time. But we don't have time, Hatcher. Yours is not the only probe team working. The Central Masses team has just turned in a most alarming report." "Have they secured a subject?" Hatcher demanded jealously. The councillor paused. "Worse than that, Hatcher. I am afraid their subjects have secured one of them. One of them is missing." There was a moment's silence. Frozen, Hatcher could only wait. The council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him. Finally the councillor said, "I speak for all of us, I think. If the Old Ones have seized one of our probers our time margin is considerably narrowed. Indeed, we may not have any time at all. You must do everything you can to establish communication with your subject." "But the danger to the specimen—" Hatcher protested automatically. "—is no greater," said the councillor, "than the danger to every one of us if we do not find allies now ." Hatcher returned to his laboratory gloomily. It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost—even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible. Hatcher did not like the idea of endangering the Earthman. It cannot be said that he was emotionally involved; it was not pity or sympathy that caused him to regret the dangers in moving too fast toward communication. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people. But Hatcher did not want him destroyed. It had been difficult enough getting him here. Hatcher checked through the members that he had left with the rest of his team and discovered that there were no immediate emergencies, so he took time to eat. In Hatcher's race this was accomplished in ways not entirely pleasant to Earthmen. A slit in the lower hemisphere of his body opened, like a purse, emitting a thin, pussy, fetid fluid which Hatcher caught and poured into a disposal trough at the side of the eating room. He then stuffed the slit with pulpy vegetation the texture of kelp; it closed, and his body was supplied with nourishment for another day. He returned quickly to the room. His second in command was busy, but one of the other team workers reported—nothing new—and asked about Hatcher's appearance before the council. Hatcher passed the question off. He considered telling his staff about the disappearance of the Central Masses team member, but decided against it. He had not been told it was secret. On the other hand, he had not been told it was not. Something of this importance was not lightly to be gossiped about. For endless generations the threat of the Old Ones had hung over his race, those queer, almost mythical beings from the Central Masses of the galaxy. One brush with them, in ages past, had almost destroyed Hatcher's people. Only by running and hiding, bearing one of their planets with them and abandoning it—with its population—as a decoy, had they arrived at all. Now they had detected mapping parties of the Old Ones dangerously near the spiral arm of the galaxy in which their planet was located, they had begun the Probe Teams to find some way of combating them, or of fleeing again. But it seemed that the Probe Teams themselves might be betraying their existence to their enemies— "Hatcher!" The call was urgent; he hurried to see what it was about. It was his second in command, very excited. "What is it?" Hatcher demanded. "Wait...." Hatcher was patient; he knew his assistant well. Obviously something was about to happen. He took the moment to call his members back to him for feeding; they dodged back to their niches on his skin, fitted themselves into their vestigial slots, poured back their wastes into his own circulation and ingested what they needed from the meal he had just taken.... "Now!" cried the assistant. "Look!" At what passed among Hatcher's people for a viewing console an image was forming. Actually it was the assistant himself who formed it, not a cathode trace or projected shadow; but it showed what it was meant to show. Hatcher was startled. "Another one! And—is it a different species? Or merely a different sex?" "Study the probe for yourself," the assistant invited. Hatcher studied him frostily; his patience was not, after all, endless. "No matter," he said at last. "Bring the other one in." And then, in a completely different mood, "We may need him badly. We may be in the process of killing our first one now." "Killing him, Hatcher?" Hatcher rose and shook himself, his mindless members floating away like puppies dislodged from suck. "Council's orders," he said. "We've got to go into Stage Two of the project at once." III Before Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun, he had an inspiration. The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on and pressed it. Light. White, flaring, Earthly light, that showed everything—even himself. "God bless," he said, almost beside himself with joy. Whatever that pinkish, dancing halo had been, it had thrown him into a panic; now that he could see his own hand again, he could blame the weird effects on some strange property of the light. At the moment he heard the click that was the beginning of Stage Two. He switched off the light and stood for a moment, listening. For a second he thought he heard the far-off voice, quiet, calm and almost hopeless, that he had sensed hours before; but then that was gone. Something else was gone. Some faint mechanical sound that had hardly registered at the time, but was not missing. And there was, perhaps, a nice new sound that had not been there before; a very faint, an almost inaudible elfin hiss. McCray switched the light on and looked around. There seemed to be no change. And yet, surely, it was warmer in here. He could see no difference; but perhaps, he thought, he could smell one. The unpleasant halogen odor from the grating was surely stronger now. He stood there, perplexed. A tinny little voice from the helmet of the space suit said sharply, amazement in its tone, "McCray, is that you? Where the devil are you calling from?" He forgot smell, sound and temperature and leaped for the suit. "This is Herrell McCray," he cried. "I'm in a room of some sort, apparently on a planet of approximate Earth mass. I don't know—" "McCray!" cried the tiny voice in his ear. "Where are you? This is Jodrell Bank calling. Answer, please!" "I am answering, damn it," he roared. "What took you so long?" "Herrell McCray," droned the tiny voice in his ear, "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank responding to your message, acknowledge please. Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray...." It kept on, and on. McCray took a deep breath and thought. Something was wrong. Either they didn't hear him, which meant the radio wasn't transmitting, or—no. That was not it; they had heard him, because they were responding. But it seemed to take them so long.... Abruptly his face went white. Took them so long! He cast back in his mind, questing for a fact, unable to face its implications. When was it he called them? Two hours ago? Three? Did that mean—did it possibly mean—that there was a lag of an hour or two each way? Did it, for example, mean that at the speed of his suit's pararadio, millions of times faster than light, it took hours to get a message to the ship and back? And if so ... where in the name of heaven was he? Herrell McCray was a navigator, which is to say, a man who has learned to trust the evidence of mathematics and instrument readings beyond the guesses of his "common sense." When Jodrell Bank , hurtling faster than light in its voyage between stars, made its regular position check, common sense was a liar. Light bore false witness. The line of sight was trustworthy directly forward and directly after—sometimes not even then—and it took computers, sensing their data through instruments, to comprehend a star bearing and convert three fixes into a position. If the evidence of his radio contradicted common sense, common sense was wrong. Perhaps it was impossible to believe what the radio's message implied; but it was not necessary to "believe," only to act. McCray thumbed down the transmitter button and gave a concise report of his situation and his guesses. "I don't know how I got here. I don't know how long I've been gone, since I was unconscious for a time. However, if the transmission lag is a reliable indication—" he swallowed and went on—"I'd estimate I am something more than five hundred light-years away from you at this moment. That's all I have to say, except for one more word: Help." He grinned sourly and released the button. The message was on its way, and it would be hours before he could have a reply. Therefore he had to consider what to do next. He mopped his brow. With the droning, repetitious call from the ship finally quiet, the room was quiet again. And warm. Very warm, he thought tardily; and more than that. The halogen stench was strong in his nostrils again. Hurriedly McCray scrambled into the suit. By the time he was sealed down he was coughing from the bottom of his lungs, deep, tearing rasps that pained him, uncontrollable. Chlorine or fluorine, one of them was in the air he had been breathing. He could not guess where it had come from; but it was ripping his lungs out. He flushed the interior of the suit out with a reckless disregard for the wastage of his air reserve, holding his breath as much as he could, daring only shallow gasps that made him retch and gag. After a long time he could breathe, though his eyes were spilling tears. He could see the fumes in the room now. The heat was building up. Automatically—now that he had put it on and so started its servo-circuits operating—the suit was cooling him. This was a deep-space suit, regulation garb when going outside the pressure hull of an FTL ship. It was good up to at least five hundred degrees in thin air, perhaps three or four hundred in dense. In thin air or in space it was the elastic joints and couplings that depolymerized when the heat grew too great; in dense air, with conduction pouring energy in faster than the cooling coils could suck it out and hurl it away, it was the refrigerating equipment that broke down. McCray had no way of knowing just how hot it was going to get. Nor, for that matter, had the suit been designed to operate in a corrosive medium. All in all it was time for him to do something. Among the debris on the floor, he remembered, was a five-foot space-ax, tungsten-steel blade and springy aluminum shaft. McCray caught it up and headed for the door. It felt good in his gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never mind why he had been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would, or could, do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out of this poisoned oven. Crash-clang! The double jolt ran up the shaft of the ax, through his gauntlets and into his arm; but he was making progress, he could see the plastic—or whatever it was—of the door. It was chipping out. Not easily, very reluctantly; but flaking out in chips that left a white powdery residue. At this rate, he thought grimly, he would be an hour getting through it. Did he have an hour? But it did not take an hour. One blow was luckier than the rest; it must have snapped the lock mechanism. The door shook and slid ajar. McCray got the thin of the blade into the crack and pried it wide. He was in another room, maybe a hall, large and bare. McCray put the broad of his back against the broken door and pressed it as nearly closed as he could; it might not keep the gas and heat out, but it would retard them. The room was again unlighted—at least to McCray's eyes. There was not even that pink pseudo-light that had baffled him; here was nothing but the beam of his suit lamp. What it showed was cryptic. There were evidences of use: shelves, boxy contraptions that might have been cupboards, crude level surfaces attached to the walls that might have been workbenches. Yet they were queerly contrived, for it was not possible to guess from them much about the creatures who used them. Some were near the floor, some at waist height, some even suspended from the ceiling itself. A man would need a ladder to work at these benches and McCray, staring, thought briefly of many-armed blind giants or shapeless huge intelligent amoebae, and felt the skin prickle at the back of his neck. He tapped half-heartedly at one of the closed cupboards, and was not surprised when it proved as refractory as the door. Undoubtedly he could batter it open, but it was not likely that much would be left of its contents when he was through; and there was the question of time. But his attention was diverted by a gleam from one of the benches. Metallic parts lay heaped in a pile. He poked at them with a stiff-fingered gauntlet; they were oddly familiar. They were, he thought, very much like the parts of a bullet-gun. In fact, they were. He could recognize barrel, chamber, trigger, even a couple of cartridges, neatly opened and the grains of powder stacked beside them. It was an older, clumsier model than the kind he had seen in survival locker, on the Jodrell Bank —and abruptly wished he were carrying now—but it was a pistol. Another trophy, like the strange assortment in the other room? He could not guess. But the others had been more familiar; they all have come from his own ship. He was prepared to swear that nothing like this antique had been aboard. The drone began again in his ear, as it had at five-minute intervals all along: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank calling Herrell McCray...." And louder, blaring, then fading to normal volume as the AVC circuits toned the signal down, another voice. A woman's voice, crying out in panic and fear: " Jodrell Bank! Where are you? Help!" IV Hatcher's second in command said: "He has got through the first survival test. In fact, he broke his way out! What next?" "Wait!" Hatcher ordered sharply. He was watching the new specimen and a troublesome thought had occurred to him. The new one was female and seemed to be in pain; but it was not the pain that disturbed Hatcher, it was something far more immediate to his interests. "I think," he said slowly, "that they are in contact." His assistant vibrated startlement. "I know," Hatcher said, "but watch. Do you see? He is going straight toward her." Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty, needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers. Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and death. He said, musing: "This new one, I cannot communicate with her, but I get—almost—a whisper, now and then. The first one, the male, nothing. But this female is perhaps not quite mute." "Then shall we abandon him and work with her, forgetting the first one?" Hatcher hesitated. "No," he said at last. "The male is responding well. Remember that when last this experiment was done every subject died; he is alive at least. But I am wondering. We can't quite communicate with the female—" "But?" "But I'm not sure that others can't." The woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit radio made a useful RDF set. He located her direction easily enough, shielding the tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock. McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped. He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come. There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall. When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same, and it was open. McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous care. Had he not looked at, this very spot a matter of moments before? He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening that stood there now. Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another hall—or tunnel—rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind it— Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard. It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he hadn't been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's, even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls. He knelt beside her and gently turned her face. She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no make-up; she was apparently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese. She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he moved her. He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in. His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation;
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C. To further elaborate how different Hatcher and his kind are from a human.
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Which language models do they compare against?
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### Introduction
Text understanding starts with the challenge of finding machine-understandable representation that captures the semantics of texts. Bag-of-words (BoW) and its N-gram extensions are arguably the most commonly used document representations. Despite its simplicity, BoW works surprisingly well for many tasks BIBREF0 . However, by treating words and phrases as unique and discrete symbols, BoW often fails to capture the similarity between words or phrases and also suffers from sparsity and high dimensionality. Recent works on using neural networks to learn distributed vector representations of words have gained great popularity. The well celebrated Word2Vec BIBREF1 , by learning to predict the target word using its neighboring words, maps words of similar meanings to nearby points in the continuous vector space. The surprisingly simple model has succeeded in generating high-quality word embeddings for tasks such as language modeling, text understanding and machine translation. Word2Vec naturally scales to large datasets thanks to its simple model architecture. It can be trained on billions of words per hour on a single machine. Paragraph Vectors BIBREF2 generalize the idea to learn vector representation for documents. A target word is predicted by the word embeddings of its neighbors in together with a unique document vector learned for each document. It outperforms established document representations, such as BoW and Latent Dirichlet Allocation BIBREF3 , on various text understanding tasks BIBREF4 . However, two caveats come with this approach: 1) the number of parameters grows with the size of the training corpus, which can easily go to billions; and 2) it is expensive to generate vector representations for unseen documents at test time. We propose an efficient model architecture, referred to as Document Vector through Corruption (Doc2VecC), to learn vector representations for documents. It is motivated by the observation that linear operations on the word embeddings learned by Word2Vec can sustain substantial amount of syntactic and semantic meanings of a phrase or a sentence BIBREF5 . For example, vec(“Russia”) + vec(“river”) is close to vec(“Volga River”) BIBREF6 , and vec(“king”) - vec(“man”) + vec(“women”) is close to vec(“queen”) BIBREF5 . In Doc2VecC, we represent each document as a simple average of the word embeddings of all the words in the document. In contrast to existing approaches which post-process learned word embeddings to form document representation BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , Doc2VecC enforces a meaningful document representation can be formed by averaging the word embeddings during learning. Furthermore, we include a corruption model that randomly remove words from a document during learning, a mechanism that is critical to the performance and learning speed of our algorithm. Doc2VecC has several desirable properties: 1. The model complexity of Doc2VecC is decoupled from the size of the training corpus, depending only on the size of the vocabulary; 2. The model architecture of Doc2VecC resembles that of Word2Vec, and can be trained very efficiently; 3. The new framework implicitly introduces a data-dependent regularization, which favors rare or informative words and suppresses words that are common but not discriminative; 4. Vector representation of a document can be generated by simply averaging the learned word embeddings of all the words in the document, which significantly boost test efficiency; 5. The vector representation generated by Doc2VecC matches or beats the state-of-the-art for sentiment analysis, document classification as well as semantic relatedness tasks. ### Related Works and Notations
Text representation learning has been extensively studied. Popular representations range from the simplest BoW and its term-frequency based variants BIBREF9 , language model based methods BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , topic models BIBREF13 , BIBREF3 , Denoising Autoencoders and its variants BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , and distributed vector representations BIBREF8 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF16 . Another prominent line of work includes learning task-specific document representation with deep neural networks, such as CNN BIBREF17 or LSTM based approaches BIBREF18 , BIBREF19 . In this section, we briefly introduce Word2Vec and Paragraph Vectors, the two approaches that are most similar to ours. There are two well-know model architectures used for both methods, referred to as Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBoW) and Skipgram models BIBREF1 . In this work, we focus on CBoW. Extending to Skipgram is straightforward. Here are the notations we are going to use throughout the paper: ### Method
Several works BIBREF6 , BIBREF5 showcased that syntactic and semantic regularities of phrases and sentences are reasonably well preserved by adding or subtracting word embeddings learned through Word2Vec. It prompts us to explore the option of simply representing a document as an average of word embeddings. Figure FIGREF9 illustrates the new model architecture. Similar to Word2Vec or Paragraph Vectors, Doc2VecC consists of an input layer, a projection layer as well as an output layer to predict the target word, “ceremony” in this example. The embeddings of neighboring words (“opening”, “for”, “the”) provide local context while the vector representation of the entire document (shown in grey) serves as the global context. In contrast to Paragraph Vectors, which directly learns a unique vector for each document, Doc2VecC represents each document as an average of the embeddings of words randomly sampled from the document (“performance” at position INLINEFORM0 , “praised” at position INLINEFORM1 , and “brazil” at position INLINEFORM2 ). BIBREF25 also proposed the idea of using average of word embeddings to represent the global context of a document. Different from their work, we choose to corrupt the original document by randomly removing significant portion of words, and represent the document using only the embeddings of the words remained. This corruption mechanism offers us great speedup during training as it significantly reduces the number of parameters to update in back propagation. At the same time, as we are going to detail in the next section, it introduces a special form of regularization, which brings great performance improvement. Here we describe the stochastic process we used to generate a global context at each update. The global context, which we denote as INLINEFORM0 , is generated through a unbiased mask-out/drop-out corruption, in which we randomly overwrites each dimension of the original document INLINEFORM1 with probability INLINEFORM2 . To make the corruption unbiased, we set the uncorrupted dimensions to INLINEFORM3 times its original value. Formally, DISPLAYFORM0 Doc2VecC then defines the probability of observing a target word INLINEFORM0 given its local context INLINEFORM1 as well as the global context INLINEFORM2 as DISPLAYFORM0 Here INLINEFORM0 is the length of the document. Exactly computing the probability is impractical, instead we approximate it with negative sampling BIBREF1 . DISPLAYFORM0 here INLINEFORM0 stands for a uniform distribution over the terms in the vocabulary. The two projection matrices INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 are then learned to minimize the loss: DISPLAYFORM0 Given the learned projection matrix INLINEFORM0 , we then represent each document simply as an average of the embeddings of the words in the document, DISPLAYFORM0 We are going to elaborate next why we choose to corrupt the original document with the corruption model in eq.( EQREF10 ) during learning, and how it enables us to simply use the average word embeddings as the vector representation for documents at test time. ### Corruption as data-dependent regularization
We approximate the log likelihood for each instance INLINEFORM0 in eq.( EQREF13 ) with its Taylor expansion with respect to INLINEFORM1 up to the second-order BIBREF26 , BIBREF27 , BIBREF28 . Concretely, we choose to expand at the mean of the corruption INLINEFORM2 : INLINEFORM3 where INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 are the first-order (i.e., gradient) and second-order (i.e., Hessian) of the log likelihood with respect to INLINEFORM2 . Expansion at the mean INLINEFORM3 is crucial as shown in the following steps. Let us assume that for each instance, we are going to sample the global context INLINEFORM4 infinitely many times, and thus compute the expected log likelihood with respect to the corrupted INLINEFORM5 . INLINEFORM6 The linear term disappears as INLINEFORM0 . We substitute in INLINEFORM1 for the mean INLINEFORM2 of the corrupting distribution (unbiased corruption) and the matrix INLINEFORM3 for the variance, and obtain DISPLAYFORM0 As each word in a document is corrupted independently of others, the variance matrix INLINEFORM0 is simplified to a diagonal matrix with INLINEFORM1 element equals INLINEFORM2 . As a result, we only need to compute the diagonal terms of the Hessian matrix INLINEFORM3 . The INLINEFORM0 dimension of the Hessian's diagonal evaluated at the mean INLINEFORM1 is given by INLINEFORM2 Plug the Hessian matrix and the variance matrix back into eq.( EQREF16 ), and then back to the loss defined in eq.( EQREF13 ), we can see that Doc2VecC intrinsically minimizes DISPLAYFORM0 Each INLINEFORM0 in the first term measures the log likelihood of observing the target word INLINEFORM1 given its local context INLINEFORM2 and the document vector INLINEFORM3 . As such, Doc2VecC enforces that a document vector generated by averaging word embeddings can capture the global semantics of the document, and fill in information missed in the local context. The second term here is a data-dependent regularization. The regularization on the embedding INLINEFORM4 of each word INLINEFORM5 takes the following form, INLINEFORM6 where INLINEFORM0 prescribes the confidence of predicting the target word INLINEFORM1 given its neighboring context INLINEFORM2 as well as the document vector INLINEFORM3 . Closely examining INLINEFORM0 leads to several interesting findings: 1. the regularizer penalizes more on the embeddings of common words. A word INLINEFORM1 that frequently appears across the training corpus, i.e, INLINEFORM2 often, will have a bigger regularization than a rare word; 2. on the other hand, the regularization is modulated by INLINEFORM3 , which is small if INLINEFORM4 . In other words, if INLINEFORM5 is critical to a confident prediction INLINEFORM6 when it is active, then the regularization is diminished. Similar effect was observed for dropout training for logistic regression model BIBREF27 and denoising autoencoders BIBREF28 . ### Experiments
We evaluate Doc2VecC on a sentiment analysis task, a document classification task and a semantic relatedness task, along with several document representation learning algorithms. All experiments can be reproduced using the code available at https://github.com/mchen24/iclr2017 ### Baselines
We compare against the following document representation baselines: bag-of-words (BoW); Denoising Autoencoders (DEA) BIBREF14 , a representation learned from reconstructing original document INLINEFORM0 using corrupted one INLINEFORM1 . SDAs have been shown to be the state-of-the-art for sentiment analysis tasks BIBREF29 . We used Kullback-Liebler divergence as the reconstruction error and an affine encoder. To scale up the algorithm to large vocabulary, we only take into account the non-zero elements of INLINEFORM2 in the reconstruction error and employed negative sampling for the remainings; Word2Vec BIBREF1 +IDF, a representation generated through weighted average of word vectors learned using Word2Vec; Doc2Vec BIBREF2 ; Skip-thought Vectors BIBREF16 , a generic, distributed sentence encoder that extends the Word2Vec skip-gram model to sentence level. It has been shown to produce highly generic sentence representations that apply to various natural language processing tasks. We also include RNNLM BIBREF11 , a recurrent neural network based language model in the comparison. In the semantic relatedness task, we further compare to LSTM-based methods BIBREF18 that have been reported on this dataset. ### Sentiment analysis
For sentiment analysis, we use the IMDB movie review dataset. It contains 100,000 movies reviews categorized as either positive or negative. It comes with predefined train/test split BIBREF30 : 25,000 reviews are used for training, 25,000 for testing, and the rest as unlabeled data. The two classes are balanced in the training and testing sets. We remove words that appear less than 10 times in the training set, resulting in a vocabulary of 43,375 distinct words and symbols. Setup. We test the various representation learning algorithms under two settings: one follows the same protocol proposed in BIBREF8 , where representation is learned using all the available data, including the test set; another one where the representation is learned using training and unlabeled set only. For both settings, a linear support vector machine (SVM) BIBREF31 is trained afterwards on the learned representation for classification. For Skip-thought Vectors, we used the generic model trained on a much bigger book corpus to encode the documents. A vector of 4800 dimensions, first 2400 from the uni-skip model, and the last 2400 from the bi-skip model, are generated for each document. In comparison, all the other algorithms produce a vector representation of size 100. The supervised RNN-LM is learned on the training set only. The hyper-parameters are tuned on a validation set subsampled from the training set. Accuracy. Comparing the two columns in Table TABREF20 , we can see that all the representation learning algorithms benefits from including the testing data during the representation learning phrase. Doc2VecC achieved similar or even better performance than Paragraph Vectors. Both methods outperforms the other baselines, beating the BOW representation by 15%. In comparison with Word2Vec+IDF, which applies post-processing on learned word embeddings to form document representation, Doc2VecC naturally enforces document semantics to be captured by averaged word embeddings during training. This leads to better performance. Doc2VecC reduces to Denoising Autoencoders (DEA) if the local context words are removed from the paradigm shown in Figure FIGREF9 . By including the context words, Doc2VecC allows the document vector to focus more on capturing the global context. Skip-thought vectors perform surprisingly poor on this dataset comparing to other methods. We hypothesized that it is due to the length of paragraphs in this dataset. The average length of paragraphs in the IMDB movie review dataset is INLINEFORM0 , much longer than the ones used for training and testing in the original paper, which is in the order of 10. As noted in BIBREF18 , the performance of LSTM based method (similarly, the gated RNN used in Skip-thought vectors) drops significantly with increasing paragraph length, as it is hard to preserve state over long sequences of words. Time. Table TABREF22 summarizes the time required by these algorithms to learn and generate the document representation. Word2Vec is the fastest one to train. Denoising Autoencoders and Doc2VecC second that. The number of parameters that needs to be back-propagated in each update was increased by the number of surviving words in INLINEFORM0 . We found that both models are not sensitive to the corruption rate INLINEFORM1 in the noise model. Since the learning time decreases with higher corruption rate, we used INLINEFORM2 throughout the experiments. Paragraph Vectors takes longer time to train as there are more parameters (linear to the number of document in the learning set) to learn. At test time, Word2Vec+IDF, DEA and Doc2VecC all use (weighted) averaging of word embeddings as document representation. Paragraph Vectors, on the other hand, requires another round of inference to produce the vector representation of unseen test documents. It takes Paragraph Vectors 4 minutes and 17 seconds to infer the vector representations for the 25,000 test documents, in comparison to 7 seconds for the other methods. As we did not re-train the Skip-thought vector models on this dataset, the training time reported in the table is the time it takes to generate the embeddings for the 25,000 training documents. Due to repeated high-dimensional matrix operations required for encoding long paragraphs, it takes fairly long time to generate the representations for these documents. Similarly for testing. The experiments were conducted on a desktop with Intel i7 2.2Ghz cpu. Data dependent regularization. As explained in Section SECREF15 , the corruption introduced in Doc2VecC acts as a data-dependent regularization that suppresses the embeddings of frequent but uninformative words. Here we conduct an experiment to exam the effect. We used a cutoff of 100 in this experiment. Table TABREF24 lists the words having the smallest INLINEFORM0 norm of embeddings found by different algorithms. The number inside the parenthesis after each word is the number of times this word appears in the learning set. In word2Vec or Paragraph Vectors, the least frequent words have embeddings that are close to zero, despite some of them being indicative of sentiment such as debacle, bliss and shabby. In contrast, Doc2VecC manages to clamp down the representation of words frequently appear in the training set, but are uninformative, such as symbols and stop words. Subsampling frequent words. Note that for all the numbers reported, we applied the trick of subsampling of frequent words introduced in BIBREF6 to counter the imbalance between frequent and rare words. It is critical to the performance of simple Word2Vec+AVG as the sole remedy to diminish the contribution of common words in the final document representation. If we were to remove this step, the error rate of Word2Vec+AVG will increases from INLINEFORM0 to INLINEFORM1 . Doc2VecC on the other hand naturally exerts a stronger regularization toward embeddings of words that are frequent but uninformative, therefore does not rely on this trick. ### Word analogy
In table TABREF24 , we demonstrated that the corruption model introduced in Doc2VecC dampens the embeddings of words which are common and non-discriminative (stop words). In this experiment, we are going to quantatively compare the word embeddings generated by Doc2VecC to the ones generated by Word2Vec, or Paragraph Vectors on the word analogy task introduced by BIBREF1 . The dataset contains five types of semantic questions, and nine types of syntactic questions, with a total of 8,869 semantic and 10,675 syntactic questions. The questions are answered through simple linear algebraic operations on the word embeddings generated by different methods. Please refer to the original paper for more details on the evaluation protocol. We trained the word embeddings of different methods using the English news dataset released under the ACL workshop on statistical machine translation. The training set includes close to 15M paragraphs with 355M tokens. We compare the performance of word embeddings trained by different methods with increasing embedding dimensionality as well as increasing training data. We observe similar trends as in BIBREF1 . Increasing embedding dimensionality as well as training data size improves performance of the word embeddings on this task. However, the improvement is diminishing. Doc2VecC produces word embeddings which performs significantly better than the ones generated by Word2Vec. We observe close to INLINEFORM0 uplift when we train on the full training corpus. Paragraph vectors on the other hand performs surprisingly bad on this dataset. Our hypothesis is that due to the large capacity of the model architecture, Paragraph Vectors relies mostly on the unique document vectors to capture the information in a text document instead of learning the word semantic or syntactic similarities. This also explains why the PV-DBOW BIBREF2 model architecture proposed in the original work, which completely removes word embedding layers, performs comparable to the distributed memory version. In table 5, we list a detailed comparison of the performance of word embeddings generated by Word2Vec and Doc2VecC on the 14 subtasks, when trained on the full dataset with embedding of size 100. We can see that Doc2VecC significantly outperforms the word embeddings produced by Word2Vec across almost all the subtasks. ### Document Classification
For the document classification task, we use a subset of the wikipedia dump, which contains over 300,000 wikipedia pages in 100 categories. The 100 categories includes categories under sports, entertainment, literature, and politics etc. Examples of categories include American drama films, Directorial debut films, Major League Baseball pitchers and Sydney Swans players. Body texts (the second paragraph) were extracted for each page as a document. For each category, we select 1,000 documents with unique category label, and 100 documents were used for training and 900 documents for testing. The remaining documents are used as unlabeled data. The 100 classes are balanced in the training and testing sets. For this data set, we learn the word embedding and document representation for all the algorithms using all the available data. We apply a cutoff of 10, resulting in a vocabulary of size INLINEFORM0 . Table TABREF29 summarizes the classification error of a linear SVM trained on representations of different sizes. We can see that most of the algorithms are not sensitive to the size of the vector representation. Doc2Vec benefits most from increasing representation size. Across all sizes of representations, Doc2VecC outperform the existing algorithms by a significant margin. In fact, Doc2VecC can achieve same or better performance with a much smaller representation vector. Figure FIGREF30 visualizes the document representations learned by Doc2Vec (left) and Doc2VecC (right) using t-SNE BIBREF32 . We can see that documents from the same category are nicely clustered using the representation generated by Doc2VecC. Doc2Vec, on the other hand, does not produce a clear separation between different categories, which explains its worse performance reported in Table TABREF29 . Figure FIGREF31 visualizes the vector representation generated by Doc2VecC w.r.t. coarser categorization. we manually grouped the 100 categories into 7 coarse categories, television, albums, writers, musicians, athletes, species and actors. Categories that do no belong to any of these 7 groups are not included in the figure. We can see that documents belonging to a coarser category are grouped together. This subset includes is a wide range of sports descriptions, ranging from football, crickets, baseball, and cycling etc., which explains why the athletes category are less concentrated. In the projection, we can see documents belonging to the musician category are closer to those belonging to albums category than those of athletes or species. ### Semantic relatedness
We test Doc2VecC on the SemEval 2014 Task 1: semantic relatedness SICK dataset BIBREF33 . Given two sentences, the task is to determine how closely they are semantically related. The set contains 9,927 pairs of sentences with human annotated relatedness score, ranging from 1 to 5. A score of 1 indicates that the two sentences are not related, while 5 indicates high relatedness. The set is splitted into a training set of 4,500 instances, a validation set of 500, and a test set of 4,927. We compare Doc2VecC with several winning solutions of the competition as well as several more recent techniques reported on this dataset, including bi-directional LSTM and Tree-LSTM trained from scratch on this dataset, Skip-thought vectors learned a large book corpus BIBREF34 and produced sentence embeddings of 4,800 dimensions on this dataset. We follow the same protocol as in skip-thought vectors, and train Doc2VecC on the larger book corpus dataset. Contrary to the vocabulary expansion technique used in BIBREF16 to handle out-of-vocabulary words, we extend the vocabulary of the learned model directly on the target dataset in the following way: we use the pre-trained word embedding as an initialization, and fine-tune the word and sentence representation on the SICK dataset. Notice that the fine-tuning is done for sentence representation learning only, and we did not use the relatedness score in the learning. This step brings small improvement to the performance of our algorithm. Given the sentence embeddings, we used the exact same training and testing protocol as in BIBREF16 to score each pair of sentences: with two sentence embedding INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 , we concatenate their component-wise product, INLINEFORM2 and their absolute difference, INLINEFORM3 as the feature representation. Table TABREF35 summarizes the performance of various algorithms on this dataset. Despite its simplicity, Doc2VecC significantly out-performs the winning solutions of the competition, which are heavily feature engineered toward this dataset and several baseline methods, noticeably the dependency-tree RNNs introduced in BIBREF35 , which relies on expensive dependency parsers to compose sentence vectors from word embeddings. The performance of Doc2VecC is slightly worse than the LSTM based methods or skip-thought vectors on this dataset, while it significantly outperforms skip-thought vectors on the IMDB movie review dataset ( INLINEFORM0 error rate vs INLINEFORM1 ). As we hypothesized in previous section, while Doc2VecC is better at handling longer paragraphs, LSTM-based methods are superior for relatively short sentences (of length in the order of 10s). We would like to point out that Doc2VecC is much faster to train and test comparing to skip-thought vectors. It takes less than 2 hours to learn the embeddings on the large book corpus for Doc2VecC on a desktop with Intel i7 2.2Ghz cpu, in comparison to the 2 weeks on GPU required by skip-thought vectors. ### Conclusion
We introduce a new model architecture Doc2VecC for document representation learning. It is very efficient to train and test thanks to its simple model architecture. Doc2VecC intrinsically makes sure document representation generated by averaging word embeddings capture semantics of document during learning. It also introduces a data-dependent regularization which favors informative or rare words while dampening the embeddings of common and non-discriminative words. As such, each document can be efficiently represented as a simple average of the learned word embeddings. In comparison to several existing document representation learning algorithms, Doc2VecC outperforms not only in testing efficiency, but also in the expressiveness of the generated representations. Figure 1: A new framework for learning document vectors. Table 1: Classification error of a linear classifier trained on various document representations on the Imdb dataset. Table 2: Learning time and representation generation time required by different representation learning algorithms. Table 3: Words with embeddings closest to 0 learned by different algorithms. Figure 2: Accuracy on subset of the Semantic-Syntactic Word Relationship test set. Only questions containing words from the most frequent 30k words are included in the test. Table 4: Top 1 accuracy on the 5 type of semantics and 9 types of syntactic questions. Table 5: Classification error (%) of a linear classifier trained on various document representations on the Wikipedia dataset. Figure 3: Visualization of document vectors on Wikipedia dataset using t-SNE. Figure 4: Visualization of Wikipedia Doc2VecC vectors using t-SNE. Table 6: Test set results on the SICK semantic relatedness task. The first group of results are from the submission to the 2014 SemEval competition; the second group includes several baseline methods reported in (Tai et al., 2015); the third group are methods based on LSTM reported in (Tai et al., 2015) as well as the skip-thought vectors (Kiros et al., 2015).
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RNNLM BIBREF11
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In Sara's version of the Chevrolet ad, what is implied as the thing that makes America great?
A. freedom of speech
B. freedom of religion
C. diverse inhabitants
D. affordable vehicles
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Divided we stand Sara lets the Lyft park itself in the drive, lets out a sigh, and tweets wish me luck plus some emojis before slipping her phone into a hoody pocket. Curtains twitch, and before she can get her bag out of the back Mom is there, right there next to her, their hands touching on the handle as they compete for control. "It's OK Mom, I got it." "You should have let us come pick you up." "It's fine, there was no need. I didn't want to put any-" "But you shouldn't be wasting money, not with how much rent you pay and-" Jesus. Not this already. "Mom. I can afford a cab ride. I'm not that much of a failure." Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. "I'm sorry honey." She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. "Now, don't I get a hug?" Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. "Mom, just leave that and I'll…" "Your father's in the front room," she says, just before she disappears from view. "Go say hi." For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself. He's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. "Hey Dad." His head jerks to look at her. "Hey! When did you get here?" He starts to push himself up. "Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really." She takes a seat on the couch. "I just got here, like two minutes ago." "Good flight?" "Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always." He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? "I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?" "Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you." "Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?" "No Dad, of course not." The war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens. "So you just got a cab?" "Yeah." "How much did that cost?" "Not much. Really. I can afford-" "Cabs are expensive. You shouldn't be wasting your money." "It wasn't expensive. It wasn't a cab, it was a Lyft." "One of those driverless things?" "Yeah." Ad break. An elderly couple ride a tandem bicycle through a park, laughing and smiling in Instagram-perfect sunshine, as a calm, relaxing voice lists the potentially lethal side effects of a diabetes drug. Dad shakes his head. "I don't know how you can use those things. I don't trust them." "Dad, they're perfectly safe." "That's not what I mean. They're stealing people's jobs." There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. "But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?" "You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?" "Nope." "Well let me tell you," He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. "Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids." "Well I'm sure they'll be fine." She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. "They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?" "I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-" "Ed!" Mom had appeared in the doorway. "Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please." "Sheryl-" "No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?" Awkward pause. "Fine." "Sorry Mom." Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is. It had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner. And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice. So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads. Dad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is Fox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil. In her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax. Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside. "How's work, honey?" Mom asks. "Yeah, going OK." Sara works for a non-profit in Brooklyn that helps big organisations to transition to renewable energy. The pay is lousy but it feels important. "We just got the last few schools in the city to agree to put solar panels on their roofs. Big deal for us. I've been working on them for the last two years." Mom says nothing, just looks down at her plate. Dad finishes chewing his mouthful, swallows, wipes his beard with a napkin. Sighs, barely controlled anger simmering behind his face. "Solar panels cause cancer." Sara laughs, covering her mouth as she nearly chokes on chewed food. "What? No they don't Dad." "They do. The material they use to coat them reacts to sunlight, and produces an airborne carcinogen. It's based on a particular kind of rare earth. It's a bit like teflon. The Chinese have known about this for decades but have kept it covered up, because they-" "Dad, no. Just no. Trust me." "-because they are the world's largest manufacturers of solar panels. But the research has been done. The scientific evidence is out there. Look it up." "Look it up?" Sara shakes her head, not knowing where to even start. "Dad, who is telling you this stuff?" "No one is telling me it, Sara. I read it. It's in the news. I mean, really, I'm surprised you've not seen it. It was all over Facebook." "Maybe on yours, but it's not all over my Facebook." She doesn't have the heart to tell him she muted him six months ago. "Well, I don't read the news and I don't know any science," says Mom, "But I do know this: after they opened that solar farm up near Mary, within just a few years her and two of her neighbours had cancer. I mean I don't know anything for sure honey, but given the risk are you sure it's safe to be putting these panels on top of schools?" "There's no risk, Mom. None at all. Dad, I wish you'd stop believing everything you see on Facebook." "Well, maybe you should read things yourself before passing judgement on them." He pushes himself up from his seat, steps away from the table. Sara sighs, thinking she's upset him that much that he's actually abandoning his dinner, but he stops to grab something off a nearby shelf. His iPad. He heads back and takes his seat again. Oh, here we fucking go she thinks to herself. He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. "Here. Read." Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. "Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!" "No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey" says Mom. "What about them?" "Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid." "They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate advertising now? Do you just hate everything about America?" Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. "No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game." After dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks. "You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things." "What things? Solar panel cancer?" "Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars." "We're all worried about all that, Mom." "He's worried about his health. I'm worried about his health. Probably more than he is." Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. "Is he OK?" "I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance." "I had no idea-" "Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity." She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. "This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara." "I know. I'm sorry I-" "And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it." Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. "I didn't realise. I'm sorry." Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. "It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please." It's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts. Dawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust. Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk. Cut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it. Cut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens. Voiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep. Cut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert. Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED. "Fuck this," says Sara, getting up from her seat. "Sara!" says Mom. "No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda." She storms out of the room. "Sara!" Mom makes to get up. "No, just leave her," says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. "Just let her go." Out in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter. Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing. omg im crying holy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji that was sooooo beautiful who knew chevrolet were so woke i can't believe they did that, so amazing Hang on, are they taking about the same ad? Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle. Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED. Cut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles. A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what. Cut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn. A large, child's rendition of the American flag. Underneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream' Text flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN Cut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away. Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep. Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here. The jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust. Fade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black. 'We know what really makes America great' Sara finds herself in the front room, sobbing. "Honey?" Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. "Sara?" "Did you - did you watch it?" "The Chevrolet ad?" "Yeah." "Yeah, we did." Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. "It was… it was very moving." She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. "I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-" "It's OK, honey. It really is." "No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-" 'Well, now, c'mon-" "No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore." She lifts her head to look up at him. "But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together." He grins back at her. "Like Super Bowl ads?" She laughs. "I guess. But you know what I mean, really." "I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country." He gestures to the couch next to him. "Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together." She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. "Sure. Let me just go freshen up first." "Of course honey." Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. "Well." "Well indeed." "What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time." "I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?" Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. "I ask myself that question every day." Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind. Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED. Cut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside. Cut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder. Suddenly, one of the party looks up, shouts something in Spanish. They all go to grab their guns. But it's too late. From three different directions, three different Chevrolet jeeps appear, screeching to a halt, kicking up dust. From them jump Border Patrol agents and Minutemen militia, guns drawn and ready. The gang of men don't even put up a fight. They know they're surrounded, they drop their weapons and pathetically raise their hands. All except one. The guy with the bag full of drugs. He's got nothing to lose. He reaches for his rifle. Cut to: Border Patrol agents, opening fire. Text flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. THREAT NEUTRALISED. Cut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away. Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep. Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong. The jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust. Fade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black. 'We know what really makes America great' Dad wipes another team from his eye. "I think we're going to be OK," he says to himself. "I think we're going to be just fine." This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.
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C. diverse inhabitants
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How big is the dataset used?
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### Introduction
Video captioning has drawn more attention and shown promising results recently. To translate content-rich video into human language is a extremely complex task, which should not only extract abundant multi-modal information from video but also cross the semantic gap to generate accurate and fluent language. Thanks to the recent developments of useful deep learning frameworks, such as LSTM BIBREF1 networks, as well as of machine translation techniques such as BIBREF2, the dominant approach in video captioning is currently based on sequence learning using an encoder-decoder framework. In encoding phase, the main task is to well represent given videos general including appearance, motion, audio even speech information. There are many pretrained models can be used to extract above features. In this report, we illustrate our system how to represent videos in detail and use video topic as a global semantic clue to guide better alignment. In decoding phase, conventional models follow encoder-decoder framework almost predict the next word conditioned on context information and the previous word. Furthermore, the previous word should be ground truth word at training step but model generated word at inference. As a result, the previous word at training and inference are drawn from different distributions, namely, from the data distribution as opposed to the model distribution. This discrepancy, called exposure bias BIBREF3 leads to a gap between training and inference. Meanwhile, most models apply cross-entropy loss as their optimization objective, but typically evaluate at inference using discrete and non-differentiable NLP metrics. For above reasons, we apply multi-stage training strategy to train our model to avoid exposure bias problem and directly optimize metrics for the task at hand. Experiments prove that our strategy can obtain steady and significant improvement during training and testing time. ### Multi-modal Video Representations
We extract the video representations from multiple clues including appearance, motion and audio. We also use video topic to provide global information for specific videos. Given one video, we uniformly extract 28 frames as key frames, then select 16 frames around the keyframes as segments. As for those videos whose number of frame less than 28, above selection will be looped. Appearance feature extracted from each frames can reflect global information of these key frames. To extract appearance-based representations from videos, we apply ResNet-152 pretrained on ImageNet dataset. We also attempt some deeper and wider networks InceptionResNet, they barely have improvement for the final result. In order to model the motion information of each segments in video, we use I3D pretrained on Kinetics-600 dataset, which exactly has the same data distribution with VATEX dataset. As for audio feature, though use it alone can not get very good result for video captioning, it can be seen as powerful additional feature, which can provide more discriminative information for some similar content videos. We build audio feature extractor based on VGGish network, which is a variant of the VGG network described in BIBREF4. First, we extract MEL-spectrogram patches for each of the input audio. The sample rate of the audio is fixed at 16 KHz. The STFT window length is 25 ms and top length is 10 ms. The number of Mel filters is 64. We uniformly sample 28 patches for computing MEL-spectrogram. We then transfer learn from an existing VGGish model which is pretrained on the Audioset dataset BIBREF5. Specifically, we fine-tune this pretrained VGGish model on VATEX training set for 10 epochs. The input size is $ 96\times 64 $ for log MEL-spectrogram audio inputs. The last group of convolutional and maxpooling layers are replaced by an embedding layer on the Mel features of size 128. We take this compact embedding layer’s output as our audio feature. In the end, we get $ 28\times 2048 $ appearance features, $ 28\times 1024 $ motion features and $ 28\times 128 $ audio features for each video. Note that each multi-modal feature should be aligned at the same frame to ensure temporal consistency. Inspired by the Wang's work BIBREF6, we found that topic plays an essential role for video captioning. From intuitive understanding, topic can provide global information for specific videos. Topic also can be seen as a cluster, video of the same class always has the similar semantic attributes. We conduct topic-embedding and label-embedding following the same method reported by Wang BIBREF6. ### Multi-stage Training Strategy
In the fist stage, we also apply teacher-forced method to directly optimize the cross-entropy loss. It is necessary to warm-up model during this step. In the second step, we utilize word-level oracle method BIBREF7 to replace conventional scheduled sampling method BIBREF8. This method mainly consists of two steps: oracle word selection and sampling with decay. In practice, by introducing the Gumbel-Max technique we can acquire more robust word-level oracles, which provides a simple and efficient way to sample from a categorical distribution. What's more, the sampling curve is smoother than scheduled sampling method due to its specially designed sampling function. This step can obviously alleviate the problem of overfitting and improve the exploration ability of model. It's time to go into the third step when the curve of CIDEr BIBREF9 metric is no longer growing for 3 epochs. To avoid exposure bias problem, self-critical reinforcement algorithm BIBREF10 directly optimizes metrics of captioning task. In this work, CIDEr BIBREF9 and BLEU BIBREF11 are equally optimized after the whole sentence generating. This step allow us to more effectively train on non-differentiable metrics, and leads to significant improvements in captioning performance on VATEX. ### Experiments ::: Dataset
We utilize the VATEX dataset for video captioning, which contains over 41,250 videos and 825,000 captions in both English and Chinese. Among the captions, there are over 206,000 English-Chinese parallel translation pairs. It covers 600 human activities and a variety of video content. Each video is paired with 10 English and 10 Chinese diverse captions. We follow the official split with 25,991 videos for training, 3,000 videos for validation and 6,000 public test videos for final testing. ### Experiments ::: System
The overall video captioning framework is illustrated in Figure FIGREF1. In general, it is composed of two components: 1) Multi-modal video encoder; 2) Top-down BIBREF12 based decoder. In decoding phase, because of the large distribution difference between vision and audio data, we leverage two one-layer LSTM-based architectures to process these two parts of data separately, namely Vision-LSTM and Audio-LSTM. As for vision processing, embedded appearance and motion features are concatenated and then input to Vision-LSTM of 512-D, embedded audio features are directly fed into Audio-LSTM of 128-D. In this way, we can obtain context features with sequential information. During the decoding phase, a top-down based captioning architecture is to be adopted. Attention-LSTM using global video topic and last generated word to guide temporal attention modules to select the most relevant vision and audio regions. Specifically, there are two independent attention modules applying soft-attention to score corresponding regions with topic guide. Meanwhile, Language-LSTM assembles both processed vision and audio context information to generate next word. ### Experiments ::: Evaluations of Video Captioning System
For this task, four common metrics including BLEU-4, METEOR, CIDEr and ROUGE-L are evaluated. In this subsection, we mainly show steady and significant improvement with different training stage as shown in Table TABREF2. ### Conclusion
In this report, we explain our designed video captioning system in general. Multi-modal information including appearance, motion and audio are extracted to better represent videos. In order to tackle exposure bias and overfitting problem, we utilize several multi-stage training strategies to train our model. Both Chinese and English tracks are all following the above methods. The experiment proves that our methods can obtain steady and significant captioning performance. Figure 1. Overview of the proposes Video Captioning framework. Vision LSTM and Audio LSTM are used to selectively merge temporal information of vision features and audio features. And two independent Attention modules can attend to vision and audio with decoding step. Table 1. Captioning performance of different training strategies on VATEX public test set
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over 41,250 videos and 825,000 captions in both English and Chinese., over 206,000 English-Chinese parallel translation pairs
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Of the following options, which set of traits best describes Tremaine?
A. Athletic, attractive, and quiet
B. Smart, kind, and determined
C. Charismatic, dumb, and athletic
D. Unreasonable, attractive, and bold
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THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER BY KEITH LAUMER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He was as ancient as time—and as strange as his own frightful battle against incredible odds! I In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder, crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection. "Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the wire as the scrambler went into operation. "Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest of the afternoon." "I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing me." "Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got some answers to go with the questions?" "I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—" "Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all. Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let me do it my way." "I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home area—" "You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—" "You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!" Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the opposite corner of his mouth. "Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of authority. Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while, though." The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What brings you back to the boondocks?" "Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess." In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more." Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment." "It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings. "I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction pattern—" "Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your word for it." "The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's near here. Now, have you got any ideas?" "That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord intended." "I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had something ..." "Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..." "Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a hundred years old when I was kid." "Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river." "Well, what about him?" "Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little touched in the head." "There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me. I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and sometimes he gave us apples." "I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right. But we never did know where he came from." "How long's he lived here in Elsby?" "Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway." "Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened then?" "You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all over again." "I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the other drug store...." "Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it on fire." "What was the idea of that?" "Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day they'll make jail age." "Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any dealings to speak of with anybody here in town." "Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll." Tremaine shook his head. "Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper. Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to think she was some kind of princess...." "What about her and Bram? A romance?" Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling, frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town, practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram in front of her." Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess. Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights." "What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of detector you were going to set up?" "I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up in my room over at the hotel." "When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?" "After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—" "Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front teeth." II Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor, a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said "MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in. A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at Tremaine. "We're closed," he said. "I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the Bram property changed hands last." The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram? He dead?" "Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place." The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to sell, mister, if that's what you want to know." "I want to know when he bought." The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said. Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw. A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly. "See what I can do," he said. It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a line written in faded ink: "May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)" "Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine. "That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?" "No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to the door. "What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of trouble?" "No. No trouble." The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one," he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age." "I guess you're right." The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place." "I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?" "Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look. "There's one story that's not superstition...." Tremaine waited. "You—uh—paying anything for information?" "Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob. The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this. Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup." Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint. "You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The older are there in the shelves." "I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far." The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle these old papers carefully." "I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed through it, muttering. "What date was it you wanted?" "Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth." The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table, adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you." "I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech. Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly. On page four, under a column headed County Notes he saw the name Bram: Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land, north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past months. "May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?" The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught his eye: A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along the river. The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now. You'll have to come back tomorrow." Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel. A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped short, stared after the car. "Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply. Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed north after the police car. Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back. The door opened. A tall figure stepped out. "What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled. "What's the matter? Run out of signal?" "What's it to you, mister?" "Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?" "We could be." "Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine." "Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike before handing it to Tremaine. The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef, Tremaine?" "I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave the word, Grammond." "That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out on me." "It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle." Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it apart brick by brick in the time—" "That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll go underground." "You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use for the spade work, that it?" "Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed." "Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—" "The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out." Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington." Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call. "It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred. Tell him if he queers this—" "I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—" "Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia moonshiners." "Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation." "Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat and left the hotel. He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned face looked at him coolly. "Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—" "There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto. Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine thought, startled. "I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said. "Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a straight chair across the room from him. "You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see that you've amounted to something." "Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid." "You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man." "I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability." "Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll. "I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your discretion?" "Of course." "How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?" Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be used against him?" "There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs to be in the national interest." "I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means, James. I distrust these glib phrases." "I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him." "Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the year." "What does he do for a living?" "I have no idea." "Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated piece of country? What's his story?" "I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story." "You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his last?" "That is his only name. Just ... Bram." "You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—" A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away impatiently. "I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me." Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...." Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him." She paused. Tremaine waited. "Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale. He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in a cave beneath his house." Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me there alone. "I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried to speak to me but I would not listen. "He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home. He never called again." "This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?" Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I am, James." "May I see it?" She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?" Miss Carroll nodded. "There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...." "I'd be grateful for any lead." "Bram fears the thunder." III As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and asked: "Any luck, Jimmy?" Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a dud, I'm afraid." "Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?" "Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark." As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand from what you were saying to me." "I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out." "Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring working—" "We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ... and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched." The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he said. "You suppose those fool boys...?" He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a gun?" "In the car." "Better get it." Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket, rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate lay on the oilcloth-covered table. "This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week." "Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the distance. "I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess." A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?" Tremaine said. Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor. "That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains. "Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen." "It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor. It ended suddenly near the wall. "What do you make of it. Jimmy?" A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks," he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing tricks?" "I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few questions." At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop of greased hair. "Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you." "I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong with burnin out a Commie, is there?" "Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that out, Hull?" "He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we heard...." "What did you hear?" "They're lookin for the spies." "Who's looking for spies?" "Cops." "Who says so?" The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said. "Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all night." "They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around hers." "And you mentioned Bram?" The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out that way, ain't he?" "Anything else?" The boy looked at his feet.
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B. Smart, kind, and determined
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What supports the claim that injected CNN into recurent units will enhance ability of the model to catch local context and reduce ambiguities?
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### Introduction
Neural network based approaches have become popular frameworks in many machine learning research fields, showing its advantages over traditional methods. In NLP tasks, two types of neural networks are widely used: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). RNNs are powerful models in various NLP tasks, such as machine translation BIBREF0, sentiment classification BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, reading comprehension BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11, etc. The recurrent neural networks can flexibly model different lengths of sequences into a fixed representation. There are two main implementations of RNN: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) BIBREF12 and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) BIBREF0, which solve the gradient vanishing problems in vanilla RNNs. Compared to RNN, the CNN model also shows competitive performances in some tasks, such as text classification BIBREF13, etc. However, different from RNN, CNN sets a pre-defined convolutional kernel to “summarize” a fixed window of adjacent elements into blended representations, showing its ability of modeling local context. As both global and local information is important in most of NLP tasks BIBREF14, in this paper, we propose a novel recurrent unit, called Contextual Recurrent Unit (CRU). The proposed CRU model adopts advantages of RNN and CNN, where CNN is good at modeling local context, and RNN is superior in capturing long-term dependencies. We propose three variants of our CRU model: shallow fusion, deep fusion and deep-enhanced fusion. To verify the effectiveness of our CRU model, we utilize it into two different NLP tasks: sentiment classification and reading comprehension, where the former is sentence-level modeling, and the latter is document-level modeling. In the sentiment classification task, we build a standard neural network and replace the recurrent unit by our CRU model. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we also tested our CRU in reading comprehension tasks with a strengthened baseline system originated from Attention-over-Attention Reader (AoA Reader) BIBREF10. Experimental results on public datasets show that our CRU model could substantially outperform various systems by a large margin, and set up new state-of-the-art performances on related datasets. The main contributions of our work are listed as follows. [leftmargin=*] We propose a novel neural recurrent unit called Contextual Recurrent Unit (CRU), which effectively incorporate the advantage of CNN and RNN. Different from previous works, our CRU model shows its excellent flexibility as GRU and provides better performance. The CRU model is applied to both sentence-level and document-level modeling tasks and gives state-of-the-art performances. The CRU could also give substantial improvements in cloze-style reading comprehension task when the baseline system is strengthened by incorporating additional features which will enrich the representations of unknown words and make the texts more readable to the machine. ### Related Works
Gated recurrent unit (GRU) has been proposed in the scenario of neural machine translations BIBREF0. It has been shown that the GRU has comparable performance in some tasks compared to the LSTM. Another advantage of GRU is that it has a simpler neural architecture than LSTM, showing a much efficient computation. However, convolutional neural network (CNN) is not as popular as RNNs in NLP tasks, as the texts are formed temporally. But in some studies, CNN shows competitive performance to the RNN models, such as text classification BIBREF13. Various efforts have been made on combining CNN and RNN. BIBREF3 proposed an architecture that combines CNN and GRU model with pre-trained word embeddings by word2vec. BIBREF5 proposed to combine asymmetric convolution neural network with the bidirectional LSTM network. BIBREF4 presented Dependency Sensitive CNN, which hierarchically construct text by using LSTMs and extracting features with convolution operations subsequently. BIBREF15 propose to make use of dependency relations information in the shortest dependency path (SDP) by combining CNN and two-channel LSTM units. BIBREF16 build a neural network for dialogue topic tracking where the CNN used to account for semantics at individual utterance and RNN for modeling conversational contexts along multiple turns in history. The difference between our CRU model and previous works can be concluded as follows. [leftmargin=*] Our CRU model could adaptively control the amount of information that flows into different gates, which was not studied in previous works. Also, the CRU does not introduce a pooling operation, as opposed to other works, such as CNN-GRU BIBREF3. Our motivation is to provide flexibility as the original GRU, while the pooling operation breaks this law (the output length is changed), and it is unable to do exact word-level attention over the output. However, in our CRU model, the output length is the same as the input's and can be easily applied to various tasks where the GRU used to. We also observed that by only using CNN to conclude contextual information is not strong enough. So we incorporate the original word embeddings to form a "word + context" representation for enhancement. ### Our approach
In this section, we will give a detailed introduction to our CRU model. Firstly, we will give a brief introduction to GRU BIBREF0 as preliminaries, and then three variants of our CRU model will be illustrated. ### Our approach ::: Gated Recurrent Unit
Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is a type of recurrent unit that models sequential data BIBREF0, which is similar to LSTM but is much simpler and computationally effective than the latter one. We will briefly introduce the formulation of GRU. Given a sequence $x = \lbrace x_1, x_2, ..., x_n\rbrace $, GRU will process the data in the following ways. For simplicity, the bias term is omitted in the following equations. where $z_t$ is the update gate, $r_t$ is the reset gate, and non-linear function $\sigma $ is often chosen as $sigmoid$ function. In many NLP tasks, we often use a bi-directional GRU, which takes both forward and backward information into account. ### Our approach ::: Contextual Recurrent Unit
By only modeling word-level representation may have drawbacks in representing the word that has different meanings when the context varies. Here is an example that shows this problem. There are many fan mails in the mailbox. There are many fan makers in the factory. As we can see that, though two sentences share the same beginning before the word fan, the meanings of the word fan itself are totally different when we meet the following word mails and makers. The first fan means “a person that has strong interests in a person or thing", and the second one means “a machine with rotating blades for ventilation". However, the embedding of word fan does not discriminate according to the context. Also, as two sentences have the same beginning, when we apply a recurrent operation (such as GRU) till the word fan, the output of GRU does not change, though they have entirely different meanings when we see the following words. To enrich the word representation with local contextual information and diminishing the word ambiguities, we propose a model as an extension to the GRU, called Contextual Recurrent Unit (CRU). In this model, we take full advantage of the convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network, where the former is good at modeling local information, and the latter is capable of capturing long-term dependencies. Moreover, in the experiment part, we will also show that our bidirectional CRU could also significantly outperform the bidirectional GRU model. In this paper, we propose three different types of CRU models: shallow fusion, deep fusion and deep-enhanced fusion, from the most fundamental one to the most expressive one. We will describe these models in detail in the following sections. ### Our approach ::: Contextual Recurrent Unit ::: Shallow Fusion
The most simple one is to directly apply a CNN layer after the embedding layer to obtain blended contextual representations. Then a GRU layer is applied afterward. We call this model as shallow fusion, because the CNN and RNN are applied linearly without changing inner architectures of both. Formally, when given a sequential data $x = \lbrace x_1, x_2, ..., x_n\rbrace $, a shallow fusion of CRU can be illustrated as follows. We first transform word $x_t$ into word embeddings through an embedding matrix $W_e$. Then a convolutional operation $\phi $ is applied to the context of $e_t$, denoted as $\widetilde{e_t}$, to obtain contextual representations. Finally, the contextual representation $c_t$ is fed into GRU units. Following BIBREF13, we apply embedding-wise convolution operation, which is commonly used in natural language processing tasks. Let $e_{i:j} \in \mathbb {R}^{\mathcal {\\}j*d}$ denote the concatenation of $j-i+1$ consecutive $d$-dimensional word embeddings. The embedding-wise convolution is to apply a convolution filter w $\in \mathbb {R}^{\mathcal {\\}k*d}$ to a window of $k$ word embeddings to generate a new feature, i.e., summarizing a local context of $k$ words. This can be formulated as where $f$ is a non-linear function and $b$ is the bias. By applying the convolutional filter to all possible windows in the sentence, a feature map $c$ will be generated. In this paper, we apply a same-length convolution (length of the sentence does not change), i.e. $c \in \mathbb {R}^{\mathcal {\\}n*1}$. Then we apply $d$ filters with the same window size to obtain multiple feature maps. So the final output of CNN has the shape of $C \in \mathbb {R}^{\mathcal {\\}n*d}$, which is exactly the same size as $n$ word embeddings, which enables us to do exact word-level attention in various tasks. ### Our approach ::: Contextual Recurrent Unit ::: Deep Fusion
The contextual information that flows into the update gate and reset gate of GRU is identical in shallow fusion. In order to let the model adaptively control the amount of information that flows into these gates, we can embed CNN into GRU in a deep manner. We can rewrite the Equation 1 to 3 of GRU as follows. where $\phi _z, \phi _r, \phi $ are three different CNN layers, i.e., the weights are not shared. When the weights share across these CNNs, the deep fusion will be degraded to shallow fusion. ### Our approach ::: Contextual Recurrent Unit ::: Deep-Enhanced Fusion
In shallow fusion and deep fusion, we used the convolutional operation to summarize the context. However, one drawback of them is that the original word embedding might be blurred by blending the words around it, i.e., applying the convolutional operation on its context. For better modeling the original word and its context, we enhanced the deep fusion model with original word embedding information, with an intuition of “enriching word representation with contextual information while preserving its basic meaning”. Figure FIGREF17 illustrates our motivations. Formally, the Equation 9 to 11 can be further rewritten into where we add original word embedding $e_t$ after the CNN operation, to “enhance” the original word information while not losing the contextual information that has learned from CNNs. ### Applications
The proposed CRU model is a general neural recurrent unit, so we could apply it to various NLP tasks. As we wonder whether the CRU model could give improvements in both sentence-level modeling and document-level modeling tasks, in this paper, we applied the CRU model to two NLP tasks: sentiment classification and cloze-style reading comprehension. In the sentiment classification task, we build a simple neural model and applied our CRU. In the cloze-style reading comprehension task, we first present some modifications to a recent reading comprehension model, called AoA Reader BIBREF10, and then replace the GRU part by our CRU model to see if our model could give substantial improvements over strong baselines. ### Applications ::: Sentiment Classification
In the sentiment classification task, we aim to classify movie reviews, where one movie review will be classified into the positive/negative or subjective/objective category. A general neural network architecture for this task is depicted in Figure FIGREF20. First, the movie review is transformed into word embeddings. And then, a sequence modeling module is applied, in which we can adopt LSTM, GRU, or our CRU, to capture the inner relations of the text. In this paper, we adopt bidirectional recurrent units for modeling sentences, and then the final hidden outputs are concatenated. After that, a fully connected layer will be added after sequence modeling. Finally, the binary decision is made through a single $sigmoid$ unit. As shown, we employed a straightforward neural architecture to this task, as we purely want to compare our CRU model against other sequential models. The detailed experimental result of sentiment classification will be given in the next section. ### Applications ::: Reading Comprehension
Besides the sentiment classification task, we also tried our CRU model in cloze-style reading comprehension, which is a much complicated task. In this paper, we strengthened the recent AoA Reader BIBREF10 and applied our CRU model to see if we could obtain substantial improvements when the baseline is strengthened. ### Applications ::: Reading Comprehension ::: Task Description
The cloze-style reading comprehension is a fundamental task that explores relations between the document and the query. Formally, a general cloze-style query can be illustrated as a triple $\langle {\mathcal {D}}, {\mathcal {Q}}, {\mathcal {A}} \rangle $, where $\mathcal {D}$ is the document, $\mathcal {Q}$ is the query and the answer $\mathcal {A}$. Note that the answer is a single word in the document, which requires us to exploit the relationship between the document and query. ### Applications ::: Reading Comprehension ::: Modified AoA Reader
In this section, we briefly introduce the original AoA Reader BIBREF10, and illustrate our modifications. When a cloze-style training triple $\langle \mathcal {D}, \mathcal {Q}, \mathcal {A} \rangle $ is given, the Modified AoA Reader will be constructed in the following steps. First, the document and query will be transformed into continuous representations with the embedding layer and recurrent layer. The recurrent layer can be the simple RNN, GRU, LSTM, or our CRU model. To further strengthen the representation power, we show a simple modification in the embedding layer, where we found strong empirical results in performance. The main idea is to utilize additional sparse features of the word and add (concatenate) these features to the word embeddings to enrich the word representations. The additional features have shown effective in various models BIBREF7, BIBREF17, BIBREF11. In this paper, we adopt two additional features in document word embeddings (no features applied to the query side). $\bullet $ Document word frequency: Calculate each document word frequency. This helps the model to pay more attention to the important (more mentioned) part of the document. $\bullet $ Count of query word: Count the number of each document word appeared in the query. For example, if a document word appears three times in the query, then the feature value will be 3. We empirically find that instead of using binary features (appear=1, otherwise=0) BIBREF17, indicating the count of the word provides more information, suggesting that the more a word occurs in the query, the less possible the answer it will be. We replace the Equation 16 with the following formulation (query side is not changed), where $freq(x)$ and $CoQ(x)$ are the features that introduced above. Other parts of the model remain the same as the original AoA Reader. For simplicity, we will omit this part, and the detailed illustrations can be found in BIBREF10. ### Experiments: Sentiment Classification ::: Experimental Setups
In the sentiment classification task, we tried our model on the following public datasets. [leftmargin=*] MR Movie reviews with one sentence each. Each review is classified into positive or negative BIBREF18. IMDB Movie reviews from IMDB website, where each movie review is labeled with binary classes, either positive or negative BIBREF19. Note that each movie review may contain several sentences. SUBJ$^1$ Movie review labeled with subjective or objective BIBREF20. The statistics and hyper-parameter settings of these datasets are listed in Table TABREF33. As these datasets are quite small and overfit easily, we employed $l_2$-regularization of 0.0001 to the embedding layer in all datasets. Also, we applied dropout BIBREF21 to the output of the embedding layer and fully connected layer. The fully connected layer has a dimension of 1024. In the MR and SUBJ, the embedding layer is initialized with 200-dimensional GloVe embeddings (trained on 840B token) BIBREF22 and fine-tuned during the training process. In the IMDB condition, the vocabulary is truncated by descending word frequency order. We adopt batched training strategy of 32 samples with ADAM optimizer BIBREF23, and clipped gradient to 5 BIBREF24. Unless indicated, the convolutional filter length is set to 3, and ReLU for the non-linear function of CNN in all experiments. We use 10-fold cross-validation (CV) in the dataset that has no train/valid/test division. ### Experiments: Sentiment Classification ::: Results
The experimental results are shown in Table TABREF35. As we mentioned before, all RNNs in these models are bi-directional, because we wonder if our bi-CRU could still give substantial improvements over bi-GRU which could capture both history and future information. As we can see that, all variants of our CRU model could give substantial improvements over the traditional GRU model, where a maximum gain of 2.7%, 1.0%, and 1.9% can be observed in three datasets, respectively. We also found that though we adopt a straightforward classification model, our CRU model could outperform the state-of-the-art systems by 0.6%, 0.7%, and 0.8% gains respectively, which demonstrate its effectiveness. By employing more sophisticated architecture or introducing task-specific features, we think there is still much room for further improvements, which is beyond the scope of this paper. When comparing three variants of the CRU model, as we expected, the CRU with deep-enhanced fusion performs best among them. This demonstrates that by incorporating contextual representations with original word embedding could enhance the representation power. Also, we noticed that when we tried a larger window size of the convolutional filter, i.e., 5 in this experiment, does not give a rise in the performance. We plot the trends of MR test set accuracy with the increasing convolutional filter length, as shown in Figure FIGREF36. As we can see that, using a smaller convolutional filter does not provide much contextual information, thus giving a lower accuracy. On the contrary, the larger filters generally outperform the lower ones, but not always. One possible reason for this is that when the filter becomes larger, the amortized contextual information is less than a smaller filter, and make it harder for the model to learn the contextual information. However, we think the proper size of the convolutional filter may vary task by task. Some tasks that require long-span contextual information may benefit from a larger filter. We also compared our CRU model with related works that combine CNN and RNN BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5. From the results, we can see that our CRU model significantly outperforms previous works, which demonstrates that by employing deep fusion and enhancing the contextual representations with original embeddings could substantially improve the power of word representations. On another aspect, we plot the trends of IMDB test set accuracy during the training process, as depicted in Figure FIGREF37. As we can see that, after iterating six epochs of training data, all variants of CRU models show faster convergence speed and smaller performance fluctuation than the traditional GRU model, which demonstrates that the proposed CRU model has better training stability. ### Experiments: Reading Comprehension ::: Experimental Setups
We also tested our CRU model in the cloze-style reading comprehension task. We carried out experiments on the public datasets: CBT NE/CN BIBREF25. The CRU model used in these experiments is the deep-enhanced type with the convolutional filter length of 3. In the re-ranking step, we also utilized three features: Global LM, Local LM, Word-class LM, as proposed by BIBREF10, and all LMs are 8-gram trained by SRILM toolkit BIBREF27. For other settings, such as hyperparameters, initializations, etc., we closely follow the experimental setups as BIBREF10 to make the experiments more comparable. ### Experiments: Reading Comprehension ::: Results
The overall experimental results are given in Table TABREF38. As we can see that our proposed models can substantially outperform various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin. [leftmargin=*] Overall, our final model (M-AoA Reader + CRU + Re-ranking) could give significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art systems by 2.1% and 1.4% in test sets, while re-ranking and ensemble bring further improvements. When comparing M-AoA Reader to the original AoA Reader, 1.8% and 0.4% improvements can be observed, suggesting that by incorporating additional features into embedding can enrich the power of word representation. Incorporating more additional features in the word embeddings would have another boost in the results, but we leave this in future work. Replacing GRU with our CRU could significantly improve the performance, where 1.6% and 1.5% gains can be obtained when compared to M-AoA Reader. This demonstrates that incorporating contextual information when modeling the sentence could enrich the representations. Also, when modeling an unknown word, except for its randomly initialized word embedding, the contextual information could give a possible guess of the unknown word, making the text more readable to the neural networks. The re-ranking strategy is an effective approach in this task. We observed that the gains in the common noun category are significantly greater than the named entity. One possible reason is that the language model is much beneficial to CN than NE, because it is much more likely to meet a new named entity that is not covered in the training data than the common noun. ### Qualitative Analysis
In this section, we will give a qualitative analysis on our proposed CRU model in the sentiment classification task. We focus on two categories of the movie reviews, which is quite harder for the model to judge the correct sentiment. The first one is the movie review that contains negation terms, such as “not”. The second type is the one contains sentiment transition, such as “clever but not compelling”. We manually select 50 samples of each category in the MR dataset, forming a total of 100 samples to see if our CRU model is superior in handling these movie reviews. The results are shown in Table TABREF45. As we can see that, our CRU model is better at both categories of movie review classification, demonstrating its effectiveness. Among these samples, we select an intuitive example that the CRU successfully captures the true meaning of the sentence and gives the correct sentiment label. We segment a full movie review into three sentences, which is shown in Table TABREF46. Regarding the first and second sentence, both models give correct sentiment prediction. While introducing the third sentence, the GRU baseline model failed to recognize this review as a positive sentiment because there are many negation terms in the sentence. However, our CRU model could capture the local context during the recurrent modeling the sentence, and the phrases such as “not making fun” and “not laughing at” could be correctly noted as positive sentiment which will correct the sentiment category of the full review, suggesting that our model is superior at modeling local context and gives much accurate meaning. ### Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed an effective recurrent model for modeling sequences, called Contextual Recurrent Units (CRU). We inject the CNN into GRU, which aims to better model the local context information via CNN before recurrently modeling the sequence. We have tested our CRU model on the cloze-style reading comprehension task and sentiment classification task. Experimental results show that our model could give substantial improvements over various state-of-the-art systems and set up new records on the respective public datasets. In the future, we plan to investigate convolutional filters that have dynamic lengths to adaptively capture the possible spans of its context. Figure 2: A general neural network architecture of sentiment classification task. Figure 1: An intuitive illustration of variants of the CRU model. The gray scale represents the amount of information. a) original sentence; b) original representation of word “shortcut”; c) applying convolutional filter (length=3); d) adding original word embedding; Table 1: Statistics and hyper-parameter settings of MR, IMDB and SUBJ datasets. 10-CV represents 10- fold cross validation. Table 2: Results on MR, IMDB and SUBJ sentiment classification task. Best previous results are marked in italics, and overall best results are mark in bold face. Multi-channel CNN (Kim, 2014): A CNN architecture with static and non-static word embeddings. HRL (Wang and Tian, 2016): A hybrid residual LSTM architecture. Multitask arc-II (Liu et al., 2016): A deep architectures with shared local-global hybrid memory for multi-task learning. CNN-GRU-word2vec (Wang et al., 2016): An architecture that combines CNN and GRU model with pre-trained word embeddings by word2vec. DSCNN-Pretrain (Zhang et al., 2016): Dependency sensitive convolutional neural networks with pretrained sequence autoencoders. AC-BLSTM (Liang and Zhang, 2016): Asymmetric convolutional bidirectional LSTM networks. Figure 3: Trends of MR test set accuracy with the increasing convolutional filter length. Figure 4: Trends of IMDB test set accuracy with the training time growing. Table 3: Results on the CBT NE and CN cloze-style reading comprehension datasets. Table 5: Predictions of each level of the sentence. Table 4: Number of correctly classified samples.
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word embeddings to generate a new feature, i.e., summarizing a local context
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How do they evaluate knowledge extraction performance?
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### Introduction
Over the past few years, the term big data has become an important key point for research into data mining and information retrieval. Through the years, the quantity of data managed across enterprises has evolved from a simple and imperceptible task to an extent to which it has become the central performance improvement problem. In other words, it evolved to be the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity BIBREF0. Extracting knowledge from data is now a very competitive environment. Many companies process vast amounts of customer/user data in order to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of their customers. For instance, a typical use-case scenario would be a book seller that performs an automatic extraction of the content of the books a customer has bought, and subsequently extracts knowledge of what customers prefer to read. The knowledge extracted could then be used to recommend other books. Book recommending systems are typical examples where data mining techniques should be considered as the primary tool for making future decisions BIBREF1. KE from TDs is an essential field of research in data mining and it certainly requires techniques that are reliable and accurate in order to neutralize (or even eliminate) uncertainty in future decisions. Grouping TDs based on their content and mutual key information is referred to as clustering. Clustering is mostly performed with respect to a measure of similarity between TDs, which must be represented as vectors in a vector space beforehand BIBREF2. News aggregation engines can be considered as a typical representative where such techniques are extensively applied as a sub-field of natural language processing (NLP). In this paper we present a new technique for measuring similarity between TDs, represented in a vector space, based on SRCC - "a statistical measure of association between two things" BIBREF3, which in this case things refer to TDs. The mathematical properties of SRCC (such as the ability to detect nonlinear correlation) make it compelling to be researched into. Our motivation is to provide a new technique of improving the quality of KE based on the well-known association measure SRCC, as opposed to other well-known TD similarity measures. The paper is organized as follows: Section SECREF2 gives a brief overview of the vector space representation of a TD and the corresponding similarity measures, in Section SECREF3 we address conducted research of the role of SRCC in data mining and trend prediction. Section SECREF4 is a detailed description of the proposed technique, and later, in Section SECREF5 we present clustering and classification experiments conducted on several sets of TDs, while Section SECREF6 summarizes our research and contribution to the broad area of statistical text analysis. ### Background
In this section we provide a brief background of vector space representation of TDs and existing similarity measures that have been widely used in statistical text analysis. To begin with, we consider the representation of documents. ### Background ::: Document Representation
A document $d$ can be defined as a finite sequence of terms (independent textual entities within a document, for example, words), namely $d=(t_1,t_2,\dots ,t_n)$. A general idea is to associate weight to each term $t_i$ within $d$, such that which has proven superior in prior extensive research BIBREF4. The most common weight measure is Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). TF is the frequency of a term within a single document, and IDF represents the importance, or uniqueness of a term within a set of documents $D=\lbrace d_1, d_2, \dots ,d_m\rbrace $. TF-IDF is defined as follows: where such that $f$ is the number of occurrences of $t$ in $d$ and $\log $ is used to avoid very small values close to zero. Having these measures defined, it becomes obvious that each $w_i$, for $i=1,\dots ,n$ is assigned the TF-IDF value of the corresponding term. It turns out that each document is represented as a vector of TF-IDF weights within a vector space model (VSM) with its properties BIBREF5. ### Background ::: Measures of Similarity
Different ways of computing the similarity of two vector exist. There are two main approaches in similarity computation: Deterministic - similarity measures exploiting algebraic properties of vectors and their geometrical interpretation. These include, for instance, cosine similarity (CS), Jaccard coefficients (for binary representations), etc. Stochastic - similarity measures in which uncertainty is taken into account. These include, for instance, statistics such as Pearson's Correlation Coefficient (PCC) BIBREF6. Let $\mathbf {u}$ and $\mathbf {v}$ be the vector representations of two documents $d_1$ and $d_2$. Cosine similarity simply measures $cos\theta $, where $\theta $ is the angle between $\mathbf {u}$ and $\mathbf {v}$ (cosine similarity) (PCC) where All of the above measures are widely used and have proven efficient, but an important aspect is the lack of importance of the order of terms in textual data. It is easy for one to conclude that, two documents containing a single sentence each, but in a reverse order of terms, most deterministic methods fail to express that these are actually very similar. On the other hand, PCC detects only linear correlation, which constraints the diversity present in textual data. In the following section, we study relevant research in solving this problem, and then in Sections SECREF4 and SECREF5 we present our solution and results. ### Related Work
A significant number of similarity measures have been proposed and this topic has been thoroughly elaborated. Its main application is considered to be clustering and classification of textual data organized in TDs. In this section, we provide an overview of relevant research on this topic, to which we can later compare our proposed technique for computing vector similarity. KE (also referred to as knowledge discovery) techniques are used to extract information from unstructured data, which can be subsequently used for applying supervised or unsupervised learning techniques, such as clustering and classification of the content BIBREF7. Text clustering should address several challenges such as vast amounts of data, very high dimensionality of more than 10,000 terms (dimensions), and most importantly - an understandable description of the clusters BIBREF8, which essentially implies the demand for high quality of extracted information. Regarding high quality KE and information accuracy, much effort has been put into improving similarity measurements. An improvement based on linear algebra, known as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), is oriented towards word similarity, but instead, its main application is document similarity BIBREF9. Alluring is the fact that this measure takes the advantage of synonym recognition and has been used to achieve human-level scores on multiple-choice synonym questions from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in a technique known as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) BIBREF10 BIBREF5. Other semantic term similarity measures have been also proposed, based on information exclusively derived from large corpora of words, such as Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), which has been reported to have achieved a large degree of correctness in the synonym questions in the TOEFL and SAT tests BIBREF11. Moreover, normalized knowledge-based measures, such as Leacock & Chodrow BIBREF12, Lesk ("how to tell a pine cone from an ice-cream cone" BIBREF13, or measures for the depth of two concepts (preferably vebs) in the Word-Net taxonomy BIBREF14 have experimentally proven to be efficient. Their accuracy converges to approximately 69%, Leacock & Chodrow and Lesk have showed the highest precision, and having them combined turns out to be the approximately optimal solution BIBREF11. ### The Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient Similarity Measure
The main idea behind our proposed technique is to introduce uncertainty in the calculations of the similarity between TDs represented in a vector space model, based on the nonlinear properties of SRCC. Unlike PCC, which is only able to detect linear correlation, SRCC's nonlinear ability provides a convenient way of taking different ordering of terms into account. ### The Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient Similarity Measure ::: Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient
The Spreaman's Rank Correlation Coefficient BIBREF3, denoted $\rho $, has a from which is very similar to PCC. Namely, for $n$ raw scores $U_i, V_i$ for $i=1,\dots ,n$ denoting TF-IDF values for two document vectors $\mathbf {U}, \mathbf {V}$, where $u_i$ and $v_i$ are the corresponding ranks of $U_i$ and $V_i$, for $i=0,\dots ,n-1$. A metric to assign the ranks of each of the TF-IDF values has to be determined beforehand. Each $U_i$ is assigned a rank value $u_i$, such that $u_i=0,1,\dots ,n-1$. It is important to note that the metric by which the TF-IDF values are ranked is essentially their sorting criteria. A convenient way of determining this criteria when dealing with TF-IDF values, which emphasize the importance of a term within a TD set, is to sort these values in an ascending order. Thus, the largest (or most important) TF-IDF value within a TD vector is assigned the rank value of $n-1$, and the least important is assigned a value of 0. ### The Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient Similarity Measure ::: Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient ::: An Illustration of the Ranking TF-IDF Vectors
Consider two TDs $d_1$ and $d_2$, each containing a single sentence. Document 1: John had asked Mary to marry him before she left. Document 2: Before she left, Mary was asked by John to be his wife. Now consider these sentences lemmatized: Document 1: John have ask Mary marry before leave. Document 2: Before leave Mary ask John his wife. Let us now represent $d_1$ and $d_2$ as TF-IDF vectors for the vocabulary in our small corpus. The results in Table TABREF7 show that SRCC performs much better in knowledge extraction. The two documents' contents contain the same idea expressed by terms in a different order that John had asked Mary to marry him before she left. It is obvious that cosine similarity cannot recognize this association, but SRCC has successfully recognized it and produced a similarity value of -0.285714. SRCC is essentially conducive to semantic similarity. Rising the importance of a term in a TD will eventually rise its importance in another TD. But if the two TDs are of different size, the terms' importance values will also differ, by which a nonlinear association will emerge. This association will not be recognized by PCC at all (as it only detects linear association), but SRCC will definitely catch this detail and produce the desirable similarity value. The idea is to use SRCC to catch such terms which drive the semantic context of a TD, which will follow a nonlinear and lie on a polynomial curve, and not on the line $x=y$. In our approach, we use a non-standard measure of similarity in textual data with simple and common frequency values, such as TF-IDF, in contrast to the statement that simple frequencies are not enough for high-quality knowledge extraction BIBREF5. In the next section, we will present our experiments and discuss the results we have obtained. ### Experiments
In order to test our proposed approach, we have conducted a series of experiments. In this section, we briefly discuss the outcome and provide a clear view of whether our approach is suitable for knowledge extraction from textual data in a semantic context. We have used a dataset of 14 TDs to conduct our experiments. There are several subjects on which their content is based: (aliens, stories, law, news) BIBREF15. ### Experiments ::: Comparison Between Similarity Measures
In this part, we have compared the similarity values produced by each of the similarity measures CS, SRCC and PCC. We have picked a few notable results and they are summarized in Table TABREF9 below. In Table TABREF9 that SRCC mostly differs from CS and PCC, which also differ in some cases.For instance, $d_1$ refers to leadership in the nineties, while $d_5$ refers to the family and medical lead act of 1993. We have empirically observed that the general topics discussed in these two textual documents are very different. Namely, discusses different frameworks for leadership empowerment, while $d_5$ discusses medical treatment and self-care of employees. We have observed that the term employee is the only connection between $d_1$ and $d_5$. The similarity value of CS of 0.36 is very unreal in this case, while PCC (0.05), and especially SRCC (0.0018) provide a much more realistic view of the semantic knowledge aggregated in these documents. Another example are $d_8$ and $d_9$. The contents of these documents are very straightforward and very similar, because they discuss aliens seen by Boeing-747 pilots and $d_9$ discusses angels that were considered to be aliens. It is obvious that SRCC is able to detect this association as good as CS and PCC which are very good in such straightforward cases. We have observed that SRCC does not perform worse than any other of these similarity measures. It does not always produce the most suitable similarity value, but it indeed does perform at least equally good as other measures. The values in Table TABREF9 are very small, and suggest that SRCC performs well in extracting tiny associations in such cases. It is mostly a few times larger than CS and PCC when there actually exist associations between the documents. These results are visually summarized in Figure FIGREF10. The two above-described examples can be clearly seen as standing out. ### Experiments ::: Non-linearity of Documents
In this part we will briefly present the nonlinear association between some of the TDs we have used in our experiments. Our purpose is to point out that $(d_6,d_{10})$ and $(d_7,d_{12})$ are the pairs where SRCC is the most appropriate measure for the observed content, and as such, it is able to detect the nonlinear association between them. This can be seen in Figure FIGREF12 below. The straightforward case of $d_8$ and $d_9$ also stands out here (SRCC can also detect it very well). The obtained results showed that our technique shows good performance on similarity computing, although it is not a perfect measure. But, it sure comes close to convenient and widely used similarity measures such as CS and PCC. The next section provides a conclusion of our research and suggestions for further work. ### Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper we have presented a non-standard technique for computing the similarity between TF-IDF vectors. We have propagated our idea and contributed a portion of new knowledge in this field of text analysis. We have proposed a technique that is widely used in similar fields, and our goal is to provide starting information to other researches in this area. We consider our observations promising and they should be extensively researched. Our experiments have proved that our technique should be a subject for further research. Our future work will concentrate on the implementation of machine learning techniques, such as clustering and subsequent classification of textual data. We expect an information of good quality to be extracted. To summarize, the rapidly emerging area of big data and information retrieval is where our technique should reside and where it should be applied. TABLE II. A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE MEASURES CS, SRCC, PCC Fig. 1. A visual comparison of similarities produced by CS, SRCC and PCC Fig. 2. The association between documents
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SRCC
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Why does the author focus on the water returning to smoothness after Ned's wreck?
A. To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society
B. To depict the difference between a 20th century moment and the future, when water has vanished from the continent
C. To illustrate the biological effects of alkali on the composition of the human body
D. To personify the all-consuming effects of nostalgia and fear in the last moments of a human's brief life
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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.
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A. To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society
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Which is most true about how the volunteers are seen by the rest of their society?
A. They are appreciated for their level of discretion
B. They are respected for their dedication to each other above anything else
C. They are considered brave for undertaking such a disapproved task
D. They are disgraced for their choice to participate in such vile acts
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The Birds and the Bees BY DAVE E. FISHER Which goes to prove that, in some instances, being heroic is easy! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young, cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion. Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began. In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars. But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the ancient evils, wars, emergencies. "Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me. That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were babbling in excitement. Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not been for the friendship of Xeon. "Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone." I stared in amazement. "Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—" "Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—" Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone." "All of it?" I asked. "There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not, what will happen with no more children?" "That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I have never before been in a real emergency. A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city. They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young men do. As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an emergency. For a machine had failed! Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity. Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who knows the mysterious workings of the machines? I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table. Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard. He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for those left were the most earnest and intelligent. "I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial." A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered around the Hall. "But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen. Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has actually failed." Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for the priest had I not been able to insure order. "That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there will be no more children!" At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked, "Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the machines may produce more children for us? "As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are helpless." Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to think. Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it; and yet it came from somewhere." "Riddles are not called for," I answered severely. "Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago, have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of the story of the animals of old—" "I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt. "I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and although not mute, they could not speak." Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films." "If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of men—if it were so, then, what of it?" "May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then we would yet have these animals among us." "And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked. "How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced from within their own bodies?" At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason", went on: "I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or disprove my words." "You wish to search the films—" I began. "Not the films, Sias, but the books." Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient, and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest, being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost. Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race. And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse— "Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the only place where it may be found?" Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the Conclave adjourned. Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet. I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak. "Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage, your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we do. Yet there is one other distinction. "Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what reason?" "Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if you could be quick—" "Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have discovered: "That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines. Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!" These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also. "In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of over-population." Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the assembled overwhelmed him. "It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do, where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?" Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps the process of reproduction was of such a pleasure that the Conclave ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!" At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately, however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search. Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this they cannot do until they meet again. I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave, whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well. The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either. His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them. I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was on his feet and I gave way. "I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes. There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined, but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and bees...." When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words, with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea. It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear to move. I cleared my throat. "Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved into nothingness?" "I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in some, at least, of the She's." We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality. "Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to such horror?" "I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from dungeon. Are there any objections?" There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would undergo such an ordeal for the City? "And who will be the partner?" I asked. "In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall and stood, noble and naked. Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it, but Xeon stepped forward. "My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that the gods may help us?" His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft fields might be some slight help. I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields. It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries— We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first stars. "They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered. "They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately." "It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go through such an ordeal again?" And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me. Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom. "Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed. I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued. "Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and said manfully, "We shall try again." I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice— "We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should like to be left alone, in private, to try." "Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and spoke again. "We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we sort of enjoy it." I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars. My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.
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C. They are considered brave for undertaking such a disapproved task
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Var and Neena most likely belong to which group:
A. A mutated strain between the slaves and masters of the Ryzgas
B. Descendants of the slaves of the Ryzgas
C. Members of an alien group that destroyed the Ryzgas
D. Descendants of the Ryzga masters
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WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK By Robert Abernathy Illustrated by Kelly Freas [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer.... At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun. Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her. The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening twilight, even as her love was about him. Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass." He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with vengeance. "Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago." She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this. For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass, she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days. "Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock. "Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm. Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the best I can do now. Come on." There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might never have won through. It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. They heard no sound. The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful. Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their childhood; but neither had been here before. But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling in the light that poured from within. They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy. The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here." "You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he had not meant to be. The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch. Come in! You're letting in the wind." Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then turned questioningly to the young pair. "We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can spare it. We're pursued." "Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world is as bad as it was when I was last in it." Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young." Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours behind us." "A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families." Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk. "And what will you do now?" Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear to follow us." "To the mountain, you mean." "And into it, if need be." The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow your lover in this?" Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why, I will lead, if his courage should fail him." The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men." "We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth." "Do you believe that?" "As one believes stories." "It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom. Var stared down at his hands. "The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them. They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars. "Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder. "In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships. "From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...." Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their vision, and they saw— Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a shaking of the earth. Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead, poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces, naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood. Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned. Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound. They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship, and it was leaving. It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others cried desolately— wait! Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and the ship was gone. The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno, and the city burned and burned.... Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man who was the Mountain Watcher. "Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep, their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely. "I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance, folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again." The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally, "this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking." Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say, "You are tired. Best sleep until morning." Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed. Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how it was. He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know the face. Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you? Where's the Watcher?" The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here." "You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—" "Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away." Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you, Watcher." "Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga mountain?" Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no alternative." There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and they followed him outside. The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain. It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and gave nothing back. Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the curling fog hid everything. "You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will be too late for them to overtake Var." That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into one. They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: " It would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone irreparable.... But to become I and you again—that cannot be borne. " They said in unison, "No. Not that." The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the Ryzga mountain." Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little dizzied by the rapid flood of detail. "You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night. Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You don't blame us?" "You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!" They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that the pursuit already halved their lead. They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep. Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently, head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle circuits.... The two stood shivering together. The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they heard a great voice crying, "There they are!" Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've caught you now!" Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows. Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!" Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him exhorting his men to haste. Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent whisper said, "Come on!" Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness. At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising potential that seemed to whisper Ready ... ready.... The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more— Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being, pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out. The immaterial globe of light danced on before them. "Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not blocked.... Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that might be near at hand. From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay, then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the dark burrow: " Stop! —before you go too far!" Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go free." In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world outside should crumble to ruin around them. "Follow us, then!" They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream. Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood before their monstrous and inhuman power. Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart. Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum.... For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life. They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold. There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood. Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them. He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway. That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow. With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures.... He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange. "Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will— toward the stars, the stars! The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...." Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face. The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place: Decision! He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it. Neena screamed. Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished. But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves. Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind. Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in our world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way." Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. "Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us man could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right." The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed. Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience. In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var. Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz? Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?"
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B. Descendants of the slaves of the Ryzgas
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What is Ben's relationship with Charlie?
A. Chalie is Ben's uncle.
B. Charlie is Ben's favorite teacher at the Academy.
C. Charlie is Ben's grandfather.
D. Charlie is the only family Ben has.
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Spacemen Die at Home By EDWARD W. LUDWIG Illustrated by THORNE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] One man's retreat is another's prison ... and it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home! Forty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura. Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning.... It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos, were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born. For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight. The first graduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important, because we were the first . We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had never really existed. But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us with pride in their eyes. A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. "... these boys have worked hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things. They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up at them and feel humility—for mankind needs humility." The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and who had just returned from his second hop to Venus. Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time, for I was thinking: He's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the first! Mickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. "I don't see 'em, Ben," he whispered. "Where do you suppose they are?" I blinked. "Who?" "My folks." That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those "You are cordially invited" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie Taggart. Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why. He was a veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the Lunar Lady , a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White Sands. I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet. My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It wasn't surprising. The Lunar Lady was in White Sands now, but liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars. It doesn't matter , I told myself. Then Mickey stiffened. "I see 'em, Ben! There in the fifth row!" Usually Mickey was the same whether in a furnace-hot engine room or a garden party, smiling, accepting whatever the world offered. But now a tenseness and an excitement had gripped even him. I was grateful that he was beside me; we'd been a good team during those final months at the Academy and I knew we'd be a good team in space. The Universe was mighty big, but with two of us to face it together, it would be only half as big. And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by the sons of Earth. They expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do. I felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared. At last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge, babbling wave. Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie. His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear rows. But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that it was hard to believe he'd once been young. He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned. "You made it, boy," he chortled, "and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as good spacemen should!" Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again, walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm with some silent melody. And you, Laura, were with him. "Meet the Brat," he said. "My sister Laura." I stared almost rudely. You were like a doll lost in the immensity of your fluffy pink dress. Your hair was long and transformed into a golden froth where sunlight touched it. But your eyes were the eyes of a woman, glowing like dark stars and reflecting a softness, a gentleness that I'd never seen in eyes before. "I'm happy to meet you, Ben," you said. "I've heard of no one else for the past year." A tide of heat crept up from my collar. I stuttered through an introduction of Charlie. You and Mickey looked strangely at Charlie, and I realized that old Stardust was not a cadet's notion of the ideal spaceman. Charlie scorned the skin-tight uniforms of the government service and wore a shiny black suit that was a relic of Everson's early-day Moon Patrol. His tie was clumsily knotted, and a button on his coat was missing. And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them; but others, I knew, would find them ugly. You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: "It's a privilege to meet you, Charlie. Just think—one of Everson's men, one of the first to reach the Moon!" Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: "Still going to spend the weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?" I shook my head. "Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're planning to see the town tonight." "Why don't you both come with us?" you asked. "Our folks have their own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room. Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the Moon?" Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian fizzes and Plutonian zombies. But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration. "We'd really like to come," I said. On our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor should look. "Ben," he called, "don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two months to decide." "No, thanks," I answered. "Better not count on me." A moment later Mickey said, frowning, "What was he talking about, Ben? Did he make you an offer?" I laughed. "He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching astrogation. What a life that would be! Imagine standing in a classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—" I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: "When you've got the chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want." I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart. Then your last words came back and jabbed me: "That's what Mickey used to want." " Used to want?" I asked. "What do you mean?" You bit your lip, not answering. "What did she mean, Mickey?" Mickey looked down at his feet. "I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben. We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—" "Yes?" "Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know." My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. "What are you trying to say, Mickey?" "I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor of White Sands Port." He raised his hand to stop me. "I know. It's not so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben." I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my knees with the blast of a jet. "It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have a good weekend." Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the 'copter. "Sure," I said to Mickey, "we can still have a good weekend." I liked your folks, Laura. There was no star-hunger in them, of course. They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things, deep-rooted, belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or housework. Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sand-monkey in a shower, but he tried courageously to be himself. At the dinner table he stared glassily at nothing and grated, "Only hit Mars once, but I'll never forget the kid who called himself a medic. Skipper started coughing, kept it up for three days. Whoopin' cough, the medic says, not knowin' the air had chemicals that turned to acid in your lungs. I'd never been to Mars before, but I knew better'n that. Hell, I says, that ain't whoopin' cough, that's lung-rot." That was when your father said he wasn't so hungry after all. Afterward, you and I walked onto the terrace, into the moonlit night, to watch for crimson-tailed continental rockets that occasionally streaked up from White Sands. We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said: "Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's sort of funny." "He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a spaceman then." "But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?" I smiled and shook my head. "If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson." You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster. There was silence. You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the feeling that I shouldn't have come here. You kept looking at me until I had to ask: "What are you thinking, Laura?" You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. "No, I shouldn't be thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that." "I could never hate you." "It—it's about the stars," you said very softly. "I understand why you want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I lived for months, just thinking about it. "One summer we went. I had fun. I saw the old buildings and castles, and the spaceports and the Channel Tube. But after it was over, I realized England wasn't so different from America. Places seem exciting before you get to them, and afterward they're not really." I frowned. "And you mean it might be the same with the stars? You think maybe I haven't grown up yet?" Anxiety darkened your features. "No, it'd be good to be a spaceman, to see the strange places and make history. But is it worth it? Is it worth the things you'd have to give up?" I didn't understand at first, and I wanted to ask, "Give up what ?" Then I looked at you and the promise in your eyes, and I knew. All through the years I'd been walking down a single, narrow path. Government boarding school, the Academy, my eyes always upward and on the stars. Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that I'd never noticed before. You can go into space , I thought, and try to do as much living in ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like Charlie—a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally alone, never finding a home. Or there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous dust. "I'm sorry," you said. "I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben." "It's all right," I said, clenching my fists. "You made sense—a lot of sense." The next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin, tight coughs. Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. "I'm leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought maybe you'd like to have 'em." I scowled, not understanding. "Why, Charlie? What for?" He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. "Oh, it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years. That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky. Some of these days, I won't be so lucky." I tried to laugh. "You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie." He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. "Maybe. Anyway, I'm gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the Space Rat , just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a look inside. I'll probably be there." He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears. "Not used to this Earth air," he muttered. "What I need's some Martian climate." Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered, too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were drugged. I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna. We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I. "When will you be back?" you asked. Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. "Maybe a couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen." Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man. I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill the doubt worming through my brain. But he rounded a corner, still grinning and waving, and then he was gone. That afternoon Mickey showed me his room. It was more like a boy's room than a spaceman's. In it were all the little things that kids treasure—pennants, models of Everson's two ships, a tennis trophy, books, a home-made video. I began to realize how important a room like this could be to a boy. I could imagine, too, the happiness that parents felt as they watched their children grow to adulthood. I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams, I hadn't realized I was different. My folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd have lived the kind of life a kid should live. Mickey noticed my frown. "What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—" "No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really." "Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?" "No. I got a couple of possibilities. Could get a berth on the Odyssey , the new ship being finished at Los Angeles. They want me, too, for the Moon Patrol, but that's old stuff, not much better than teaching. I want to be in deep space." "Well, how about staying with us till you decide? Might as well enjoy Earth life while you can. Okay?" I felt like running from the house, to forget that it existed. I wanted someone to tell me one of the old stories about space, a tale of courage that would put fuel on dying dreams. But I wanted, also, to be with you, Laura, to see your smile and the flecks of silver in your eyes and the way your nose turned upward ever so slightly when you laughed. You see, I loved you already, almost as much as I loved the stars. And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, "Sure, I'll stay, Mickey. Sure." Forty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted. One morning I thought, Why must I make a choice? Why can't I have both you and the stars? Would that be asking too much? All day the thought lay in my mind like fire. That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: "Laura, I want you to be my wife." You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face flushed. Then you murmured, "I—I want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me to marry a spaceman or a teacher?" "Can't a spaceman marry, too?" "Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't you see, Ben? You'd be like Charlie. Gone for maybe two months, maybe two years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty—and I'd have what?" Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. "I wouldn't have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years, then teach." "Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?" Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears glittering in your eyes. "Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened on the Cyclops . There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it was—" "I know, Laura. Don't say it." You had to finish. "It was a monster." That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me sleep. You've got to decide now , I told myself. You can't stay here. You've got to make a choice. The teaching job was still open. The spot on the Odyssey was still open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the way to Pluto. You can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now. Or you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a line in a history book. I cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, "Get the hell out of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get out there on the Odyssey where you belong. We got a date on Mars, remember? At the Space Rat , just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal." That's what he'd say. And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always. "Oh God," I moaned, "what shall I do?" Next morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who could be sending me a message. I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping, automatic voice droned: "Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman...." Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word "lung-rot" and the metallic phrase, "This message brought to you by courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps." I stood staring at the cylinder. Charles Taggart was dead. Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie. My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie! The audiogram had lied! I pressed the stud again. "... regret to inform you of death of Charles ..." I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken voice droned on. You ran to it, shut it off. "I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—" Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze. The metallic words had told the truth. I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at Charlie's faded tin box. Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions—a few wrinkled photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god, a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol. This was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space. It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters instead of children, a medal instead of a home. It'd be a great future , I thought. You'd dream of sitting in a dingy stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky, stinking candles. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls with dirty feet for company. And a sudden cough that would be the first sign of lung-rot. To hell with it! I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visiphone. I accepted that job teaching. And now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping, and the house is silent. It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am writing this. I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they could tell me what he could not express in words. And among the things, Laura, I found a ring. A wedding ring. In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife. Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose. Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a man's dream. He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was kind—but that doesn't matter now. Do you know why he wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth? It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother, brothers, the planets his children. You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes after you reach it. But how can one ever be sure until the journey is made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a star and think, I might have gone there; I could have been the first ? We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways? Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it. Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson. Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe on Mars, the Space Rat , just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura. I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.
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D. Charlie is the only family Ben has.
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What does this society think about breasts?
A. They are appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint but not a sexual one
B. They are considered to be milk-producing devices but nothing else
C. They are seen as vistigial structures
D. They are well-regarded because they are so rare
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The Birds and the Bees BY DAVE E. FISHER Which goes to prove that, in some instances, being heroic is easy! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young, cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion. Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began. In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars. But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the ancient evils, wars, emergencies. "Sias! Sias—" And they were upon me. That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were babbling in excitement. Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not been for the friendship of Xeon. "Sias," they were saying, "the Maternite's gone." I stared in amazement. "Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—" "Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you—" Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for the Elder?" Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone." "All of it?" I asked. "There is nothing left," Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not, what will happen with no more children?" "That is for the priests to say, not I," I replied. In moments of emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I have never before been in a real emergency. A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city. They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young men do. As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an emergency. For a machine had failed! Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity. Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who knows the mysterious workings of the machines? I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table. Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard. He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for those left were the most earnest and intelligent. "I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial." A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered around the Hall. "But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen. Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has actually failed." Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for the priest had I not been able to insure order. "That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there will be no more children!" At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked, "Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the machines may produce more children for us? "As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are helpless." Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to think. Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not—must there not have been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it; and yet it came from somewhere." "Riddles are not called for," I answered severely. "Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago, have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of the story of the animals of old—" "I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt. "I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to do—" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and although not mute, they could not speak." Rocsates' voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films." "If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of men—if it were so, then, what of it?" "May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then we would yet have these animals among us." "And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked. "How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced from within their own bodies?" At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason", went on: "I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or disprove my words." "You wish to search the films—" I began. "Not the films, Sias, but the books." Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient, and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest, being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost. Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race. And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse— "Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the only place where it may be found?" Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the Conclave adjourned. Several weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet. I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak. "Some of those among you are She's," he began. "And you know you are different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage, your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we do. Yet there is one other distinction. "Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what reason?" "Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if you could be quick—" "Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have discovered: "That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines. Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!" These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also. "In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of over-population." Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the assembled overwhelmed him. "It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do, where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?" Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps the process of reproduction was of such a pleasure that the Conclave ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!" At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately, however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search. Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this they cannot do until they meet again. I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave, whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well. The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either. His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them. I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was on his feet and I gave way. "I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After many searchings, I came upon this—" and he held forth the object he had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes. There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined, but it seems to mean...." His words trailed off. He was obviously unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time there were birds and bees...." When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words, with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea. It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear to move. I cleared my throat. "Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved into nothingness?" "I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in some, at least, of the She's." We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality. "Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to such horror?" "I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from dungeon. Are there any objections?" There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would undergo such an ordeal for the City? "And who will be the partner?" I asked. "In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall and stood, noble and naked. Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it, but Xeon stepped forward. "My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that the gods may help us?" His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft fields might be some slight help. I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields. It was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries— We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first stars. "They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered. "They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately." "It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go through such an ordeal again?" And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me. Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom. "Sias," he said. Then stopped, embarrassed. I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued. "Sias, we come to tell.... We will...." He raised his eyes to mine and said manfully, "We shall try again." I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice— "We beg one favor," Xeon went on. "We are agreed that—Well, we should like to be left alone, in private, to try." "Of course," I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and spoke again. "We do not deserve praise, Sias," he said. "The truth is, we ... we sort of enjoy it." I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars. My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.
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C. They are seen as vistigial structures
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What was the difference between the first and second test?
A. Beer type and expense
B. Beer type only
C. The types of beer in both stages of the test were the same, but the presentation method differed significantly
D. Expense only
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More Booze You Can Use When we last heard from them, the members of the Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. (Click for a wrap-up of the first round of beer tasting.) The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word. The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale? Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward. Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A "craft beer." A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of "urine" or "get it away!" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would "do better" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round as amusing to administer as the first one had been. Here is what happened and what it meant: 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of "my wife is sick" (one person) and "meeting is running long" (two). As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: that the flight included one "holdover" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); that it included at least one import (Bass); that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--"smooth and nutty," "too strong," etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. Best and Worst , one of each from the group. Name that beer! The tasters were told that some of the drinks were Hefeweizens, some might be IPAs (India pale ales), some might be bitters, and so on. They were asked to put each beer in its proper category--and to name a specific brewery and brand if they could. The idea here was to test the veteran beer drinkers' claim to recognize the distinctive tastes of famous brands. (To see all the grids for all the beers, click .) 2. Philosophy. The first round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not Lager. As several correspondents (for instance, the of Best American Beers ) have helpfully pointed out, the definition of lager provided last time was not exactly "accurate." If you want to stay within the realm of textbook definitions, a lager is a beer brewed a particular way--slowly, at cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on top. By this same reasoning, lagers don't have to be light-colored, weak-flavored, and watery, as mainstream American lagers are. In principle, lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it was wrong to impugn Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked for deceptive labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too. To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few "strong" lagers too. 3. Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on. To include both imported and domestic beers. Among the domestic microbrews, there's an obvious skew toward beers from the Pacific Northwest. But as Microsoft would put it, that's a feature not a bug. These beers all came from the Safeway nearest the Redmond, Wash., "main campus" of Microsoft, and microbrews are supposed to be local. To include one holdover from the previous test, as a scientific control on our tasters' preferences. This was Sam Adams , runaway winner of Round 1. To include one fancy product from a monster-scale U.S. mass brewery, to see if the tasters liked it better or worse than the cute little microbrews. This was Michelob Hefeweizen , from the pride of St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch. Click for pricing information and pre-quaffing evaluations. The beers tasted were: 4. Data Analysis. a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of "best" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the "Best and Worst" rankings. The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.) The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. ("Bitter, drinkable.") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers. b) Overall preference points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: Pyramid Hefeweizen came in last on rating points, as it had in the Best/Worst derby. But the amazing dark horse winner was Michelob Hefeweizen . The three elements of surprise here, in ascending order of unexpectedness, are: This best-liked beer belonged to the same category, Hefeweizen, as the least-liked product, from Pyramid. This was also the only outright Anheuser-Busch product in the contest (the Redhooks are 75 percent A-B free). It is safe to say that all tasters would have said beforehand that they would rank an American macrobrew last, and Anheuser-Busch last of all. Although it clearly won on overall preference points, Michelob Hefeweizen was the only beer not to have received a single "Best" vote. The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of "bestness." Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: This table shows how the beers performed on "raw score"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. Next, we have "corrected average preference points," throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same: It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 "Best" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's. c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: Pyramid Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on "sale" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment. d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer. Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we? If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for "welfare maximization" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time. But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail "Equinox." For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the "revealed preferences" that come from the blind test. As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the "after" list. If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.
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A. Beer type and expense
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How do they evaluate interpretability?
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### Introduction
Knowledge Graphs such as Freebase, WordNet etc. have become important resources for supporting many AI applications like web search, Q&A etc. They store a collection of facts in the form of a graph. The nodes in the graph represent real world entities such as Roger Federer, Tennis, United States etc while the edges represent relationships between them. These KGs have grown huge, but they are still not complete BIBREF1 . Hence the task of inferring new facts becomes important. Many vector space models have been proposed which can perform reasoning over KGs efficiently BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 etc. These methods learn representations for entities and relations as vectors in a vector space, capturing global information about the KG. The task of KG inference is then defined as operations over these vectors. Some of these methods like BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 are capable of exploiting additional text data apart from the KG, resulting in better representations. Although these methods have shown good performance in applications, they don't address the problem of understanding semantics of individual dimensions of the KG embedding. A recent work BIBREF6 addressed the problem of learning semantic features for KGs. However, they don't directly use vector space modeling. In this work, we focus on incorporating interpretability in KG embeddings. Specifically, we aim to learn interpretable embeddings for KG entities by incorporating additional entity co-occurrence statistics from text data. This work is motivated by BIBREF7 who presented automated methods for evaluating topics learned via topic modelling methods. We adapt these measures for the vector space model and propose a method to directly maximize them while learning KG embedding. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first regularization term which induces interpretability in KG embeddings. ### Related Work
Several methods have been proposed for learning KG embeddings. They differ on the modeling of entities and relations, usage of text data and interpretability of the learned embeddings. We summarize some of these methods in following sections. ### Vector-space models for KG Embeddings
A very effective and powerful set of models are based on translation vectors. These models represent entities as vectors in $d$ -dimensional space, $\mathbb {R}^d$ and relations as translation vectors from head entity to tail entity, in either same or a projected space. TransE BIBREF2 is one of the initial works, which was later improved by many works [ BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 ]. Also, there are methods which are able to incorporate text data while learning KG embeddings. BIBREF0 is one such method, which assumes a combined universal schema of relations from KG as well as text. BIBREF1 further improves the performance by sharing parameters among similar textual relations. ### Interpretability of Embedding
While the vector space models perform well in many tasks, the semantics of learned representations are not directly clear. This problem for word embeddings was addressed by BIBREF12 where they proposed a set of constraints inducing interpretability. However, its adaptation for KG embeddings hasn't been addressed. A recent work BIBREF6 addressed a similar problem, where they learn coherent semantic features for entities and relations in KG. Our method differs from theirs in the following two aspects. Firstly, we use vector space modeling leading directly to KG embeddings while they need to infer KG embeddings from their probabilistic model. Second, we incorporate additional information about entities which helps in learning interpretable embeddings. ### Proposed Method
We are interested in inducing interpretability in KG embeddings and regularization is one good way to do it. So we want to look at novel regularizers in KG embeddings. Hence, we explore a measure of coherence proposed in BIBREF7 . This measure allows automated evaluation of the quality of topics learned by topic modeling methods by using additional Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) for word pairs. It was also shown to have high correlation with human evaluation of topics. Based on this measure of coherence, we propose a regularization term. This term can be used with existing KG embedding methods (eg BIBREF0 ) for inducing interpretability. It is described in the following sections. ### Coherence
In topic models, coherence of a topic can be determined by semantic relatedness among top entities within the topic. This idea can also be used in vector space models by treating dimensions of the vector space as topics. With this assumption, we can use a measure of coherence defined in following section for evaluating interpretability of the embeddings. $Coherence@k$ has been shown to have high correlation with human interpretability of topics learned via various topic modeling methods BIBREF7 . Hence, we can expect interpretable embeddings by maximizing it. Coherence for top $k$ entities along dimension $l$ is defined as follows: $$Coherence@k^{(l)} = \sum _{i=2}^{k}\sum _{j=1}^{i-1}{p_{ij}}$$ (Eq. 5) where $p_{ij}$ is PMI score between entities $e_i$ and $e_j$ extracted from text data. $Coherence@k$ for the entity embedding matrix $\theta _e$ is defined as the average over all dimensions. $$Coherence@k = \frac{1}{d} \sum _{l=1}^{d} Coherence@k^{(l)}$$ (Eq. 6) We want to learn an embedding matrix $\theta _e$ which has high coherence (i.e. which maximizes $Coherence@k$ ). Since $\theta _e$ changes during training, the set of top $k$ entities along each dimension varies over iterations. Hence, directly maximizing $Coherence@k$ seems to be tricky. An alternate approach could be to promote higher values for entity pairs having high PMI score $p_{ij}$ . This will result in an embedding matrix $\theta _e$ with a high value of $Coherence@k$ since high PMI entity pairs are more likely to be among top $k$ entities. This idea can be captured by following coherence term $$\mathcal {C}(\theta _e, P) = \sum _{i=2}^{n}\sum _{j=1}^{i-1} \left\Vert v(e_i)^\intercal v(e_j) - p_{ij} \right\Vert ^2$$ (Eq. 8) where $P$ is entity-pair PMI matrix and $v(e)$ denote vector for entity $e$ . This term can be used in the objective function defined in Equation 13 ### Entity Model (Model-E)
We use the Entity Model proposed in BIBREF0 for learning KG embeddings. This model assumes a vector $v(e)$ for each entity and two vectors $v_s(r)$ and $v_o(r)$ for each relation of the KG. The score for the triple $(e_s, r, e_o)$ is given by, $$f(e_s, r, e_o) = v(e_s)^\intercal v_s(r) + v(e_o)^\intercal v_o(r)$$ (Eq. 10) Training these vectors requires incorrect triples. So, we use the closed world assumption. For each triple $t \in \mathcal {T}$ , we create two negative triples $t^-_o$ and $t^-_s$ by corrupting the object and subject of the triples respectively such that the corrupted triples don't appear in training, test or validation data. The loss for a triple pair is defined as $loss(t, t^-) = - \log (\sigma (f(t) - f(t^-)))$ . Then, the aggregate loss function is defined as $$L(\theta _e, \theta _r, \mathcal {T}) = \frac{1}{|\mathcal {T}|}\sum _{t\in \mathcal {T}} \left(loss(t, t^-_o) + loss(t, t^-_s) \right)$$ (Eq. 11) ### Objective
The overall loss function can be written as follows: $$L(\theta _e, \theta _r, \mathcal {T}) + \lambda _c \mathcal {C}(\theta _e, P) + \lambda _r \mathcal {R}(\theta _e, \theta _r)$$ (Eq. 13) Where $\mathcal {R}(\theta _e, \theta _r) = \frac{1}{2}\left(\left\Vert \theta _e\right\Vert ^2+\left\Vert \theta _r\right\Vert ^2\right)$ is the $L2$ regularization term and $\lambda _c$ and $\lambda _r$ are hyper-parameters controlling the trade-off among different terms in the objective function. ### Datasets
We use the FB15k-237 BIBREF13 dataset for experiments. It contains 14541 entities and 237 relations. The triples are split into training, validation and test set having 272115, 17535 and 20466 triples respectively. For extracting entity co-occurrences, we use the textual relations used in BIBREF1 . It contains around 3.7 millions textual triples, which we use for calculating PMI for entity pairs. ### Experimental Setup
We use the method proposed in BIBREF0 as the baseline. Please refer to Section "Entity Model (Model-E)" for more details. For evaluating the learned embeddings, we test them on different tasks. All the hyper-parameters are tuned using performance (MRR) on validation data. We use 100 dimensions after cross validating among 50, 100 and 200 dimensions. For regularization, we use $\lambda _r = 0.01$ (from $10,1,0.1,0.01$ ) and $\lambda _c = 0.01$ (from $10,1,0.1,0.01$ ) for $L2$ and coherence regularization respectively. We use multiple random initializations sampled from a Gaussian distribution. For optimization, we use gradient descent and stop optimization when gradient becomes 0 upto 3 decimal places. The final performance measures are reported for test data. ### Results
In following sections, we compare the performance of the proposed method with the baseline method in different tasks. Please refer to Table 1 for results. For evaluating the interpretability, we use $Coherence@k$ (Equation 6 ) , automated and manual word intrusion tests. In word intrusion test BIBREF14 , top $k(=5)$ entities along a dimension are mixed with the bottom most entity (the intruder) in that dimension and shuffled. Then multiple (3 in our case) human annotators are asked to find out the intruder. We use majority voting to finalize one intruder. Amazon Mechanical Turk was used for crowdsourcing the task and we used 25 randomly selected dimensions for evaluation. For automated word intrusion BIBREF7 , we calculate following score for all $k+1$ entities $$\text{AutoWI}(e_i) = \sum _{j=1, j\ne i}^{k+1}{p_{ij}}$$ (Eq. 18) where $p_{ij}$ are the PMI scores. The entity having least score is identified as the intruder. We report the fraction of dimensions for which we were able to identify the intruder correctly. As we can see in Table 1 , the proposed method achieves better values for $Coherence@5$ as a direct consequence of the regularization term, thereby maximizing coherence between appropriate entities. Performance on the word intrusion task also improves drastically as the intruder along each dimension is a lot easier to identify owing to the fact that the top entities for each dimension group together more conspicuously. In this experiment, we test the model's ability to predict the best object entity for a given subject entity and relation. For each of the triples, we fix the subject and the relation and rank all entities (within same category as true object entity) based on their score according to Equation 10 . We report Mean Rank (MR) and Mean Reciprocal rank (MRR) of the true object entity and Hits@10 (the number of times true object entity is ranked in top 10) as percentage. The objective of the coherence regularization term being tangential to that of the original loss function, is not expected to affect performance on the link prediction task. However, the results show a trivial drop of $1.2$ in MRR as the coherence term gives credibility to triples that are otherwise deemed incorrect by the closed world assumption. We have used abbreviations for BS (Bachelor of Science), MS (Master of Science), UK (United Kingdom) and USA (United States of America). They appear as full form in the data. In this experiment, we test the model on classifying correct and incorrect triples. For finding incorrect triples, we corrupt the object entity with a randomly selected entity within the same category. For classification, we use validation data to find the best threshold for each relation by training an SVM classifier and later use this threshold for classifying test triples. We report the mean accuracy and mean AUC over all relations. We observe that the proposed method achieves slightly better performance for triple classification improving the accuracy by $4.4$ . The PMI information adds more evidence to the correct triples which are related in text data, generating a better threshold that more accurately distinguishes correct and incorrect triples. ### Qualitative Analysis of Results
Since our aim is to induce interpretability in representations, in this section, we evaluate the embeddings learned by the baseline as well as the proposed method. For both methods, we select some dimensions randomly and present top 5 entities along those dimensions. The results are presented in Table 2 . As we can see from the results, the proposed method produces more coherent entities than the baseline method. ### Conclusion and Future Works
In this work, we proposed a method for inducing interpretability in KG embeddings using a coherence regularization term. We evaluated the proposed and the baseline method on the interpretability of the learned embeddings. We also evaluated the methods on different KG tasks and compared their performance. We found that the proposed method achieves better interpretability while maintaining comparable performance on KG tasks. As next steps, we plan to evaluate the generalizability of the method with more recent KG embeddings. Table 1: Results on test data. The proposed method significantly improves interpretability while maintaining comparable performance on KG tasks (Section 4.3). Table 2: Top 5 and bottom most entities for randomly selected dimensions. As we see, the proposed method produces more coherent entities compared to the baseline. Incoherent entities are marked in bold face. 2
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For evaluating the interpretability, we use $Coherence@k$ (Equation 6 ) , automated and manual word intrusion tests.
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Why did Yuri go back to Cupia?
A. He was in love with Lilla
B. He wanted to rule both lands
C. He was afraid of Myles
D. He deserted New Formia
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THE RADIO PLANET Ralph Milne Farley I “It’s too bad that Myles Cabot can’t see this!” I exclaimed, as my eye fell on the following item: SIGNALS FROM MARS FAIL TO REACH HARVARD Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wednesday. The Harvard College Radio Station has for several weeks been in receipt of fragmentary signals of extraordinarily long wave-length, Professor Hammond announced yesterday. So far as it has been possible to test the direction of the source of these waves, it appears that the direction has a twenty-four hour cycle, thus indicating that the origin of these waves is some point outside the earth. The university authorities will express no opinion as to whether or not these messages come from Mars. Myles, alone of all the radio engineers of my acquaintance, was competent to surmount these difficulties, and thus enable the Cambridge savants to receive with clearness the message from another planet. 6 Twelve months ago he would have been available, for he was then quietly visiting at my farm, after five earth-years spent on the planet Venus, where, by the aid of radio, he had led the Cupians to victory over their oppressors, a human-brained race of gigantic black ants. He had driven the last ant from the face of continental Poros, and had won and wed the Princess Lilla, who had borne him a son to occupy the throne of Cupia. While at my farm Cabot had rigged up a huge radio set and a matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had (presumably) shot himself back to Poros on the night of the big October storm which had wrecked his installation. I showed the newspaper item to Mrs. Farley, and lamented on Cabot’s absence. Her response opened up an entirely new line of thought. Said she: “Doesn’t the very fact that Mr. Cabot isn’t here suggest to you that this may be a message, not from Mars, but from him? Or perhaps from the Princess Lilla, inquiring about him in case he has failed in his attempted return?” That had never occurred to me! How stupid! “What had I better do about it, if anything?” I asked. “Drop Professor Hammond a line?” But Mrs. Farley was afraid that I would be taken for a crank. That evening, when I was over in town, the clerk in the drug store waylaid me to say that there had been a long-distance phone call for me, and would I please call a certain Cambridge number. So, after waiting an interminable time in the stuffy booth with my hands full of dimes, nickels, and quarters, I finally got my party. “Mr. Farley?” “Speaking.” “This is Professor Kellogg, O. D. Kellogg,” the voice replied. 7 It was my friend of the Harvard math faculty, the man who had analyzed the measurements of the streamline projectile in which Myles Cabot had shot to earth the account of the first part of his adventures on Venus. Some further adventures Myles had told me in person during his stay on my farm. “Professor Hammond thinks that he is getting Mars on the air,” the voice continued. “Yes,” I replied. “I judged as much from what I read in this morning’s paper. But what do you think?” Kellogg’s reply gave my sluggish mind the second jolt which it had received that day. “Well,” he said, “in view of the fact that I am one of the few people among your readers who take your radio stories seriously, I think that Hammond is getting Venus. Can you run up here and help me try and convince him?” And so it was that I took the early boat next morning for Boston, and had lunch with the two professors. As a result of our conference, a small committee of engineers returned with me to Edgartown that evening for the purpose of trying to repair the wrecked radio set which Myles Cabot had left on my farm. They utterly failed to comprehend the matter-transmitting apparatus, and so—after the fallen tower had been reerected and the rubbish cleared away—they had devoted their attention to the restoration of the conversational part of the set. To make a long story short, we finally restored it, with the aid of some old blue prints of Cabot’s which Mrs. Farley, like Swiss Family Robinson’s wife, produced from somewhere. I was the first to try the earphones, and was rewarded by a faint “bzt-bzt” like the song of a north woods blackfly. In conventional radioese, I repeated the sounds to the Harvard group: “Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah. Dah-dit-dit dit. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit dit dit dah-dah-dah dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dah. Dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dah dah-dit-dit-dit-dah dah-dah-dah.” 8 A look of incredulity spread over their faces. Again came the same message, and again I repeated it. “You’re spoofing us!” one of them shouted. “Give me the earphones.” And he snatched them from my head. Adjusting them on his own head, he spelled out to us, “C-Q C-Q C-Q D-E C-A-B-O-T C-A-B-O-T C-A-B-O-T—” Seizing the big leaf-switch, he threw it over. The motor-generator began to hum. Grasping the key, the Harvard engineer ticked off into space: “Cabot Cabot Cabot D-E—” “Has this station a call letter?” he hurriedly asked me. “Yes,” I answered quickly, “One-X-X-B.” “One-X-X-B,” he continued the ticking “K.” Interplanetary communication was an established fact at last! And not with Mars after all these years of scientific speculations. But what meant more to me was that I was again in touch with my classmate Myles Standish Cabot, the radio man. The next day a party of prominent scientists, accompanied by a telegrapher and two stenographers, arrived at my farm. During the weeks that followed there was recorded Myles’s own account of the amazing adventures on the planet Venus (or Poros, as its own inhabitants call it,) which befell him upon his return there after his brief visit to the earth. I have edited those notes into the following coherent story. II TOO MUCH STATIC Myles Cabot had returned to the earth to study the latest developments of modern terrestrial science for the benefit of the Cupian nation. He was the regent of Cupia during the minority of his baby son, King Kew the Thirteenth. The loyal Prince Toron occupied the throne in his absence. The last of the ant-men and their ally, the renegade Cupian Prince Yuri, had presumably perished in an attempt to escape by flying through the steam-clouds which completely hem in continental Poros. What lay beyond the boiling seas no man knew. 9 During his stay on my farm, Cabot had built the matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had shot himself off into space on that October night on which he had received the message from the skies: “S O S, Lilla.” A thunderstorm had been brewing all that evening, and just as Myles had placed himself between the coordinate axes of his machine and had gathered up the strings which ran from his control levers to within the apparatus, there had come a blinding flash. Lightning had struck his aerial. How long his unconsciousness lasted he knew not. He was some time in regaining his senses. But when he had finally and fully recovered, he found himself lying on a sandy beach beside a calm and placid lake beneath a silver sky. He fell to wondering, vaguely and pleasantly, where he was and how he had got here. Suddenly, however, his ears were jarred by a familiar sound. At once his senses cleared, and he listened intently to the distant purring of a motor. Yes, there could be no mistake; an airplane was approaching. Now he could see it, a speck in the sky, far down the beach. Nearer and nearer it came. Myles sprang to his feet. To his intense surprise, he found that the effort threw him quite a distance into the air. Instantly the idea flashed through his mind: “I must be on Mars! Or some other strange planet.” This idea was vaguely reminiscent of something. But while he was trying to catch this vaguely elusive train of thought, his attention was diverted by the fact that, for some unaccountable reason, his belt buckle and most of the buttons which had held his clothes together were missing, so that his clothing came to pieces as he rose, and that he had to shed it rapidly in order to avoid impeding his movements. He wondered at the cause of this. 10 But his speculations were cut short by the alighting of the plane a hundred yards down the beach. What was his horror when out of it clambered, not men but ants! Ants, six-footed, and six feet high. Huge ants, four of them, running toward him over the glistening sands. Gone was all his languor, as he seized a piece of driftwood and prepared to defend himself. As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had befriended him on his previous visit. Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of his imagination? Horrible thought! And then events began to differ from those of the past; for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he had contrived and built during his previous visit to that planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of which races are earless and converse by means of radiations from their antennae. So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears. Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot, you are our prisoner.” “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of submission. 11 He dreaded the paralyzing bite which Formians usually administer to their victims, and which he had twice experienced in the past; but, fortunately, it was not now forthcoming. The other three ants kept away from him as Doggo led him to the beached airplane, and soon they were scudding along beneath silver skies, northward as it later turned out. Far below them were silver-green fields and tangled tropical woods, interspersed with rivulets and little ponds. This was Cupia, his Cupia. He was home once more, back again upon the planet which held all that was dear to him in two worlds. His heart glowed with the warmth of homecoming. What mattered it that he was now a prisoner, in the hands (or, rather, claws) of his old enemies, the Formians? He had been their prisoner before, and had escaped. Once more he could escape, and rescue the Princess Lilla. Poor girl! How eager he was to reach her side, and save her from that peril, whatever it was, which had caused her to flash that “S O S” a hundred million miles across the solar system from Poros to the earth. He wondered what could have happened in Cupia since his departure, only a few sangths ago. How was it that the ant-men had survived their airplane journey across the boiling seas? What had led them to return? Or perhaps these ants were a group who had hidden somewhere and thus had escaped the general extermination of their race. In either event, how had they been able to reconquer Cupia? And where was their former leader, Yuri, the renegade Cupian prince? These and a hundred other similar questions flooded in upon the earth-man, as the Formian airship carried him, a captive, through the skies. He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be, over which they were now passing? 12 Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles would have to wait until they reached their landing place; for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the country below was wholly unfamiliar. Finally a small settlement loomed ahead. It was of the familiar style of toy-building-block architecture affected by the ant-men, and, from its appearance, was very new. On its outskirts further building operations were actively in progress. Apparently a few survivors of the accursed race of Formians were consolidating their position and attempting to build up a new empire in some out-of-the-way portion of the continent. As the earth-man was turning these thoughts over in his mind the plane softly settled down upon one of the flat roofs, and its occupants disembarked. Three of the ants advanced menacingly toward Myles, but Doggo held them off. Then all of the party descended down one of the ramps to the lower levels of the building. Narrow slitlike window openings gave onto courtyards, where fountains played and masses of blue and yellow flowers bloomed, amid gray-branched lichens with red and purple twig-knobs. It was in just such a garden, through just such a window, that he had first looked upon the lovely blue-eyed, golden-haired Lilla, Crown Princess of Cupia. The earth-man sighed. Where was his beloved wife now? That she needed his help was certain. He must therefore get busy. So once again he made motions of writing on the palm of his left hand with the thumb and forefinger of his right; and this time the sign language produced results, for Doggo halted the procession and led Cabot into a room. 13 It was a plain bare room, devoid of any furniture except a small table, for ant-men have no use for chairs and couches. The sky outside was already beginning to pinken with the unseen sun. With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus, not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw of a Formian. Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment, and then quickly filled a sheet with questions: “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city? Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with me this time?” Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old friend Doggo. They were alone together at last. The ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper; but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not take so very much more time than speaking would have required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to Myles, who read as follows: “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne of Cupia, splendid even in defeat. “It was his brain that conceived our daring plan of escape. If there were other lands beyond the boiling seas, the lands which tradition taught were the origin of the Cupian race, then there we might prosper and raise up a new empire. At the worst we should merely meet death in another form, rather than at your hands. So we essayed. 14 “Your planes followed us, but turned back as we neared the area of terrific heat. Soon the vapor closed over us, blotting our enemies and our native land from view.” For page after page Doggo, the ant-man, related the harrowing details of that perilous flight across the boiling seas, ending with the words: “Here we are, and here are you, in Yuriana, capitol of New Formia. But how is it that you, Myles Cabot, have arrived here on this continent in exactly the same manner and condition in which I discovered you in old Formia eight years ago?” When Myles reached the end of reading this narrative, he in turn took the pad and stylus and related how he had gone to the planet Minos (which we call the Earth) to learn the latest discoveries and inventions there, and how his calculations for his return to Poros had been upset by some static conditions just as he had been about to transmit himself back. Oh, if only he had landed by chance upon the same beach as on his first journey through the skies! Wisely he refrained from mentioning the “S O S” message from Lilla. But his recollection of her predicament spurred him to be anxious about her rescue. His immediate problem was to learn what the ant-men planned for him; so the concluding words which he wrote upon the pad were: “And, now that you have me in your power, what shall you do with me?” “Old friend,” Doggo wrote in reply, “that depends entirely upon Yuri, our king, whose toga you now have on.” III YURI OR FORMIS? The earth-man grimaced, but then smiled. Perhaps, his succeeding to the toga of King Yuri might prove to be an omen. 15 “So Yuri is king of the ants?” he asked. “Yes,” his captor replied, “for Queen Formis did not survive the trip across the boiling seas.” “Then what of your empire?” Myles inquired. “No queen. No eggs. How can your race continue? For you Formians are like the ants on my own planet Minos.” Doggo’s reply astounded him. “Do you remember back at Wautoosa, I told you that some of us lesser Formians had occasionally laid eggs? So now behold before you Doggo, Admiral of the Formian Air Navy, and mother of a new Queen Formis.” This was truly a surprise! All along Cabot had always regarded the Formians as mannish. And rightly so, for they performed in their own country the duties assigned to men among the Cupians. Furthermore, all Formians, save only the reigning Formis herself, were called by the Porovian pronoun, which corresponds to “he” in English. When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment, he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom. “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person of some importance among the Formians.” “It ought to,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me. Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and for the Formians exclusively.” “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own difficulties. But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an autocracy. The earth-man, however, persisted. “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?” 16 “Only one—myself.” And again Doggo tore up the correspondence. Myles tactfully changed the subject. “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked. “We know not,” the Formian wrote in reply. “Six days ago he left us in his airship and flew westward. When he failed to return, we sent out scout planes to search for him, and we have been hunting ever since. When we sighted you on the beach this morning we thought that you might be our lost leader, and that is why we landed and approached you.” At about this point the conversation was interrupted by a worker ant who brought food: roast alta and green aphid milk. With what relish did the earth-man plunge into the feast, his first taste of Porovian delicacies in many months. During the meal conversation lagged, owing to the difficulty of writing and eating at the same time. But now Myles Cabot seized his pad and stylus and wrote: “Have you ever known me to fail in any undertaking on the planet Poros?” “No,” the ant-man wrote in reply. “Have you ever known me to be untrue to a principle, a cause, or a friend?” “No,” Doggo replied. “Then,” Myles wrote, “let us make your daughter queen in fact as well as in name.” “It is treason,” Doggo wrote in reply, but this time he did not tear up the correspondence. “Treason?” Myles asked. If he had spoken the word, he would have spoken it with scorn and derision. “Treason? Is it treason to support your own queen? What has become of the national pride of the once great Formians? Look! I pledge myself to the cause of Formis, rightful Queen of Formia. Formis, daughter of Doggo! What say you?” This time, as he tore up the correspondence, Doggo signified an affirmative. And thus there resulted further correspondence. 17 “Doggo,” Myles wrote, “can you get to the antenna of the queen?” The ant-man indicated that he could. “If she has inherited any of your character,” Myles continued, “she will assert herself, if given half a chance.” So the Pitmanesque conversation continued. Long since had the pink light of Porovian evening faded from the western sky. The ceiling vapor-lamps were lit. The night showed velvet-black through the slit-like windows. And still the two old friends wrote on, Myles Standish Cabot, the Bostonian, and Doggo, No. 334-2-18, the only really humanlike ant-man whom Myles had ever known among the once dominant race of Poros. Finally, as the dials indicated midnight, the two conspirators ceased their labors. All was arranged for the coup d’ etat . They tore into shreds every scrap of used paper, leaving extant merely the ant-man’s concluding words: “Meanwhile you are my prisoner.” Doggo then rang a soundless bell, which was answered by a worker ant, whom he inaudibly directed to bring sufficient draperies to form a bed for the earth-man. These brought, the two friends patted each other a fond good night, and the tired earth-man lay down for the first sleep which he had had in over forty earth hours. It hardly seemed possible! Night before last he had slept peacefully on a conventional feather-bed in a little New England farmhouse. Then had come the S O S message from the skies; and here he was now, millions of miles away through space retiring on matted silver felting on the concrete floor of a Porovian ant-house. Such are the mutations of fortune! With these thoughts the returned wanderer lapsed into a deep and dreamless sleep. When he awakened in the morning there was a guard posted at the door. 18 Doggo did not show up until nearly noon, when he rattled in, bristling with excitement. Seizing the pad he wrote: “A stormy session of the Council of Twelve! We are all agreed that you must be indicted for high crimes and misdemeanors. But the great question is as to just what we can charge you with.” “Sorry I can’t assist you,” the earth-man wrote. “How would it be if I were to slap your daughter’s face, or something? Or why not try me for general cussedness?” “That is just what we finally decided to do,” the ant-man wrote in reply. “We shall try you on general principles, and let the proper accusation develop from the evidence. “At some stage of the proceedings it will inevitably occur to some member of the council to suggest that you be charged with treason to Yuri, whereupon two members of the council, whom I have won over to the cause of my daughter, will raise the objection that Yuri is not our king. This will be the signal for the proclaiming of Queen Formis. If you will waive counsel the trial can take place to-morrow.” “I will waive anything,” Myles replied, “counsel, immunity, extradition, anything in order to speed up my return to Cupia, where Lilla awaits in some dire extremity.” “All right,” Doggo wrote, and the conference was at an end. The morrow would decide the ascendancy of Myles Cabot or the Prince Yuri over the new continent. IV THE COUP D’ETAT The next morning Myles Cabot was led under guard to the council chamber of the dread thirteen: Formis and her twelve advisers. The accused was placed in a wicker cage, from which he surveyed his surroundings as the proceedings opened. 19 On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve was Doggo. Messenger ants hurried hither and thither. First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished with a written copy. The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors. They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved Formia. Their testimony was brief. Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders, sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of making an argument through the antennae of another.” Whereupon the queen and the council went into executive session. Their remarks were not intended for the eyes of the prisoner, but he soon observed that some kind of a dispute was on between Doggo, supported by two councillors named Emu and Fum on one side, and a councillor named Barth on the other. As this dispute reached its height, a messenger ant rushed in and held up one paw. Cabot’s interpreter, not deeming this a part of the executive session, obligingly translated the following into writing: The messenger: “Yuri lives and reigns over Cupia. It is his command that Cabot die.” Barth: “It is the radio. Know then, O Queen, and ye, members of the council, that when we fled across the boiling seas under the gallant leadership of Prince Yuri, the man with the heart of a Formian, he brought with him one of those powerful radio sets invented by the beast who is our prisoner here to-day. “Supporters of Yuri still remained among the Cupians, and he has been in constant communication with these ever since shortly after our arrival here. From them he learned of the return of Myles Cabot to the planet Minos. 20 “Then Yuri disappeared. Those of us who were closest to him suspected that he had gone back across the boiling seas to claim as his own the throne of Cupia. But we hesitated to announce this until we were sure, for we feared that some of our own people would regard his departure as desertion. Yet who can blame him for returning to his father-land and to the throne which is his by rights?” To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us back our own old country, if we too will return across the boiling seas again.” “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted. “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!” shouted Emu. “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth. “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum. “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen. And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation, for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free! With one bound he gained the throne, where fighting was already in progress between the two factions. Barth and Doggo were rolling over and over on the floor in a death grapple, while the ant-queen had backed to the rear of the stage, closely guarded by Emu and Fum. Seizing one of the pikes which supported the scarlet canopy, Myles wrenched it loose and drove it into the thorax of Barth. In another instant the earth-man and Doggo stood beside the queen. Ant-men now came pouring into the chamber through all the entrances, taking sides as they entered and sized up the situation. If it had still been in vogue among the Formians to be known by numbers rather than names, and to have these identifying numbers painted on the backs of their abdomens followed by the numbers of those whom they had defeated in the duels so common among them, then many a Formian would have “got the number” of many another, that day.
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B. He wanted to rule both lands
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What is Simon referring to when he says "now it comes" to Betty during their discussion at the beginning of the story?
A. He knows his headache is about to get worse.
B. The client he is expecting is about to show up.
C. He is used to complaints about Betty's salary.
D. He is expecting the usual argument with Betty about her job.
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UNBORN TOMORROW BY MACK REYNOLDS Unfortunately , there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future ... and though he didn't want to ... nevertheless he did.... Illustrated by Freas Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, "will provide." "Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars." Simon said, mournful of tone, "Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?" "I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary." "Money," Simon said. "When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you." "Hm-m-m. I didn't know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down." Simon said, enigmatically, "Now it comes." There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling. Simon said unenthusiastically, "Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated the client's chair. "Sit down, sir." The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, "You know my name, that's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything." "Anything," Simon said. "Only one exception." "Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?" Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, "Time travel is impossible." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, why?" Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, "Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?" "Confound it if I know," the little fellow growled. "How?" Simon said, "Let's get to the point, what you wanted to see me about." "I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy said. Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?" "Some," Betty admitted. "Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers." Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't we ever meet such travelers?" Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully." Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man." Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time and—" Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him." Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler." "Right!" Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, "But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they're interested in keeping hid?" The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest , that's where they'd be!" He seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. "The Oktoberfest ," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria , fiesta to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description. "It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst , a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—" "All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding." "Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest . For one thing, a time traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest . People would figure they had D.T.'s." "But why would a time traveler want to go to a—" Betty began. "Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked." The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—" Simon was shaking his head. "Not interested." As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. "See here, young man, I realize this isn't an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—" "Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be done." "A hundred dollars a day plus expenses," Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn't appear often in the papers." "No go," Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. "A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler." "Out of the question," Simon said. "But why ?" Betty wailed. "Just for laughs," Simon told the two of them sourly, "suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:" I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh! Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen. Who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German, with his twenty-five dollars a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bahnhof where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could, and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer bout, how were they accommodated? The Theresienwiese , the fair ground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circuslike tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about five thousand persons and from six to ten thousands pack themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand, the musicians all lederhosen clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of peasant garbed fräuleins darted about the tables with quart sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for twenty-odd beer bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up, ranging from a seventy- or eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian costume, to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They call them masses , by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. "Down the hatch," the other said, holding up his mass in toast. "To the ladies," I told him. Before sipping, I said, "You know, the tourist pamphlets say this stuff is eighteen per cent. That's nonsense. No beer is that strong." I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted. A mass or two apiece later he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu," he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. "That's a queer looking pencil you have there," I told him. "German?" "Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry. Shouldn't have said that." I had never heard of the brand so I skipped it. "Next is the Hofbräu," he said. "Next what?" Baldy's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. "My pilgrimage," he told me. "All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid I'll never make it." I finished my mass . "I'll help you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor. Name is Simon." "Arth," he said. "How could you help?" "I'm still fresh—comparatively. I'll navigate you around. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through, so far?" "Two, counting this one," Arth said. I looked at him. "It's going to be a chore," I said. "You've already got a nice edge on." Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big State-Fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing as the last but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. "This is what I call a real beer bust," I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later I said, "I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth." "Make what?" "All seven tents." "Oh." A waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured to her for refills. "Where are you from, Arth?" I asked him, in the way of making conversation. "2183." "2183 where?" He looked at me, closing one eye to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well, 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque." "New Albuquerque? Where's that?" Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. "Right across the way from old Albuquerque," he said finally. "Maybe we ought to be getting on to the Pschorrbräu tent." "Maybe we ought to eat something first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox." Arth closed his eyes in pain. "Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh." "Well, we need some nourishment," I said. "There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer." That made sense. I yelled, " Fräulein! Zwei neu bier! " Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, "Where's your hotel?" That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, "Haven't got one. Town's jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?" "Lost track," Arth said. "You can come home with me." We drank to that and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, "Who ... how ... oh, Wodo , where'd you come from?" I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. "Where's the shade," I moaned. Arth did something and the window went opaque. "That's quite a gadget," I groaned. "If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it." Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed. "You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased. Phased all the way down." "You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you?" I asked him. "Just a minute," Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't touch anything." "All right," I told him plaintively. "I'm clean. I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice." Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. "Here, take one of these." I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water. And went out like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. "Want another mass ?" The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus! Eins, Zwei, G'sufa! At the G'sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other's health. My head was killing me. "This is where I came in, or something," I groaned. Arth said, "That was last night." He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass and then remembered. "I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?" Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?" "Not very well," I admitted. "I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage." Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they'd somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn't speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest , and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk's error, evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself. From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I'd left. I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, "Glad you're here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results?" My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover. "Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted. "I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left." "You'll miss your plane," Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left." Betty said, "What's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time travelers yet." I tried just once more. "Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?" "Never saw him before in my life," she said. "Not until he came in this morning." "This morning," I said weakly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?" "You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back." "See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon's story), "did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed." Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, "That's only the first chapter. There are two more." "I'm not interested in more," Mr. Oyster said. "I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!" He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. "Week's wages," she said. "I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about." "I did," Simon groaned. "Three times." Betty stared at him. "You mean—" Simon nodded, miserably. She said, "But Simon . Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—" "I keep telling you," Simon said bitterly, "I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands." He took a deep breath. "Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past." "You mean," Betty was suddenly furious at him, "you've given up! Why this is the biggest thing— Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!" Simon said wearily, "There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What's more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!" He shuddered. "If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing, all at once, you can think again." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 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.
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B. The client he is expecting is about to show up.
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What kind of model do they build to expand abbreviations?
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### Introduction
Abbreviations and acronyms appear frequently in the medical domain. Based on a popular online knowledge base, among the 3,096,346 stored abbreviations, 197,787 records are medical abbreviations, ranked first among all ten domains. An abbreviation can have over 100 possible explanations even within the medical domain. Medical record documentation, the authors of which are mainly physicians, other health professionals, and domain experts, is usually written under the pressure of time and high workload, requiring notation to be frequently compressed with shorthand jargon and acronyms. This is even more evident within intensive care medicine, where it is crucial that information is expressed in the most efficient manner possible to provide time-sensitive care to critically ill patients, but can result in code-like messages with poor readability. For example, given a sentence written by a physician with specialty training in critical care medicine, “STAT TTE c/w RVS. AKI - no CTA. .. etc”, it is difficult for non-experts to understand all abbreviations without specific context and/or knowledge. But when a doctor reads this, he/she would know that although “STAT” is widely used as the abbreviation of “statistic”, “statistics” and “statistical” in most domains, in hospital emergency rooms, it is often used to represent “immediately”. Within the arena of medical research, abbreviation expansion using a natural language processing system to automatically analyze clinical notes may enable knowledge discovery (e.g., relations between diseases) and has potential to improve communication and quality of care. In this paper, we study the task of abbreviation expansion in clinical notes. As shown in Figure 1, our goal is to normalize all the abbreviations in the intensive care unit (ICU) documentation to reduce misinterpretation and to make the texts accessible to a wider range of readers. For accurately capturing the semantics of an abbreviation in its context, we adopt word embedding, which can be seen as a distributional semantic representation and has been proven to be effective BIBREF0 to compute the semantic similarity between words based on the context without any labeled data. The intuition of distributional semantics BIBREF1 is that if two words share similar contexts, they should have highly similar semantics. For example, in Figure 1, “RF” and “respiratory failure” have very similar contexts so that their semantics should be similar. If we know “respiratory failure” is a possible candidate expansion of “RF” and its semantics is similar to the “RF” in the intensive care medicine texts, we can determine that it should be the correct expansion of “RF”. Due to the limited resource of intensive care medicine texts where full expansions rarely appear, we exploit abundant and easily-accessible task-oriented resources to enrich our dataset for training embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply word embeddings to this task. Experimental results show that the embeddings trained on the task-oriented corpus are much more useful than those trained on other corpora. By combining the embeddings with domain-specific knowledge, we achieve 82.27% accuracy, which outperforms baselines and is close to human's performance. ### Related Work
The task of abbreviation disambiguation in biomedical documents has been studied by various researchers using supervised machine learning algorithms BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 . However, the performance of these supervised methods mainly depends on a large amount of labeled data which is extremely difficult to obtain for our task since intensive care medicine texts are very rare resources in clinical domain due to the high cost of de-identification and annotation. Tengstrand et al. tengstrand2014eacl proposed a distributional semantics-based approach for abbreviation expansion in Swedish but they focused only on expanding single words and cannot handle multi-word phrases. In contrast, we use word embeddings combined with task-oriented resources and knowledge, which can handle multiword expressions. ### Overview
The overview of our approach is shown in Figure FIGREF6 . Within ICU notes (e.g., text example in top-left box in Figure 2), we first identify all abbreviations using regular expressions and then try to find all possible expansions of these abbreviations from domain-specific knowledge base as candidates. We train word embeddings using the clinical notes data with task-oriented resources such as Wikipedia articles of candidates and medical scientific papers and compute the semantic similarity between an abbreviation and its candidate expansions based on their embeddings (vector representations of words). ### Training embeddings with task oriented resources
Given an abbreviation as input, we expect the correct expansion to be the most semantically similar to the abbreviation, which requires the abbreviation and the expansion share similar contexts. For this reason, we exploit rich task-oriented resources such as the Wikipedia articles of all the possible candidates, research papers and books written by the intensive care medicine fellows. Together with our clinical notes data which functions as a corpus, we train word embeddings since the expansions of abbreviations in the clinical notes are likely to appear in these resources and also share the similar contexts to the abbreviation's contexts. ### Handling MultiWord Phrases
In most cases, an abbreviation's expansion is a multi-word phrase. Therefore, we need to obtain the phrase's embedding so that we can compute its semantic similarity to the abbreviation. It is proven that a phrase's embedding can be effectively obtained by summing the embeddings of words contained in the phrase BIBREF0 , BIBREF7 . For computing a phrase's embedding, we formally define a candidate INLINEFORM0 as a list of the words contained in the candidate, for example: one of MICU's candidate expansions is medical intensive care unit=[medical,intensive,care,unit]. Then, INLINEFORM1 's embedding can be computed as follows: DISPLAYFORM0 where INLINEFORM0 is a token in the candidate INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 denotes the embedding of a word/phrase, which is a vector of real-value entries. ### Expansion Candidate Ranking
Even though embeddings are very helpful to compute the semantic similarity between an abbreviation and a candidate expansion, in some cases, context-independent information is also useful to identify the correct expansion. For example, CHF in the clinical notes usually refers to “congestive heart failure”. By using embedding-based semantic similarity, we can find two possible candidates – “congestive heart failure” (similarity=0.595) and “chronic heart failure”(similarity=0.621). These two candidates have close semantic similarity score but their popularity scores in the medical domain are quite different – the former has a rating score of 50 while the latter only has a rating score of 7. Therefore, we can see that the rating score, which can be seen as a kind of domain-specific knowledge, can also contribute to the candidate ranking. We combine semantic similarity with rating information. Formally, given an abbreviation INLINEFORM0 's candidate list INLINEFORM1 , we rank INLINEFORM2 based on the following formula: DISPLAYFORM0 where INLINEFORM0 denotes the rating of this candidate as an expansion of the abbreviation INLINEFORM1 , which reflects this candidate's popularity, INLINEFORM2 denotes the embedding of a word. The parameter INLINEFORM3 serves to adjust the weights of similarity and popularity ### Data and Evaluation Metrics
The clinical notes we used for the experiment are provided by domain experts, consisting of 1,160 physician logs of Medical ICU admission requests at a tertiary care center affiliated to Mount Sanai. Prospectively collected over one year, these semi-structured logs contain free-text descriptions of patients' clinical presentations, medical history, and required critical care-level interventions. We identify 818 abbreviations and find 42,506 candidates using domain-specific knowledge (i.e., www.allacronym.com/_medical). The enriched corpus contains 42,506 Wikipedia articles, each of which corresponds to one candidate, 6 research papers and 2 critical care medicine textbooks, besides our raw ICU data. We use word2vec BIBREF0 to train the word embeddings. The dimension of embeddings is empirically set to 100. Since the goal of our task is to find the correct expansion for an abbreviation, we use accuracy as a metric to evaluate the performance of our approach. For ground-truth, we have 100 physician logs which are manually expanded and normalized by one of the authors Dr. Mathews, a well-trained domain expert, and thus we use these 100 physician logs as the test set to evaluate our approach's performance. ### Baseline Models
For our task, it's difficult to re-implement the supervised methods as in previous works mentioned since we do not have sufficient training data. And a direct comparison is also impossible because all previous work used different data sets which are not publicly available. Alternatively, we use the following baselines to compare with our approach. Rating: This baseline model chooses the highest rating candidate expansion in the domain specific knowledge base. Raw Input embeddings: We trained word embeddings only from the 1,160 raw ICU texts and we choose the most semantically related candidate as the answer. General embeddings: Different from the Raw Input embeddings baseline, we use the embedding trained from a large biomedical data collection that includes knowledge bases like PubMed and PMC and a Wikipedia dump of biomedical related articles BIBREF8 for semantic similarity computation. ### Results
Table 1 shows the performance of abbreviation expansion. Our approach significantly outperforms the baseline methods and achieves 82.27% accuracy. Figure FIGREF21 shows how our approach improves the performance of a rating-based approach. By using embeddings, we can learn that the meaning of “OD” used in our test cases should be “overdose” rather than “out-of-date” and this semantic information largely benefits the abbreviation expansion model. Compared with our approach, embeddings trained only from the ICU texts do not significantly contribute to the performance over the rating baseline. The reason is that the size of data for training the embeddings is so small that many candidate expansions of abbreviations do not appear in the corpus, which results in poor performance. It is notable that general embeddings trained from large biomedical data are not effective for this task because many abbreviations within critical care medicine appear in the biomedical corpus with different senses. For example, “OD” in intensive care medicine texts refers to “overdose” while in the PubMed corpus it usually refers to “optical density”, as shown in Figure FIGREF24 . Therefore, the embeddings trained from the PubMed corpus do not benefit the expansion of abbreviations in the ICU texts. Moreover, we estimated human performance for this task, shown in Table TABREF26 . Note that the performance is estimated by one of the authors Dr. Mathews who is a board-certified pulmonologist and critical care medicine specialist based on her experience and the human's performance estimated in Table TABREF26 is under the condition that the participants can not use any other external resources. We can see that our approach can achieve a performance close to domain experts and thus it is promising to tackle this challenge. ### Error Analysis
The distribution of errors is shown in Table TABREF28 . There are mainly three reasons that cause the incorrect expansion. In some cases, some certain abbreviations do not exist in the knowledge base. In this case we would not be able to populate the corresponding candidate list. Secondly, in many cases although we have the correct expansion in the candidate list, it's not ranked as the top one due to the lower semantic similarity because there are not enough samples in the training data. Among all the incorrect expansions in our test set, such kind of errors accounted for about 54%. One possible solution may be adding more effective data to the embedding training, which means discovering more task-oriented resources. In a few cases, we failed to identify some abbreviations because of their complicated representations. For example, we have the following sentence in the patient's notes: “ No n/v/f/c.” and the correct expansion should be “No nausea/vomiting/fever/chills.” Such abbreviations are by far the most difficult to expand in our task because they do not exist in any knowledge base and usually only occur once in the training data. ### Conclusions and Future Work
This paper proposes a simple but novel approach for automatic expansion of abbreviations. It achieves very good performance without any manually labeled data. Experiments demonstrate that using task-oriented resources to train word embeddings is much more effective than using general or arbitrary corpus. In the future, we plan to collectively expand semantically related abbreviations co-occurring in a sentence. In addition, we expect to integrate our work into a natural language processing system for processing the clinical notes for discovering knowledge, which will largely benefit the medical research. ### Acknowledgements
This work is supported by RPI's Tetherless World Constellation, IARPA FUSE Numbers D11PC20154 and J71493 and DARPA DEFT No. FA8750-13-2-0041. Dr. Mathews' effort is supported by Award #1K12HL109005-01 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NHLBI, the National Institutes of Health, IARPA, or DARPA. Figure 1: Sample Input and Output of the task and intuition of distributional similarity Figure 2: Approach overview. Table 1: Overall performance Table 2: Estimated human performance for abbreviation expansion Table 3: Error distribution
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word2vec BIBREF0
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How do Wayne's thoughts toward Captain Jack and his dialogue toward Captain Jack differ?
A. Wayne speaks to Captain Jack respectfully, but mocks him in his thoughts.
B. Wayne speaks to Captain Jack in a fearful manner, but underestimates him in his thoughts.
C. Wayne speaks to Captain Jack quietly, but wishes he could have more confidence on the inside.
D. Wayne speaks to Captain Jack arrogantly, but is scared of him in his thoughts.
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THE RECRUIT BY BRYCE WALTON It was dirty work, but it would make him a man. And kids had a right to grow up—some of them! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs. The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out. The old man said, "He'll be okay. Let him alone." "But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time." "Hell," the old man said. "Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough." Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly. "We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. You read the books." "But he's unhappy." "Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or we'll be late." Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say. Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland. But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ. "Well, dear, if you say so," Mother said, with the old resigned sigh that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly. They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up. "Relax," Wayne said. "You're not going anywhere tonight." "What, son?" his old man said uneasily. "Sure we are. We're going to the movies." He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was silent. "Okay, go," Wayne said. "If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family boltbucket." "But we promised the Clemons, dear," his mother said. "Hell," Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. "I just got my draft call." He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. "Oh, my dear boy," Mother cried out. "So gimme the keys," Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes. "Do be careful, dear," his mother said. She ran toward him as he laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed the glaring wonders of escape. He burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. 947 and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork. "Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?" Wayne grinned down. "Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey." "Well," the sergeant said. "How tough we are this evening. You have a pass, killer?" "Wayne Seton. Draft call." "Oh." The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. "Go to the Armory and check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to Captain Jack, room 307." "Thanks, sarge dear," Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory. A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne. Finally he said, "So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid breaking out tonight?" "Hold your teeth, pop," Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a cigarette. "I've decided." The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement. "Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes are clever hellcats in a dark alley." "You must be a genius," Wayne said. "A corporal with no hair and still a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad." The corporal sighed wearily. "You can get that balloon head ventilated, bud, and good." Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the shelves and racks of weapons. "I'll remember that crack when I get my commission." He blew smoke in the corporal's face. "Bring me a Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the double springs." The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger, while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and scary. He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, "Good luck, tiger." Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had a head shaped like a grinning bear. Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea among bowling balls. Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags. "Wayne Seton," said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something in a bug collection. "Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you? Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?" "Yes, sir," Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos. His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him, ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy, what was he doing holding down a desk? "Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly collection." The cane darted up. A blade snicked from the end and stopped an inch from Wayne's nose. He jerked up a shaky hand involuntarily and clamped a knuckle-ridged gag to his gasping mouth. Captain Jack chuckled. "All right, superboy." He handed Wayne his passcard. "Curfew's off, punk, for 6 hours. You got 6 hours to make out." "Yes, sir." "Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West Side. Know where that is, punk?" "No, sir, but I'll find it fast." "Sure you will, punk," smiled Captain Jack. "She'll be wearing yellow slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people. They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and they're your key to the stars." "Yes, sir," Wayne said. "So run along and make out, punk," grinned Captain Jack. A copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river. Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away. The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind. He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale, secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells. Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with the shadows of mysterious promise. He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling. FOUR ACES CLUB He parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass filtering through windows painted black. He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub balanced on one end. The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and doom. "I gotta hide, kid. They're on me." Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled. The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons. "Help me, kid." He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and crouched as he began stalking the old rummy. "This is him! This is him all right," the teener yelled, and one hand came up swinging a baseball bat. A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled. The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up. Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything. Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless, until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep. The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled up with stick arms over his rheumy face. The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling glass. "Go, man!" The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like bright wind-blown sparks. Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage. He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires. He walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table. He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift. The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm. She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive. Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse heavy. "What's yours, teener?" the slug-faced waiter asked. "Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo," Wayne said, and flashed his pass card. "Sure, teener." Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass. Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious cat's. Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little mouse. The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in the pay of the state. "What else, teener?" "One thing. Fade." "Sure, teener," the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup. Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his veins, became hot wire twisting in his head. He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good. "Okay, you creep," Wayne said. He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was out the door. Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet. He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the life-or-death animation of a wild deer. Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots. Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling, sliding down a brick shute. He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood. She quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with terror. "You, baby," Wayne gasped. "I gotcha." She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall, her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked. He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling plaster, a whimpering whine. "No use running," Wayne said. "Go loose. Give, baby. Give now." She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her, feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's shadow floated ahead. He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the jagged skylight. Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening to his creeping, implacable footfalls. Then he yelled and slammed open the door. Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior, shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the moon-streaming skylight. She crouched in the corner panting. He took his time moving in. He snickered as he flashed the switchblade and circled it like a serpent's tongue. He watched what was left of her nerves go to pieces like rotten cloth. "Do it quick, hunter," she whispered. "Please do it quick." "What's that, baby?" "I'm tired running. Kill me first. Beat me after. They won't know the difference." "I'm gonna bruise and beat you," he said. "Kill me first," she begged. "I don't want—" She began to cry. She cried right up in his face, her wide eyes unblinking, and her mouth open. "You got bad blood, baby," he snarled. He laughed but it didn't sound like him and something was wrong with his belly. It was knotting up. "Bad, I know! So get it over with, please. Hurry, hurry." She was small and white and quivering. She moaned but kept staring up at him. He ripped off his rivet-studded belt and swung once, then groaned and shuffled away from her. He kept backing toward the door. She crawled after him, begging and clutching with both arms as she wriggled forward on her knees. "Don't run. Please. Kill me! It'll be someone else if you don't. Oh, God, I'm so tired waiting and running!" "I can't," he said, and sickness soured in his throat. "Please." "I can't, I can't!" He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs. Doctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center, studied Wayne with abstract interest. "You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?" "Yes, sir." "But you couldn't execute them?" "No, sir." "They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?" "Yes, sir." "The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can be done for them? That they have to be executed?" "I know." "Too bad," the doctor said. "We all have aggressive impulses, primitive needs that must be expressed early, purged. There's murder in all of us, Seton. The impulse shouldn't be denied or suppressed, but educated . The state used to kill them. Isn't it better all around, Seton, for us to do it, as part of growing up? What was the matter, Seton?" "I—felt sorry for her." "Is that all you can say about it?" "Yes, sir." The doctor pressed a buzzer. Two men in white coats entered. "You should have got it out of your system, Seton, but now it's still in there. I can't turn you out and have it erupt later—and maybe shed clean innocent blood, can I?" "No, sir," Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. "I'm sorry I punked out." "Give him the treatment," the doctor said wearily. "And send him back to his mother." Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his poker-playing pals. They had all punked out. Like him.
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A. Wayne speaks to Captain Jack respectfully, but mocks him in his thoughts.
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How long would it take for the needed replacements to be delivered to Freedom 19?
A. three hours
B. 90 seconds
C. ten days
D. three weeks
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The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [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.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.
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C. ten days
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what opportunities are highlighted?
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### Introduction
Current research, theory, and policy surrounding K-12 instruction in the United States highlight the role of student-centered disciplinary discussions (i.e. discussions related to a specific academic discipline or school subject such as physics or English Language Arts) in instructional quality and student learning opportunities BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . Such student-centered discussions – often called “dialogic" or “inquiry-based” – are widely viewed as the most effective instructional approach for disciplinary understanding, problem-solving, and literacy BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . In English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, student-centered discussions about literature have a positive impact on the development of students' reasoning, writing, and reading skills BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 . However, most studies have focused on the role of teachers and their talk BIBREF7 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF8 rather than on the aspects of student talk that contribute to discussion quality. Additionally, studies of student-centered discussions rarely use the same coding schemes, making it difficult to generalize across studies BIBREF2 , BIBREF9 . This limitation is partly due to the time-intensive work required to analyze discourse data through qualitative methods such as ethnography and discourse analysis. Thus, qualitative case studies have generated compelling theories about the specific features of student talk that lead to high-quality discussions, but few findings can be generalized and leveraged to influence instructional improvements across ELA classrooms. As a first step towards developing an automated system for detecting the features of student talk that lead to high quality discussions, we propose a new annotation scheme for student talk during ELA “text-based" discussions - that is, discussions that center on a text or piece of literature (e.g., book, play, or speech). The annotation scheme was developed to capture three aspects of classroom talk that are theorized in the literature as important to discussion quality and learning opportunities: argumentation (the process of systematically reasoning in support of an idea), specificity (the quality of belonging or relating uniquely to a particular subject), and knowledge domain (area of expertise represented in the content of the talk). We demonstrate the reliability and validity of our scheme via an annotation study of five transcripts of classroom discussion. ### Related Work
One discourse feature used to assess the quality of discussions is students' argument moves: their claims about the text, their sharing of textual evidence for claims, and their warranting or reasoning to support the claims BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 . Many researchers view student reasoning as of primary importance, particularly when the reasoning is elaborated and highly inferential BIBREF12 . In Natural Language Processing (NLP), most educationally-oriented argumentation research has focused on corpora of student persuasive essays BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 . We instead focus on multi-party spoken discussion transcripts from classrooms. A second key difference consists in the inclusion of the warrant label in our scheme, as it is important to understand how students explicitly use reasoning to connect evidence to claims. Educational studies suggest that discussion quality is also influenced by the specificity of student talk BIBREF19 , BIBREF20 . Chisholm and Godley found that as specificity increased, the quality of students' claims and reasoning also increased. Previous NLP research has studied specificity in the context of professionally written newspaper articles BIBREF21 , BIBREF22 , BIBREF23 , BIBREF24 . While the annotation instructions used in these studies work well for general purpose corpora, specificity in text-based discussions also needs to capture particular relations between discussions and texts. Furthermore, since the concept of a sentence is not clearly defined in speech, we annotate argumentative discourse units rather than sentences (see Section SECREF3 ). The knowledge domain of student talk may also matter, that is, whether the talk focuses on disciplinary knowledge or lived experiences. Some research suggests that disciplinary learning opportunities are maximized when students draw on evidence and reasoning that are commonly accepted in the discipline BIBREF25 , although some studies suggest that evidence or reasoning from lived experiences increases discussion quality BIBREF26 . Previous related work in NLP analyzed evidence type for argumentative tweets BIBREF27 . Although the categories of evidence type are different, their definition of evidence type is in line with our definition of knowledge domain. However, our research is distinct from this research in its application domain (i.e. social media vs. education) and in analyzing knowledge domain for all argumentative components, not only those containing claims. ### Annotation Scheme
Our annotation scheme uses argument moves as the unit of analysis. We define an argument move as an utterance, or part of an utterance, that contains an argumentative discourse unit (ADU) BIBREF28 . Like Peldszus and Stede Peldszus:15, in this paper we use transcripts already segmented into argument moves and focus on the steps following segmentation, i.e., labeling argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. Table TABREF2 shows a section of a transcribed classroom discussion along with labels assigned by a human annotator following segmentation. ### Argumentation
The argumentation scheme is based on BIBREF29 and consists of a simplified set of labels derived from Toulmin's Toulmin:58 model: INLINEFORM0 Claim: an arguable statement that presents a particular interpretation of a text or topic. INLINEFORM1 Evidence: facts, documentation, text reference, or testimony used to support or justify a claim. INLINEFORM2 Warrant: reasons explaining how a specific evidence instance supports a specific claim. Our scheme specifies that warrants must come after claim and evidence, since by definition warrants cannot exist without them. The first three moves in Table TABREF2 show a natural expression of an argument: a student first claims that Willy's wife is only trying to protect him, then provides a reference as evidence by mentioning something she said to her kids at the end of the book, and finally explains how not caring about her kids ties the evidence to the initial claim. The second group shows the same argument progression, with evidence given as a direct quote. ### Specificity
Specificity annotations are based on BIBREF19 and have the goal of capturing text-related characteristics expressed in student talk. Specificity labels are directly related to four distinct elements for an argument move: (1) it is specific to one (or a few) character or scene; (2) it makes significant qualifications or elaborations; (3) it uses content-specific vocabulary (e.g. quotes from the text); (4) it provides a chain of reasons. Our annotation scheme for specificity includes three labels along a linear scale: INLINEFORM0 Low: statement that does not contain any of these elements. INLINEFORM1 Medium: statement that accomplishes one of these elements. INLINEFORM2 High: statement that clearly accomplishes at least two specificity elements. Even though we do not explicitly use labels for the four specificity elements, we found that explicitly breaking down specificity into multiple components helped increase reliability when training annotators. The first three argument moves in Table TABREF2 all contain the first element, as they refer to select characters in the book. However, no content-specific vocabulary, clear chain of reasoning, or significant qualifications are provided; therefore all three moves are labeled as medium specificity. The fourth move, however, accomplishes the first and fourth specificity elements, and is labeled as high specificity. The fifth move is also labeled high specificity since it is specific to one character/scene, and provides a direct quote from the text. The last move is labeled as low specificity as it reflects an overgeneralization about all humans. ### Knowledge Domain
The possible labels for knowledge domain are: INLINEFORM0 Disciplinary: the statement is grounded in knowledge gathered from a text (either the one under discussion or others), such as a quote or a description of a character/event. INLINEFORM1 Experiential: the statement is drawn from human experience, such as what the speaker has experienced or thinks that other humans have experienced. In Table TABREF2 the first six argument moves are labeled as disciplinary, since the moves reflect knowledge from the text currently being discussed. The last move, however, draws from a student's experience or perceived knowledge about the real world. ### Reliability and Validity Analyses
We carried out a reliability study for the proposed scheme using two pairs of expert annotators, P1 and P2. The annotators were trained by coding one transcript at a time and discussing disagreements. Five text-based discussions were used for testing reliability after training: pair P1 annotated discussions of The Bluest Eye, Death of a Salesman, and Macbeth, while pair P2 annotated two separate discussions of Ain't I a Woman. 250 argument moves (discussed by over 40 students and consisting of over 8200 words) were annotated. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using Cohen's kappa: unweighted for argumentation and knowledge domain, but quadratic-weighted for specificity given its ordered labels. Table TABREF6 shows that kappa for argumentation ranges from INLINEFORM0 , which generally indicates substantial agreement BIBREF30 . Kappa values for specificity and knowledge domain are in the INLINEFORM1 range which generally indicates almost perfect agreement BIBREF30 . These results show that our proposed annotation scheme can be used to produce reliable annotations of classroom discussion with respect to argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. Table TABREF7 shows confusion matrices for annotator pair P1 (we observed similar trends for P2). The argumentation section of the table shows that the largest number of disagreements happens between the claim and warrant labels. One reason may be related to the constraint we impose on warrants - they require the existence of a claim and evidence. If a student tries to provide a warrant for a claim that happened much earlier in the discussion, the annotators might interpret the warrant as new claim. The specificity section shows relatively few low-high label disagreements as compared to low-med and med-high. This is also reflected in the quadratic-weighted kappa as low-high disagreements will carry a larger penalty (unweighted kappa is INLINEFORM0 ). The main reasons for disagreements over specificity labels come from two of the four specificity elements discussed in Section 3.2: whether an argument move is related to one character or scene, and whether it provides a chain of reasons. With respect to the first of these two elements we observed disagreements in argument moves containing pronouns with an ambiguous reference. Of particular note is the pronoun it. If we consider the argument move “I mean even if you know you have a hatred towards a standard or whatever, you still don't kill it", the pronoun it clearly refers to something within the move (i.e. the standard) that the student themselves mentioned. In contrast, for argument moves such as “It did happen" it might not be clear to what previous move the pronoun refers, therefore creating confusion on whether this specificity element is accomplished. Regarding specificity element (4) we found that it was easier to determine the presence of a chain of reasons when discourse connectives (e.g. because, therefore) were present in the argument move. The absence of explicit discourse connectives in an argument move might drive annotators to disagree on the presence/absence of a chain of reasons, which is likely to result in a different specificity label. Additionally, annotators found that shorter turns at talk proved harder to annotate for specificity. Finally, as we can see from the third section in the table, knowledge domain has the lowest disagreements with only one. We also BIBREF32 explored the validity of our coding scheme by comparing our annotations of student talk to English Education experts' evaluations (quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.544) of the discussion's quality. Using stepwise regressions, we found that the best model of discussion quality (R-squared of INLINEFORM0 ) included all three of our coding dimensions: argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. ### Opportunities and Challenges
Our annotation scheme introduces opportunities for the educational community to conduct further research on the relationship between features of student talk, student learning, and discussion quality. Although Chisholm and Godley Chisholm:11 and we found relations between our coding constructs and discussion quality, these were small-scale studies based on manual annotations. Once automated classifiers are developed, such relations between talk and learning can be examined at scale. Also, automatic labeling via a standard coding scheme can support the generalization of findings across studies, and potentially lead to automated tools for teachers and students. The proposed annotation scheme also introduces NLP opportunities and challenges. Existing systems for classifying specificity and argumentation have largely been designed to analyze written text rather than spoken discussions. This is (at least in part) due to a lack of publicly available corpora and schemes for annotating argumentation and specificity in spoken discussions. The development of an annotation scheme explicitly designed for this problem is the first step towards collecting and annotating corpora that can be used by the NLP community to advance the field in this particular area. Furthermore, in text-based discussions, NLP methods need to tightly couple the discussion with contextual information (i.e., the text under discussion). For example, an argument move from one of the discussions mentioned in Section 4 stated “She's saying like free like, I don't have to be, I don't have to be this salesman's wife anymore, your know? I don't have to play this role anymore." The use of the term salesman shows the presence of specificity element (3) (see Section 3.2) because the text under discussion is indeed Death of a Salesman. If the students were discussing another text, the mention of the term salesman would not indicate one of the specificity elements, therefore lowering the specificity rating. Thus, using existing systems is unlikely to yield good performance. In fact, we previously BIBREF31 showed that while using an off-the-shelf system for predicting specificity in newspaper articles resulted in low performance when applied to classroom discussions, exploiting characteristics of our data could significantly improve performance. We have similarly evaluated the performance of two existing argument mining systems BIBREF18 , BIBREF33 on the transcripts described in Section SECREF4 . We noticed that since the two systems were trained to classify only claims and premises, they were never able to correctly predict warrants in our transcripts. Additionally, both systems classified the overwhelming majority of moves as premise, resulting in negative kappa in some cases. Using our scheme to create a corpus of classroom discussion data manually annotated for argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain will support the development of more robust NLP prediction systems. ### Conclusions
In this work we proposed a new annotation scheme for three theoretically-motivated features of student talk in classroom discussion: argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. We demonstrated usage of the scheme by presenting an annotated excerpt of a classroom discussion. We demonstrated that the scheme can be annotated with high reliability and reported on scheme validity. Finally, we discussed some possible applications and challenges posed by the proposed annotation scheme for both the educational and NLP communities. We plan to extend our annotation scheme to label information about collaborative relations between different argument moves, and release a corpus annotated with the extended scheme. ### Acknowledgements
We want to thank Haoran Zhang, Tazin Afrin, and Annika Swallen for their contribution, and all the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. This work was supported by the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Table 1: Examples of argument moves and their respective annotations from a discussion of the book Death of a Salesman. As shown by the argument move numbers, boxes for students S1, S2, and S3 indicate separate, non contiguous excerpts of the discussion. Table 2: Inter-rater reliability for pairs P1 and P2. Table 3: Confusion matrices for argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain, for annotator pair P1.
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Our annotation scheme introduces opportunities for the educational community to conduct further research , Once automated classifiers are developed, such relations between talk and learning can be examined at scale, automatic labeling via a standard coding scheme can support the generalization of findings across studies, and potentially lead to automated tools for teachers and students, collecting and annotating corpora that can be used by the NLP community to advance the field in this particular area
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What major change happened to the country's landscape as the tragedy continued?
A. State lines were made to be different after the upsets by the earthquakes.
B. Much of the landscape is upset by the earthquakes, throwing dirt and dust everywhere.
C. Several states totally sink, and water takes its place.
D. New cliffs and fault lines continued to form.
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THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!
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C. Several states totally sink, and water takes its place.
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How does Ingra’s kiss affect Svan?
A. Ingra’s kiss makes Svan think twice about his decision to destroy the Earth ship. It makes him feel his humanity, momentarily breaking his steadfast desire to go through with this plan.
B. Ingra’s kiss does nothing to Svan. He continues with his plan, annoyed.
C. Ingra’s kiss makes Svan think twice about his decision to sacrifice himself for the cause. It makes him feel something toward her, momentarily breaking his steadfast desire to go through with his plan.
D. Ingra’s kiss makes Svan think twice about his decision to sacrifice Ingra in the name of his rebel cause. It makes him feel something toward her, momentarily breaking his steadfast desire to go through with his plan.
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DOUBLECROSS by JAMES Mac CREIGH Revolt was brewing on Venus, led by the descendant of the first Earthmen to land. Svan was the leader making the final plans—plotting them a bit too well. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock. There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He turned. "Everything shipshape, I take it!" he commented. The OD nodded. "I'll have a blank log if this keeps up," he said. "Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers ready to lift as soon as they come back." The Exec tossed away his cigarette. " If they come back." "Is there any question?" The Exec shrugged. "I don't know, Lowry," he said. "This is a funny place. I don't trust the natives." Lowry lifted his eyebrows. "Oh? But after all, they're human beings, just like us—" "Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins—I don't like them." "Acclimation," Lowry said scientifically. "They had to acclimate themselves to Venus's climate. They're friendly enough." The Exec shrugged again. He stared at the wooden shacks that were the outskirts of the native city, dimly visible through the ever-present Venusian mist. The native guard of honor, posted a hundred yards from the Earth-ship, stood stolidly at attention with their old-fashioned proton-rifles slung over their backs. A few natives were gazing wonderingly at the great ship, but made no move to pass the line of guards. "Of course," Lowry said suddenly, "there's a minority who are afraid of us. I was in town yesterday, and I talked with some of the natives. They think there will be hordes of immigrants from Earth, now that we know Venus is habitable. And there's some sort of a paltry underground group that is spreading the word that the immigrants will drive the native Venusians—the descendants of the first expedition, that is—right down into the mud. Well—" he laughed—"maybe they will. After all, the fittest survive. That's a basic law of—" The annunciator over the open lock clanged vigorously, and a metallic voice rasped: "Officer of the Deck! Post Number One! Instruments reports a spy ray focused on the main lock!" Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it. "Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!" But even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec. The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, "You see!" "You see?" Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five others in the room looked apprehensive. "You see?" Svan repeated. "From their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right." The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her head. "Svan, I'm afraid," she said. "Who are we to decide if this is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood." Svan laughed harshly. " They don't think so. You heard them. We are not human any more. The officer said it." The other woman spoke unexpectedly. "The Council was right," she agreed. "Svan, what must we do?" Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. "One moment. Ingra, do you still object?" The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly convinced by Svan. "No," she said slowly. "I do not object." "And the rest of us? Does any of us object?" Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of assent. "Good," said Svan. "Then we must act. The Council has told us that we alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not return." An old man shifted restlessly. "But they are strong, Svan," he complained. "They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay." Svan nodded. "No. They will leave. But they will never get back to Earth." "Never get back to Earth?" the old man gasped. "Has the Council authorized—murder?" Svan shrugged. "The Council did not know what we would face. The Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the Earth-ship has." He paused dangerously. "Toller," he said, "do you object?" Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was dull. "What is your plan?" he asked. Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his feet, held up a shiny metal globe. "One of us will plant this in the ship. It will be set by means of this dial—" he touched a spot on the surface of the globe with a pallid finger—"to do nothing for forty hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite." He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty, irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a mark on one of them, held it up. "We will let chance decide who is to do the work," he said angrily. "Is there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think...." No answer. Svan jerked his head. "Good," he said. "Ingra, bring me that bowl." Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it with his hand, offered it to the girl. "You first, Ingra," he said. She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their slips. Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them. "This is the plan," he said. "We will go, all six of us, in my ground car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation. The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough, after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed." There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: "Look at the slips!" Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled. Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over, striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing.... And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance. Almost he was disappointed. Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen one to announce it—a second, ten seconds.... Then gray understanding came to him. A traitor! his subconscious whispered. A coward! He stared at them in a new light, saw their indecision magnified, became opposition. Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision. Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly beneath the table, marked his own slip. In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in secret. His voice was very tired as he said, "I will plant the bomb." The six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the entrance to the town's Hall of Justice. "Good," said Svan, observing them. "The delegation is still here. We have ample time." He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered. Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men? The right answer leaped up at him. They all are , he thought. Not one of them understands what this means. They're afraid. He clamped his lips. "Go faster, Ingra," he ordered the girl who was driving. "Let's get this done with." She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them, illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done. A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: "Halt!" The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again. "Where are you going?" he growled. Svan spoke up. "We want to look at the Earth-ship," he said. He opened the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. "We heard it was leaving tonight," he continued, "and we have not seen it. Is that not permitted?" The guard shook his head sourly. "No one is allowed near the ship. The order was just issued. It is thought there is danger." Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. "It is urgent," he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a complicated gesture. "Do you understand?" Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. "The Council!" he roared. "By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—" He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining. He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had ruthlessly pounded it against the road. Svan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally. Svan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously, then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be no trace. Svan strode back to the car. "Hurry up," he gasped to the girl. "Now there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep a watch for other guards." Venus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer. Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness. "Can't see a thing," he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away at the computer's table. "Look—are those lights over there?" The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. "Probably the guards. Of course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party." Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no answer in his stolid face. "Don't joke about it," he said. "Suppose something happens to the delegation?" "Then we're in the soup," the Exec said philosophically. "I told you the natives were dangerous. Spy-rays! They've been prohibited for the last three hundred years." "It isn't all the natives," Lowry said. "Look how they've doubled the guard around us. The administration is co-operating every way they know how. You heard the delegation's report on the intercom. It's this secret group they call the Council." "And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?" the Exec retorted. "They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be coming from the town, anyhow...." Svan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed. Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been two bombs in the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one. He got out of the car, holding the sphere. "This will do for me," he said. "They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?" Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. "We must circle back again," she parroted. "We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards." Svan, listening, thought: It's not much of a plan. The guards would not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a purpose. Aloud, he said, "You understand. If I get through, I will return to the city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember, you are in no danger from the guards." From the guards , his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a ground-shaking crash. Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting off the seconds. "Go ahead," he ordered. "I will wait here." "Svan." The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached for him, kissed him. "Good luck to you, Svan," she said. "Good luck," repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around, sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again. Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean? Was it an error that the girl should die with the others? There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die. He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own. They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the side of the ship. Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance. He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men? He became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop. Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. "Svan! They're coming! They found the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan, with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came for you. We must flee!" He stared unseeingly at the light. "Go away!" he croaked unbelievingly. Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb in the car— "Go away!" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body.... The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. "He's still alive," he said callously to Lowry, who had just come up. "It won't last long, though. What've you got there?" Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a connection had been broken. "He had a bomb," he said. "A magnetic-type, delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car, and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us." "Amazing," the surgeon said dryly. "Well, they won't do any bombing now." Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered. The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder. "Better them than us," he said. "It's poetic justice if I ever saw it. They had it coming...." He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of paper between his fingers. "This is the only part I don't get," he said. "What's that?" Lowry craned his neck. "A piece of paper with a cross on it? What about it?" The surgeon shrugged. "He had it clenched in his hand," he said. "Had the devil of a time getting it loose from him." He turned it over slowly, displayed the other side. "Now what in the world would he be doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?"
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D. Ingra’s kiss makes Svan think twice about his decision to sacrifice Ingra in the name of his rebel cause. It makes him feel something toward her, momentarily breaking his steadfast desire to go through with his plan.
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What does the author believe is Dole's real grievance with the New York Times?
A. Dole is angry because he cannot use them to bolster his campaign
B. Dole was once fired from the New York Times when he worked there as a young adult
C. Dole feels isolated from the Washington elite
D. Dole cannot receive constructive criticism
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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 verité " 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.
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C. Dole feels isolated from the Washington elite
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How did Meryl Streep prepare for the role of Roberta?
A. She learned to play the violin without any former instrument training.
B. She began to act very helplessly and feeble around the rest of the cast.
C. She is a method actor and became very vulnerable.
D. She made herself look dumpy and thick-waisted.
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Machines in the Garden In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail. But then, "soft" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion. The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called "the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry. The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker. P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal. It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him puh-sonally." The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why. "A special smile ... a certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers." Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers. Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in "ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc., we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers. In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh, man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all too close to me.") But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup? Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love. Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.
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A. She learned to play the violin without any former instrument training.
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What seems to be Krugman's biggest issue with Arthur?
A. Arthur allows too many people to misquote him.
B. Arthur received too much credit for increasing returns.
C. Arthur provided inaccurate information.
D. Arthur didn't do enough research on increasing returns.
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Krugman's Life of Brian Where it all started: Paul Krugman's "The Legend of Arthur." Letter from John Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow Letter from Ted C. Fishman David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe Letter from John Cassidy: Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government"--is "pure fiction." Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been around since Adam Smith, and it was written about at length by Alfred Marshall in 1890. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the "wreckage" of a large part of economic theory.) 3) Pace Krugman, I also did not claim that Arthur bears principal responsibility for the rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As Krugman notes, several scholars (himself included) who were working in the fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating increasing returns before Arthur did. My claim was simply that Arthur applied increasing returns to high-technology markets, and that his work influenced how other economists and government officials think about these markets. Krugman apart, virtually every economist I have spoken to, including Daniel Rubinfeld, a former Berkeley professor who is now the chief economist at the Justice Department's antitrust division, told me this was the case. (Rubinfeld also mentioned several other economists who did influential work, and I cited three of them in the article.) 4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a "nice guy," of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings. 5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. "Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light," he pronounces. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that economic research, principally macroeconomic research, has taken over the past two decades. In response to that article, I received dozens of messages of appreciation from mainstream economists, including from two former presidents of the American Economic Association. Among the sources quoted in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that I "don't like mainstream economists" and that I am out to denigrate their work is malicious hogwash. The fact of the matter is that I spend much of my life reading the work of mainstream economists, speaking to them, and trying to find something they have written that might interest the general public. In my experience, most economists appreciate the attention. 6) I might attach more weight to Krugman's criticisms if I hadn't recently reread his informative 1994 book Peddling Prosperity , in which he devotes a chapter to the rediscovery of increasing returns by contemporary economists. Who are the first scholars Krugman mentions in his account? Paul David, an economic historian who wrote a famous paper about how the QWERTYUIOP typewriter keyboard evolved and, you guessed it, Brian Arthur. "Why QWERTYUIOP?" Krugman wrote. "In the early 1980s, Paul David and his Stanford colleague Brian Arthur asked that question, and quickly realized that it led them into surprisingly deep waters. ... What Paul David, Brian Arthur, and a growing number of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy." Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it "didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know." Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact that Arthur has started to receive some public recognition. The eminent MIT professor, whose early academic work received widespread media attention, is far too generous a scholar to succumb to such pettiness. --John Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story ("The Legend of Arthur"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre. Among many other things, Complexity tells the story of the Irish-born economist Brian Arthur and how he came to champion a principle known as "increasing returns." The recent New Yorker article explains how that principle has since become the intellectual foundation of the Clinton administration's antitrust case against Microsoft. Krugman's complaint is that the popular press--including Complexity and The New Yorker --is now hailing Brian Arthur as the originator of increasing returns, even though Krugman and many others had worked on the idea long before Arthur did. I leave it for others to decide whether I was too gullible in writing Complexity . For the record, however, I would like to inject a few facts into Krugman's story, which he summarizes nicely in the final paragraph: When Waldrop's book came out, I wrote him as politely as I could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out of shape. ... So what we really learn from the legend of Arthur is that some journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really true. Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. During my research for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, including Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, co-creator of the General Equilibrium Theory of economics that Brian so eloquently criticizes. They generally agreed that Brian was a maverick in the field--and perhaps a bit too much in love with his own self-image as a misunderstood outsider--but basically sound. None of them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due. Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891. c) So, when I received Krugman's letter shortly after Complexity came out, I was puzzled: He was complaining that I hadn't referenced others in the increasing-returns field--Paul Krugman among them--although I had explicitly done so. d) But, when I checked the published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage mentioning Krugman wasn't there. e) Only then did I realize what had happened. After I had submitted the manuscript, my editor at Simon & Schuster had suggested a number of cuts to streamline what was already a long and involved chapter on Brian's ideas. I accepted some of the cuts, and restored others--including (I thought) the passage that mentioned Krugman. In the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor anyway, and I didn't notice until too late. That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop: I am truly sorry that The New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include a link directly to the Cassidy piece. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in "Tasty Bits from the Technology Front." Cassidy did not present a story about one guy among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against the unified opposition of a narrow-minded profession both intellectually and politically conservative. As TBTF's host--not exactly a naive reader--put it, "These ideas were anathema to mainstream economists in 1984 when Arthur first tried to publish them." That morality play--not the question of who deserves credit--was the main point of my column, because it is a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream economics. The fact, which is easily documented, is that during the years that, according to the legend, increasing returns was unacceptable in mainstream economics, papers about increasing returns were in fact being cheerfully published by all the major journals. And as I pointed out in the chronology I provided with the article, even standard reference volumes like the Handbook of International Economics (published in 1984, the year Arthur supposedly met a blank wall of resistance) have long contained chapters on increasing returns. Whatever the reason that Arthur had trouble getting his own paper published, ideological rigidity had nothing to do with it. How did this fantasy come to be so widely believed? I am glad to hear that you tried to tell a more balanced story, Mr. Waldrop, even if sloppy paperwork kept it from seeing the light of day. And I am glad that you talked to Ken Arrow. But Nobel laureates, who have wide responsibilities and much on their mind, are not necessarily on top of what has been going on in research outside their usual field. I happen to know of one laureate who, circa 1991, was quite unaware that anyone had thought about increasing returns in either growth or trade. Did you try talking to anyone else--say, to one of the economists who are the straight men in the stories you tell? For example, your book starts with the story of Arthur's meeting in 1987 with Al Fishlow at Berkeley, in which Fishlow supposedly said, "We know that increasing returns can't exist"--and Arthur went away in despair over the unwillingness of economists to think the unthinkable. Did you call Fishlow to ask whether he said it, and what he meant? Since by 1987 Paul Romer's 1986 papers on increasing returns and growth had started an avalanche of derivative work, he was certainly joking--what he probably meant was "Oh no, not you too." And let me say that I simply cannot believe that you could have talked about increasing returns with any significant number of economists outside Santa Fe without Romer's name popping up in the first 30 seconds of every conversation--unless you were very selective about whom you talked to. And oh, by the way, there are such things as libraries, where you can browse actual economics journals and see what they contain. The point is that it's not just a matter of failing to cite a few more people. Your book, like the Cassidy article, didn't just tell the story of Brian Arthur; it also painted a picture of the economics profession, its intellectual bigotry and prejudice, which happens to be a complete fabrication (with some real, named people cast as villains) that somehow someone managed to sell you. I wonder who? Even more to the point: How did Cassidy come by his story? Is it possible that he completely misunderstood what Brian Arthur was saying--that the whole business about the seminar at Harvard where nobody would accept increasing returns, about the lonely struggle of Arthur in the face of ideological rigidity, even the quotation from Arthur about economists being unwilling to consider the possibility of imperfect markets because of the Cold War (give me a break!) were all in Cassidy's imagination? Let me say that I am actually quite grateful to Cassidy and The New Yorker . A number of people have long been furious about your book--for example, Victor Norman, whom you portrayed as the first of many economists too dumb or perhaps narrow-minded to understand Arthur's brilliant innovation. Norman e-mailed me to say that "I have read the tales from the Vienna woods before and had hoped that it could be cleared up by someone at some point." Yet up to now there was nothing anyone could do about the situation. The trouble was that while "heroic rebel defies orthodoxy" is a story so good that nobody even tries to check it out, "guy makes minor contribution to well-established field, proclaims himself its founder" is so boring as to be unpublishable. (David Warsh's 1994 series of columns in the Boston Globe on the increasing-returns revolution in economics, the basis for a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, is far and away the best reporting on the subject, did include a sympathetic but devastating exposé of Arthur's pretensions--but to little effect. [Click to read Warsh on Arthur.]) Only now did I have a publishable story: "guy makes minor contribution to well-established field, portrays himself as heroic rebel--and The New Yorker believes him." Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur ("The Legend of Arthur") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was "just pissed off," not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows. His theme is stated in his first paragraph: "Cassidy's article [in The New Yorker of Jan. 12] tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." Cassidy, however, said nothing of the sort. The concept of increasing returns is indeed very old, and Cassidy at no point attributed that idea to Arthur. Indeed, the phrase "increasing returns" appears just once in Cassidy's article and then merely to say that Arthur had used the term while others refer to network externalities. Further, Arthur has never made any such preposterous claim at any other time. On the contrary, his papers have fully cited the history of the field and made references to the previous papers, including those of Paul Krugman. (See Arthur's papers collected in the volume Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, especially his preface and my foreword for longer comments on Arthur's work in historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur has in fact said. What Cassidy in fact did in his article was to trace a line of influence between one of Arthur's early articles and the current claims of the Department of Justice against Microsoft. It appears that Cassidy based his article on several interviews, not just one. The point that Arthur has emphasized and which is influential in the current debates about antitrust policy is the dynamic implication of increasing returns. It is the concept of path-dependence, that small events, whether random or the result of corporate strategic choice, may have large consequences because of increasing returns of various kinds. Initial small advantages become magnified, for example, by creating a large installed base, and direct the future, possibly in an inefficient direction. Techniques of production may be locked in at an early stage. Similar considerations apply to regional development and learning. --Kenneth J. Arrow Nobel laureate and Joan Kenney professor of economics emeritus Stanford University Letter from Ted C. Fishman: After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in "The Legend of Arthur," I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to tell me how his ideas about increasing returns have encouraged a new strain of economic investigations. Despite much prodding, Arthur obliged only by placing himself in a long line of theorists dating back to Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. I also found him disarmingly generous in giving credit to the biologists, physicists, and fellow economists who have helped advance his own thinking. Savvy to the journalist's quest for heroes, Arthur urged me to focus on his ideas, not his rank among his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons. --Ted C. Fishman (For additional background on the history of "increasing returns" and Brian Arthur's standing in the field, click for David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe article on Brian Arthur)
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B. Arthur received too much credit for increasing returns.
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Why does the narrator only want one bed?
A. He wants to be able to buy himself a coffee later on
B. He needs the spare money to buy food for himself and Doc
C. He is convinced everyone is trying to cheat him out of his money, and refuses to pay for more than he needs
D. He is frugal on principle, and knows that Doc needs supervision
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Confidence Game By JIM HARMON Illustrated by EPSTEIN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I admit it: I didn't know if I was coming or going—but I know that if I stuck to the old man, I was a comer ... even if he was a goner! Doc had this solemn human by the throat when I caught up with him. "Tonight," Doc was saying in his old voice that was as crackled and important as parchment, "tonight Man will reach the Moon. The golden Moon and the silver ship, symbols of greed. Tonight is the night when this is to happen." "Sure," the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. "No argument. Sure, up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the teeth!" I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose, one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled, but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie. It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame, layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side. One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the greasy collar of the human. "I hope you'll forgive him, sir," I said, not meeting the man's eyes. "He's my father and very old, as you can see." I laughed inside at the absurd, easy lie. "Old events seem recent to him." The human nodded, Adam's apple jerking in the angry neon twilight. "'Memory Jump,' you mean. All my great-grandfathers have it. But Great-great-grandmother Lupos, funny thing, is like a schoolgirl. Sharp, you know. I.... Say, the poor old guy looks sick. Want any help?" I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for all I knew. Martians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated Martians. They were aliens . They weren't men like Doc and me. Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we kept getting closer each of the times. I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked flophouse doors. The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance. "Fifteen cents a bed," he said mechanically. "We'll use one bed," I told him. "I'll give you twenty cents." I felt the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining. "Fifteen cents a bed," he played it back for me. Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless. "We can always make it over to the mission," I lied. The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. "Awright, since we ain't full up. In ad vance." I placed the quarter on the desk. "Give me a nickel." The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown before I could move, what with holding up Doc. "You've got your nerve," he said at me with a fine mist of dew. "Had a quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents." He saw the look on my face. "I'll give you a room for the two bits. That's better'n a bed for twenty." I knew I was going to need that nickel. Desperately. I reached across the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed. "Give me a nickel," I said. "What nickel?" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me. "You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?" I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble and that did scare me. I had to get him alone. "Where's the room?" I asked. The room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone. I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily. Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I didn't need to. The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered, uncovered floor. It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it an unreal distortion. Doc began to mumble louder. I knew I had to move. I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I moved. I was bent double, but I got from the floor to the chair and found my notebook and orb-point in my hands. I found I couldn't focus both my mind and my eyes through the electric flashes of agony, so I concentrated on Doc's voice and trusted my hands would follow their habit pattern and construct the symbols for his words. They were suddenly distinguishable. " Outsider ... Thoth ... Dyzan ... Seven ... Hsan ... Beyond Six, Seven, Eight ... Two boxes ... Ralston ... Richard Wentworth ... Jimmy Christopher ... Kent Allard ... Ayem ... Oh, are ... see ...." His voice rose to a meaningless wail that stretched into non-existence. The pen slid across the scribbled face of the notebook and both dropped from my numb hands. But I knew. Somehow, inside me, I knew that these words were what I had been waiting for. They told everything I needed to know to become the most powerful man in the Solar Federation. That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was. I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc. Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a nickel. Still, I had to get some. I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave Doc alone, but I had to. He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that. I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow. Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his lumpy skull. He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.) I don't remember how I got out onto the street. She was pink and clean and her platinum hair was pulled straight back, drawing her cheek-bones tighter, straightening her wide, appealing mouth, drawing her lean, athletic, feminine body erect. She was wearing a powder-blue dress that covered all of her breasts and hips and the upper half of her legs. The most wonderful thing about her was her perfume. Then I realized it wasn't perfume, only the scent of soap. Finally, I knew it wasn't that. It was just healthy, fresh-scrubbed skin. I went to her at the bus stop, forcing my legs not to stagger. Nobody would help a drunk. I don't know why, but nobody will help you if they think you are blotto. "Ma'am, could you help a man who's not had work?" I kept my eyes down. I couldn't look a human in the eye and ask for help. "Just a dime for a cup of coffee." I knew where I could get it for three cents, maybe two and a half. I felt her looking at me. She spoke in an educated voice, one she used, perhaps, as a teacher or supervising telephone operator. "Do you want it for coffee, or to apply, or a glass or hypo of something else?" I cringed and whined. She would expect it of me. I suddenly realized that anybody as clean as she was had to be a tourist here. I hate tourists. "Just coffee, ma'am." She was younger than I was, so I didn't have to call her that. "A little more for food, if you could spare it." I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much. "I'll buy you a dinner," she said carefully, "provided I can go with you and see for myself that you actually eat it." I felt my face flushing red. "You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum like me, ma'am." "I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat." It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice whatever. "Okay," I said, tasting bitterness over the craving. The coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands to feel its warmth. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the woman sitting on the stool beside me. She had no right to intrude. This moment should be mine, but there she sat, marring it for me, a contemptible tourist . I gulped down the thick, dark liquid brutally. It was all I could do. The cramp flowed out of my diaphragm. I took another swallow and was able to think straight again. A third swallow and I felt—good. Not abnormally stimulated, but strong, alert, poised on the brink of exhilaration. That was what coffee did for me. I was a caffeine addict. Earth-norm humans sometimes have the addiction to a slight extent, but I knew that as a Centurian I had it infinitely worse. Caffeine affected my metabolism like a pure alkaloid. The immediate effects weren't the same, but the need ran as deep. I finished the cup. I didn't order another because I wasn't a pure sensualist. I just needed release. Sometimes, when I didn't have the price of a cup, I would look around in alleys and find cola bottles with a few drops left in them. They have a little caffeine in them—not enough, never enough, but better than nothing. "Now what do you want to eat?" the woman asked. I didn't look at her. She didn't know. She thought I was a human—an Earth human. I was a man , of course, not an alien like a Martian. Earthmen ran the whole Solar Federation, but I was just as good as an Earthman. With my suntan and short mane, I could pass, couldn't I? That proved it, didn't it? "Hamburger," I said. "Well done." I knew that would probably be all they had fit to eat at a place like this. It might be horse meat, but then I didn't have the local prejudices. I didn't look at the woman. I couldn't. But I kept remembering how clean she looked and I was aware of how clean she smelled. I was so dirty, so very dirty that I could never get clean if I bathed every hour for the rest of my life. The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba, almost in a single movement of my jaws. Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting for me. "Could I have a few to take with me, miss?" I pleaded. She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I just felt it. "That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am'," she said. "I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know." That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. "No, miss," I said. "It's Miss Casey—Vivian Casey," she corrected. She was a schoolteacher, all right. No other girl would introduce herself as Miss Last Name. Then there was something in her voice.... "What's your name?" she said to me. I choked a little on a bite of stale bun. I had a name, of course . Everybody has a name, and I knew if I went off somewhere quiet and thought about it, mine would come to me. Meanwhile, I would tell the girl that my name was ... Kevin O'Malley. Abruptly I realized that that was my name. "Kevin," I told her. "John Kevin." "Mister Kevin," she said, her words dancing with bright absurdity like waterhose mist on a summer afternoon, "I wonder if you could help me ." "Happy to, miss," I mumbled. She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar. "What do you think of this?" I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine. Dear Acolyte R. I. S. : Please send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, "The Scarlet Book" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe. Name : ........................ Address : ..................... The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent. There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was trying to pull it out. I looked up at his stubbled face. "I had half a dozen hamburgers, a cup of coffee and a glass of milk. I want four more 'burgers to go and a pint of coffee. By your prices, that will be one sixty-five—if the lady didn't pay you." "She didn't," he stammered. "Why do you think I was trying to get that bill out of your hand?" I didn't say anything, just got up off the floor. After the counterman put down my change, I spread out the five dollar bill on the vacant bar, smoothing it. I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the sidewalk, only in the doorways. First I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right. Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a thing . My heart hammered at my lungs. I knew this last time had been different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a start. He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom. His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed "springs"—metal webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a meaningful whole. I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I became lost. I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any hungry rats out of the walls. I knelt beside Doc. "An order, my boy, an order," he whispered. I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders? He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen, before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it. "Concentrate," Doc said hoarsely. "Concentrate...." I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of concentration. The words "First Edition" were what I was thinking about most. The heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, "The bullet struck me as I was pulling on my boot...." I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately. Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these months—time travel. A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a snowbird. "My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these rooms," the thin man remarked, "but never before have they used instantaneous materialization." The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. "I say—I say, I would like to see you explain this, my dear fellow." "I have no data," the thin man answered coolly. "In such instance, one begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place and time from which he comes." The surprise stung. "How did you know?" I asked. He gestured with a pale hand. "To maintain a logical approach, I must reject the supernatural. Your arrival, unless hallucinatory—and despite my voluntary use of one drug and my involuntary experiences recently with another, I must accept the evidence of my senses or retire from my profession—your arrival was then super-normal. I might say super-scientific, of a science not of my or the good doctor's time, clearly. Time travel is a familiar folk legend and I have been reading an article by the entertaining Mr. Wells. Perhaps he will expand it into one of his novels of scientific romance." I knew who these two men were, with a tormenting doubt. "But the other—" "Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth. Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary state?" He was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I couldn't trust to my own senses as he did. "You don't exist," I said slowly, painfully. "You are fictional creations." The doctor flushed darkly. "You give my literary agent too much credit for the addition of professional polish to my works." The other man was filling a large, curved pipe from something that looked vaguely like an ice-skate. "Interesting. Perhaps if our visitor would tell us something of his age with special reference to the theory and practice of temporal transference, Doctor, we would be better equipped to judge whether we exist." There was no theory or practice of time travel. I told them all I had ever heard theorized from Hindu yoga through Extra-sensory Perception to Relativity and the positron and negatron. "Interesting." He breathed out suffocating black clouds of smoke. "Presume that the people of your time by their 'Extra-sensory Perception' have altered the past to make it as they suppose it to be. The great historical figures are made the larger than life-size that we know them. The great literary creations assume reality." I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal. His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. "Withdrawal symptoms." The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He was not really a snowbird. After a time, I asked the doctor a question. "Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously." Accepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened. My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote in sunlight and stepped toward it.... ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun. She inclined the lethal silver toy. "Let me see those papers, Kevin." I handed her the doctor's manuscript. Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. "It's all right. It's all right. It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read this myself." Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror. "Don't move, Kevin," she said. "I'll have to shoot you—maybe not to kill, but painfully." I watched her face flash blue, red, blue and knew she meant it. But I had known too much in too short a time. I had to help Doc, but there was something else. "I just want a drink of coffee from that container on the chair," I told her. She shook her head. "I don't know what you think it does to you." It was getting hard for me to think. "Who are you?" She showed me a card from her wrist purse. Vivian Casey, Constable, North American Mounted Police. I had to help Doc. I had to have some coffee. "What do you want?" "Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical, topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?" I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee. "It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money," Miss Casey said, "even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of Doc's character. He was a scholar." Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I needed some coffee. "He became a book finder. He got rare editions of books and magazines for his clients in absolutely mint condition. That was all right—until he started obtaining books that did not exist ." I didn't know what all that was supposed to mean. I got to the chair, snatched up the coffee container, tore it open and gulped down the soothing liquid. I turned toward her and threw the rest of the coffee into her face. The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powder-blue dress that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber. The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad, unreasonably happy. I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy hands touch her scrubbed pink ones. I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the thing on the floor to the cot. Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for a fever and there wasn't one. After that, I didn't know what to do. I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway. "Call me Andre," the Martian said. "A common name but foreign. It should serve as a point of reference." I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes I wondered if they really could. "You won't need the gun," Andre said conversationally. "I'll keep it, thanks. What do you want?" "I'll begin as Miss Casey did—by telling you things. Hundreds of people disappeared from North America a few months ago." "They always do," I told him. "They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a book from Doc," the Martian said. Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but managed to hold onto the gun and stand up. "Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again," I warned him, "and I'll kill the girl." Martians were supposed to be against the destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but it was worth a try. "Kevin," Andre said, "why don't you take a bath?" The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no matter how often I bathed. No words formed. "But, Kevin," Andre said, "you aren't that dirty." The blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the thing on the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and miss it. I knew something. "I don't wash because I drink coffee." "It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?" he asked. "Of course," I said, and added absurdly, "That's why I don't wash." "You mean," Andre said slowly, ploddingly, "that if you bathed, you would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently." I was knocked to my knees. "Kevin," the Martian said, "drinking coffee represents a major vice only in Centurian humanoids, not Earth-norm human beings. Which are you? " Nothing came out of my gabbling mouth. " What is Doc's full name? " I almost fell in, but at the last instant I caught myself and said, "Doctor Kevin O'Malley, Senior." From the bed, Doc said a word. "Son." Then he disappeared. I looked at that which he had made. I wondered where he had gone, in search of what. "He didn't use that," Andre said. So I was an Earthman, Doc's son. So my addiction to coffee was all in my mind. That didn't change anything. They say sex is all in your mind. I didn't want to be cured. I wouldn't be. Doc was gone. That was all I had now. That and the thing he left. "The rest is simple," Andre said. "Doc O'Malley bought up all the stock in a certain ancient metaphysical order and started supplying members with certain books. Can you imagine the effect of the Book of Dyzan or the Book of Thoth or the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan or the Necronomican itself on human beings?" "But they don't exist," I said wearily. "Exactly, Kevin, exactly. They have never existed any more than your Victorian detective friend. But the unconscious racial mind has reached back into time and created them. And that unconscious mind, deeper than psychology terms the subconscious, has always known about the powers of ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition. Through these books, the human race can tell itself how to achieve a state of pure logic, without food, without sex, without conflict—just as Doc has achieved such a state—a little late, true. He had a powerful guilt complex, even stronger than your withdrawal, over releasing this blessing on the inhabited universe, but reason finally prevailed. He had reached a state of pure thought." "The North American government has to have this secret, Kevin," the girl said. "You can't let it fall into the hands of the Martians." Andre did not deny that he wanted it to fall into his hands. I knew I could not let Doc's—Dad's—time travel thing fall into anyone's hands. I remembered that all the copies of the books had disappeared with their readers now. There must not be any more, I knew. Miss Casey did her duty and tried to stop me with a judo hold, but I don't think her heart was in it, because I reversed and broke it. I kicked the thing to pieces and stomped on the pieces. Maybe you can't stop the progress of science, but I knew it might be millenniums before Doc's genes and creative environment were recreated and time travel was rediscovered. Maybe we would be ready for it then. I knew we weren't now. Miss Casey leaned against my dirty chest and cried into it. I didn't mind her touching me. "I'm glad," she said. Andre flowed out of the doorway with a sigh. Of relief? I would never know. I supposed I had destroyed it because I didn't want the human race to become a thing of pure reason without purpose, direction or love, but I would never know for sure. I thought I could kick the habit—perhaps with Miss Casey's help—but I wasn't really confident. Maybe I had destroyed the time machine because a world without material needs would not grow and roast coffee.
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A. He wants to be able to buy himself a coffee later on
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What drove operating margin change as of the FY22 for AMD? If operating margin is not a useful metric for a company like this, then please state that and explain why.
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Evidence 0:
Operating income for 2022 was $1.3 billion compared to operating income of $3.6 billion for 2021. The decrease in operating income was primarily driven by
amortization of intangible assets associated with the Xilinx acquisition.
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The decrease in AMD's operating income was primarily driven by amortization of intangible assets associated with the Xilinx acquisition
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How did the author feel about Unmade Beds?
A. the movie didn't show the real truth about its characters
B. it displayed many hidden truths about people
C. it was uncomfortable to watch but worth watching
D. Barker created something that people will be talking about for a long time
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Dirty Laundry Now and then, a documentary film comes along that makes us re-examine the rules that unofficially govern the genre: Can there be a middle ground between fiction and fact? Can a documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? How much can you stylize material before you alter the reality that you're striving, at least in theory, to capture? Unmade Beds , Nicholas Barker's " 'real life' feature film," has proudly worn its mongrel status as a "directed" documentary of single life in the big city, employing, in the face of criticism, what amounts to a cackling-punk defiance. The movie tracks four aging New Yorkers--two men, two women--through their lonely dating rituals, in the process depicting a universe of lusty, coupled-up haves and downcast, excluded have-nots, all viewed Rear Window -style through rectangular openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside. This is not cinema vérité , and nothing has been left to chance. The director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates, followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in mendacity," Barker goes on, "I'm quite happy to tell lies about my characters and even collude with their self-delusions if it enables me to communicate larger dramatic truths." Spurned by U.S. distributors, Unmade Beds opened two weeks ago in a small screening room in downtown Manhattan, where it proceeded to set box office records and generate lots of (largely favorable) press. In part due to smart publicity, which has bannered some of the bad reviews and commentary ("I have to tell you that this film upset me so much that I really don't want to have anything to do with it"--a New York publicist), it threatens to become a cause célèbre --and to be coming soon to a theater near you. It's always nice to see distributors proved wrong about the merits of "difficult" films, but in this case I think they did the decent thing. Unmade Beds isn't just bad--it's obnoxiously, noxiously bad, a freak show for the empathetically challenged. The outrage it has prompted isn't the Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths." Those truths are large, all right. Take Michael, the 40-year-old, 5 foot 4 inch lonely guy who has been looking for a wife for almost two decades. If you were to walk past him on the street, you might think that a man of his small stature might have some trouble getting dates and be rather bitter about it. The larger dramatic truth is that Michael has lots of trouble getting dates and is very bitter about it. Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however, Barker is careful to include a homophobic monologue in which Michael complains about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males. Michael turns out to be the film's most sympathetic subject--by a wide margin. At least he's not Mikey, a paunchy 54-year-old who writes but can't sell screenplays and who always flees blind dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts." Sounding like one of the low-level gangsters who posture like kingpins in Donnie Brasco , Mikey talks a lot about mutts. He also reminisces about that 24 hour period in the '70s when he managed to sleep with three different beautiful women, whose pictures he shows off. These days, all he meets are mutts. He comes off as a pathetic little loser--a mutt. Aimee, on the other hand, is a pathetic big loser, weighing in at 225 pounds. Determined to get married before she turns 30, she generally is filmed beside bags of groceries and assorted junk foods. She cries about her situation to her thin friend, Laurie, who, in one scene, gently mentions Aimee's weight. Clearly the scene is scripted, but Aimee does a good job acting taken aback. She has always been fat--and she's "OK with it," and a man just has to accept it. This is followed by more talk about how you attract men. Will they respect you if you call them back? If you express too much interest? "Or," the viewer thinks, "if you're 225 pounds?" The only natural performer here is Brenda, a garrulous exhibitionist who blossoms with the camera on her--she could have a career as a Penny Marshall-style character actress. Divorced and aging, Brenda needs money and is willing to charge for her sexual services. It shouldn't be too difficult, because men are always showing her their dicks ("I'm up to two dicks a day"). They meet her and, a few minutes later, they show her their dicks. Weird, huh? What Barker leaves out (it's in a New York Observer article) is that Brenda, a former lap dancer, works in marketing at a strip joint. Presumably, men standing next to her in line at McDonald's don't show her their dicks. Nor, presumably, does she show them her breasts--although she bares them for Barker's camera, jabbering about her body while she doffs her clothes and steps into the shower and soaps up. Barker might have crafted his subjects' monologues from their own words, but he has robbed them of their spontaneity--and, thus, of their essence. They aren't thinking or trying to come to grips with their situations in front of your eyes, because they already know what they're going to say: They've been fixed like butterflies on the ends of pins and held up for voyeuristic inspection. The scenes with friends and confidantes have a crude, programmatic purpose. You can imagine the director composing a shot (the shots are tightly composed and elaborately lighted) and reminding them, "In this scene she points out that you should lose weight and you get shocked and defensive. Ready ... Action." Call me square, but I find this antithetical to the documentary spirit. An Englishman who trained as an anthropologist before going to work for BBC Television, Barker clearly made up his mind about his material before his cameras began to roll--so it's no surprise that it feels prechewed and predigested. When reality interfered (Brenda apparently did not go through with a marriage to an immigrant in search of a green card for $10,000, as she does on-screen), Barker brushed the truth aside as immaterial, following her up the steps of City Hall in her wedding dress because it was "true to her character." But what separates documentary from fiction is that real people are often more complicated, and more conflicted, than finished characters--as Brenda proved to be more (or, at least, other) than the sum of her parts. That's the kind of truth that reveals itself to documentary filmmakers after the fact, when they go over footage and discover unexpected patterns, dissonances, glimmers of a universe that's richer and messier than the one they set out to portray. So what are Barker's "larger dramatic truths"? Single people in big cities can be desperate. Single people fear they're going to die alone--unloved and unloving. People are judged and, in turn, judge others by how they look. Big news. One could argue, charitably, that the movie is meant to be prescriptive, that Barker intends for us to regard the ways in which his subjects delude themselves and thereby learn to see through our own self-delusions. But Barker hasn't concocted a larger dramatic structure that would hold those larger dramatic truths together and help us comprehend where these people went wrong. He dramatizes right up to the point where a dramatist would be expected to provide some insight--and then, hey, he's a documentarian. Unmade Beds might make a good date movie. There's little to argue about in its subjects' personalities--both males and females will find them repulsive--and the picture the film paints of single life in the big city is so bleak that you'll probably want to jump into bed with whoever is sitting next to you. Anything to keep from turning into one of those people. The Slums of Beverly Hills also walks a line between two genres, in this case coming-of-age sex comedy and autobiographical monologue. Tamara Jenkins, the writer and first-time director, has an eye for absurd juxtapositions that was obviously sharpened by the pain of her nomadic upbringing. Her protagonist (Natasha Lyonne) spends her teen-age years being shuttled with her two brothers from one cheap dive to another in the 90210 ZIP code, all because her egregiously unsuccessful father (Alan Arkin) wants them to be educated in the best schools. ("Furniture's temporary; education is permanent.") It's a major omission, then, that we never see those schools or the kids' interaction with their stable, well-to-do Beverly Hills counterparts. We can't tell if the father is, on some weird level, justified in his fervor, or whether he's screwing up his children--subjecting them to humiliation and robbing them of a sense of permanence--for no reason. Jenkins hasn't quite figured out how to shape her narrative, which is full of episodes that are there because they actually happened but that don't have a payoff. I almost wish she'd included more voice-over narration, more commentary on the things that, as a filmmaker, she hasn't learned to bring out. The Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor. The father, to obtain financial support from his wealthy brother (Carl Reiner), volunteers to take in his vaguely schizzy, dipsomaniacal niece (Marisa Tomei). She and her cousin compare breasts, play with vibrators, and talk in pig Latinish gibberish, but Jenkins never lets the proceedings get too sentimental: The whimsy is always cut with an acidic awareness of the family's desperation. "Are we middle-class now?" ask the children, hopefully, before another crisis sends them back into their van, cruising past the movie stars' mansions, in the mean streets of Beverly Hills. Grading on the steep curve established by summer blockbuster seasons past, these have turned out to be a pretty good few months at the movies. Even the commercial swill ( Deep Impact , Armageddon , The Mask of Zorro , Small Soldiers , Snake Eyes , Halloween: H20 ) has been of a high grade, and Saving Private Ryan and Return to Paradise were Vitalis slaps in the kisser for people woozy from all the warm weather escapism. Out of Sight was tender and charming, as was, in its gross-out way, There's Something About Mary . And, on the indie front, The Opposite of Sex , Buffalo 66 , and Pi have proved that there's still commercial life after Sundance. Sure, we had stinkers, but even Godzilla was fun to jeer at. And there's something reassuring about the fact that The Avengers is so rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard production designers but can't fake class. I don't know who the credited screenwriter, Don MacPherson, is, but it's unlikely that he has ever seen an episode of the old Avengers , let alone sussed out the source of its appeal. Opening with a slapstick sequence of agent John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) doing kung fu, the film shifts to a scene in which he meets Mrs. Peel (Uma Thurman) while sitting naked in a sauna with only a newspaper to cover his private parts. The series was erotic in a way only prim English humor can be: The Old Boy Steed was capable of throwing a punch and bonking someone with his bowler, but he left the karate kicking to his liberated, leather-suited distaff associate. Here their roles have been witlessly muddled, and MacPherson's idea of banter is to have the pair complete each other's clichés. Whereas the original Steed, Patrick Macnee, was to the English Men's Club born, Fiennes is an eternal caddie. The willowy Thurman looks great in her outfits, but it's ever more apparent that she isn't much of an actress--at least, not a trained one--and her attempts at insouciance are embarrassingly arch. As the eccentric master villain who controls the weather, even Sean Connery is flat-out terrible, acting high on the hog. To think Connery once found the Bond films so far beneath him! When he sputters lines like "Time to die!" one imagines Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Blofeld snickering in the wings.
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A. the movie didn't show the real truth about its characters
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How is this article written?
A. Like a factual retelling of events that have happened in America's history.
B. As a scientific paper going over a tragedy that happened once in America.
C. As a theory as to what could end up happening to America one day.
D. As an obviously fictional scenario.
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THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!
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A. Like a factual retelling of events that have happened in America's history.
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Was Akroida like the rest of the scorpions?
A. Yes - they were all enormous and vicious
B. Yes - they were all purple and covered in jewels
C. No - she was larger and meaner
D. No - she spoke better and was prettier
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JUPITER'S JOKE By A. L. HALEY Casey Ritter, the guy who never turned down a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods of idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward the great red spot of terrible Jupiter. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Those methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner, and sewed up tight. Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately, in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not to rat on him before taking the job. Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter. I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out. Then I croaked, "Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir? Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?" Being civil to the court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen, a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence. The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny throat, and told me what for. "You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter," he said. "Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—" I snorted. "Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy tales! How could any—" The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again. "I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field, the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we say, eminently suited to the task." He beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me! Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup.... At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not unless it was a straight suicide mission! I feebly massaged my throat. "Pictures?" I whispered. "Show me 'em." Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out. I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well, a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to gangrene around the edges. The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties had taken my voice again. "How big?" I whispered. He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "About the size of a man, I believe." I raised my shrinking head. "Take me to jail!" I said firmly, and collapsed onto my chair. A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. "So this is the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!" he sneered. "Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!" I shuddered. "You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!" They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back turned. How stupid could they get? When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C. made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed. At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a right to be; and after awhile I braced him. I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip. "Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me," he says. "I just made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed." "Oh, no!" I moaned. "What were you trying to do, start a feud between us and Mars?" He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. "Buddy," he said reverently, "I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again! Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!" His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a fresh scent. I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to him. "How'd you make the getaway?" I asked, taking him at his word. He looked loftily past me. "Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise where I cached 'em." "Cached what?" "The rocks, stupe." I hardly heard the cut. "You mean you really did get away with them?" My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was impossible. I'd investigated once myself. He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard coming. That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a week later. By that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead, he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, "When I chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl won't give me fer 'em—" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it. "Jupiter!" I goggled at him. "Akroida! Who's she?" He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he was sure I'd been born. "Don't you know nothin', butterhead?" From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke again. The memory still makes me fry. "Akroida," he explained in his own sweet time, "is the queen-scorp of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago, remember?" He winked broadly. "It come from Mars in the first place, you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em, if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—" He went off into a dream about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back. "You mean those scorpions have really got brains?" "Brains!" he snorted. "Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone. Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce, so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!" He sighed regretfully. "But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer them emeralds." I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins. But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it. So did I. For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone, while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a letter to the S.S.C. The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me, friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad. "I put on a yeller slicker," he confessed sadly. "That there ammonia mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to an audience with the old rip." He shook his head slowly. "The kid that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all. I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it a-purpose to upset her." Then he winked at me. "But then I got off in a corner and cooked up some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida, though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper." He ruminated a few minutes. "Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an' put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful." II Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp. I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and to remind me that this was public service, strictly. "These—" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—"These jewels are as nothing, Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—" He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—"IF you succeed, your reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man." That twitch of the nose riled me no little. "I ain't failed yet!" I snarled at him. "Just you wait till I do, feller!" I slipped the string of emeralds back into its little safe. "Instead of sniping at me, why don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?" With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and passionate purple. I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean. That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise! The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor, I eased along. But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally. There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty. Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing, though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too. I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its expression. I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone else. "I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming lady," I informed him. "However, I have something very special in the way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might be interested." He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up screaming.... Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted. Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye, and I gagged again. My actions didn't bother him a bit. "Jewels, did you say?" he tapped out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff.... A shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it, and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo. Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, "How's about taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida, old pal?" Or words to that effect. He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. "Anything! Just anything you desire, my dearest friend." I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. "I'm Casey Ritter. What's your label, chum?" "Attaboy," he ticked coyly. "Attaboy?" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. "Who named you that?" He simpered. "My dear friend, Pard Hoskins." I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?" He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly. Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him. "Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow in my boat." Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place? Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts. Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me. Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions, all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt. Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth. It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly. It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant. In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my eyeballs felt paralyzed. Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C. persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds. Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the airlock. III That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of space. In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather? Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls. We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it glowed like the inside of a red light. No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all that red! A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one! Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit. Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding, shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire. Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went across to her alone with the arsenic. Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I could hear her question reverberate away over where I was. "Who from?" asked Akroida. That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code at all. "Who from?" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush. "Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly remarkable jewels," he confessed coyly. Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. "His name?" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my direction. "Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?" Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. "I—uh—the stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman." He ducked his head and fearfully waited. A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. "An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?" Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly. The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with that dragon's tail of hers.
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C. No - she was larger and meaner
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Which chemotherapy regimen was Mr. Rudolph initially treated with after his diagnosis?
Choose the correct answer from the following options:
A. Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide
B. Fluorouracil and Leucovorin
C. Methotrexate and Vinblastine
D. Gemcitabine and Cisplatin
E. Carboplatin and Paclitaxel
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### Patient Report 0
**Dear colleague, **
We would like to inform you about our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph, born
on 05/26/1954, who was under our care from 01/16/2019 to 01/17/2019.
**Diagnosis**: Suspected malignant mass at pyeloureteral junction/left
renal pelvis and suspicious paraaortic lymph nodes.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- Atrial fibrillation: Post-ablation in 2013
- pTCA stenting in 2010 for acute myocardial infarction
- Suspected soft tissue rheumatism, currently no complaints
- Laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 2012
- Tonsillectomy
- Obesity
**Procedure:** Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left with biopsy and
left DJ stent placement on 01/16/2019.
**Current Presentation:** Elective presentation for further endoscopic
evaluation of the unclear mass in the pyeloureteral junction area
involving the proximal ureter and renal pelvis. Additionally, abnormal
lymph nodes were observed in external imaging. The patient reports
occasional mild discomfort in the left upper abdomen.
**Physical Examination:** Soft abdomen, no pressure pain.
**CT Thorax (Plain) from 01/16/2019:**
Presence of axillary and mediastinal lymph nodes with borderline
enlarged lymph nodes ventral to the tracheal bifurcation (approximately
10 mm).
Calcification of aortic valves. Aortic and coronary sclerosis.
No suspicious lesions detected within the lungs. No pleural effusions.
No infiltrates.
History of cholecystectomy.
Known soft tissue density formation in the left renal hilum from the
previous examination.
The assessment of other upper abdominal organs that were visible and
could be evaluated natively was unremarkable.
No evidence of suspicious retrocrural lymph nodes. Vascular sclerosis.
**Skeletal Assessment:** Degenerative changes in the spine. No evidence
of suspicious lesions.
**Assessment:** No definitive evidence of metastatic lesions in the
lungs. Increased presence of mediastinal lymph nodes, some borderline
enlarged, ventral to the tracheal bifurcation. Differential diagnosis
includes nonspecific findings or lymph node metastases, which cannot be
excluded based solely on CT morphology.
**Main Diagnosis and Main Procedure from the Surgical Report:**
- Surgical Diagnosis: Unclear proximal ureter tumor on the left
- Unclear tumor in the left renal pelvis
- Surgical Procedure: Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left
- Biopsy of the left ureter
- Retrograde urography on the left
- DJ catheter placement on the left
- Diagnostic urethroscopy
**Procedure:**
The patient underwent a diagnostic ureterorenoscopy, which proceeded
without complications. During the procedure, a total of eight biopsies
were successfully obtained from the ureter for histological evaluation.
Cytological samples were also collected from both the ureter and renal
pelvis. Although there was a stenosing tumor present, endoscopic passage
into the renal pelvis was successfully accomplished.
Following the diagnostic procedure, a left-sided double-J catheter was
placed under radiographic control. Additionally, a urinary catheter was
inserted. It was observed that the initial urine output appeared
hemorrhagic, but it subsequently cleared to a normal coloration.
For post-procedural management, plans are in place for the DJ catheter
to be removed, the timing of which will be guided by improvements in the
color of the urine as well as the patient\'s overall clinical status. A
sonogram will be performed prior to discharge as part of routine
follow-up. Moreover, the patient has been scheduled for counseling to
address the significantly elevated PSA values noted in recent lab tests.
**Diagnosis:** Unclear proximal ureter tumor on the left. Unclear tumor
in the left renal pelvis
**Type of Surgery:**
- Diagnostic ureterorenoscopy on the left
- Biopsy of the left ureter
- Retrograde urography on the left
- DJ catheter placement on the left
- Diagnostic urethroscopy
**Anesthesia Type:** Laryngeal mask
**Report:** Indication: Unclear mass in the left renal pelvis. Elective
diagnostic ureterorenoscopy for further assessment. Written consent is
obtained. The urine is sterile. The procedure is conducted under
antibacterial prophylaxis with Ampicillin/Sulbactam 3g.
1. Standard preparation, lithotomy position on the X-ray unit, sterile
scrubbing/disinfection, and sterile draping by nursing staff.
Verification and approval.
2. Anesthesiology and urology discussion. Surgery clearance. Antibiotic
administration.
3. Initial urethroscopy was unremarkable, with no signs of tumors.
4. Semi-rigid ureterorenoscopy with a 6.5/8.5 continuous-flow
ureterorenoscopy. Unremarkable ureterorenoscopy of the entire ureter
until just before the pyeloureteral junction, where a papillary
stenotic constriction was encountered, impeding further passage with
the endoscope. Cytology collection (20 mL) was performed. Retrograde
urography was conducted to visualize the proximal collecting system,
and biopsies were obtained from the accessible portions, with 8
biopsies taken using an access sheath. Even with flexible
Viperscope, further passage was not feasible.
5. A DJ catheter was inserted under radiographic guidance over a
guidewire. Collection of irrigation cytology (5 ml) from the renal
pelvis.
6. Insertion of a DJ catheter (7/28 Vortek) over the indwelling wire
and endoscope under radiographic control. Documentation of images.
7. Placement of a permanent catheter. Urine initially appeared bloody
but cleared rapidly.
**Conclusion:** Uncomplicated diagnostic ureterorenoscopy with biopsy of
the ureter (8 biopsies taken), cytology collection from the ureter and
renal pelvis, and endoscopic passage into the renal pelvis in the
presence of a stenosing tumor. DJ catheter placement on the left.
Endoscopic assessment of the urinary bladder and distal ureter revealed
no abnormalities. Follow-up steps:
- Removal of the urinary catheter based on urine appearance and
patient vigilance.
- Sonography before discharge.
- Further steps determined by histology.
- Recommend evaluation and clarification of the significantly elevated
PSA value.
**Internal Cytological Report Clinical Details: Sample Date: 01/16/2019
**
1. Left ureter (100 mL colorless, clear)
2. Left renal pelvis (50 mL brown) (Papanicolaou staining)
Both materials contain increased urinary sediment, along with
granulocytes, erythrocytes, and urothelial cells from various layers
with multi-nuclear surface cells. Material 1 also shows papillary
arrangements of urothelial cells, some of which have peripheral
hyperchromatic cell nuclei and altered nuclear-plasma ratios. Material 2
shows individual papillary urothelial cell arrangements with similar
nuclear quality, hyperchromasia, and eccentric placement within the
cytoplasm, as well as nuclear rounding. Numerous individual urothelial
cells are also present with significantly rounded and enlarged cell
nuclei, frequently in a peripheral location with hyperchromasia.
**Critical Findings Report:**
1. Detection of a papillary-structured urothelial population with
nuclear changes, which may be related to instrumentation. Malignant
urothelial proliferation cannot be definitively ruled out.
2. Abundant cell material with papillary and single atypical urothelia,
highly suspicious for urothelial carcinoma cells.
**Diagnostic Classification:** Suspicious
**Internal Histopathological Report**
**Clinical Details/Question:** Endoscopic suspicion of urothelial
carcinoma.
**Macroscopy:**
1. Left proximal ureter: Unfixed nephrectomy specimen measuring 9.2 x
6.5 x 5.2 cm with a maximum 4 cm wide perirenal fat tissue and
maximum 1 cm wide perihilar fat tissue. Also, a 5 cm long ureter,
max 1 cm hilar vessels, and a 2.1 x 1.3 x 0.8 cm adrenal gland at
the upper pole of the kidney. On the sections at the renal hilum,
there is a maximum 4.3 cm grayish induration. No clear infiltration
of vessels by the induration is visible macroscopically. No
connection between the induration and the adrenal gland. The minimal
distance from the induration to the specimen edge at the renal hilum
is focally \< 0.1 cm. Furthermore, the renal pelvis system is
dilated, and there is a maximum 0.4 cm grayish indurated nodule in
the perirenal fat tissue.
**Therapy and Progression:** After thorough preparation and patient
counseling, we successfully performed the above procedure on 01/16/2019
without complications. Intraoperatively, a stenotic process reaching the
proximal ureter was observed, preventing passage into the renal pelvis.
Cytology and biopsy were obtained, and a left DJ stent was placed. The
postoperative course was uneventful. We were able to remove the
transurethral catheter upon clearing of urine and discharged the patient
to your outpatient care.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request regular follow-up urological evaluations.
- Given the histological findings and highly suspicious radiological
findings for a malignant mass, we recommend performing an isotope
renogram to assess separate kidney function. An appointment has been
scheduled for 03/05/2019. We ask the patient to visit our
preoperative outpatient clinic on the same day to prepare for left
nephroureterectomy.
- The surgical procedure is scheduled for 03/20/2019.
- In case of acute urological symptoms, immediate reevaluation is
welcome at any time.
### Patient Report 1
**Dear colleague, **
We would like to report to you regarding our mutual patient Mr. Peter
Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954, who was under our care from 03/17/2019 to
04/01/2019.
**Diagnosis:** Urothelial carcinoma of the renal pelvis, high grade,
maximum size 4.3 cm. TNM Classification (8th edition, 2017): pT3, pN0
(0/11), M1 (ADR), Pn1, L1, V1.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- Atrial fibrillation: History of ablation in 2013
- History of pTCA stenting in 2010 due to acute myocardial infarction
- Suspected soft tissue rheumatism
- History of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 2012
- History of tonsillectomy
- Obesity
**Procedures:** Open left nephroureterectomy with lymphadenectomy on
03/18/2019.
**Histology: Critical Findings Report:**
[Renal pelvis carcinoma (left kidney):]{.underline} Extensive
infiltration of a high-grade urothelial carcinoma in the renal pelvis
with infiltration of the renal parenchyma and perihilar adipose tissue,
maximum size 4.3 cm (1.). In the included adrenal tissue, central
evidence of small carcinoma infiltrates, to be interpreted as distant
metastasis (M1) with no macroscopic evidence of direct infiltration and
central localization.
[Resection Status]{.underline}: Carcinoma-free resection margins of the
proximal left ureter and ureter with mild florid urocystitis at the
ureteral orifice. Margin-forming carcinoma infiltrates at the main
preparation hilar near the renal vein, with the cranial hilar resection
margins I and II being carcinoma-free.
[Nodal Status:]{.underline} Eleven metastasis-free lymph nodes in the
submissions as follows: 0/1 (2.), 0/3 (4.), 0/6 (5.), 0/1 (6.).
Final TNM Classification (8th edition, 2017): pT3, pN0(0/11), M1 (ADR),
Pn1, L1, V1.
**Current Presentation:** The patient was electively scheduled for the
above-mentioned procedure. The patient does not report any complaints in
the urological field.
**Physical Examination:** Abdomen is soft, no tenderness. Both renal
beds are free.
**Fast Track Report on 03/18/2019: **
**Microscopy:** Histologically, there are extensive infiltrations of a
carcinoma growing in large solid formations with focal necrosis and
highly pleomorphic cell nuclei. In block 1A, there is a section of a
urothelium-lined duct structure with a transition from normal epithelium
to highly atypical epithelium and invasive carcinoma infiltrates. Broad
infiltration into adjacent fat tissue and renal parenchyma is observed.
Focal perineural sheath infiltration.
**Critical Findings**: Left renal pelvis carcinoma: Extensive
infiltrates of high-grade urothelial carcinoma in the renal pelvis,
infiltrating the renal parenchyma and perihilar fat tissue, max 4.3 cm
(1.). No direct infiltration of the accompanying adrenal gland is found.
Isolated abnormal cells in the adrenal gland parenchyma, which will be
further characterized to exclude the smallest carcinoma extensions. An
update will be provided after the completion of investigations.
**Resection Status:** Carcinoma-free resection margins of the proximal
left ureter with mild florid urocystitis near the ureteral orifice.
Carcinoma-forming infiltrates on the main specimen hilus near the renal
vein, but postresected cranial hili I and II were free of carcinoma.
**Nodal status**: Eleven metastasis-free lymph nodes in the submissions
as follows: 0/1 (2nd.), 0/3 (4.), 0/6 (5.), 0/1 (6.).
TNM classification (8th edition 2017): pT3, pN0 (0/11), Pn1, L1, V1.
**Urinanalysis from 03/20/2019**
**Material: Urine, Midstream Collected on 10/13/2020 at 00:00**
- Antimicrobial Agents: Negative. No evidence of growth-inhibiting
substances in the sample material.
- Bacterial Count per ml: 1,000 - 10,000
- Assessment: Bacterial counts of 1000 CFU/mL or higher can be
clinically relevant, especially with corresponding clinical
symptoms, especially in pure cultures of uropathogenic
microorganisms from midstream urine or single-catheter urine, along
with concomitant leukocyturia.
- Epithelial Cells (microscopic): \<20 epithelial cells/μL
- Leukocytes (microscopic): \<20 leukocytes/μL
- Microorganisms (microscopic): \<20 microorganisms/μL
**Pathogen:** Citrobacter koseri
**Antibiogram:**
- Cefalexin: Susceptible (S) with a minimum inhibitory concentration
(MIC) of 8
- Ampicillin/Amoxicillin: Resistant (R) with MIC \>=32
- Amoxicillin+Clavulanic Acid: Susceptible (S) with MIC of 8
- Piperacillin+Tazobactam: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=4
- Cefotaxime: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=1
- Ceftazidime: Susceptible (S) with MIC of 0.25
- Cefepime: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.12
- Meropenem: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.25
- Ertapenem: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.5
- Cotrimoxazole: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=20
- Gentamicin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=1
- Ciprofloxacin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.25
- Levofloxacin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=0.12
- Fosfomycin: Susceptible (S) with MIC \<=16
**Therapy and Progression:** After thorough preparation and patient
education, we performed the above-mentioned procedure on 03/18/2019,
without complications. The postoperative course was uneventful except
for prolonged milky secretion from the indwelling wound drainage. Prior
to catheter removal, a single instillation of Mitomycin was
administered. Regular examinations were unremarkable. We discharged Mr.
Rudolph on 04/01/2019, in good general condition after removal of the
drainage, following an unremarkable final examination, for your esteemed
outpatient follow-up.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request regular follow-up urological appointments. The first one
should take place within one week after discharge.
- Based on the histopathological findings with evidence of a
metastasis in the adrenal tissue, we recommend the administration of
adjuvant chemotherapy with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. The patient wishes
for a local connection, which was initiated during the inpatient
stay.
- Anticoagulation: Following the recommendations of the current
guideline for prophylaxis of venous thromboembolism, we advise
continuing anticoagulation with low molecular weight heparins for a
total of 4 - 5 weeks post-operation after urological procedures in
the abdominal and pelvic area.
- With the current single kidney situation, we recommend regular
nephrological follow-up examinations.
- In case of acute urological complaints, immediate re-presentation
is, of course, welcome.
### Patient Report 2
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to inform you about our patient Mr. Peter Rudolph, born
on 05/26/1954, who was under treatment at our outpatient clinic on
04/20/2020.
**Diagnosis:** Newly hepatic and previously known adrenal metastasized,
locally advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis
(diagnosed in 03/19).
**Previous Diagnoses and Treatment:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis, pT3, pN0 (0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1,
V1, high-grade. 04 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy
with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- Newly emerged, progressively enlarging liver metastasis in Segment 6
and Segment 7, in relation to the previously known adrenal
metastasized and locally advanced urothelial carcinoma of the renal
pelvis, following left nephroureterectomy and four cycles of
adjuvant chemotherapy with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. Suspected
activation of a rheumatic disease.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown)
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presents electively with current
imaging in our uro-oncological outpatient clinic for treatment and
discussion of the further therapy plan.
**Medical History:** In March 2019, Mr. Rudolph underwent a
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis. Subsequently, four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin were performed due to the detection of locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma with primary metastasis to the left
adrenal gland. The chemotherapy was well-tolerated. In the summer, the
patient presented with abdominal pain, and subsequently, an extensive
psoas abscess was detected during our inpatient treatment. Planned
follow-up examinations have taken place since then, but the current
imaging now suggests a newly emerged hepatic metastasis.
**Therapy and Progression**: Mr. Rudolph is in a satisfactory general
condition. Bowel movements are unremarkable with 1-2 well-formed stools
per day. Urinary frequency is up to 5-6 times a day with one episode of
nocturia. There is no urinary hesitancy. Currently, the patient
complains of an activation of his previously unclarified rheumatic
disease. He describes increasing pain with swelling in the left distal
ankle more than the right. Additionally, the patient complains of
painful right knee, and a total endoprosthesis on this side was
apparently planned but postponed due to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, the patient reports pain in the distal and proximal
interphalangeal joints of both hands. Externally, the general
practitioner initiated a short-term cortisone pulse therapy with 3-day
intervals (initial dose 100mg) due to suspicion of soft tissue
rheumatism a week ago. Under this treatment, the pain has progressively
improved, and the patient is currently almost symptom-free. Otherwise,
there is a good social network, and no nursing care is required.
The urological findings indicate a newly emerged hepatic metastasis in
relation to the previously known adrenal metastasized, locally advanced
urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis, following
nephroureterectomy and four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin. Due to the newly emerged metastasis within one
year after successful Cisplatin therapy, platinum resistance is
presumed. Therefore, the indication for initiating a second-line therapy
with the immune checkpoint inhibitor Pembrolizumab, Atezolizumab, or
Nivolumab now exists. A comprehensive explanation was provided, with a
particular focus on risks and side effects. Special attention was given
to the exacerbation of pre-existing rheumatic complaints, and it was
strongly advised that the patient consult a rheumatologist before
initiating systemic therapy with an immune checkpoint inhibitor. As the
patient is already well-connected to the outpatient oncologist and has a
long commute, the initiation of local therapy was discussed with the
patient. Telephonically, the patient has already been connected to the
mentioned practice. Therapy initiation is planned for this week and will
be communicated to the patient separately.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request the initiation of systemic therapy with an immune
checkpoint inhibitor (Pembrolizumab, Atezolizumab, or Nivolumab).
The first follow-up staging examination should take place after 4
cycles of therapy using CT of the chest/abdomen/pelvis.
- Prior to initiating systemic therapy, we recommend consultation with
a local rheumatologist for further evaluation of rheumatic symptoms.
- In particular, if systemic therapy with an immune checkpoint
inhibitor is initiated despite existing rheumatic symptoms, regular
follow-up and clinical monitoring should be closely observed.
- Regarding the externally initiated high-dose Prednisolone course, we
recommend a rapid tapering, so that after reaching a threshold dose
of 10mg/day, immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy can be initiated.
- In the event of acute complications or side effects, immediate
medical evaluation may be necessary. In particular, the need for
timely high-dose cortisone therapy with Prednisolone was emphasized
if it is an immune-associated side effect.
- If immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy is not feasible, the
discussion of re-induction with Gemcitabine/Cisplatin or alternative
therapy with Vinflunine as a second-line treatment should be
considered.
**Current Medication: **
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
------------------------- ------------ ---------------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0
Prednisolone (Prelone) 80 mg According to scheme
### Patient Report 3
**Dear colleague, **
We are reporting on our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954,
who was under our inpatient care from 11/04/2020 to 11/05/2020.
**Diagnosis**: Hepatic, lymphatic, and adrenal metastasized, locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis (diagnosed in
03/19).
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
<!-- -->
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD.
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy).
- Unclear thyroid nodule.
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown).
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus.
**Intervention**: CT-guided liver biopsy on 11/04/2020.
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presents electively in our
urological clinic for the aforementioned procedure. Under immunotherapy
with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d, there has been significant disease
progression. A CT-guided liver biopsy was initially discussed with Mr.
Rudolph for further therapy evaluation. At the time of admission, the
patient is in good general condition.
**Therapy and Progression:** Following appropriate patient information
and preparation, we performed the above procedure without complications.
Postoperatively, there were no complications. We were able to discharge
Mr. Rudolph in good general condition after unremarkable laboratory
checks on 11/05/2020.
**Current Recommendations:**
- We request a follow-up visit with the outpatient urologist within 1
week of discharge for clinical monitoring.
- We recommend switching the systemic therapy to Vinflunine. The
patient can have this done locally through his outpatient urologist.
- Further sequencing will be conducted through our interdisciplinary
molecular tumor board, and the patient will be informed of this in
due course.
- In case of symptoms or complications (especially fever over 38.5°C,
chills, or flank pain), an immediate return to our clinic is welcome
at any time.
### Patient Report 4
**Dear colleague, **
We are providing you with an update on our patient, Mr. Peter Rudolph,
born on 05/26/1954, who presented himself at our outpatient clinic on
06/29/2021.
**Diagnosis**: Hepatic, lymphatic, and adrenal metastasized, locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma of the left renal pelvis (diagnosed in
03/19).
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis (pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade)
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Initial diagnosis of liver metastases in Segment 6 and
Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
- 10/20 - 06/21: Third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin (external),
resulting in hepatic progression
- 01/21: Molecular tumor board: no evidence of a molecular target
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
<!-- -->
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Soft tissue rheumatism
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy (date unknown)
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Current Presentation:** Mr. Rudolph presented to out outpatient clinic
on 06/29/2021, accompanied by his wife, in subjectively satisfactory
condition. Given the negative PDL1 status and FGFR mutation status
observed in our institution\'s molecular tumor board, Mr. Rudolph was
now presented to us for reevaluation and discussion of further
procedures.
**External CT Thorax dated 06/07/2021: **
**Findings:** The last relevant preliminary examination was conducted on
03/03/2021. Currently, well-ventilated lungs bilaterally without
tumor-typical findings or infiltrates. The bronchial system is clear. No
pathologically enlarged lymph nodes in the mediastinum, hilar region, or
axillae. Relatively pronounced atherosclerotic vascular calcifications,
otherwise unremarkable imaging of the major pulmonary and mediastinal
vessels. Normal dimensions of the cardiac chambers. No pericardial
effusion or pleural effusion. Thyroid and esophagus appear normal. No
osteolysis or spinal canal stenosis.
**Assessment**: Continued absence of thoracic metastases.
**External CT Abdomen dated 06/07/2021: **
**Findings:** Comparison with CT Abdomen dated 03/03/2021. Significant
progression of numerous, some large liver metastases in both liver
lobes. For example, a formerly 4.2 x 2.5 cm measuring metastasis
subcapsular in liver segment 7 has now increased to 5.8 x 3.6 cm. A
formerly 1.2 x 1.1 cm measuring metastasis in liver segment 4a has
increased to 3.3 x 2.4 cm. Portal vein and hepatic veins are properly
contrasted. Post-cholecystectomy status. Unremarkable adrenal glands.
Post-left nephrectomy. The right kidney is unremarkable. The spleen is
unremarkable. The pancreas appears normal. Diverticula of the sigmoid
and colon. No suspicious inguinal, iliac, retroperitoneal, or mesenteric
lymph nodes.
Assessment: Significant progression of numerous, some large liver
metastases. Otherwise, no organ metastases. No lymph node metastases.
Post-left nephrectomy.
**Assessment**: The urological examination findings indicate progressive
hepatic metastasized urothelial carcinoma originating from the left
renal pelvis, despite third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin. The
findings were thoroughly discussed in the urological-interdisciplinary
conference on 06/29/2021.
[Recommendations for further procedures include:]{.underline}
1. Chemotherapy with Gemcitabine and Paclitaxel.
2. A best-supportive-care strategy with symptom-oriented approach and
possible palliative medical support.
3. After approval, a targeted therapy with Enfortumab Vedotin could be
considered if further tumor-specific treatment is desired.
These recommendations were discussed with Mr. Rudolph and his wife
during an outpatient uro-oncology consultation. Mr. Rudolph demonstrated
adequate orientation regarding his medical condition, given the overall
limited therapeutic options. A final decision on one of the proposed
alternatives was not reached collectively, although Mr. Rudolph tended
towards a watchful waiting approach due to perceived significant side
effects from the previous third-line chemotherapy with Vinflunin.
Therefore, we left the final recommendation open with a tendency towards
the best-supportive-care strategy. A local palliative medicine
outpatient connection was also recommended. According to the patient,
there is a living will and a power of attorney for healthcare decisions
in place.
We have already provided feedback to the attending oncologist by phone.
**Current Recommendations:**
- In the presence of apparent treatment fatigue in the patient, a
best-supportive-care strategy with a symptom-oriented approach and
potential initiation of chemotherapy with Gemcitabine and Paclitaxel
could be considered at the current time in an individualized
setting.
- We request the continuation of uro-oncological care by the attending
oncologist.
- After the medication Enfortumab-Vedotin is approved, a discussion of
this therapy can take place, depending on the patient\'s overall
condition and the desire for further tumor-specific treatment.
**Medication upon Discharge: **
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
------------------------- ------------ ---------------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg 1-0-0
Prednisolone (Prelone) 80 mg According to scheme
### Patient Report 5
**Dear colleague, **
We are reporting on the examination conducted on Mr. Rudolph, born on
05/26/1954 on 08/26/2021.
**Diagnosis**: Stenosis of the left subclavian artery
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d
<!-- -->
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Clinical Findings:**
[Fist Closure Test:]{.underline} Color Doppler sonography of the
shoulder-arm arteries: Bilateral triphasic flow in the subclavian
arteries. Bilateral triphasic flow in the brachial arteries, even with
arm elevation. Left vertebral artery shows orthograde flow, no flow
reversal during overhead work.
[Conclusion]{.underline}: Clinically and duplex sonographically, no
subclavian stenosis can be demonstrated.
Both hands are warm and rosy and show intact sensory-motor function. No
hand claudication or dizziness provoked during overhead work.
Pulse status: Bilateral palpable radial and ulnar arteries. Blood
pressure on the right 160 mmHg systolic, on the left 190 mmHg systolic.
Duplex: Bilateral subclavian arteries show triphasic flow. Bilateral
brachial arteries show triphasic flow, even with arm elevation. Left
vertebral artery demonstrates orthograde flow, with no flow reversal
during overhead work.
**Current Recommenations: **
The evaluation is performed to assess a potential left subclavian
stenosis with blood pressure side differences. Dizziness or arm
claudication, especially during overhead work, is denied.
### Patient Report 6
**Dear colleague, **
We report to you about Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on 05/26/1954, who was in
our inpatient treatment from 02/22/2022 to 02/29/2022.
**Diagnosis**: Symptomatic incisional hernia in the area of the old
laparotomy scar (status post left nephroureterectomy in 03/19.
**Other Diagnoses:**
- 03/19: Left nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial
carcinoma of the renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0,
(0/11), M1 (ADR), pn1, L1, V1, high-grade
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg q14d
<!-- -->
- 2013: Atrial fibrillation with ablation
- 2010: pTCA stenting for acute myocardial infarction/CHD
- Suspected activated soft tissue rheumatism (currently under
Prednisolone pulse therapy)
- Unclear thyroid nodule
- 2012: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy
- Tonsillectomy
- 01/2019: Left psoas abscess with detection of multisensitive
Staphylococcus aureus
**Operation:** Alloplastic Incisional Hernia Repair in intubation
anesthesia on 02/23/2022.
**Current Presentation:** The patient was admitted for elective surgery
after indications were assessed and preoperative preparation was
conducted in our clinic for the above-mentioned diagnosis.
**Therapy and Progression:** Following routine preoperative
preparations, comprehensive informed consent, and premedication, we
performed the aforementioned procedure on 02/23/2022 in uncomplicated
ITN. There were no intraoperative complications.
The postoperative inpatient course progressed normally with dry and
non-irritated wound conditions. The drainage was timely removed as the
drainage volume decreased. Full mobilization and intensive respiratory
therapy exercises were initiated on the first postoperative day. Regular
clinical and laboratory check-ups indicated a normal healing process.
The diet was well tolerated, and the wounds healed primarily. We
discharged Mr. Rudolph for further outpatient care on 02/29/2022.
**Histology**: Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar fibrosis.
Fibrolipomatous hernial sac with obstructed vessels. No evidence of
malignancy.
**Medication upon Admission:**
**Medication ** **Dosage** **Frequency**
--------------------- ------------ ---------------
Aspirin 100 mg 1-0-0
Bisoprolol (Zebeta) 50 mg 1/2-0-0
**Procedure:** From a surgical perspective, we request wound
inspections. To prevent recurrence, avoid lifting heavy objects (\>5 kg)
for the next 8-12 weeks. Please consistently wear the abdominal binder
during the wound healing period (14 days). Additionally, avoid excessive
abdominal pressure, especially during bowel movements.
**Surgical Report: **
**Diagnoses:**
- Extensive incisional hernia in the area of the transverse upper
abdominal laparotomy scar, with a history of: Left
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0, (0/11), M1 (ADR),
pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
**Type of Surgery:** Incisional Hernia Repair with Optilene Mesh (30 x
30 cm), Adhesiolysis of the intestine
**Anesthesia Type:** Intubation anesthesia
**Report**: **Indication**: Mr. Rudolph presents with an extensive
incisional hernia following a history of nephrectomy and pancreatic
resection for clear cell renal cell carcinoma. The indication for hernia
repair with mesh was made.
**Operation**: The procedure was performed with the patient in a supine
position and in ITN. Sterile preparation, draping, and perioperative
antibiotic prophylaxis with Ampicillin/Sulbactam 3g were administered.
Initially, a skin incision was made to the left of the existing
transverse upper abdominal laparotomy scar, and a sparing spindly
excision of the scar was performed. Dissection into the depth revealed
the first hernia sac. This sac was dissected free and opened. Further
lateral to the left, a very large additional hernia sac was found. This
one was also completely dissected free and opened. The two hernia
defects were connected only by a narrow isthmus of thinned abdominal
wall fascia, which was cut, and the two hernia defects were united.
Furthermore, another hernia sac was found laterally to the right in the
area of the scar. Thus, the scar was opened across its entire width by
extending the skin incision to the right. The right lateral hernia sac
was also dissected free and opened. Now, the hernia sacs were removed
one after the other (histology specimens). The epifascial adipose tissue
was then mobilized so that the abdominal wall fascia was exposed and
could serve as the base for the mesh to be placed. The three hernia
defects were then closed with a total of three continuous sutures using
Vicryl. This was done after the abdominal wall fascia was also dissected
free intra-abdominally, where the intestines or large mesh adhered to
the abdominal wall. After the hernia defects were now closed, the 30x30
cm Optilene mesh was introduced after thorough irrigation and careful
electrocoagulation for hemostasis. It was fixed tightly but without
tension at the edges with Ethibond sutures of size 0. Subsequently, a
Palisade suture was placed around the closed hernia defects using
Prolene size 0 in a continuous technique. Final irrigation and
hemostasis were performed. Four 12 Redon drains were placed in the
wound, led out, and sutured. Subcutaneous sutures were made with Vicryl
2-0. Skin sutures were placed with Nylon 3-0, followed by a sterile
wound compression dressing.
**Internal Histopathological Report**
**Macroscopy:**
- Skin spindle: Fixed. Skin spindle measuring 9 x 0.5 x 1.5 cm with a
centrally located, slightly raised, and indurated scar.
- Hernia sac I: Fixed. Cap-shaped serosal lamella measuring 8 x 7.5 x
2 cm with a bulging cord-like fibrosis. The serosa is smooth and
shiny.
- Hernia sac II: Fixed. A 15 x 3 x 0.5 cm large, reddish-livid serosal
specimen with focal indurations, petechial hemorrhages, and adhesion
strands. Multiple cross-sections embedded.
- Hernia sac III: Fixed. A 3.5 x 1 x 0.3 cm serosal lamella with
scarred fibrosis. Processing: Blocks: 4, H&E. Microscopy:
- Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar fibrosis of the adjacent
stroma. 2-4. Fibrolipomatous tissue, superficially peritonealized.
Markedly congested blood vessels.
**Critical Findings Report:** Skin/subcutaneous resection with scar
fibrosis. 2-4. Fibrolipomatous hernia sac tissue with congested blood
vessels. No evidence of malignancy.
### Patient Report 7
**Dear colleague, **
We are writing to provide an update regarding Mr. Peter Rudolph, born on
05/26/1954, who presented to our surgical outpatient clinic on
03/04/2022.
**Diagnoses**: Status post umbilical hernia repair 10 days ago.
- Extensive incisional hernia in the area of the transverse upper
abdominal laparotomy scar, with a history of: Left
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis and adrenal metastasis, pT3, pN0, (0/11), M1 (ADR),
pn1, L1, V1, high-grade.
- 04/19 - 07/19: Four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin.
- 04/20: Newly emerged liver metastasis in Segment 6 and Segment 7.
- 05/20 - 09/20: 10 cycles of immunotherapy with Nivolumab 240 mg
q14d.
**Medical History:** In March 2019, Mr. Rudolph underwent a
nephroureterectomy with the detection of urothelial carcinoma of the
renal pelvis. Subsequently, four cycles of adjuvant chemotherapy with
Gemcitabine/Cisplatin were performed due to the detection of locally
advanced urothelial carcinoma with primary metastasis to the left
adrenal gland. The chemotherapy was well-tolerated overall. On
02/22/2022, Mr. Rudolph presented with an extensive incisional hernia
following a history of left nephroureterectomy. The indication for
hernia repair with mesh was made.
**Physical Examination**: Unremarkable scar, sutures in place.
**Current Recommendation**: Follow-up appointment scheduled for Thursday
(12th postoperative day) for suture removal and progress assessment.
|
Gemcitabine and Cisplatin
|
Which writer seemed to like Krugman the most?
A. Waldrop
B. Arrow
C. Cassidy
D. Fishman
|
Krugman's Life of Brian Where it all started: Paul Krugman's "The Legend of Arthur." Letter from John Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow Letter from Ted C. Fishman David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe Letter from John Cassidy: Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government"--is "pure fiction." Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been around since Adam Smith, and it was written about at length by Alfred Marshall in 1890. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the "wreckage" of a large part of economic theory.) 3) Pace Krugman, I also did not claim that Arthur bears principal responsibility for the rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As Krugman notes, several scholars (himself included) who were working in the fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating increasing returns before Arthur did. My claim was simply that Arthur applied increasing returns to high-technology markets, and that his work influenced how other economists and government officials think about these markets. Krugman apart, virtually every economist I have spoken to, including Daniel Rubinfeld, a former Berkeley professor who is now the chief economist at the Justice Department's antitrust division, told me this was the case. (Rubinfeld also mentioned several other economists who did influential work, and I cited three of them in the article.) 4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a "nice guy," of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings. 5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. "Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light," he pronounces. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that economic research, principally macroeconomic research, has taken over the past two decades. In response to that article, I received dozens of messages of appreciation from mainstream economists, including from two former presidents of the American Economic Association. Among the sources quoted in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that I "don't like mainstream economists" and that I am out to denigrate their work is malicious hogwash. The fact of the matter is that I spend much of my life reading the work of mainstream economists, speaking to them, and trying to find something they have written that might interest the general public. In my experience, most economists appreciate the attention. 6) I might attach more weight to Krugman's criticisms if I hadn't recently reread his informative 1994 book Peddling Prosperity , in which he devotes a chapter to the rediscovery of increasing returns by contemporary economists. Who are the first scholars Krugman mentions in his account? Paul David, an economic historian who wrote a famous paper about how the QWERTYUIOP typewriter keyboard evolved and, you guessed it, Brian Arthur. "Why QWERTYUIOP?" Krugman wrote. "In the early 1980s, Paul David and his Stanford colleague Brian Arthur asked that question, and quickly realized that it led them into surprisingly deep waters. ... What Paul David, Brian Arthur, and a growing number of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy." Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it "didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know." Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact that Arthur has started to receive some public recognition. The eminent MIT professor, whose early academic work received widespread media attention, is far too generous a scholar to succumb to such pettiness. --John Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story ("The Legend of Arthur"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre. Among many other things, Complexity tells the story of the Irish-born economist Brian Arthur and how he came to champion a principle known as "increasing returns." The recent New Yorker article explains how that principle has since become the intellectual foundation of the Clinton administration's antitrust case against Microsoft. Krugman's complaint is that the popular press--including Complexity and The New Yorker --is now hailing Brian Arthur as the originator of increasing returns, even though Krugman and many others had worked on the idea long before Arthur did. I leave it for others to decide whether I was too gullible in writing Complexity . For the record, however, I would like to inject a few facts into Krugman's story, which he summarizes nicely in the final paragraph: When Waldrop's book came out, I wrote him as politely as I could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out of shape. ... So what we really learn from the legend of Arthur is that some journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really true. Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. During my research for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, including Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, co-creator of the General Equilibrium Theory of economics that Brian so eloquently criticizes. They generally agreed that Brian was a maverick in the field--and perhaps a bit too much in love with his own self-image as a misunderstood outsider--but basically sound. None of them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due. Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891. c) So, when I received Krugman's letter shortly after Complexity came out, I was puzzled: He was complaining that I hadn't referenced others in the increasing-returns field--Paul Krugman among them--although I had explicitly done so. d) But, when I checked the published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage mentioning Krugman wasn't there. e) Only then did I realize what had happened. After I had submitted the manuscript, my editor at Simon & Schuster had suggested a number of cuts to streamline what was already a long and involved chapter on Brian's ideas. I accepted some of the cuts, and restored others--including (I thought) the passage that mentioned Krugman. In the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor anyway, and I didn't notice until too late. That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop: I am truly sorry that The New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include a link directly to the Cassidy piece. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in "Tasty Bits from the Technology Front." Cassidy did not present a story about one guy among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against the unified opposition of a narrow-minded profession both intellectually and politically conservative. As TBTF's host--not exactly a naive reader--put it, "These ideas were anathema to mainstream economists in 1984 when Arthur first tried to publish them." That morality play--not the question of who deserves credit--was the main point of my column, because it is a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream economics. The fact, which is easily documented, is that during the years that, according to the legend, increasing returns was unacceptable in mainstream economics, papers about increasing returns were in fact being cheerfully published by all the major journals. And as I pointed out in the chronology I provided with the article, even standard reference volumes like the Handbook of International Economics (published in 1984, the year Arthur supposedly met a blank wall of resistance) have long contained chapters on increasing returns. Whatever the reason that Arthur had trouble getting his own paper published, ideological rigidity had nothing to do with it. How did this fantasy come to be so widely believed? I am glad to hear that you tried to tell a more balanced story, Mr. Waldrop, even if sloppy paperwork kept it from seeing the light of day. And I am glad that you talked to Ken Arrow. But Nobel laureates, who have wide responsibilities and much on their mind, are not necessarily on top of what has been going on in research outside their usual field. I happen to know of one laureate who, circa 1991, was quite unaware that anyone had thought about increasing returns in either growth or trade. Did you try talking to anyone else--say, to one of the economists who are the straight men in the stories you tell? For example, your book starts with the story of Arthur's meeting in 1987 with Al Fishlow at Berkeley, in which Fishlow supposedly said, "We know that increasing returns can't exist"--and Arthur went away in despair over the unwillingness of economists to think the unthinkable. Did you call Fishlow to ask whether he said it, and what he meant? Since by 1987 Paul Romer's 1986 papers on increasing returns and growth had started an avalanche of derivative work, he was certainly joking--what he probably meant was "Oh no, not you too." And let me say that I simply cannot believe that you could have talked about increasing returns with any significant number of economists outside Santa Fe without Romer's name popping up in the first 30 seconds of every conversation--unless you were very selective about whom you talked to. And oh, by the way, there are such things as libraries, where you can browse actual economics journals and see what they contain. The point is that it's not just a matter of failing to cite a few more people. Your book, like the Cassidy article, didn't just tell the story of Brian Arthur; it also painted a picture of the economics profession, its intellectual bigotry and prejudice, which happens to be a complete fabrication (with some real, named people cast as villains) that somehow someone managed to sell you. I wonder who? Even more to the point: How did Cassidy come by his story? Is it possible that he completely misunderstood what Brian Arthur was saying--that the whole business about the seminar at Harvard where nobody would accept increasing returns, about the lonely struggle of Arthur in the face of ideological rigidity, even the quotation from Arthur about economists being unwilling to consider the possibility of imperfect markets because of the Cold War (give me a break!) were all in Cassidy's imagination? Let me say that I am actually quite grateful to Cassidy and The New Yorker . A number of people have long been furious about your book--for example, Victor Norman, whom you portrayed as the first of many economists too dumb or perhaps narrow-minded to understand Arthur's brilliant innovation. Norman e-mailed me to say that "I have read the tales from the Vienna woods before and had hoped that it could be cleared up by someone at some point." Yet up to now there was nothing anyone could do about the situation. The trouble was that while "heroic rebel defies orthodoxy" is a story so good that nobody even tries to check it out, "guy makes minor contribution to well-established field, proclaims himself its founder" is so boring as to be unpublishable. (David Warsh's 1994 series of columns in the Boston Globe on the increasing-returns revolution in economics, the basis for a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, is far and away the best reporting on the subject, did include a sympathetic but devastating exposé of Arthur's pretensions--but to little effect. [Click to read Warsh on Arthur.]) Only now did I have a publishable story: "guy makes minor contribution to well-established field, portrays himself as heroic rebel--and The New Yorker believes him." Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur ("The Legend of Arthur") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was "just pissed off," not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows. His theme is stated in his first paragraph: "Cassidy's article [in The New Yorker of Jan. 12] tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." Cassidy, however, said nothing of the sort. The concept of increasing returns is indeed very old, and Cassidy at no point attributed that idea to Arthur. Indeed, the phrase "increasing returns" appears just once in Cassidy's article and then merely to say that Arthur had used the term while others refer to network externalities. Further, Arthur has never made any such preposterous claim at any other time. On the contrary, his papers have fully cited the history of the field and made references to the previous papers, including those of Paul Krugman. (See Arthur's papers collected in the volume Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, especially his preface and my foreword for longer comments on Arthur's work in historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur has in fact said. What Cassidy in fact did in his article was to trace a line of influence between one of Arthur's early articles and the current claims of the Department of Justice against Microsoft. It appears that Cassidy based his article on several interviews, not just one. The point that Arthur has emphasized and which is influential in the current debates about antitrust policy is the dynamic implication of increasing returns. It is the concept of path-dependence, that small events, whether random or the result of corporate strategic choice, may have large consequences because of increasing returns of various kinds. Initial small advantages become magnified, for example, by creating a large installed base, and direct the future, possibly in an inefficient direction. Techniques of production may be locked in at an early stage. Similar considerations apply to regional development and learning. --Kenneth J. Arrow Nobel laureate and Joan Kenney professor of economics emeritus Stanford University Letter from Ted C. Fishman: After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in "The Legend of Arthur," I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to tell me how his ideas about increasing returns have encouraged a new strain of economic investigations. Despite much prodding, Arthur obliged only by placing himself in a long line of theorists dating back to Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. I also found him disarmingly generous in giving credit to the biologists, physicists, and fellow economists who have helped advance his own thinking. Savvy to the journalist's quest for heroes, Arthur urged me to focus on his ideas, not his rank among his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons. --Ted C. Fishman (For additional background on the history of "increasing returns" and Brian Arthur's standing in the field, click for David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe article on Brian Arthur)
|
A. Waldrop
|
How does Loy Chuk communicate with Ned?
A. Loy Chuk communicates with Ned through telepathy.
B. Loy Chuk has a device that translates his speech into English.
C. Loy Chuk has a device that lets him speak English.
D. Loy Chuk has a device that converts his thoughts into English.
|
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.
|
D. Loy Chuk has a device that converts his thoughts into English.
|
What mutation was found in Mrs. Done's molecular profile, which is specifically targeted by the recommended therapeutic combination?
Choose the correct answer from the following options:
A. ALK-EML4
B. RAS
C. BRAF V600E
D. EGFR
E. KRAS
|
### Patient Report 0
**Dear colleague, **
We wish to provide an update regarding Mrs. Jane Done, born on
01.01.1966. She was admitted to our clinic from 02/18/2018 to
03/01/2018.
**Diagnoses: **
- Malignant melanoma of the left scapula, TD 16 mm, exophytic
ulcerating, invasion stage - III, R0
- **Mutation analysis:** BRAF status: mutated. PD-L1 status: PD-L1
tumor proportion score (TPS): \<1%. Immune cell infiltrate (IC): 2%
of tumor area. PD-L1 combined-positive score (CPS): 2.
- **History:** Ms. Done was admitted to the hospital with high grade
suspicion of malignant melanoma of the back. The patient reported a
skin lesion that had been present for approximately 4 weeks. The
lesion had grown rapidly during this time and appeared to be oozing
and bleeding. She presented to our outpatient clinic, where she was
advised to undergo surgical excision in case of suspected
malignancy.
- Questions about B-symptoms, AP complaints, stool or urine
abnormalities were negated.
- System Therapy (Adjuvant Treatment for Stage III Melanoma): 1
02/22/18: 1st dose pembrolizumab 200mg
03/15/18: 2nd dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
04/05/18: 3rd dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
04/26/18: 4th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
05/17/18: 5th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
06/07/18: 6th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
06/28/18: 7th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
07/19/18: 8th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg
08/09/18: 9th dose Pembrolizumab 200mg i.v.
**Physical examination findings:** 52-year-old female patient in normal
general condition, nutritional status, consciousness unremarkable.
Cranial mobility free, eye movement normal. Pupils are equal and
reactive to light and accommodation. Regular, normocardial heart rate
during recording. Cor and pulmo auscultatory and percutaneously
unremarkable. No typical heart murmurs. Abdomen: Abdominal wall, liver
and spleen not enlarged, no pain to palpation, no resistance to
palpation, vivid bowel sounds. Renal bed and spine not palpable. No
enlarged cervical, submandibular, supra- and infraclavicular, axillary
and inguinal lymph nodes palpable. inguinal lymph nodes palpable.
Further internal and orienting neurological examination neurological
examination remained without pathological findings.
**Skin findings:** In the area of the left scapula, a table tennis-ball
sized area with a slightly fissured, oozing, pink-black pigmented
surface. On the cranial side an irregularly black-brown pigmented macula
of about 3.2x1.2 cm is visible.
**PET/CT with 203 MBq (F-18)-Fluorodeoxyglucose from 02/18/2018: **
Weight: 66 kg, blood glucose: 118 mg/dL. 20 mg furosemide; acquisition
start 91 min after tracer injection; 821 mm scan length á () mm/s in
flow technique (neck to proximal thigh); oral and i.v. contrast (1.5
mL/kg, i.v., max. 120 mL). Quantitative analysis of
attenuation-corrected image data using SUV calculation.
**Findings:**
CT: In case of known contrast agent allergy, premedication was performed
with one ampoule each of H1 and H2 antihistamine. The contrast-enhanced
examination proceeded without complications during the course.
Neck: Symmetrical visualization of the soft tissues of the neck. No
evidence of pathologically enlarged cervical lymph nodes. Struma nodosa
with several hypodense nodes on the right side up to max. approx. 1 cm.
Thorax: Cutaneous/subcutaneous irregular-shaped lesion caudal to the
right scapula. Limited assessability in the lung window with motion
artifacts and shallow inspiration depth. As far as assessable, no
evidence of larger suspicious intrapulmonary pulmonary round foci. No
infiltrate. No pleural effusion. No evidence of pathologically enlarged
lymph nodes mediastinal, hilar and axillary bilaterally.
Abdomen/pelvis: Normal contrast of liver parenchyma without evidence of
suspicious focal liver lesions. Portal vein and hepatic veins perfused
regularly. Gallbladder without irritation. Spleen with accessory spleen,
pancreas and adrenal glands bds. regular. Kidneys perfused at the same
side. No urinary retention. Nephrolithiasis on the right side.
Visualization of the parenchymatous upper abdominal organs. No evidence
of pathologically enlarged coeliacal, mesenteric, retroperitoneal,
iliac, and inguinal lymph nodes. Inhomogeneously contrasted enlarged
prostate. Urinary bladder wall, as far as assessable with low filling
circumferentially wall thickened.
Skeleton: no evidence of suspicious osteodestructive lesions. Osteopenia
with degenerative skeletal changes.
PET:
Increased tracer enhancement of the suspicious lesion caudal to left
scapula, indicative of a melanoma (SUVmax 67). Focal intense tracer
enhancement in the right thyroid lobe (SUVmax approximately 7.9).
Elongated intense tracer enhancement in the lower abdomen ventrally
median without clear correlate, most consistent with contamination.
Otherwise, unremarkable activity distribution in the study area.
Assessment:
No evidence of metabolically active metastases in the study area.
**Operation report from** **02/22/2018**:
Procedure: Excision of malignant melanoma on the left upper back.
Preoperative Diagnosis: Malignant melanoma, left upper back.
Postoperative Diagnosis: Malignant melanoma, left upper back.
Anesthesia: Local anesthesia using 70 mL tumescent solution comprising
0.21% Lidocaine/Ropivacaine with epinephrine.
Procedure Details: The surgical area was prepped using Betadine. The
area was draped in a sterile fashion. Excision of the exophytic tumor
was performed, measuring 51 x 20 x 15 mm. A safety margin of 10 mm was
maintained in depth, with the excision extending slightly into the
subcutaneous tissue but not beyond the fascia. This resulted in a total
defect size of 75 x 45 mm. The defect could not be closed with a simple
primary suture. Perforator vessels were coagulated, and the defect was
bridged using skin flaps. Additional resection of Burow triangles was
done according to aesthetic units. The wound was closed using an
intracutaneous suture technique. A continuous overhand blocked suture
was used with 3-0 Vicryl. The patient was advised that the visible
suture material could be removed between postoperative days 14 and 16. A
dressing was applied, followed by a pressure dressing to minimize
swelling and promote healing. Comments: The patient tolerated the
procedure well and was provided postoperative care instructions.
Plan: Follow up in clinic for suture removal and wound assessment
between postoperative days 14 and 16.
**Histology Dermatohistology:** **02/23/2018.**
**Gross Examination:** A roughly oval excision specimen measuring 48 x
36 x 14 mm. The specimen is serially sectioned into lamellar stages A
through H (8 cassettes).
**Microscopic Examination:**
Stage A: Displays a benign epidermis and dermis without evidence of
melanocytic tumor cells.
Stage B: Features an irregularly thickened epidermis. At the center of
the section, melanocytic tumor cells are observed at the dermoepidermal
junction (positive for MelanA stain). Additionally, abundant
melanophages and pigment deposits are noted. The lateral safety margin
measures at least 8 mm.
Stage C: Resembles stage B. Atypical melanocytic tumor cells are present
at the dermoepidermal junction. Upper dermis displays fibrosis,
inflammation, and numerous melanophages (confirmed by positive MelanA
staining). The lateral safety margin is at least 6 mm.
Stage D: Central region shows melanocytic tumor cells in both the
epidermis and upper dermis. There is significant inflammation,
melanophages, and pigment deposition (confirmed by MelanA staining).
The maximum lateral safety margin here is approximately 8 mm. A small
lymph node in the subcutaneous fat tissue is also seen, infiltrated by
melanocytic tumor cells.
The tumor shows stages E, F, G and H: Exophytic, bovist-like growing
ulcerated hemorrhagic tumor consisting of completely pleomorphic tumor
cells. These cells vary in morphology, appearing both nested and
spindle-shaped, with clear cytoplasm and conspicuous nucleoli. Notable
pigment production is observed, as are numerous atypical mitoses.
Control staining in stage F with MelanA is completely positive. The
sections are entirely excised.
**Diagnosis:** Exophytic, ulcerated malignant melanoma with a tumor
thickness of at least 15 mm. The tumor invasion is categorized as stage
III.
**Medication upon discharge: **
**Medication** **Dosage** **Route** **Frequency**
----------------------------------------- --------------- -------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clopidogrel (Plavix) 75 mg Oral Once daily in the morning
Enoxaparin (Lovenox) 0.2 mL Subcutaneous In the evening, only on days when not receiving dialysis
Dronabinol (Marinol) Drops 3 drops Oral Morning and evening
Leuprorelin (Lupron Depot) 3.75 mg Depot Subcutaneous Every 4 weeks
Fentanyl Transdermal System (Duragesic) 12 μg/hr Transdermal Changed every 3 days
Pantoprazole (Protonix) 40 mg Oral Once daily in the morning
Sevelamer (Renagel) 800 mg Oral Once daily in the morning
Multivitamin One tablet Oral Once daily in the morning
Torsemide (Demadex) 200 mg Oral Once daily in the morning
Cholecalciferol (Dekristol) 20,000 IU Oral Once weekly
Sodium Bicarbonate (Bicanorm) One tablet Oral Once daily in the morning
Calcitriol (Rocaltrol) 0.25 μg Oral Once daily in the morning
Valacyclovir (Valtrex) 500 mg Oral Half-tablet daily in the morning
Trimethoprim/Sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim) 480 mg Oral Mornings on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
Dexamethasone (Decadron) 4 mg Oral In the morning on day 1 and day 2 following daratumumab administration
### Patient Report 1
**Dear colleague, **
We wish to provide an update regarding Mrs. Jane Done, born on
01.01.1966. She was admitted to our clinic from 10/23/2020 to
11/01/2020.
- Metastatic malignant melanoma (presumed ID 2018); M1, stage IV
according to UICC.
- Therapies to date:
- Resection of primary tumor (malignant melanoma) on the left upper
back (02/2018)
- 01/20 Microsurgical resection right frontal tumor
- 02/20 Excision of empyema
- 02-03/20: Radiation therapy
- 05/02/20: Start of immunotherapy with Nivolumab & 05/26/20: Start of
combination immunotherapy 60 mg nivolumab, 200 mg ipilimumab (-\>
drug exanthema)
**Physical examination findings: **
On admission, the patient was awake and adequately oriented. Height:
166cm, weight: 56kg. Nutritional status, consciousness unremarkable.
Cranial mobility free, eye movement regular. Pupils equal, pupillary
reflex responsive to accommodation and light. Regular, normocardial
heart rate on admission. Heart and lung: auscultatory and percutaneous
unremarkable. No typical heart murmurs. Abdomen: Abdominal wall Liver
and spleen are not enlarged, no tenderness, no rebound palpable.
Resistences palpable, loud bowel sounds. No enlarged No enlarged
cervical, submandibular, supra- and infraclavicular lymph nodes
palpable. **Skin findings:** Pronounced xerosis cutis, raised skin
folds, some with erythema and fine lamellar scale and fine lamellar
scale, especially on the arms and face. **Microbiology:** Nasal swab:
normal flora, no MRSA. Throat swab: Normal flora, no MRSA Virology:
10/23/2020: No detection of SARS-CoV-2 by PCR in the submitted material.
**Therapy and Progression:**
**Summary:** The patient presented with exsiccation eczema on the arms,
legs, and face.
**Treatment Details:** Topical Treatment for Eczema: Applied Desonide
Cream once daily to the affected areas. For maintenance, applied Eucerin
Cream daily to the body and a moisturizing ointment like Cetaphil to the
face.
**Antipruritic Treatment:** Prescribed Benadryl tablets, to be taken as
needed.
**Oncology Consultation:** The patient was educated by our oncologist,
Dr. Ex, regarding adjuvant therapy options. The potential benefits and
risks of a combination immunotherapy with Nivolumab and Ipilimumab were
discussed. The patient had already started Nivolumab 200 mg therapy on
05/26/2020.
**Incident on 10/28/2020**: The patient had an unattended fall,
resulting in a hematoma on the left forehead. An emergency CT scan
showed no new fractures or acute hemorrhage but confirmed the presence
of previously known cystic metastasis.
**Operation report (01/02/2020): **
**Diagnosis:** Hemorrhaged right frontal metastasis from previously
diagnosed malignant melanoma (ID 2018)
**Procedure:** Microsurgical resection of right frontal mass with
intraoperative neuromonitoring (MEPs stable) and neuronavigation via a
left frontolateral craniotomy.
Time: 10:34 am Closure Time: 1:04 pm. Total Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes
**Preoperative Evaluation:** Imaging identified a hemorrhage in the
right frontal lobe. Given the patient\'s history of malignant melanoma,
a hemorrhagic melanoma metastasis was suspected. No other intracranial
metastases were detected. The patient and their family were informed of
the surgical benefits and risks. After ample time for consideration and
questions, written informed consent was obtained.
**Procedure Details:** The patient was positioned supine and intubated.
The head was secured in a Mayfield clamp and rotated 60° to the right.
The navigation dataset was reviewed. Using the navigation system, a left
frontotemporal craniotomy was planned. An arcuate incision line was
drawn. The surgical area was shaved, cleaned, and sterilized.
Prophylactic antibiotics and mannitol were administered. A time-out was
conducted preoperatively. The skin was incised, and Raney clips were
inserted. The left temporal muscle was split. Using the navigation
system for guidance, a left frontolateral craniotomy was performed. The
bone flap was carefully removed and preserved in an antibiotic solution
for later reimplantation. The dura mater was opened, and the operating
microscope was introduced. Upon inspection, the tumor was evident.
**MRI brain report (01/04/2020): **
**Clinical Information:** Postoperative assessment following
microsurgical resection of a left frontal hemorrhaged metastasis from
previously diagnosed malignant melanoma.
**Technique:** Multiplanar, multisequence MRI of the brain, including
T1-weighted, T2-weighted, FLAIR, diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), and
post-contrast T1-weighted sequences.
**Findings:** There is evidence of a right frontotemporal craniotomy
with associated post-surgical changes in the right frontal region.
Titanium plates and screws are noted securing the bone flap, causing
minimal artifact. The previous tumor site in the right frontal lobe
shows post-surgical changes with a well-circumscribed cavity. There is
no evidence of residual enhancing tumor within this cavity on
post-contrast sequences, suggesting complete resection. Surrounding this
cavity, there\'s mild edema, consistent with expected post-operative
changes. No other intracranial metastases. The ventricles are of normal
size and symmetric. There is no evidence of hydrocephalus. No midline
shift or mass effect is observed. There are scattered foci of
susceptibility artifact in the surgical bed on gradient echo sequences,
consistent with expected postoperative blood products. Major
intracranial vessels appear patent with no evidence of vascular
occlusion or significant stenosis. The remaining brain parenchyma
appears normal in signal intensity and morphology on all sequences. No
other significant abnormalities are identified.
**Impression:** Post-surgical changes in the left frontal lobe
consistent with recent tumor resection. There is no evidence of residual
tumor in the surgical bed. Expected postoperative edema and blood
products adjacent to the resection site. No new metastatic foci
identified. No evidence of complications such as hydrocephalus, midline
shift, or vascular abnormalities.
**Operation report (02/04/2020): **
**Diagnosis:** Subfascial, epidural, and subdural empyema following
resection of right frontal metastasis for malignant melanoma.
**Procedure:** Empyema removal (subfascial, epidural, subdural) S
Incision Time: 15:23 Closure Time: 04:01 PM Total Duration: 2 hours 31
minutes
**Preoperative Evaluation:** The patient had a prior surgical resection
of a right frontal metastasis due to known malignant melanoma. On a
recent outpatient visit, a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) cushion was
identified and punctured, revealing the presence of pathogens. Imaging
indicated deep and subcutaneous abscesses, necessitating revision
surgery. The patient was adequately informed about the procedure,
understood the associated risks, and provided written consent.
**Procedure Details:** The patient was positioned supine with the head
rotated approximately 60° in a Mayfield clamp. The surgical area was
washed and sterilized, focusing on the pre-existing access point. A team
time-out was conducted. Perioperative antibiotics were withheld until
all samples for microbiology were obtained. The skin was incised,
revealing multiple layers of muscle. These were carefully dissected,
leading to the identification and evacuation of the subcutaneous
epifascial abscess. Infected muscle tissue and abscess walls were
resected. The skull flap appeared loosened. A miniplate was removed, and
upon further inspection, the dura mater appeared strained. It was
incised and revealed turbid fluid, indicating a deep abscess. The dura
mater was mobilized, though adherence to the cortex was observed around
the resection cavity, suggesting possible tumor regrowth. Affected areas
were carefully resected. After thorough irrigation, a drainage system
was inserted into the resection cavity. A duraplasty was performed,
followed by the reimplantation of the bone flap using a miniplate. The
patient was also included in a bone flap study and was randomized for
flap reimplantation. After further irrigation, the wound was
meticulously closed, and a subfascial drain was inserted. The final
closure was completed with single button sutures. Under the guidance of
the operating microscope, the tumor was meticulously dissected from the
surrounding healthy tissue. Special care was taken to minimize damage to
the surrounding brain structures. The intraoperative neuromonitoring
indicated stable MEPs throughout, suggesting that motor pathways
remained undisturbed during the procedure. Throughout the resection,
periodic hemostasis was achieved using bipolar electrocautery to control
bleeding. Following the complete resection of the tumor, the surgical
cavity was irrigated with sterile saline to remove any residual debris.
The integrity of the surrounding brain tissue was assessed, and no
immediate complications were observed. The dura mater was sutured,
ensuring a watertight closure. A synthetic dural graft was used to
reinforce the suture line. The preserved bone flap was reimplanted and
secured in place using titanium plates and screws. The temporal muscle
and soft tissues were reapproximated and sutured in layers. The skin was
closed using a combination of absorbable sutures for the subcutaneous
layer and non-absorbable sutures for the skin. Sterile dressings were
applied to the incision site. Postoperative Assessment: The procedure
was completed without complications. Immediate postoperative
neurological examination revealed no new deficits. The patient was
transferred to the recovery room in stable condition, awaiting
extubation by the anesthesiology team.
**Recommendations:** Close monitoring in the neurological intensive care
unit (NICU) is advised for the first 24 hours. Postoperative imaging,
typically an MRI, should be scheduled within the next 48 hours to assess
the extent of tumor resection and to rule out any postoperative
complications.
**Summary:** Mrs. Done\'s recent hospital course was complicated by the
detection and subsequent excision of a hemorrhagic metastasis from a
known history of malignant melanoma. She continues to be on targeted
therapy with close monitoring. No new metastasis or recurrence has been
detected as of the last evaluation. The interdisciplinary approach
involving the neurosurgery and oncology teams has been pivotal in her
management. Given the aggressive nature of melanoma, regular
surveillance and immediate action upon detection of new
lesions/metastasis are paramount for her prognosis.
**02-03/20: Radiation therapy **
Diagnosis: Metastatic malignant melanoma with a focus on the right
frontal metastasis. Technique: Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) using a
linear accelerator (LINAC). Fractionation: Given the aggressive nature
of malignant melanoma, a hypofractionated regimen was adopted. The
patient underwent five sessions, each delivering a dose of 6 Gy for a
cumulative total dose of 30 Gy.
Treatment Planning: A simulation CT scan with a 1mm slice thickness was
performed in the treatment position, with a thermoplastic mask for
immobilization. The treatment planning system utilized the simulation
CT, along with MRI for better tumor delineation. The target volume and
critical structures like the eyes, optic nerves, chiasm, and brainstem
were contoured. The radiation plan was optimized to ensure maximal dose
to the target while sparing the critical structures.
Procedure: At each session, patient positioning was verified using
cone-beam CT (CBCT) to ensure precise targeting. Real-time monitoring
was employed to account for any intrafraction motion.
Side Effects: The patient tolerated the treatment well. She reported
transient fatigue and mild scalp irritation, which resolved with
conservative measures. No acute radiation-induced neurotoxicity was
observed.
**Patient History Update: Mrs. Jane Done (DOB: 01/01/1966)**
**General Status (10/03/2020):**
Mrs. Done presented in stable condition with stable vital signs.
Neurologically, she\'s intact with no new focal deficits. The surgical
scars in the frontal region from previous operations are not fully
healed and there is some dehiscence and swelling, indicative of
infection. This wound complication can be traced back to her previous
history of an empyema which required surgical intervention.
**Dermatological Assessment:**
The previous exsiccation eczema, prominent on her arms, legs, and face,
has improved markedly. The treatment regimen involving consistent
moisturization and targeted topical therapies seems effective.
Importantly, there were no new suspicious skin lesions or nodules noted
during her most recent full-body skin check.
**Oncology Status:**
Mrs. Done remains on her immunotherapy regimen, specifically the
combination of Nivolumab and Ipilimumab. Her response has been positive,
with no new metastatic sites identified in the latest assessments. She
has displayed commendable compliance with this regimen and regular
follow-up evaluations.
**Recent MRI Brain (09/30/2020):**
Her latest multiplanar, multisequence MRI revealed post-surgical
alterations in the right frontal lobe, consistent with previous
observations. Encouragingly, there was no sign of any residual or
recurrent tumor activity. Moreover, the MRI did not show any new
intracranial metastatic sites or other significant abnormalities.
**Thoracic CT Scan (10/01/2020): **
Technique: Post complication-free bolus i.v. administration of Imeron
400, a multiline spiral CT was performed through the thorax during the
venous contrast phase, supplemented with thin-section, coronary, and
sagittal secondary reconstructions.
Findings: Multiple roundish subsolid nodules found bipulmonary, notably
a 4mm nodule in the right upper lobe. Blurred subpleural condensations
in the left upper lobe. Another blurred bronchus-associated
consolidation was observed in the left upper lobe and pleurally in the
left dorsal lower lobe. No evidence of pathologically enlarged lymph
nodes in the hilar, mediastinal, or axillary regions. Unchanged
presentation of the left adrenal gland from the preliminary examination.
Thickened imprinting of the gastric wall noted. Ventrally emphasized
spondylophytic attachments observed in the thoracic spine. No
osteodestructive processes detected.
**Impression:** Presence of multiple subsolid pulmonary nodules;
recommended follow-up in 4-6 weeks for potential (post-) inflammatory or
malignant genesis. No evidence of pathologically enlarged lymph nodes.
**Abdomen/Pelvis CT Scan (10/01/2023): **
Technique: A low dose CT scan was taken of the abdomen and pelvis.
**Findings:** Regular visualization of the acquired basal lung sections.
Orthotopic kidneys without urinary stasis. No evidence of urinary
calculi. Suspected uterine fibroids attached to the uterus wall.
Enlarged right ovary with minor calcifications. Assessment: Absence of
urinary calculi. Possible uterine fibroids and an enlarged right ovary,
suggesting a specialized gynecological examination.
**PICC Line Installation (10/02/2020)**
**Diagnosis:**
Home antibiotics required for wound healing disorder following discharge
due to an empyema.
**Type of Surgery:**
Installation of a PICC line in the left basilic vein.
**Anesthesia:**
Local anesthesia
**Procedure Details:**
The patient was presented for long-term antibiotic treatment due to a
wound healing disturbance post the discharge of an epidural abscess. The
primary aim was to apply a PICC-line catheter for the antibiotic
regimen. A written informed consent was duly obtained prior to the
procedure.
The standard procedure began with the washing off and draping of the
patient. A preoperative sonography of the arm veins was conducted. Based
on the sonographic results, it was decided to insert the catheter via
the left basilica vein.
Under venous congestion and following local anesthesia with 2mL Mecain,
a 2mm skin incision was made. The sonographically guided puncture was
performed successfully. Post this, the peel-away sheath was inserted.
With the wire in place, the catheter was advanced with its tip
positioned approximately 2cm below the carina. The wire was subsequently
removed. Following this, the catheter was aspirated and flushed with
NaCl to ensure its patency. A sterile fixation was then applied, and the
wound was dressed.
**Notes:**
No complications were observed during the procedure. The patient was
advised on the care and maintenance of the PICC line. Regular follow-ups
are recommended to monitor the wound healing and the effectiveness of
the antibiotic treatment.
The patient was discharged with instructions and is scheduled for a
follow-up in two weeks.
**Additional Therapeutic Engagements:**
For her overall well-being and to counter the side effects of her
treatment journey, Mrs. Done has been actively involved in physical
therapy sessions. These sessions focus on enhancing her strength and
balance, especially given the previous incident of an unattended fall.
To address the inevitable psychological strains of her diagnosis, she
has also been attending counseling sessions.
**Current Recommendations:**
-Continue the ongoing immunotherapy without changes.
-Dermatological check-ups every month are advised for early detection of
any potential skin abnormalities.
-Regular neurological evaluations are crucial to ensure no emergence of
new deficits.
-Imaging should be scheduled every six months for proactive monitoring.
-Her physical therapy regimen should be ongoing to maintain and improve
mobility.
-Continue counseling to support her emotional and psychological
well-being.
**Summary and Notes:**
Mrs. Done\'s resilience and adherence to her treatments are commendable.
Her progress is a testament to the integrated care approach she has been
receiving. Maintaining a proactive surveillance stance will be essential
for her long-term prognosis and quality of life.
### Patient Report 2
**Dear colleague, **
We wish to provide an update regarding our mutual patient, Mrs. Jane
Done, born on 01.01.1966. She was admitted to our clinic from 11/23/2020
to 12/01/2020.
**Previous Diagnoses and Therapies:**
-Metastatic malignant melanoma (presumed ID 2018); M1, stage IV
according to UICC.
-Resection of primary tumor (malignant melanoma) on the left upper back
(02/2018)
-01/20 Microsurgical resection right frontal tumor
-02/20 Excision of empyema
-02-03/20: Radiation therapy
-05/02/20: Start of immunotherapy with Nivolumab
-05/26/20: Start of combination immunotherapy 60 mg nivolumab, 200 mg
ipilimumab (resulting in drug exanthema)
**Current Presentation:**
Mrs. Done presented for a follow-up visit on 11/23/2020. Over the past
few months, she reported fatigue and intermittent bouts of nausea. Of
significant concern were newly identified skin changes located on her
right arm.
**Clinical Findings:**
Skin: Multiple macules and patches on the right arm, the largest
measuring about 1.5cm in diameter, hyperpigmented with irregular
borders.
**US: **
Ultrasound imaging of the right arm revealed no deep extension or
invasion of underlying structures. This preliminary assessment was
crucial, suggesting that if malignancy is present, it might be in early
stages.
**Histology: **
Histological examination: Gross Description: The sample consists of
multiple tan-pink soft tissue fragments, aggregating to 1.8 cm in the
greatest dimension.
Microscopic description: Sections show a proliferation of atypical
melanocytes arranged in nests and as single units at the dermoepidermal
junction. Some of these cells infiltrate the papillary dermis.
Immunohistochemistry: The atypical cells are positive for HMB-45 and
S-100. Melan A is focally positive. Ki-67 proliferation index is about
10%.
Final Diagnosis: Dysplastic nevus with severe atypia; margins appear
clear. Further excision is recommended to ensure complete removal and to
rule out invasive melanoma.
**Lab results: **
Complete Blood Count (CBC):
Hemoglobin: 12.3 g/dL (Normal range: 12-16 g/dL)
White Blood Cell Count: 6,200 cells/µL (Normal range: 4,000-11,000
cells/µL)
Platelet Count: 290,000 cells/µL (Normal range: 150,000-450,000
cells/µL)
Differential:
Neutrophils 65%, Lymphocytes 25%, Monocytes 8%, Eosinophils 2%. B.
Liver Function Tests (LFTs):
ALT (Alanine Aminotransferase): 40 U/L (Normal range: 7-56 U/L)
AST (Aspartate Aminotransferase): 38 U/L (Normal range: 10-40 U/L)
ALP (Alkaline Phosphatase): 90 U/L (Normal range: 44-147 U/L)
Total Bilirubin: 1.0 mg/dL (Normal range: 0.1-1.2 mg/dL)
Albumin: 4.2 g/dL (Normal range: 3.4-5.4 g/dL)
Assessment/Recommendations:
Given her history and the suspicious nature of the new skin changes, we
have decided to send the biopsy for urgent histological assessment.
Furthermore, considering her reported symptoms, we have conducted a
thorough internal check-up, including blood tests and liver function
tests, to rule out any systemic side effects of the immunotherapy.
We recommend continuous monitoring of Mrs. Done's condition and kindly
request your valuable input in managing her case optimally. A
multidisciplinary approach, given her complicated medical history, will
be most beneficial for the patient.
Please find attached the detailed examination and investigative reports
for your reference.
With kind regards,
### Patient Report 3
**Dear colleague, **
We wish to provide a comprehensive update regarding our mutual patient,
Mrs. Jane Done, born on 01.01.1966. She has had a history of various
medical conditions and treatments, which we believe is essential to
discuss for her optimal management and was admitted to our clinical from
01/01/2021 to 01/28/2021.
**Previous Diagnoses and Therapies:**
Metastatic malignant melanoma (presumed ID 2018); M1, stage IV according
to UICC. Resection of primary tumor (malignant melanoma) on the left
upper back (02/2018)
01/20 Microsurgical resection right frontal tumor
02/20 Excision of empyema
02-03/20: Radiation therapy
05/02/20: Start of immunotherapy with Nivolumab
05/26/20: Start of combination immunotherapy 60 mg nivolumab, 200 mg
ipilimumab (resulting in drug exanthema)
Imaging 01/02/2021: PET/CT: Cervical lymph node metastasis;
cMRI: no evidence of metastases. Contrast-enhancing meninges.
**Virology: **
Upon Admission: SARS-CoV2 PCR (Nose/Throat): POSITIVE with a viral load
of 7,000 Geq/mL and a Ct value of 32.
At Discharge: SARS-CoV2 PCR (Nose/Throat): POSITIVE with a viral load of
2,350 Geq/mL and a Ct value of 32.
**Microbiology: **
MRSA Screening Upon Admission: Nasal Swab: Normal flora detected; MRSA
not present. Throat Swab: Normal flora detected; MRSA not present.
Procedures:
\- Presentation to neurology for CSF puncture (e.g., exclude
meningeosis)
\- Panel sequencing complement
\- Surgery/therapy: Neck dissection followed by adjuvant therapy with
pembrolizumab.
Clinical examination:
Examination findings: Patient in normal general and nutritional
condition, consciousness unremarkable. Cranial mobility free, ocular
mobility normal. Pupils are isocor, pupillary reflex prompt to
accommodation and light. Regular, normocardial heart rate on admission.
No typical heart murmurs. Abdomen: abdominal wall soft, liver and spleen
not enlarged, vivid bowel sounds. Renal bed and spine not palpable. No
enlarged in the axillary or inguinal region palpable.
PET-CT from 01/02/2021:
Intense metabolically active lymph node metastases, otherwise no
evidence of vital tumor tissue in the study area.
**PET CT report from 01/02/2021: **
Procedure: PET/CT with 246 MBq (F-18)-fluorodeoxyglucose and a 60-minute
uptake period.
Findings: CT Findings: Neck: Right Level II: Three lymph nodes, largest
measuring 2.1 x 1.8 cm with central necrosis. Right Level III: Two lymph
nodes, largest measuring 1.5 x 1.2 cm. Left Level II: One lymph node
measuring 1.3 x 1.1 cm. Left Level IV: Two lymph nodes, largest
measuring 1.7 x 1.4 cm. Retropharyngeal space: One lymph node measuring
1.0 x 0.9 cm.
PET Findings: Neck: Right Level II: Increased FDG uptake with SUVmax of
7.8, consistent with metastatic disease. Right Level III: Increased FDG
uptake with SUVmax of 6.5. Left Level II: Increased FDG uptake with
SUVmax of 6.0. Left Level IV: Increased FDG uptake with SUVmax of 7.2.
Retropharyngeal space: Increased FDG uptake with SUVmax of 6.1.
Impression: Cervical Lymph Nodes: Multiple pathologically enlarged
cervical lymph nodes in bilateral level II, right level III, left level
IV, and retropharyngeal space with increased FDG uptake, highly
suggestive of metastatic involvement from the known primary melanoma.
**Surgery report 01/05/2021: **
The surgery commenced with a collaborative discussion with the
anesthesia team and a standard team time-out was executed. The patient
was properly positioned, and the surgical site was aseptically draped.
The facial neuromonitoring system was set up and verified. Local
anesthesia was then administered at the site of the skin incision, which
was located near the previous scar. This incision followed the anterior
border of the sternocleidomastoid muscle in a curved pattern. Upon
incising the subcutaneous tissue, the external jugular vein became
visible and was selectively ligated. The encountered tissue appeared
notably fibrotic and scarred. A skin incision extended from the mastoid
region down nearly to the clavicle. The platysma muscle was subsequently
cut. Due to the presence of a lymph node mass, the auricularis magnus
nerve had to be severed. The sternocleidomastoid muscle and the
posterior belly of the digastric muscle were then exposed. Multiple
darkened lymph node metastases were identified, both beneath the skin
and within the sternocleidomastoid muscle. In subsequent steps, efforts
were made to distinguish the internal jugular vein from the surrounding
scarred tissue. A lymph node mass, which exhibited characteristics
highly suggestive of metastasis (given its darkened color), was removed.
The accessory nerve was identified and preserved. Further dissection was
done posteriorly to the sternocleidomastoid muscle, in the direction of
level V. An expansive mass of lymph nodes was excised in this region.
The trapezoid branch of the accessory nerve was visualized, and its
function was monitored and preserved with the aid of neuromonitoring.
The removed lymph node mass, some excised tissue, and portions of the
sternocleidomastoid muscle with embedded lymph nodes were sent for
histological analysis. During the procedure, care was taken to avoid
damaging major neck vessels and nerves. Concluding the procedure, 8 and
10 French Redon drains were placed, the wound was closed in layers, and
then covered with a spray-on bandage, steristrips, and a pressure
dressing. The surgical site appeared bloodless at the conclusion of the
surgery.
**Macroscopy:**
**Macroscopic Description:**
Dimensions: 6.8 x 0.7 x 0.4 cm spindle-shaped, non-oriented skin and
subcutaneous tissue resection. Central area shows an irritation-free,
fine scar measuring up to 6.3 x 4.8 cm. The cut surface appears
consistently off-white.
Ink markings: soft tissue margin of specimen = green. A: central
lamellae B: spindle tips perpendicular
Anterior Margin of Upper Third of Sternocleidomastoid Muscle:
Dimensions: Four combined tissue samples totaling 4.7 x 3.8 x 1.1 cm.
Appearance: Tan, fibrous soft tissues with multiple uniformly dark
nodules on the cut surface, each measuring up to 1.1 cm.
A, B: one nodule each halved C, D: other nodular sections E: remaining
tan fibrous sections Anterior Margin of Lower Third of
Sternocleidomastoid Muscle: Largest measurement: 3.4 cm.
Appearance: Grayish-brown with some fibrous regions and homogeneously
dark-brown nodes up to 1.5 cm in size on the cut surface. A, B: one node
each halved C: other nodes D: brown-fibrous sections Region V Occipital:
Largest measurement: Two samples, each up to 3.8 cm.
Appearance: Mixture of grayish-tan and light brown fibrous soft tissue
with nodes up to 2.2 cm, uniformly dark brown.
A, B: one node halved C, D: another node halved each Processing: 16
paraffin blocks, HE stained.
Microscopic Description: Dermis and subcutaneous resection shows
scarring with fibrosis. Epidermis is regular, without any atypical
cells. No evidence of melanoma or carcinoma. 2./3.
Multiple nodular tumor clusters present in the soft tissue and skeletal
muscles, lacking lymph node structure. Tumor cells are polygonal, with
some spindle-shaped cells having moderately large, irregular nuclei and
noticeable nucleoli. Cytoplasm appears slightly granular with a light
brownish pigment.
Seven lymph nodes (measuring up to 3.6 cm) indicate metastasis from the
previously mentioned tumor, with extracapsular spread. Four other lymph
nodes are free from the tumor.
**Critical Findings:** Multiple nodular soft tissue metastases, with the
largest measuring 1.3 cm, indicative of melanoma present in both soft
tissue and muscle. Resection margins are mostly free of tumor, with the
closest approach being less than 0.15 cm (points 2 and 3). Seven lymph
nodes (up to 3.6 cm in size) show metastasis from the melanoma, with
extracapsular spread. Four lymph nodes are tumor-free (7 out of 11
nodes, ECE positive) (point 4). Dermis and subcutaneous excision shows
scarring fibrosis (point 1).
For the optimal management of Mrs. Done, close monitoring and a
multidisciplinary approach will be essential. Thank you for your
continued collaboration in ensuring the best care for our mutual
patient.
**Lab values upon discharge: **
**Parameter** **Result** **Reference Range** **Interpretation**
-------------------------------- -------------- ---------------------------------------- ---------------------
**Complete Blood Count (CBC)**
Hemoglobin (Hb) 12.4 g/dL 12.0 - 16.0 g/dL Within normal range
White Blood Cell (WBC) 9.2 x10\^9/L 4.0 - 10.0 x10\^9/L Within normal range
Platelets 250 x10\^9/L 150 - 400 x10\^9/L Within normal range
**Liver Function Tests (LFT)**
AST 28 U/L 10 - 35 U/L Within normal range
ALT 32 U/L 10 - 40 U/L Within normal range
Total Bilirubin 0.8 mg/dL 0.2 - 1.2 mg/dL Within normal range
**Kidney Function Test**
Serum Creatinine 0.9 mg/dL 0.5 - 1.2 mg/dL Within normal range
Blood Urea Nitrogen (BUN) 15 mg/dL 7 - 20 mg/dL Within normal range
**Electrolytes**
Sodium 138 mEq/L 135 - 145 mEq/L Within normal range
Potassium 4.2 mEq/L 3.5 - 5.0 mEq/L Within normal range
Chloride 101 mEq/L 95 - 105 mEq/L Within normal range
**Thyroid Function Tests**
TSH 3.1 mU/L 0.5 - 5.0 mU/L Within normal range
Free T4 1.4 ng/dL 0.9 - 2.4 ng/dL Within normal range
**Lipid Profile**
Total Cholesterol 190 mg/dL \< 200 mg/dL Desirable
LDL Cholesterol 100 mg/dL \< 100 mg/dL Optimal
HDL Cholesterol 55 mg/dL \> 40 mg/dL (Men), \> 50 mg/dL (Women) Normal
Triglycerides 110 mg/dL \< 150 mg/dL Normal
**Medication: **
**Medication** **Dosage** **Route** **Frequency**
---------------- ------------ ----------- -----------------------------
Pembrolizumab 200mg IV Every 3 weeks
Nivolumab 60mg IV As per oncologist\'s advice
Ipilimumab 200mg IV As per oncologist\'s advice
Paracetamol 500mg Oral Every 4-6 hours as needed
Omeprazole 20mg Oral Once daily
### Patient Report 4
**Dear colleague, **
We wish to provide an update regarding Mrs. Jane Done, born on
01.01.1966. She was admitted to our clinic from 02/14/2022 to
03/01/2022.
**Previous Diagnoses and Therapies:**
-Metastatic malignant melanoma (presumed ID 2018); M1, stage IV
according to UICC.
-Resection of primary tumor (malignant melanoma) on the left upper back
(02/2018)
-01/20 Microsurgical resection right frontal tumor
-02/20 Excision of empyema
-02-03/20: Radiation therapy
-05/02/20: Start of immunotherapy with Nivolumab
-05/26/20: Start of combination immunotherapy 60 mg nivolumab, 200 mg
ipilimumab (resulting in drug exanthema)
**Current Presentation:**
Mrs. Done showed multiple metastases in her CT examination. On physical
examination, Mrs. Done appears well-nourished and in no acute distress.
Her vital signs are stable. Cardiovascular examination reveals regular
heart sounds with no murmurs. Respiratory examination shows clear breath
sounds bilaterally. Abdominal examination reveals no palpable masses or
organomegaly. Neurological examination is within normal limits.
**Radiology/Nuclear Medicine**
**CT thorax/abdomen/pelvis + Contrast from 02/10/2022**
**Technique:** Multi-phase, multi-slice computed tomography of the
thorax, abdomen, and pelvis was performed following the intravenous
administration of contrast material. Coronal and sagittal
reconstructions were obtained.
**Thorax:** In the thoracic region, the lungs are notable for multiple
nodular opacities across both lung fields, consistent with metastatic
deposits. The most sizable lesion is seen in the right upper lobe,
approximately 1.5 cm in diameter. No associated cavitation or pleural
effusion is detected. A concerning 2 cm mass abutting the lateral wall
of the left ventricle is noted, raising the suspicion for cardiac
metastasis. The mediastinum also exhibits lymphadenopathy with a
dominant node in the prevascular space, measuring 2.2 cm. Further, there
are lytic lesions involving the sternum and right 4th rib, consistent
with osseous metastatic disease.
**Abdomen/pelvis**: Liver shows multiple hypodense lesions throughout
both lobes, indicative of metastatic spread. The dominant lesion in the
right lobe measures 3 cm. The kidneys, however, are unremarkable without
discernible metastatic deposits. Retroperitoneal lymphadenopathy is also
present, highlighted by a node anterior to the aorta of 1.8 cm. In
addition, there is a 2.5 cm mass identified within the left psoas
muscle, consistent with muscular metastasis. Both the left acetabulum
and the right iliac wing manifest with lytic lesions, suggestive of
metastatic involvement. There is also enlargement of the bilateral
internal iliac lymph nodes, with the left side\'s node measuring up to
1.6 cm. Bladder, prostate, and rectum with no discernible pathology.
**Impression**: Multiple pulmonary nodules consistent with pulmonary
metastases. Cardiac lesion suggestive of metastatic involvement.
Evidence of skeletal metastases in the thorax and pelvis. Hepatic and
muscular metastases, indicative of disseminated disease. Lymphadenopathy
in the mediastinal, retroperitoneal, and pelvic regions.
**PET-CT scan from 02/11/2022**
**Clinical Indication:** Follow-up evaluation of a known case of
Metastatic Melanoma, Stage IV, M1c with notable findings from a CT scan
dated 12/01/2014.
**Technique:** Whole-body PET-CT scan was conducted after intravenous
administration of 18F-FDG. The patient fasted for 6 hours prior to the
scan, and blood glucose levels were confirmed to be within the
acceptable range. Both CT and PET images were acquired, and images were
co-registered for optimal evaluation. Standard uptake values (SUVs) were
calculated for areas of interest.
**Findings: **
**Thorax:** Both lungs depict several hypermetabolic foci, corroborating
the CT findings of multiple nodules. The largest lesion in the right
upper lobe demonstrates an SUVmax of 8.2, indicative of active metabolic
disease. The cardiac mass adjacent to the left ventricle, measuring
approximately 2 cm, also reveals increased 18F-FDG uptake with an SUVmax
of 9.5, strengthening the suspicion of cardiac metastasis. Enlarged
mediastinal lymph nodes, particularly the node in the prevascular space,
shows marked hypermetabolism with an SUVmax of 7.4. Notably, the lytic
skeletal lesions identified on the CT in the sternum and right 4th rib
also display increased metabolic activity, consistent with metastatic
bone disease.
**Abdomen/Pelvis:** Hepatic lesions are congruent with the findings of
the preceding CT, showing heightened metabolic activity. The most
prominent lesion in the right lobe exhibits an SUVmax of 8.8.
Retroperitoneal lymph nodes are metabolically active, with the anterior
aortic node demonstrating an SUVmax of 6.9. The 2.5 cm left psoas muscle
mass also reveals increased uptake with an SUVmax of 7.3, suggesting
active muscular metastasis. In the pelvic region, the lytic lesions
identified in the left acetabulum and right iliac wing on the CT confirm
their malignant nature with notable metabolic activity. Bilateral
internal iliac lymph nodes show hypermetabolism with the left node\'s
SUVmax reaching 7.1. Other pelvic organs, including the bladder,
prostate, and rectum, did not show any significant 18F-FDG uptake, in
line with the unremarkable CT findings.
**Impression:** The PET-CT findings are consistent with active
metastatic disease. There is evidence of hypermetabolic pulmonary
nodules, a likely cardiac metastasis, hepatic and muscular metastases,
and metabolically active skeletal lesions in both the thorax and pelvis.
Additionally, there is hypermetabolism in the lymph nodes across
multiple regions. These findings align closely with the previously
diagnosed metastatic melanoma, Stage IV, M1c**. **
**Discussion**
Mrs. Done has been diagnosed with recurrent metastatic melanoma with
lymph node involvement. This poses significant implications for her
prognosis, emphasizing the need for urgent and comprehensive
intervention.
Her molecular profile has revealed the presence of the BRAF V600E
mutation.
Our recommended therapeutic combination includes Vemurafenib and
Cobimetinib, both of which are aimed at disrupting the aberrant BRAF-MEK
signaling cascade. Complementing this, we suggest the administration of
Pembrolizumab.
Mrs. Done is scheduled for six cycles of this treatment regimen. We will
monitor her laboratory parameters, such as blood counts, electrolytes,
and hepatic and renal profiles, bi-weekly. It is imperative to note that
any fevers surpassing 38.3°C warrant immediate medical attention.
Comprehensive patient education module has been designed to enable Mrs.
Done to identify and manage any potential side effects efficiently.
We will ensure rigorous monitoring of her blood pressure and lipid
metrics, with the possibility of introducing alternative medications if
clinical scenarios demand.
We deeply value your collaboration in Mrs. Done\'s healthcare journey.
Our team remains at your disposal for any queries or clarifications.
|
BRAF V600E
|
What is NOT a technological advancement involved in this story?
A. Rapid healing abilities
B. Advanced space travel
C. Rapid mutations
D. Advanced weaponry
|
BIG ANCESTOR By F. L. WALLACE Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Man's family tree was awesome enough to give every galactic race an inferiority complex—but then he tried to climb it! In repose, Taphetta the Ribboneer resembled a fancy giant bow on a package. His four flat legs looped out and in, the ends tucked under his wide, thin body, which constituted the knot at the middle. His neck was flat, too, arching out in another loop. Of all his features, only his head had appreciable thickness and it was crowned with a dozen long though narrower ribbons. Taphetta rattled the head fronds together in a surprisingly good imitation of speech. "Yes, I've heard the legend." "It's more than a legend," said Sam Halden, biologist. The reaction was not unexpected—non-humans tended to dismiss the data as convenient speculation and nothing more. "There are at least a hundred kinds of humans, each supposedly originating in strict seclusion on as many widely scattered planets. Obviously there was no contact throughout the ages before space travel— and yet each planetary race can interbreed with a minimum of ten others ! That's more than a legend—one hell of a lot more!" "It is impressive," admitted Taphetta. "But I find it mildly distasteful to consider mating with someone who does not belong to my species." "That's because you're unique," said Halden. "Outside of your own world, there's nothing like your species, except superficially, and that's true of all other creatures, intelligent or not, with the sole exception of mankind. Actually, the four of us here, though it's accidental, very nearly represent the biological spectrum of human development. "Emmer, a Neanderthal type and our archeologist, is around the beginning of the scale. I'm from Earth, near the middle, though on Emmer's side. Meredith, linguist, is on the other side of the middle. And beyond her, toward the far end, is Kelburn, mathematician. There's a corresponding span of fertility. Emmer just misses being able to breed with my kind, but there's a fair chance that I'd be fertile with Meredith and a similar though lesser chance that her fertility may extend to Kelburn." Taphetta rustled his speech ribbons quizzically. "But I thought it was proved that some humans did originate on one planet, that there was an unbroken line of evolution that could be traced back a billion years." "You're thinking of Earth," said Halden. "Humans require a certain kind of planet. It's reasonable to assume that, if men were set down on a hundred such worlds, they'd seem to fit in with native life-forms on a few of them. That's what happened on Earth; when Man arrived, there was actually a manlike creature there. Naturally our early evolutionists stretched their theories to cover the facts they had. "But there are other worlds in which humans who were there before the Stone Age aren't related to anything else there. We have to conclude that Man didn't originate on any of the planets on which he is now found. Instead, he evolved elsewhere and later was scattered throughout this section of the Milky Way." "And so, to account for the unique race that can interbreed across thousands of light-years, you've brought in the big ancestor," commented Taphetta dryly. "It seems an unnecessary simplification." "Can you think of a better explanation?" asked Kelburn. "Something had to distribute one species so widely and it's not the result of parallel evolution—not when a hundred human races are involved, and only the human race." "I can't think of a better explanation." Taphetta rearranged his ribbons. "Frankly, no one else is much interested in Man's theories about himself." It was easy to understand the attitude. Man was the most numerous though not always the most advanced—Ribboneers had a civilization as high as anything in the known section of the Milky Way, and there were others—and humans were more than a little feared. If they ever got together—but they hadn't except in agreement as to their common origin. Still, Taphetta the Ribboneer was an experienced pilot and could be very useful. A clear statement of their position was essential in helping him make up his mind. "You've heard of the adjacency mating principle?" asked Sam Halden. "Vaguely. Most people have if they've been around men." "We've got new data and are able to interpret it better. The theory is that humans who can mate with each other were once physically close. We've got a list of all our races arranged in sequence. If planetary race F can mate with race E back to A and forward to M, and race G is fertile only back to B, but forward to O, then we assume that whatever their positions are now, at once time G was actually adjacent to F, but was a little further along. When we project back into time those star systems on which humans existed prior to space travel, we get a certain pattern. Kelburn can explain it to you." The normally pink body of the Ribboneer flushed slightly. The color change was almost imperceptible, but it was enough to indicate that he was interested. Kelburn went to the projector. "It would be easier if we knew all the stars in the Milky Way, but though we've explored only a small portion of it, we can reconstruct a fairly accurate representation of the past." He pressed the controls and stars twinkled on the screen. "We're looking down on the plane of the Galaxy. This is one arm of it as it is today and here are the human systems." He pressed another control and, for purposes of identification, certain stars became more brilliant. There was no pattern, merely a scattering of stars. "The whole Milky Way is rotating. And while stars in a given region tend to remain together, there's also a random motion. Here's what happens when we calculate the positions of stars in the past." Flecks of light shifted and flowed across the screen. Kelburn stopped the motion. "Two hundred thousand years ago," he said. There was a pattern of the identified stars. They were spaced at fairly equal intervals along a regular curve, a horseshoe loop that didn't close, though if the ends were extended, the lines would have crossed. Taphetta rustled. "The math is accurate?" "As accurate as it can be with a million-plus body problem." "And that's the hypothetical route of the unknown ancestor?" "To the best of our knowledge," said Kelburn. "And whereas there are humans who are relatively near and not fertile, they can always mate with those they were adjacent to two hundred thousand years ago !" "The adjacency mating principle. I've never seen it demonstrated," murmured Taphetta, flexing his ribbons. "Is that the only era that satisfies the calculations?" "Plus or minus a hundred thousand years, we can still get something that might be the path of a spaceship attempting to cover a representative section of territory," said Kelburn. "However, we have other ways of dating it. On some worlds on which there are no other mammals, we're able to place the first human fossils chronologically. The evidence is sometimes contradictory, but we believe we've got the time right." Taphetta waved a ribbon at the chart. "And you think that where the two ends of the curve cross is your original home?" "We think so," said Kelburn. "We've narrowed it down to several cubic light-years—then. Now it's far more. And, of course, if it were a fast-moving star, it might be completely out of the field of our exploration. But we're certain we've got a good chance of finding it this trip." "It seems I must decide quickly." The Ribboneer glanced out the visionport, where another ship hung motionless in space beside them. "Do you mind if I ask other questions?" "Go ahead," Kelburn invited sardonically. "But if it's not math, you'd better ask Halden. He's the leader of the expedition." Halden flushed; the sarcasm wasn't necessary. It was true that Kelburn was the most advanced human type present, but while there were differences, biological and in the scale of intelligence, it wasn't as great as once was thought. Anyway, non-humans weren't trained in the fine distinctions that men made among themselves. And, higher or lower, he was as good a biologist as the other was a mathematician. And there was the matter of training; he'd been on several expeditions and this was Kelburn's first trip. Damn it, he thought, that rated some respect. The Ribboneer shifted his attention. "Aside from the sudden illness of your pilot, why did you ask for me?" "We didn't. The man became sick and required treatment we can't give him. Luckily, a ship was passing and we hailed it because it's four months to the nearest planet. They consented to take him back and told us that there was a passenger on board who was an experienced pilot. We have men who could do the job in a makeshift fashion, but the region we're heading for, while mapped, is largely unknown. We'd prefer to have an expert—and Ribboneers are famous for their navigational ability." Taphetta crinkled politely at the reference to his skill. "I had other plans, but I can't evade professional obligations, and an emergency such as this should cancel out any previous agreements. Still, what are the incentives?" Sam Halden coughed. "The usual, plus a little extra. We've copied the Ribboneer's standard nature, simplifying it a little and adding a per cent here and there for the crew pilot and scientist's share of the profits from any discoveries we may make." "I'm complimented that you like our contract so well," said Taphetta, "but I really must have our own unsimplified version. If you want me, you'll take my contract. I came prepared." He extended a tightly bound roll that he had kept somewhere on his person. They glanced at one another as Halden took it. "You can read it if you want," offered Taphetta. "But it will take you all day—it's micro-printing. However, you needn't be afraid that I'm defrauding you. It's honored everywhere we go and we go nearly everywhere in this sector—places men have never been." There was no choice if they wanted him, and they did. Besides, the integrity of Ribboneers was not to be questioned. Halden signed. "Good." Taphetta crinkled. "Send it to the ship; they'll forward it for me. And you can tell the ship to go on without me." He rubbed his ribbons together. "Now if you'll get me the charts, I'll examine the region toward which we're heading." Firmon of hydroponics slouched in, a tall man with scanty hair and an equal lack of grace. He seemed to have difficulty in taking his eyes off Meredith, though, since he was a notch or so above her in the mating scale, he shouldn't have been so interested. But his planet had been inexplicably slow in developing and he wasn't completely aware of his place in the human hierarchy. Disdainfully, Meredith adjusted a skirt that, a few inches shorter, wouldn't have been a skirt at all, revealing, while doing so, just how long and beautiful a woman's legs could be. Her people had never given much thought to physical modesty and, with legs like that, it was easy to see why. Muttering something about primitive women, Firmon turned to the biologist. "The pilot doesn't like our air." "Then change it to suit him. He's in charge of the ship and knows more about these things than I do." "More than a man?" Firmon leered at Meredith and, when she failed to smile, added plaintively, "I did try to change it, but he still complains." Halden took a deep breath. "Seems all right to me." "To everybody else, too, but the tapeworm hasn't got lungs. He breathes through a million tubes scattered over his body." It would do no good to explain that Taphetta wasn't a worm, that his evolution had taken a different course, but that he was in no sense less complex than Man. It was a paradox that some biologically higher humans hadn't developed as much as lower races and actually weren't prepared for the multitude of life-forms they'd meet in space. Firmon's reaction was quite typical. "If he asks for cleaner air, it's because his system needs it," said Halden. "Do anything you can to give it to him." "Can't. This is as good as I can get it. Taphetta thought you could do something about it." "Hydroponics is your job. There's nothing I can do." Halden paused thoughtfully. "Is there something wrong with the plants?" "In a way, I guess, and yet not really." "What is it, some kind of toxic condition?" "The plants are healthy enough, but something's chewing them down as fast as they grow." "Insects? There shouldn't be any, but if there are, we've got sprays. Use them." "It's an animal," said Firmon. "We tried poison and got a few, but now they won't touch the stuff. I had electronics rig up some traps. The animals seem to know what they are and we've never caught one that way." Halden glowered at the man. "How long has this been going on?" "About three months. It's not bad; we can keep up with them." It was probably nothing to become alarmed at, but an animal on the ship was a nuisance, doubly so because of their pilot. "Tell me what you know about it," said Halden. "They're little things." Firmon held out his hands to show how small. "I don't know how they got on, but once they did, there were plenty of places to hide." He looked up defensively. "This is an old ship with new equipment and they hide under the machinery. There's nothing we can do except rebuild the ship from the hull inward." Firmon was right. The new equipment had been installed in any place just to get it in and now there were inaccessible corners and crevices everywhere that couldn't be closed off without rebuilding. They couldn't set up a continuous watch and shoot the animals down because there weren't that many men to spare. Besides, the use of weapons in hydroponics would cause more damage to the thing they were trying to protect than to the pest. He'd have to devise other ways. Sam Halden got up. "I'll take a look and see what I can do." "I'll come along and help," said Meredith, untwining her legs and leaning against him. "Your mistress ought to have some sort of privileges." Halden started. So she knew that the crew was calling her that! Perhaps it was intended to discourage Firmon, but he wished she hadn't said it. It didn't help the situation at all. Taphetta sat in a chair designed for humans. With a less flexible body, he wouldn't have fitted. Maybe it wasn't sitting, but his flat legs were folded neatly around the arms and his head rested comfortably on the seat. The head ribbons, which were his hands and voice, were never quite still. He looked from Halden to Emmer and back again. "The hydroponics tech tells me you're contemplating an experiment. I don't like it." Halden shrugged. "We've got to have better air. It might work." "Pests on the ship? It's filthy! My people would never tolerate it!" "Neither do we." The Ribboneer's distaste subsided. "What kind of creatures are they?" "I have a description, though I've never seen one. It's a small four-legged animal with two antennae at the lower base of its skull. A typical pest." Taphetta rustled. "Have you found out how it got on?" "It was probably brought in with the supplies," said the biologist. "Considering how far we've come, it may have been any one of a half a dozen planets. Anyway, it hid, and since most of the places it had access to were near the outer hull, it got an extra dose of hard radiation, or it may have nested near the atomic engines; both are possibilities. Either way, it mutated, became a different animal. It's developed a tolerance for the poisons we spray on plants. Other things it detects and avoids, even electronic traps." "Then you believe it changed mentally as well as physically, that it's smarter?" "I'd say that, yes. It must be a fairly intelligent creature to be so hard to get rid of. But it can be lured into traps, if the bait's strong enough." "That's what I don't like," said Taphetta, curling. "Let me think it over while I ask questions." He turned to Emmer. "I'm curious about humans. Is there anything else you can tell me about the hypothetical ancestor?" Emmer didn't look like the genius he was—a Neanderthal genius, but nonetheless a real one. In his field, he rated very high. He raised a stubble-flecked cheek from a large thick-fingered paw and ran shaggy hands through shaggier hair. "I can speak with some authority," he rumbled. "I was born on a world with the most extensive relics. As a child, I played in the ruins of their camp." "I don't question your authority," crinkled Taphetta. "To me, all humans—late or early and male or female—look remarkably alike. If you are an archeologist, that's enough for me." He paused and flicked his speech ribbons. "Camp, did you say?" Emmer smiled, unsheathing great teeth. "You've never seen any pictures? Impressive, but just a camp, monolithic one-story structures, and we'd give something to know what they're made of. Presumably my world was one of the first they stopped at. They weren't used to roughing it, so they built more elaborately than they did later on. One-story structures and that's how we can guess at their size. The doorways were forty feet high." "Very large," agreed Taphetta. It was difficult to tell whether he was impressed. "What did you find in the ruins?" "Nothing," said Emmer. "There were buildings there and that was all, not a scrap of writing or a tool or a single picture. They covered a route estimated at thirty thousand light-years in less than five thousand years—and not one of them died that we have a record of." "A faster-than-light drive and an extremely long life," mused Taphetta. "But they didn't leave any information for their descendants. Why?" "Who knows? Their mental processes were certainly far different from ours. They may have thought we'd be better off without it. We do know they were looking for a special kind of planet, like Earth, because they visited so many of that type, yet different from it because they never stayed. They were pretty special people themselves, big and long-lived, and maybe they couldn't survive on any planet they found. Perhaps they had ways of determining there wasn't the kind of planet they needed in the entire Milky Way. Their science was tremendously advanced and when they learned that, they may have altered their germ plasm and left us, hoping that some of us would survive. Most of us did." "This special planet sounds strange," murmured Taphetta. "Not really," said Emmer. "Fifty human races reached space travel independently and those who did were scattered equally among early and late species. It's well known that individuals among my people are often as bright as any of Halden's or Meredith's, but as a whole we don't have the total capacity that later Man does, and yet we're as advanced in civilization. The difference? It must lie somewhere in the planets we live on and it's hard to say just what it is." "What happened to those who didn't develop space travel?" asked Taphetta. "We helped them," said Emmer. And they had, no matter who or what they were, biologically late or early, in the depths of the bronze age or the threshold of atomic—because they were human. That was sometimes a frightening thing for non-humans, that the race stuck together. They weren't actually aggressive, but their total number was great and they held themselves aloof. The unknown ancestor again. Who else had such an origin and, it was tacitly assumed, such a destiny? Taphetta changed his questioning. "What do you expect to gain from this discovery of the unknown ancestor?" It was Halden who answered him. "There's the satisfaction of knowing where we came from." "Of course," rustled the Ribboneer. "But a lot of money and equipment was required for this expedition. I can't believe that the educational institutions that are backing you did so purely out of intellectual curiosity." "Cultural discoveries," rumbled Emmer. "How did our ancestors live? When a creature is greatly reduced in size, as we are, more than physiology is changed—the pattern of life itself is altered. Things that were easy for them are impossible for us. Look at their life span." "No doubt," said Taphetta. "An archeologist would be interested in cultural discoveries." "Two hundred thousand years ago, they had an extremely advanced civilization," added Halden. "A faster-than-light drive, and we've achieved that only within the last thousand years." "But I think we have a better one than they did," said the Ribboneer. "There may be things we can learn from them in mechanics or physics, but wouldn't you say they were better biologists than anything else?" Halden nodded. "Agreed. They couldn't find a suitable planet. So, working directly with their germ plasm, they modified themselves and produced us. They were master biologists." "I thought so," said Taphetta. "I never paid much attention to your fantastic theories before I signed to pilot this ship, but you've built up a convincing case." He raised his head, speech ribbons curling fractionally and ceaselessly. "I don't like to, but we'll have to risk using bait for your pest." He'd have done it anyway, but it was better to have the pilot's consent. And there was one question Halden wanted to ask; it had been bothering him vaguely. "What's the difference between the Ribboneer contract and the one we offered you? Our terms are more liberal." "To the individual, they are, but it won't matter if you discover as much as you think you will. The difference is this: My terms don't permit you to withhold any discovery for the benefit of one race." Taphetta was wrong; there had been no intention of withholding anything. Halden examined his own attitudes. He hadn't intended, but could he say that was true of the institutions backing the expedition? He couldn't, and it was too late now—whatever knowledge they acquired would have to be shared. That was what Taphetta had been afraid of—there was one kind of technical advancement that multiplied unceasingly. The race that could improve itself through scientific control of its germ plasm had a start that could never be headed. The Ribboneer needn't worry now. "Why do we have to watch it on the screen?" asked Meredith, glancing up. "I'd rather be in hydroponics." Halden shrugged. "They may or may not be smarter than planetbound animals, but they're warier. They don't come out when anyone's near." Lights dimmed in the distant hydroponic section and the screen with it, until he adjusted the infra-red frequencies. He motioned to the two crew members, each with his own peculiar screen, below which was a miniature keyboard. "Ready?" When they nodded, Halden said: "Do as you've rehearsed. Keep noise at a minimum, but when you do use it, be vague. Don't try to imitate them exactly." At first, nothing happened on the big screen, and then a gray shape crept out. It slid through leaves, listened intently before coming forward. It jumped off one hydroponic section and fled across the open floor to the next. It paused, eyes glittering and antennae twitching. Looking around once, it leaped up, seizing the ledge and clawing up the side of the tank. Standing on top and rising to its haunches, it began nibbling what it could reach. Suddenly it whirled. Behind it and hitherto unnoticed was another shape, like it but larger. The newcomer inched forward. The small one retreated, skittering nervously. Without warning, the big one leaped and the small one tried to flee. In a few jumps, the big one caught up and mauled the other unmercifully. It continued to bite even after the little one lay still. At last it backed off and waited, watching for signs of motion. There was none. Then it turned to the plant. When it had chewed off everything within reach, it climbed into the branches. The little one twitched, moved a leg, and cautiously began dragging itself away. It rolled off the raised section and surprisingly made no noise as it fell. It seemed to revive, shaking itself and scurrying away, still within range of the screen. Against the wall was a small platform. The little one climbed on top and there found something that seemed to interest it. It sniffed around and reached and felt the discovery. Wounds were forgotten as it snatched up the object and frisked back to the scene of its recent defeat. This time it had no trouble with the raised section. It leaped and landed on top and made considerable noise in doing so. The big animal heard and twisted around. It saw and clambered down hastily, jumping the last few feet. Squealing, it hit the floor and charged. The small one stood still till the last instant—and then a paw flickered out and an inch-long knife blade plunged into the throat of the charging creature. Red spurted out as the bigger beast screamed. The knife flashed in and out until the big animal collapsed and stopped moving. The small creature removed the knife and wiped it on the pelt of its foe. Then it scampered back to the platform on which the knife had been found— and laid it down . At Halden's signal, the lights flared up and the screen became too bright for anything to be visible. "Go in and get them," said Halden. "We don't want the pests to find out that the bodies aren't flesh." "It was realistic enough," said Meredith as the crewmen shut off their machines and went out. "Do you think it will work?" "It might. We had an audience." "Did we? I didn't notice." Meredith leaned back. "Were the puppets exactly like the pests? And if not, will the pests be fooled?" "The electronic puppets were a good imitation, but the animals don't have to identify them as their species. If they're smart enough, they'll know the value of a knife, no matter who uses it." "What if they're smarter? Suppose they know a knife can't be used by a creature without real hands?" "That's part of our precautions. They'll never know until they try—and they'll never get away from the trap to try." "Very good. I never thought of that," said Meredith, coming closer. "I like the way your primitive mind works. At times I actually think of marrying you." "Primitive," he said, alternately frozen and thawed, though he knew that, in relation to her, he was not advanced. "It's almost a curse, isn't it?" She laughed and took the curse away by leaning provocatively against him. "But barbaric lovers are often nice." Here we go again, he thought drearily, sliding his arm around her. To her, I'm merely a passionate savage. They went to his cabin. She sat down, smiling. Was she pretty? Maybe. For her own race, she wasn't tall, only by Terran standards. Her legs were disproportionately long and well shaped and her face was somewhat bland and featureless, except for a thin, straight, short nose. It was her eyes that made the difference, he decided. A notch or two up the scale of visual development, her eyes were larger and she could see an extra color on the violet end of the spectrum. She settled back and looked at him. "It might be fun living with you on primeval Earth." He said nothing; she knew as well as he that Earth was as advanced as her own world. She had something else in mind. "I don't think I will, though. We might have children." "Would it be wrong?" he asked. "I'm as intelligent as you. We wouldn't have subhuman monsters." "It would be a step up—for you." Under her calm, there was tension. It had been there as long as he'd known her, but it was closer to the surface now. "Do I have the right to condemn the unborn? Should I make them start lower than I am?" The conflict was not new nor confined to them. In one form or another, it governed personal relations between races that were united against non-humans, but held sharp distinctions themselves. "I haven't asked you to marry me," he said bluntly. "Because you're afraid I'd refuse." It was true; no one asked a member of a higher race to enter a permanent union. "Why did you ever have anything to do with me?" demanded Halden. "Love," she said gloomily. "Physical attraction. But I can't let it lead me astray." "Why not make a play for Kelburn? If you're going to be scientific about it, he'd give you children of the higher type." "Kelburn." It didn't sound like a name, the way she said it. "I don't like him and he wouldn't marry me." "He wouldn't, but he'd give you children if you were humble enough. There's a fifty per cent chance you might conceive." She provocatively arched her back. Not even the women of Kelburn's race had a body like hers and she knew it. "Racially, there should be a chance," she said. "Actually, Kelburn and I would be infertile." "Can you be sure?" he asked, knowing it was a poor attempt to act unconcerned. "How can anyone be sure on a theoretical basis?" she asked, an oblique smile narrowing her eyes. "I know we can't." His face felt anesthetized. "Did you have to tell me that?" She got up and came to him. She nuzzled against him and his reaction was purely reflexive. His hand swung out and he could feel the flesh give when his knuckles struck it. She fell back and dazedly covered her face with her hand. When she took it away, blood spurted. She groped toward the mirror and stood in front of it. She wiped the blood off, examining her features carefully. "You've broken my nose," she said factually. "I'll have to stop the blood and pain." She pushed her nose back into place and waggled it to make sure. She closed her eyes and stood silent and motionless. Then she stepped back and looked at herself critically. "It's set and partially knitted. I'll concentrate tonight and have it healed by morning." She felt in the cabinet and attached an invisible strip firmly across the bridge. Then she came over to him. "I wondered what you'd do. You didn't disappoint me." He scowled miserably at her. Her face was almost plain and the bandage, invisible or not, didn't improve her appearance any. How could he still feel that attraction to her? "Try Emmer," he suggested tiredly. "He'll find you irresistible, and he's even more savage than I am." "Is he?" She smiled enigmatically. "Maybe, in a biological sense. Too much, though. You're just right." He sat down on the bed. Again there was only one way of knowing what Emmer would do—and she knew. She had no concept of love outside of the physical, to make use of her body so as to gain an advantage—what advantage?—for the children she intended to have. Outside of that, nothing mattered, and for the sake of alloying the lower with the higher, she was as cruel to herself as she was to him. And yet he wanted her. "I do think I love you," she said. "And if love's enough, I may marry you in spite of everything. But you'll have to watch out whose children I have." She wriggled into his arms. The racial disparity was great and she had provoked him, but it was not completely her fault. Besides.... Besides what? She had a beautiful body that could bear superior children—and they might be his. He twisted away. With those thoughts, he was as bad as she was. Were they all that way, every one of them, crawling upward out of the slime toward the highest goal they could conceive of? Climbing over—no, through —everybody they could coerce, seduce or marry—onward and upward. He raised his hand, but it was against himself that his anger was turned. "Careful of the nose," she said, pressing against him. "You've already broken it once." He kissed her with sudden passion that even he knew was primitive.
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D. Advanced weaponry
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What does Ben seem to fear, more than anything else?
A. The law, and atoning for his crime.
B. Losing his position and the chance to fly spaceships.
C. The dead man, and the way he persists in his mind.
D. Maggie and her husband, and the position they've put him in.
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A Coffin for Jacob By EDWARD W. LUDWIG Illustrated by EMSH [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.] With never a moment to rest, the pursuit through space felt like a game of hounds and hares ... or was it follow the leader? Ben Curtis eased his pale, gaunt body through the open doorway of the Blast Inn, the dead man following silently behind him. His fear-borne gaze traveled into the dimly illumined Venusian gin mill. The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets. Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen, Martians or Venusians. Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it was the dead man's hand. " Coma esta, senor? " a small voice piped. " Speken die Deutsch? Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet? " Ben looked down. The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees. "I'm American," Ben muttered. "Ah, buena ! I speak English tres fine, senor . I have Martian friend, she tres pretty and tres fat. She weigh almost eighty pounds, monsieur . I take you to her, si ?" Ben shook his head. He thought, I don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul. "It is deal, monsieur ? Five dollars or twenty keelis for visit Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—" "I'm not buying." The dirty-faced kid shrugged. "Then I show you to good table,— tres bien . I do not charge you, senor ." The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices. They passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed Earthmen—merchant spacemen. They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed tombstones. Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO 2 -breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen. They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape. They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine. Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club against the stone booths. Keep walking , Ben told himself. You look the same as anyone else here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead. The officer passed. Ben breathed easier. "Here we are, monsieur ," piped the Martian boy. "A tres fine table. Close in the shadows." Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows? Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man. He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra. The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of their cirillas or crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur. For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead man. He thought, What are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world? Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me, felt the challenge of new worlds? He sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the faces of the Inn's other occupants. You've got to find him , he thought. You've got to find the man with the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man. The dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and about forty and he hated spacemen. His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a part of Ben as sight in his eyes. Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips spitting whiskey-slurred curses. Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle from a corner of the gaping mouth. You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a memory that has burned into your mind. It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate. He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him. "Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen." He was a neatly dressed civilian. Ben smiled. "If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here." "The name's Cobb." The man hiccoughed. "Spacemen in their white monkey suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a little tin god." He downed a shot of whiskey. Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white, crimson-braided uniform of the Odyssey's junior astrogation officer. He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe. He'd sought long for that key. At the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents' death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his collection of astronomy and rocketry books. At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space. And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the Odyssey —the first ship, it was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps beyond. Cobb was persistent: "Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth. What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?" The guy's drunk , Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three stools down the bar. Cobb followed. "You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like people to call you a sucker." Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and held him there. "Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!" Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and without warning, it welled up into savage fury. His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of life. He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw. Ben knew that he was dead. Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as, a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger. He ran. For some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet. At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the city. He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette. A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone above him through Luna City's transparent dome. He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run. Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision. You can do two things , he thought. You can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do. That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free. But you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. You'd get the rest of the thrill of conquering space through video and by peeking through electric fences of spaceports. Or— There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who operated from the Solar System's frontiers. The spacemen weren't outlaws. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth. And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a red-bearded giant. So , Ben reflected, you can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously. You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from Earth. After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant second, to destroy a man's life and his dream? He was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new personnel even more so. Ben Curtis made it to Venus. There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs. But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways obscure the dead face? So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant, and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once. "You look for someone, senor ?" He jumped. "Oh. You still here?" " Oui. " The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. "I keep you company on your first night in Hoover City, n'est-ce-pas ?" "This isn't my first night here," Ben lied. "I've been around a while." "You are spacemen?" Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. "Here. Take off, will you?" Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. " Ich danke, senor. You know why city is called Hoover City?" Ben didn't answer. "They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner, monsieur ?" Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy. " Ai-yee , I go. You keep listen to good Martian music." The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness. Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a face with a red beard. A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this. He needed help. But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The Martian kid, perhaps? Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of white. He tensed. Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought. His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness. And then he saw another and another and another. Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a wheel with Ben as their focal point. You idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known! Light showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded, realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been turned on. The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor. Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away. Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward, falling. The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised. A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in Ben's direction. "Curtis!" one of the policemen yelled. "You're covered! Hold it!" Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into which the musicians had disappeared. A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall ahead of him crumbled. He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the mildly stunning neuro-clubs. Another hiss passed his cheek. He was about twelve feet from the exit. Another second , his brain screamed. Just another second— Or would the exits be guarded? He heard the hiss. It hit directly in the small of his back. There was no pain, just a slight pricking sensation, like the shallow jab of a needle. He froze as if yanked to a stop by a noose. His body seemed to be growing, swelling into balloon proportions. He knew that the tiny needle had imbedded itself deep in his flesh, knew that the paralyzing mortocain was spreading like icy fire into every fiber and muscle of his body. He staggered like a man of stone moving in slow motion. He'd have fifteen—maybe twenty—seconds before complete lethargy of mind and body overpowered him. In the dark world beyond his fading consciousness, he heard a voice yell, "Turn on the damn lights!" Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that someone had seized it. A soft feminine voice spoke to him. "You're wounded? They hit you?" "Yes." His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word. "You want to escape—even now?" "Yes." "You may die if you don't give yourself up." "No, no." He tried to stumble toward the exit. "All right then. Not that way. Here, this way." Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight flicked on. Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his vision—if he still had vision. "You're sure?" the voice persisted. "I'm sure," Ben managed to say. "I have no antidote. You may die." His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection, massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender at once. "Anti ... anti ..." The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced from his throat. "No ... I'm sure ... sure." He didn't hear the answer or anything else. Ben Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness. He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders, hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to transfer itself to his own body. For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered constantly above him—a face, he supposed. He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was a deep, staccato grunting. But he heard someone say, "Don't try to talk." It was the same gentle voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. "Don't talk. Just lie still and rest. Everything'll be all right." Everything all right , he thought dimly. There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach. Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears: "Swallow this now. That's it. You must have food." Or, "Close your eyes. Don't strain. It won't be long. You're getting better." Better , he'd think. Getting better.... At last, after one of the periods of lethargy, his eyes opened. The mist brightened, then dissolved. He beheld the cracked, unpainted ceiling of a small room, its colorless walls broken with a single, round window. He saw the footboard of his aluminite bed and the outlines of his feet beneath a faded blanket. Finally he saw the face and figure that stood at his side. "You are better?" the kind voice asked. The face was that of a girl probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Her features, devoid of makeup, had an unhealthy-looking pallor, as if she hadn't used a sunlamp for many weeks. Yet, at the same time, her firm slim body suggested a solidity and a strength. Her straight brown hair was combed backward, tight upon her scalp, and drawn together in a knot at the nape of her neck. "I—I am better," he murmured. His words were still slow and thick. "I am going to live?" "You will live." He thought for a moment. "How long have I been here?" "Nine days." "You took care of me?" He noted the deep, dark circles beneath her sleep-robbed eyes. She nodded. "You're the one who carried me when I was shot?" "Yes." "Why?" Suddenly he began to cough. Breath came hard. She held the oxygen mask in readiness. He shook his head, not wanting it. "Why?" he asked again. "It would be a long story. Perhaps I'll tell you tomorrow." A new thought, cloaked in sudden fear, entered his murky consciousness. "Tell me, will—will I be well again? Will I be able to walk?" He lay back then, panting, exhausted. "You have nothing to worry about," the girl said softly. Her cool hand touched his hot forehead. "Rest. We'll talk later." His eyes closed and breath came easier. He slept. When he next awoke, his gaze turned first to the window. There was light outside, but he had no way of knowing if this was morning, noon or afternoon—or on what planet. He saw no white-domed buildings of Hoover City, no formal lines of green-treed parks, no streams of buzzing gyro-cars. There was only a translucent and infinite whiteness. It was as if the window were set on the edge of the Universe overlooking a solemn, silent and matterless void. The girl entered the room. "Hi," she said, smiling. The dark half-moons under her eyes were less prominent. Her face was relaxed. She increased the pressure in his rubberex pillows and helped him rise to a sitting position. "Where are we?" he asked. "Venus." "We're not in Hoover City?" "No." He looked at her, wondering. "You won't tell me?" "Not yet. Later, perhaps." "Then how did you get me here? How did we escape from the Inn?" She shrugged. "We have friends who can be bribed. A hiding place in the city, the use of a small desert-taxi, a pass to leave the city—these can be had for a price." "You'll tell me your name?" "Maggie." "Why did you save me?" Her eyes twinkled mischievously. "Because you're a good astrogator." His own eyes widened. "How did you know that?" She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. "I know everything about you, Lieutenant Curtis." "How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—" "I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four, you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation. Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?" Fascinated, Ben nodded. "You were accepted as junior astrogation officer aboard the Odyssey . You did well on your flight from Roswell to Luna City. In a barroom fight in Luna City, you struck and killed a man named Arthur Cobb, a pre-fab salesman. You've been charged with second degree murder and escape. A reward of 5,000 credits has been offered for your capture. You came to Hoover City in the hope of finding a renegade group of spacemen who operate beyond Mars. You were looking for them in the Blast Inn." He gaped incredulously, struggling to rise from his pillows. "I—don't get it." "There are ways of finding out what we want to know. As I told you, we have many friends." He fell back into his pillows, breathing hard. She rose quickly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have told you yet. I felt so happy because you're alive. Rest now. We'll talk again soon." "Maggie, you—you said I'd live. You didn't say I'd be able to walk again." She lowered her gaze. "I hope you'll be able to." "But you don't think I will, do you?" "I don't know. We'll try walking tomorrow. Don't think about it now. Rest." He tried to relax, but his mind was a vortex of conjecture. "Just one more question," he almost whispered. "Yes?" "The man I killed—did he have a wife?" She hesitated. He thought, Damn it, of all the questions, why did I ask that? Finally she said, "He had a wife." "Children?" "Two. I don't know their ages." She left the room. He sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side, his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room. He sat straight up, his chest heaving. The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly trimmed red beard ! Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his brain. The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night. And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a chilling wail in his ears. His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed, the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping relentlessly toward him. He awoke still screaming.... A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a question already formed in his mind. She came and at once he asked, "Who is the man with the red beard?" She smiled. "I was right then when I gave you that thumbnail biog. You were looking for him, weren't you?" "Who is he?" She sat on the chair beside him. "My husband," she said softly. He began to understand. "And your husband needs an astrogator? That's why you saved me?" "We need all the good men we can get." "Where is he?" She cocked her head in mock suspicion. "Somewhere between Mercury and Pluto. He's building a new base for us—and a home for me. When his ship returns, I'll be going to him." "Why aren't you with him now?" "He said unexplored space is no place for a woman. So I've been studying criminal reports and photos from the Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation and trying to find recruits like yourself. You know how we operate?" He told her the tales he'd heard. She nodded. "There are quite a few of us now—about a thousand—and a dozen ships. Our base used to be here on Venus, down toward the Pole. The dome we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago after we got pushed off Mars. We lost a few men in the construction, but with almost every advance in space, someone dies." "Venus is getting too civilized. We're moving out and this dome is only a temporary base when we have cases like yours. The new base—I might as well tell you it's going to be an asteroid. I won't say which one." "Don't get the idea that we're outlaws. Sure, about half our group is wanted by the Bureau, but we make honest livings. We're just people like yourself and Jacob." "Jacob? Your husband?" She laughed. "Makes you think of a Biblical character, doesn't it? Jacob's anything but that. And just plain 'Jake' reminds one of a grizzled old uranium prospector and he isn't like that, either." She lit a cigarette. "Anyway, the wanted ones stay out beyond the frontiers. Jacob and those like him can never return to Earth—not even to Hoover City—except dead. The others are physical or psycho rejects who couldn't get clearance if they went back to Earth. They know nothing but rocketing and won't give up. They bring in our ships to frontier ports like Hoover City to unload cargo and take on supplies." "Don't the authorities object?" "Not very strongly. The I. B. I. has too many problems right here to search the whole System for a few two-bit crooks. Besides, we carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. Nobody really cares whether it comes from the asteroids or Hades. If we want to risk our lives mining it, that's our business." She pursed her lips. "But if they guessed how strong we are or that we have friends planted in the I. B. I.—well, things might be different. There probably would be a crackdown." Ben scowled. "What happens if there is a crackdown? And what will you do when Space Corps ships officially reach the asteroids? They can't ignore you then." "Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It could be us, you know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up your own." Ben stiffened. "And that's why you want me for an astrogator." Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. "If you want to come—and if you get well." She looked at him strangely. "Suppose—" He fought to find the right words. "Suppose I got well and decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me go?" Her thin face was criss-crossed by emotion—alarm, then bewilderment, then fear. "I don't know. That would be up to Jacob." He lay biting his lip, staring at the photo of Jacob. She touched his hand and it seemed that sadness now dominated the flurry of emotion that had coursed through her. "The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?" "Okay," he said. When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo. He was like two people, he thought. Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal. He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions: "A Space Officer Is Honest" "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space Officer Is Dutiful." Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts, mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it prisoner for half a million years. Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead, would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.
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B. Losing his position and the chance to fly spaceships.
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Which of the following best serves as a metaphor for Phil and Mary's relationship, by the end of the story?
A. Mary's cigarette burned down too far
B. The new, government-built town
C. The barbed wire fence
D. The broken zipper on Phil's space suit
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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. BREAKAWAY BY STANLEY GIMBLE Illustrated by Freas She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting what she wanted. Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his wife. "All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?" His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack. He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?" "Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped smiling. "Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch." She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand. "Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks. "Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He released her and stood up. "I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?" "Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil, if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not the noble sort of wife." She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes. "I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it." "Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off. It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous dream!" He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his. "Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever. If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky again. I'd be through." She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in her eyes. "Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said. They drove through the streets of the small town with its small bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert, if such was its destiny. Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand. "Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled. They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field, and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until the eye lost the tip against the stars. "She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?" "No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap. "Please go now, Phil," she said. He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms, her head buried against his shoulder. "Good-by, darling," she said. "Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked. "Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out. The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell of the rocket waiting silently for flight. "Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the administration building without looking back. Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to him and took his hand. "Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all set, son?" "Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said. "I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by the radar." As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come later. "Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the Secretary of Defense." "How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said. "On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history, colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you." "Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little." The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now. He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence. The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears. "... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours until—" Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and handshakes. They were ready now. "Phil," the general said, and took him aside. "Sir?" "Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?" "Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?" "Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness, Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?" "No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry conviction. He reached for a cigarette. "Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension wrong with you. Want to tell me?" Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress; and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood. Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of wire. But her eyes were on the ship. And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And, alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the ground and then disappeared through a small port. Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck tight in her throat. The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then, from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky. For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned. "Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and over. "They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not let me go." She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only thing that matters is you didn't go." "You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked toward the car. THE END
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B. The new, government-built town
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What preprocessing techniques are used in the experiments?
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### Introduction
Lately, there has been enormous increase in User Generated Contents (UGC) on the online platforms such as newsgroups, blogs, online forums and social networking websites. According to the January 2018 report, the number of active users in Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat was more than 2.1, 1.5, 1.3, 1.3 and 0.98 billions respectively BIBREF1 . The UGCs, most of the times, are helpful but sometimes, they are in bad taste usually posted by trolls, spammers and bullies. According to a study by McAfee, 87% of the teens have observed cyberbullying online BIBREF2 . The Futures Company found that 54% of the teens witnessed cyber bullying on social media platforms BIBREF3 . Another study found 27% of all American internet users self-censor their online postings out of fear of online harassment BIBREF4 . Filtering toxic comments is a challenge for the content providers as their appearances result in the loss of subscriptions. In this paper, we will be using toxic and abusive terms interchangeably to represent comments which are inappropriate, disrespectful, threat or discriminative. Toxic comment classification on online channels is conventionally carried out either by moderators or with the help of text classification tools BIBREF5 . With recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) techniques, researchers are exploring if DL can be used for comment classification task. Jigsaw launched Perspective (www.perspectiveapi.com), which uses ML to automatically attach a confidence score to a comment to show the extent to which a comment is considered toxic. Kaggle also hosted an online competition on toxic classification challenge recently BIBREF6 . Text transformation is the very first step in any form of text classification. The online comments are generally in non-standard English and contain lots of spelling mistakes partly because of typos (resulting from small screens of the mobile devices) but more importantly because of the deliberate attempt to write the abusive comments in creative ways to dodge the automatic filters. In this paper we have identified 20 different atomic transformations (plus 15 sequence of transformations) to preprocess the texts. We will apply four different ML models which are considered among the best to see how much we gain by performing those transformations. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 focuses on the relevant research in the area of toxic comment classification. Section 3 focuses on the preprocessing methods which are taken into account in this paper. Section 4 is on ML methods used. Section 5 is dedicated to results and section 6 is discussion and future work. ### Relevant Research
A large number of studies have been done on comment classification in the news, finance and similar other domains. One such study to classify comments from news domain was done with the help of mixture of features such as the length of comments, uppercase and punctuation frequencies, lexical features such as spelling, profanity and readability by applying applied linear and tree based classifier BIBREF7 . FastText, developed by the Facebook AI research (FAIR) team, is a text classification tool suitable to model text involving out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words BIBREF8 BIBREF9 . Zhang et al shown that character level CNN works well for text classification without the need for words BIBREF10 . ### Abusive/toxic comment classification
Toxic comment classification is relatively new field and in recent years, different studies have been carried out to automatically classify toxic comments.Yin et.al. proposed a supervised classification method with n-grams and manually developed regular expressions patterns to detect abusive language BIBREF11 . Sood et. al. used predefined blacklist words and edit distance metric to detect profanity which allowed them to catch words such as sh!+ or @ss as profane BIBREF12 . Warner and Hirschberg detected hate speech by annotating corpus of websites and user comments geared towards detecting anti-semitic hate BIBREF13 . Nobata et. al. used manually labeled online user comments from Yahoo! Finance and news website for detecting hate speech BIBREF5 . Chen et. al. performed feature engineering for classification of comments into abusive, non-abusive and undecided BIBREF14 . Georgakopoulos and Plagianakos compared performance of five different classifiers namely; Word embeddings and CNN, BoW approach SVM, NB, k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) and Linear Discriminated Analysis (LDA) and found that CNN outperform all other methods in classifying toxic comments BIBREF15 . ### Preprocessing of online comments
We found few dedicated papers that address the effect of incorporating different text transformations on the model accuracy for sentiment classification. Uysal and Gunal shown the impact of transformation on text classification by taking into account four transformations and their all possible combination on news and email domain to observe the classification accuracy. Their experimental analyses shown that choosing appropriate combination may result in significant improvement on classification accuracy BIBREF16 . Nobata et. al. used normalization of numbers, replacing very long unknown words and repeated punctuations with the same token BIBREF5 . Haddi et. al. explained the role of transformation in sentiment analyses and demonstrated with the help of SVM on movie review database that the accuracies improve significantly with the appropriate transformation and feature selection. They used transformation methods such as white space removal, expanding abbreviation, stemming, stop words removal and negation handling BIBREF17 . Other papers focus more on modeling as compared to transformation. For example, Wang and manning filter out anything from corpus that is not alphabet. However, this would filter out all the numbers, symbols, Instant Messages (IM) codes, acronyms such as $#!+, 13itch, </3 (broken heart), a$$ which gives completely different meaning to the words or miss out a lot of information. In another sentiment analyses study, Bao et. al. used five transformations namely URLs features reservation, negation transformation, repeated letters normalization, stemming and lemmatization on twitter data and applied linear classifier available in WEKA machine learning tool. They found the accuracy of the classification increases when URLs features reservation, negation transformation and repeated letters normalization are employed while decreases when stemming and lemmatization are applied BIBREF18 . Jianqiang and Xiaolin also looked at the effect of transformation on five different twitter datasets in order to perform sentiment classification and found that removal of URLs, the removal of stop words and the removal of numbers have minimal effect on accuracy whereas replacing negation and expanding acronyms can improve the accuracy. Most of the exploration regarding application of the transformation has been around the sentiment classification on twitter data which is length-restricted. The length of online comments varies and may range from a couple of words to a few paragraphs. Most of the authors used conventional ML models such as SVM, LR, RF and NB. We are expanding our candidate pool for transformations and using latest state-of-the-art models such as LR, NBSVM, XGBoost and Bidirectional LSTM model using fastText’s skipgram word vector. ### Preprocessing tasks
The most intimidating challenge with the online comments data is that the words are non-standard English full of typos and spurious characters. The number of words in corpora are multi-folds because of different reasons including comments originating from mobile devices, use of acronyms, leetspeak words (http://1337.me/), or intentionally obfuscating words to avoid filters by inserting spurious characters, using phonemes, dropping characters etc. Having several forms of the same word result in feature explosion making it difficult for the model to train. Therefore, it seems natural to perform some transformation before feeding the data to the learning algorithm. To explore how helpful these transformations are, we incorporated 20 simple transformations and 15 additional sequences of transformations in our experiment to see their effect on different type of metrics on four different ML models (See Figure FIGREF3 ). The preprocessing steps are usually performed in sequence of multiple transformations. In this work, we considered 15 combinations of the above transformations that seemed natural to us: Preprocess-order-1 through 15 in the above table represent composite transformations. For instance, PPO-11-LWTN-CoAcBkPrCm represents sequence of the following transformations of the raw text in sequence: Change to lower case INLINEFORM0 remove white spaces INLINEFORM1 trim words len INLINEFORM2 remove Non Printable characters INLINEFORM3 replace contraction INLINEFORM4 replace acronym INLINEFORM5 replace blacklist using regex INLINEFORM6 replace profane words using fuzzy INLINEFORM7 replace common words using fuzzy. ### Datasets
We downloaded the data for our experiment from the Kaggle’s toxic comment classification challenge sponsored by Jigsaw (An incubator within Alphabet). The dataset contains comments from Wikipedia’s talk page edits which have been labeled by human raters for toxicity. Although there are six classes in all: ‘toxic’, ‘severe toxic’, ‘obscene’, ‘threat’, ‘insult’ and ‘identity hate’, to simplify the problem, we combined all the labels and created another label ‘abusive’. A comment is labeled in any one of the six class, then it is categorized as ‘abusive’ else the comment is considered clean or non-abusive. We only used training data for our experiment which has 159,571 labeled comments. ### Models Used
We used four classification algorithms: 1) Logistic regression, which is conventionally used in sentiment classification. Other three algorithms which are relatively new and has shown great results on sentiment classification types of problems are: 2) Naïve Bayes with SVM (NBSVM), 3) Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and 4) FastText algorithm with Bidirectional LSTM (FastText-BiLSTM). The linear models such as logistic regression or classifiers are used by many researchers for Twitter comments sentiment analyses BIBREF7 BIBREF18 BIBREF19 BIBREF20 . Naveed et. al. used logistic regression for finding interestingness of tweet and the likelihood of a tweet being retweeted. Wang and Manning found that the logistic regression’s performance is at par with SVM for sentiment and topic classification purposes BIBREF21 . Wang and Manning, shown the variant of NB and SVM gave them the best result for sentiment classification. The NB did a good job on short texts while the SVM worked better on relatively longer texts BIBREF21 . Inclusion of bigrams produced consistent gains compared to methods such as Multinomial NB, SVM and BoWSVM (Bag of Words SVM). Considering these advantages, we decided to include NBSVM in our analyses as the length of online comments vary, ranging from few words to few paragraphs. The features are generated the way it is generated for the logit model above. Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) is a highly scalable tree-based supervised classifier BIBREF22 based on gradient boosting, proposed by Friedman BIBREF23 . This boosted models are ensemble of shallow trees which are weak learners with high bias and low variance. Although boosting in general has been used by many researchers for text classification BIBREF24 BIBREF25 , XGBoost implementation is relatively new and some of the winners of the ML competitions have used XGBoost BIBREF26 in their winning solution. We set the parameters of XGBoost as follows: number of round, evaluation metric, learning rate and maximum depth of the tree at 500, logloss, 0.01 and 6 respectively. FastText BIBREF9 is an open source library for word vector representation and text classification. It is highly memory efficient and significantly faster compared to other deep learning algorithms such as Char-CNN (days vs few seconds) and VDCNN (hours vs few seconds) and produce comparable accuracy BIBREF27 . The fastText uses both skipgram (words represented as bag of character n-grams) and continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) method. FastText is suitable to model text involving out-of-vocabulary (OOV) or rare words more suitable for detecting obscure words in online comments BIBREF9 . The Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM) BIBREF28 , proposed by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber (1997), is a variant of RNN with an additional memory output for the self-looping connections and has the capability to remember inputs nearly 1000 time steps away. The Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) is a further improvement on the LSTM where the network can see the context in either direction and can be trained using all available input information in the past and future of a specific time frame BIBREF29 BIBREF30 . We will be training our BiLSTM model on FastText skipgram (FastText-BiLSTM) embedding obtained using Facebook’s fastText algorithm. Using fastText algorithm, we created embedding matrix having width 100 and used Bidirectional LSTM followd by GlobalMaxPool1D, Dropout(0.2), Dense (50, activation = ‘relu’), Dropout(0.2), Dense (1, activation = ‘sigmoid’). ### Results
We performed 10-fold cross validation by dividing the entire 159,571 comments into nearly 10 equal parts. We trained each of the four models mentioned above on nine folds and tested on the remaining tenth fold and repeated the same process for other folds as well. Eventually, we have Out-of-Fold (OOF) metrics for all 10 parts. We calculated average OOF CV metrics (accuracy, F1-score, logloss, number of misclassified samples) of all 10 folds. As the data distribution is highly skewed (16,225 out of 159,571 ( 10%) are abusive), the accuracy metric here is for reference purpose only as predicting only the majority class every single time can get us 90% accuracy. The transformation, ‘Raw’, represents the actual data free from any transformation and can be considered the baseline for comparison purposes. Overall, the algorithms showed similar trend for all the transformations or sequence of transformations. The NBSVM and FastText-BiLSTM showed similar accuracy with a slight upper edge to the FastText-BiLSTM (See the logloss plot in Fig. FIGREF15 ). For atomic transformations, NBSVM seemed to work better than fastText-BiLSTM and for composite transformations fastText-BiLSTM was better. Logistic regression performed better than the XGBoost algorithm and we guess that the XGBoost might be overfitting the data. A similar trend can be seen in the corresponding F1-score as well. One advantage about the NBSVM is that it is blazingly fast compared to the FastText-BiLSTM. We also calculated total number of misclassified comments (see Fig. FIGREF16 ). The transformation, Convert_to_lower, resulted in reduced accuracy for Logit and NBSVM and higher accuracy for fastText-BiLSTM and XGBoost. Similarly, removing_whitespaces had no effect on Logit, NBSM and XGBoost but the result of fastText-BiLSTM got worse. Only XGBoost was benefitted from replacing_acronyms and replace_contractions transformation. Both, remove_stopwords and remove_rare_words resulted in worse performance for all four algorithms. The transformation, remove_words_containing_non_alpha leads to drop in accuracy in all the four algorithms. This step might be dropping some useful words (sh**, sh1t, hello123 etc.) from the data and resulted in the worse performance. The widely used transformation, Remove_non_alphabet_chars (strip all non-alphabet characters from text), leads to lower performance for all except fastText-BiLSTM where the number of misclassified comments dropped from 6,229 to 5,794. The transformation Stemming seemed to be performing better compared with the Lemmatization for fastText-BiLSTM and XGBoost. For logistic regression and the XGBoost, the best result was achieved with PPO-15, where the number of misclassified comments reduced from 6,992 to 6,816 and from 9,864 to 8,919 respectively. For NBSVM, the best result was achieved using fuzzy_common_mapping (5,946 to 5,933) and for fastText-BiLSTM, the best result was with PPO-8 (6,217 to 5,715) (See Table 2). This shows that the NBSVM are not helped significantly by transformations. In contrast, transformations did help the fastText-BiLSTM significantly. We also looked at the effect of the transformations on the precision and recall the negative class. The fastText-BiLSTM and NBSVM performed consistently well for most of the transformations compared to the Logit and XGBoost. The precision for the XGBoost was the highest and the recall was lowest among the four algorithm pointing to the fact that the negative class data is not enough for this algorithm and the algorithm parameters needs to be tuned. The interpretation of F1-score is different based on the how the classes are distributed. For toxic data, toxic class is more important than the clean comments as the content providers do not want toxic comments to be shown to their users. Therefore, we want the negative class comments to have high F1-scores as compared to the clean comments. We also looked at the effect of the transformations on the precision and recall of the negative class. The F1-score for negative class is somewhere around 0.8 for NBSVM and fastText-BiLSTM, for logit this value is around 0.74 and for XGBoost, the value is around 0.57. The fastText-BiLSTM and NBSVM performed consistently well for most of the transformations compared to the Logit and XGBoost. The precision for the XGBoost was the highest and the recall was lowest among the four algorithm pointing to the fact that the negative class data is not enough for this algorithm and the algorithm parameters needs to be tuned. ### Discussion and Future Work
We spent quite a bit of time on transformation of the toxic data set in the hope that it will ultimately increase the accuracy of our classifiers. However, we empirically found that our intuition, to a large extent, was wrong. Most of the transformations resulted in reduced accuracy for Logit and NBSVM. We considered a total of 35 different ways to transform the data. Since, there will be exponential number of possible transformation sequences to try, we selected only 15 that we thought reasonable. Changing the order can have a different outcome as well. Most of the papers on sentiment classification, that we reviewed, resulted in better accuracy after application of some of these transformations, however, for us it was not completely true. We are not sure about the reason but out best guess is that the twitter data is character-limited while our comment data has no restriction on the size. The toxic data is unbalanced and we did not try to balance the classes in this experiment. It would be interesting to know what happens when we do oversampling BIBREF31 of the minority class or under-sampling of majority class or a combination of both. Pseudo-labeling BIBREF32 can also be used to mitigate the class imbalance problem to some extent. We did not tune the parameters of different algorithms presented in our experiment. It will also be interesting to use word2vec/GloVe word embedding to see how they behave during the above transformations. Since the words in these word embedding are mostly clean and without any spurious/special characters, we can't use the pre-trained word vectors on raw data. To compare apple to apple, the embedding vectors needs to be trained on the corpora from scratch which is time consuming. Also, we only considered six composite transformations which is not comprehensive in any way and will be taking this issue up in the future. We also looked only at the Jigsaw's Wikipedia data only. This paper gives an idea to the NLP researchers on the worth of spending time on transformations of toxic data. Based on the results we have, our recommendation is not to spend too much time on the transformations rather focus on the selection of the best algorithms. All the codes, data and results can be found here: https://github.com/ifahim/toxic-preprocess ### Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Joseph Batz and Christine Cheng for reviewing the draft and providing valuable feedback. We are also immensely grateful to Sasi Kuppanagari and Phani Vadali for their continued support and encouragement throughout this project. Fig. 1: List of transformations. Fig. 2: a) Frequency distribution plot of the Jigsaw Toxic classification corpora. b) Different number of ways some of the commonly abusive words are written in the corpora. Fig. 3: Log loss plot for all four models on different transformations. Fig. 4: Results: F1 scores, accuracies and total number of misclassified.
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See Figure FIGREF3
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Why didn't Tremaine automatically include the state law enforcement in his investigation?
A. He thinks the state law enforcement officers are all incredibly rude.
B. He thinks the state law enforcement officers are all incredibly dumb.
C. He's unsure of how serious the investigation is, and he doesn't want them stepping on his toes.
D. He's unsure of how serious the investigation is.
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THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER BY KEITH LAUMER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He was as ancient as time—and as strange as his own frightful battle against incredible odds! I In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder, crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection. "Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the wire as the scrambler went into operation. "Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest of the afternoon." "I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing me." "Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got some answers to go with the questions?" "I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—" "Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all. Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let me do it my way." "I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home area—" "You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—" "You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!" Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the opposite corner of his mouth. "Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of authority. Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while, though." The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What brings you back to the boondocks?" "Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess." In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more." Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment." "It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings. "I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction pattern—" "Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your word for it." "The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's near here. Now, have you got any ideas?" "That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord intended." "I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had something ..." "Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..." "Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a hundred years old when I was kid." "Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river." "Well, what about him?" "Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little touched in the head." "There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me. I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and sometimes he gave us apples." "I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right. But we never did know where he came from." "How long's he lived here in Elsby?" "Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway." "Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened then?" "You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all over again." "I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the other drug store...." "Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it on fire." "What was the idea of that?" "Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day they'll make jail age." "Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any dealings to speak of with anybody here in town." "Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll." Tremaine shook his head. "Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper. Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to think she was some kind of princess...." "What about her and Bram? A romance?" Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling, frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town, practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram in front of her." Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess. Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights." "What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of detector you were going to set up?" "I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up in my room over at the hotel." "When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?" "After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—" "Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front teeth." II Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor, a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said "MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in. A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at Tremaine. "We're closed," he said. "I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the Bram property changed hands last." The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram? He dead?" "Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place." The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to sell, mister, if that's what you want to know." "I want to know when he bought." The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said. Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw. A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly. "See what I can do," he said. It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a line written in faded ink: "May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)" "Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine. "That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?" "No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to the door. "What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of trouble?" "No. No trouble." The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one," he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age." "I guess you're right." The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place." "I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?" "Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look. "There's one story that's not superstition...." Tremaine waited. "You—uh—paying anything for information?" "Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob. The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this. Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup." Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint. "You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The older are there in the shelves." "I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far." The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle these old papers carefully." "I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed through it, muttering. "What date was it you wanted?" "Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth." The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table, adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you." "I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech. Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly. On page four, under a column headed County Notes he saw the name Bram: Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land, north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past months. "May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?" The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught his eye: A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along the river. The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now. You'll have to come back tomorrow." Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel. A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped short, stared after the car. "Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply. Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed north after the police car. Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back. The door opened. A tall figure stepped out. "What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled. "What's the matter? Run out of signal?" "What's it to you, mister?" "Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?" "We could be." "Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine." "Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike before handing it to Tremaine. The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef, Tremaine?" "I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave the word, Grammond." "That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out on me." "It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle." Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it apart brick by brick in the time—" "That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll go underground." "You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use for the spade work, that it?" "Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed." "Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—" "The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out." Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington." Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call. "It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred. Tell him if he queers this—" "I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—" "Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia moonshiners." "Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation." "Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat and left the hotel. He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned face looked at him coolly. "Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—" "There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto. Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine thought, startled. "I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said. "Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a straight chair across the room from him. "You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see that you've amounted to something." "Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid." "You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man." "I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability." "Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll. "I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your discretion?" "Of course." "How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?" Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be used against him?" "There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs to be in the national interest." "I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means, James. I distrust these glib phrases." "I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him." "Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the year." "What does he do for a living?" "I have no idea." "Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated piece of country? What's his story?" "I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story." "You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his last?" "That is his only name. Just ... Bram." "You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—" A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away impatiently. "I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me." Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...." Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him." She paused. Tremaine waited. "Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale. He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in a cave beneath his house." Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me there alone. "I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried to speak to me but I would not listen. "He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home. He never called again." "This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?" Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I am, James." "May I see it?" She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?" Miss Carroll nodded. "There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...." "I'd be grateful for any lead." "Bram fears the thunder." III As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and asked: "Any luck, Jimmy?" Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a dud, I'm afraid." "Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?" "Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark." As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand from what you were saying to me." "I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out." "Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring working—" "We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ... and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched." The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he said. "You suppose those fool boys...?" He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a gun?" "In the car." "Better get it." Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket, rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate lay on the oilcloth-covered table. "This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week." "Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the distance. "I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess." A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?" Tremaine said. Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor. "That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains. "Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen." "It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor. It ended suddenly near the wall. "What do you make of it. Jimmy?" A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks," he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing tricks?" "I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few questions." At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop of greased hair. "Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you." "I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong with burnin out a Commie, is there?" "Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that out, Hull?" "He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we heard...." "What did you hear?" "They're lookin for the spies." "Who's looking for spies?" "Cops." "Who says so?" The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said. "Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all night." "They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around hers." "And you mentioned Bram?" The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out that way, ain't he?" "Anything else?" The boy looked at his feet.
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C. He's unsure of how serious the investigation is, and he doesn't want them stepping on his toes.
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What was the initial goal of the protagonist?
A. To collect more money
B. To increase his personal reputation
C. To improve his institution's reputation
D. To befriend his colleague
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The Snowball Effect By KATHERINE MacLEAN Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Tack power drives on a sewing circle and you can needle the world into the darndest mess! "All right," I said, "what is sociology good for?" Wilton Caswell, Ph.D., was head of my Sociology Department, and right then he was mad enough to chew nails. On the office wall behind him were three or four framed documents in Latin that were supposed to be signs of great learning, but I didn't care at that moment if he papered the walls with his degrees. I had been appointed dean and president to see to it that the university made money. I had a job to do, and I meant to do it. He bit off each word with great restraint: "Sociology is the study of social institutions, Mr. Halloway." I tried to make him understand my position. "Look, it's the big-money men who are supposed to be contributing to the support of this college. To them, sociology sounds like socialism—nothing can sound worse than that—and an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album. We can't appeal to them that way. Come on now." I smiled condescendingly, knowing it would irritate him. "What are you doing that's worth anything?" He glared at me, his white hair bristling and his nostrils dilated like a war horse about to whinny. I can say one thing for them—these scientists and professors always keep themselves well under control. He had a book in his hand and I was expecting him to throw it, but he spoke instead: "This department's analysis of institutional accretion, by the use of open system mathematics, has been recognized as an outstanding and valuable contribution to—" The words were impressive, whatever they meant, but this still didn't sound like anything that would pull in money. I interrupted, "Valuable in what way?" He sat down on the edge of his desk thoughtfully, apparently recovering from the shock of being asked to produce something solid for his position, and ran his eyes over the titles of the books that lined his office walls. "Well, sociology has been valuable to business in initiating worker efficiency and group motivation studies, which they now use in management decisions. And, of course, since the depression, Washington has been using sociological studies of employment, labor and standards of living as a basis for its general policies of—" I stopped him with both raised hands. "Please, Professor Caswell! That would hardly be a recommendation. Washington, the New Deal and the present Administration are somewhat touchy subjects to the men I have to deal with. They consider its value debatable, if you know what I mean. If they got the idea that sociology professors are giving advice and guidance—No, we have to stick to brass tacks and leave Washington out of this. What, specifically, has the work of this specific department done that would make it as worthy to receive money as—say, a heart disease research fund?" He began to tap the corner of his book absently on the desk, watching me. "Fundamental research doesn't show immediate effects, Mr. Halloway, but its value is recognized." I smiled and took out my pipe. "All right, tell me about it. Maybe I'll recognize its value." Prof. Caswell smiled back tightly. He knew his department was at stake. The other departments were popular with donors and pulled in gift money by scholarships and fellowships, and supported their professors and graduate students by research contracts with the government and industry. Caswell had to show a way to make his own department popular—or else. I couldn't fire him directly, of course, but there are ways of doing it indirectly. He laid down his book and ran a hand over his ruffled hair. "Institutions—organizations, that is—" his voice became more resonant; like most professors, when he had to explain something he instinctively slipped into his platform lecture mannerisms, and began to deliver an essay—"have certain tendencies built into the way they happen to have been organized, which cause them to expand or contract without reference to the needs they were founded to serve." He was becoming flushed with the pleasure of explaining his subject. "All through the ages, it has been a matter of wonder and dismay to men that a simple organization—such as a church to worship in, or a delegation of weapons to a warrior class merely for defense against an outside enemy—will either grow insensately and extend its control until it is a tyranny over their whole lives, or, like other organizations set up to serve a vital need, will tend to repeatedly dwindle and vanish, and have to be painfully rebuilt. "The reason can be traced to little quirks in the way they were organized, a matter of positive and negative power feedbacks. Such simple questions as, 'Is there a way a holder of authority in this organization can use the power available to him to increase his power?' provide the key. But it still could not be handled until the complex questions of interacting motives and long-range accumulations of minor effects could somehow be simplified and formulated. In working on the problem, I found that the mathematics of open system, as introduced to biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and George Kreezer, could be used as a base that would enable me to develop a specifically social mathematics, expressing the human factors of intermeshing authority and motives in simple formulas. "By these formulations, it is possible to determine automatically the amount of growth and period of life of any organization. The UN, to choose an unfortunate example, is a shrinker type organization. Its monetary support is not in the hands of those who personally benefit by its governmental activities, but, instead, in the hands of those who would personally lose by any extension and encroachment of its authority on their own. Yet by the use of formula analysis—" "That's theory," I said. "How about proof?" "My equations are already being used in the study of limited-size Federal corporations. Washington—" I held up my palm again. "Please, not that nasty word again. I mean, where else has it been put into operation? Just a simple demonstration, something to show that it works, that's all." He looked away from me thoughtfully, picked up the book and began to tap it on the desk again. It had some unreadable title and his name on it in gold letters. I got the distinct impression again that he was repressing an urge to hit me with it. He spoke quietly. "All right, I'll give you a demonstration. Are you willing to wait six months?" "Certainly, if you can show me something at the end of that time." Reminded of time, I glanced at my watch and stood up. "Could we discuss this over lunch?" he asked. "I wouldn't mind hearing more, but I'm having lunch with some executors of a millionaire's will. They have to be convinced that by, 'furtherance of research into human ills,' he meant that the money should go to research fellowships for postgraduate biologists at the university, rather than to a medical foundation." "I see you have your problems, too," Caswell said, conceding me nothing. He extended his hand with a chilly smile. "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Halloway. I'm glad we had this talk." I shook hands and left him standing there, sure of his place in the progress of science and the respect of his colleagues, yet seething inside because I, the president and dean, had boorishly demanded that he produce something tangible. I frankly didn't give a hoot if he blew his lid. My job isn't easy. For a crumb of favorable publicity and respect in the newspapers and an annual ceremony in a silly costume, I spend the rest of the year going hat in hand, asking politely for money at everyone's door, like a well-dressed panhandler, and trying to manage the university on the dribble I get. As far as I was concerned, a department had to support itself or be cut down to what student tuition pays for, which is a handful of over-crowded courses taught by an assistant lecturer. Caswell had to make it work or get out. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to hear what he was going to do for a demonstration. At lunch, three days later, while we were waiting for our order, he opened a small notebook. "Ever hear of feedback effects?" "Not enough to have it clear." "You know the snowball effect, though." "Sure, start a snowball rolling downhill and it grows." "Well, now—" He wrote a short line of symbols on a blank page and turned the notebook around for me to inspect it. "Here's the formula for the snowball process. It's the basic general growth formula—covers everything." It was a row of little symbols arranged like an algebra equation. One was a concentric spiral going up, like a cross-section of a snowball rolling in snow. That was a growth sign. I hadn't expected to understand the equation, but it was almost as clear as a sentence. I was impressed and slightly intimidated by it. He had already explained enough so that I knew that, if he was right, here was the growth of the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire, the conquests of Alexander and the spread of the smoking habit and the change and rigidity of the unwritten law of styles. "Is it really as simple as that?" I asked. "You notice," he said, "that when it becomes too heavy for the cohesion strength of snow, it breaks apart. Now in human terms—" The chops and mashed potatoes and peas arrived. "Go on," I urged. He was deep in the symbology of human motives and the equations of human behavior in groups. After running through a few different types of grower and shrinker type organizations, we came back to the snowball, and decided to run the test by making something grow. "You add the motives," he said, "and the equation will translate them into organization." "How about a good selfish reason for the ins to drag others into the group—some sort of bounty on new members, a cut of their membership fee?" I suggested uncertainly, feeling slightly foolish. "And maybe a reason why the members would lose if any of them resigned, and some indirect way they could use to force each other to stay in." "The first is the chain letter principle," he nodded. "I've got that. The other...." He put the symbols through some mathematical manipulation so that a special grouping appeared in the middle of the equation. "That's it." Since I seemed to have the right idea, I suggested some more, and he added some, and juggled them around in different patterns. We threw out a few that would have made the organization too complicated, and finally worked out an idyllically simple and deadly little organization setup where joining had all the temptation of buying a sweepstakes ticket, going in deeper was as easy as hanging around a race track, and getting out was like trying to pull free from a Malayan thumb trap. We put our heads closer together and talked lower, picking the best place for the demonstration. "Abington?" "How about Watashaw? I have some student sociological surveys of it already. We can pick a suitable group from that." "This demonstration has got to be convincing. We'd better pick a little group that no one in his right mind would expect to grow." "There should be a suitable club—" Picture Professor Caswell, head of the Department of Sociology, and with him the President of the University, leaning across the table toward each other, sipping coffee and talking in conspiratorial tones over something they were writing in a notebook. That was us. "Ladies," said the skinny female chairman of the Watashaw Sewing Circle. "Today we have guests." She signaled for us to rise, and we stood up, bowing to polite applause and smiles. "Professor Caswell, and Professor Smith." (My alias.) "They are making a survey of the methods and duties of the clubs of Watashaw." We sat down to another ripple of applause and slightly wider smiles, and then the meeting of the Watashaw Sewing Circle began. In five minutes I began to feel sleepy. There were only about thirty people there, and it was a small room, not the halls of Congress, but they discussed their business of collecting and repairing second hand clothing for charity with the same endless boring parliamentary formality. I pointed out to Caswell the member I thought would be the natural leader, a tall, well-built woman in a green suit, with conscious gestures and a resonant, penetrating voice, and then went into a half doze while Caswell stayed awake beside me and wrote in his notebook. After a while the resonant voice roused me to attention for a moment. It was the tall woman holding the floor over some collective dereliction of the club. She was being scathing. I nudged Caswell and murmured, "Did you fix it so that a shover has a better chance of getting into office than a non-shover?" "I think there's a way they could find for it," Caswell whispered back, and went to work on his equation again. "Yes, several ways to bias the elections." "Good. Point them out tactfully to the one you select. Not as if she'd use such methods, but just as an example of the reason why only she can be trusted with initiating the change. Just mention all the personal advantages an unscrupulous person could have." He nodded, keeping a straight and sober face as if we were exchanging admiring remarks about the techniques of clothes repairing, instead of conspiring. After the meeting, Caswell drew the tall woman in the green suit aside and spoke to her confidentially, showing her the diagram of organization we had drawn up. I saw the responsive glitter in the woman's eyes and knew she was hooked. We left the diagram of organization and our typed copy of the new bylaws with her and went off soberly, as befitted two social science experimenters. We didn't start laughing until our car passed the town limits and began the climb for University Heights. If Caswell's equations meant anything at all, we had given that sewing circle more growth drives than the Roman Empire. Four months later I had time out from a very busy schedule to wonder how the test was coming along. Passing Caswell's office, I put my head in. He looked up from a student research paper he was correcting. "Caswell, about that sewing club business—I'm beginning to feel the suspense. Could I get an advance report on how it's coming?" "I'm not following it. We're supposed to let it run the full six months." "But I'm curious. Could I get in touch with that woman—what's her name?" "Searles. Mrs. George Searles." "Would that change the results?" "Not in the slightest. If you want to graph the membership rise, it should be going up in a log curve, probably doubling every so often." I grinned. "If it's not rising, you're fired." He grinned back. "If it's not rising, you won't have to fire me—I'll burn my books and shoot myself." I returned to my office and put in a call to Watashaw. While I was waiting for the phone to be answered, I took a piece of graph paper and ruled it off into six sections, one for each month. After the phone had rung in the distance for a long time, a servant answered with a bored drawl: "Mrs. Searles' residence." I picked up a red gummed star and licked it. "Mrs. Searles, please." "She's not in just now. Could I take a message?" I placed the star at the thirty line in the beginning of the first section. Thirty members they'd started with. "No, thanks. Could you tell me when she'll be back?" "Not until dinner. She's at the meetin'." "The sewing club?" I asked. "No, sir, not that thing. There isn't any Sewing club any more, not for a long time. She's at the Civic Welfare meeting." Somehow I hadn't expected anything like that. "Thank you," I said and hung up, and after a moment noticed I was holding a box of red gummed stars in my hand. I closed it and put it down on top of the graph of membership in the sewing circle. No more members.... Poor Caswell. The bet between us was ironclad. He wouldn't let me back down on it even if I wanted to. He'd probably quit before I put through the first slow move to fire him. His professional pride would be shattered, sunk without a trace. I remembered what he said about shooting himself. It had seemed funny to both of us at the time, but.... What a mess that would make for the university. I had to talk to Mrs. Searles. Perhaps there was some outside reason why the club had disbanded. Perhaps it had not just died. I called back. "This is Professor Smith," I said, giving the alias I had used before. "I called a few minutes ago. When did you say Mrs. Searles will return?" "About six-thirty or seven o'clock." Five hours to wait. And what if Caswell asked me what I had found out in the meantime? I didn't want to tell him anything until I had talked it over with that woman Searles first. "Where is this Civic Welfare meeting?" She told me. Five minutes later, I was in my car, heading for Watashaw, driving considerably faster than my usual speed and keeping a careful watch for highway patrol cars as the speedometer climbed. The town meeting hall and theater was a big place, probably with lots of small rooms for different clubs. I went in through the center door and found myself in the huge central hall where some sort of rally was being held. A political-type rally—you know, cheers and chants, with bunting already down on the floor, people holding banners, and plenty of enthusiasm and excitement in the air. Someone was making a speech up on the platform. Most of the people there were women. I wondered how the Civic Welfare League could dare hold its meeting at the same time as a political rally that could pull its members away. The group with Mrs. Searles was probably holding a shrunken and almost memberless meeting somewhere in an upper room. There probably was a side door that would lead upstairs. While I glanced around, a pretty girl usher put a printed bulletin in my hand, whispering, "Here's one of the new copies." As I attempted to hand it back, she retreated. "Oh, you can keep it. It's the new one. Everyone's supposed to have it. We've just printed up six thousand copies to make sure there'll be enough to last." The tall woman on the platform had been making a driving, forceful speech about some plans for rebuilding Watashaw's slum section. It began to penetrate my mind dimly as I glanced down at the bulletin in my hands. "Civic Welfare League of Watashaw. The United Organization of Church and Secular Charities." That's what it said. Below began the rules of membership. I looked up. The speaker, with a clear, determined voice and conscious, forceful gestures, had entered the homestretch of her speech, an appeal to the civic pride of all citizens of Watashaw. "With a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country—the jewel of the United States." She paused and then leaned forward intensely, striking her clenched hand on the speaker's stand with each word for emphasis. " All we need is more members. Now get out there and recruit! " I finally recognized Mrs. Searles, as an answering sudden blast of sound half deafened me. The crowd was chanting at the top of its lungs: "Recruit! Recruit!" Mrs. Searles stood still at the speaker's table and behind her, seated in a row of chairs, was a group that was probably the board of directors. It was mostly women, and the women began to look vaguely familiar, as if they could be members of the sewing circle. I put my lips close to the ear of the pretty usher while I turned over the stiff printed bulletin on a hunch. "How long has the League been organized?" On the back of the bulletin was a constitution. She was cheering with the crowd, her eyes sparkling. "I don't know," she answered between cheers. "I only joined two days ago. Isn't it wonderful?" I went into the quiet outer air and got into my car with my skin prickling. Even as I drove away, I could hear them. They were singing some kind of organization song with the tune of "Marching through Georgia." Even at the single glance I had given it, the constitution looked exactly like the one we had given the Watashaw Sewing Circle. All I told Caswell when I got back was that the sewing circle had changed its name and the membership seemed to be rising. Next day, after calling Mrs. Searles, I placed some red stars on my graph for the first three months. They made a nice curve, rising more steeply as it reached the fourth month. They had picked up their first increase in membership simply by amalgamating with all the other types of charity organizations in Watashaw, changing the club name with each fusion, but keeping the same constitution—the constitution with the bright promise of advantages as long as there were always new members being brought in. By the fifth month, the League had added a mutual baby-sitting service and had induced the local school board to add a nursery school to the town service, so as to free more women for League activity. But charity must have been completely organized by then, and expansion had to be in other directions. Some real estate agents evidently had been drawn into the whirlpool early, along with their ideas. The slum improvement plans began to blossom and take on a tinge of real estate planning later in the month. The first day of the sixth month, a big two page spread appeared in the local paper of a mass meeting which had approved a full-fledged scheme for slum clearance of Watashaw's shack-town section, plus plans for rehousing, civic building, and rezoning. And good prospects for attracting some new industries to the town, industries which had already been contacted and seemed interested by the privileges offered. And with all this, an arrangement for securing and distributing to the club members alone most of the profit that would come to the town in the form of a rise in the price of building sites and a boom in the building industry. The profit distributing arrangement was the same one that had been built into the organization plan for the distribution of the small profits of membership fees and honorary promotions. It was becoming an openly profitable business. Membership was rising more rapidly now. By the second week of the sixth month, news appeared in the local paper that the club had filed an application to incorporate itself as the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and all the local real estate promoters had finished joining en masse. The Mutual Trade part sounded to me as if the Chamber of Commerce was on the point of being pulled in with them, ideas, ambitions and all. I chuckled while reading the next page of the paper, on which a local politician was reported as having addressed the club with a long flowery oration on their enterprise, charity, and civic spirit. He had been made an honorary member. If he allowed himself to be made a full member with its contractual obligations and its lures, if the politicians went into this, too.... I laughed, filing the newspaper with the other documents on the Watashaw test. These proofs would fascinate any businessman with the sense to see where his bread was buttered. A businessman is constantly dealing with organizations, including his own, and finding them either inert, cantankerous, or both. Caswell's formula could be a handle to grasp them with. Gratitude alone would bring money into the university in carload lots. The end of the sixth month came. The test was over and the end reports were spectacular. Caswell's formulas were proven to the hilt. After reading the last newspaper reports, I called him up. "Perfect, Wilt, perfect ! I can use this Watashaw thing to get you so many fellowships and scholarships and grants for your department that you'll think it's snowing money!" He answered somewhat disinterestedly, "I've been busy working with students on their research papers and marking tests—not following the Watashaw business at all, I'm afraid. You say the demonstration went well and you're satisfied?" He was definitely putting on a chill. We were friends now, but obviously he was still peeved whenever he was reminded that I had doubted that his theory could work. And he was using its success to rub my nose in the realization that I had been wrong. A man with a string of degrees after his name is just as human as anyone else. I had needled him pretty hard that first time. "I'm satisfied," I acknowledged. "I was wrong. The formulas work beautifully. Come over and see my file of documents on it if you want a boost for your ego. Now let's see the formula for stopping it." He sounded cheerful again. "I didn't complicate that organization with negatives. I wanted it to grow . It falls apart naturally when it stops growing for more than two months. It's like the great stock boom before an economic crash. Everyone in it is prosperous as long as the prices just keep going up and new buyers come into the market, but they all knew what would happen if it stopped growing. You remember, we built in as one of the incentives that the members know they are going to lose if membership stops growing. Why, if I tried to stop it now, they'd cut my throat." I remembered the drive and frenzy of the crowd in the one early meeting I had seen. They probably would. "No," he continued. "We'll just let it play out to the end of its tether and die of old age." "When will that be?" "It can't grow past the female population of the town. There are only so many women in Watashaw, and some of them don't like sewing." The graph on the desk before me began to look sinister. Surely Caswell must have made some provision for— "You underestimate their ingenuity," I said into the phone. "Since they wanted to expand, they didn't stick to sewing. They went from general charity to social welfare schemes to something that's pretty close to an incorporated government. The name is now the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and they're filing an application to change it to Civic Property Pool and Social Dividend, membership contractual, open to all. That social dividend sounds like a Technocrat climbed on the band wagon, eh?" While I spoke, I carefully added another red star to the curve above the thousand member level, checking with the newspaper that still lay open on my desk. The curve was definitely some sort of log curve now, growing more rapidly with each increase. "Leaving out practical limitations for a moment, where does the formula say it will stop?" I asked. "When you run out of people to join it. But after all, there are only so many people in Watashaw. It's a pretty small town." "They've opened a branch office in New York," I said carefully into the phone, a few weeks later. With my pencil, very carefully, I extended the membership curve from where it was then. After the next doubling, the curve went almost straight up and off the page. Allowing for a lag of contagion from one nation to another, depending on how much their citizens intermingled, I'd give the rest of the world about twelve years. There was a long silence while Caswell probably drew the same graph in his own mind. Then he laughed weakly. "Well, you asked me for a demonstration." That was as good an answer as any. We got together and had lunch in a bar, if you can call it lunch. The movement we started will expand by hook or by crook, by seduction or by bribery or by propaganda or by conquest, but it will expand. And maybe a total world government will be a fine thing—until it hits the end of its rope in twelve years or so. What happens then, I don't know. But I don't want anyone to pin that on me. From now on, if anyone asks me, I've never heard of Watashaw.
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A. To collect more money
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What is the best representation of the significance of the boy who falls sick at the end?
A. It shows that Dr. Melrose could have been right, because this is not consistent with Dr. Lessing's prior conclusions
B. The incident is proof that Dr. Lessing should give up on his work
C. It means Dr. Lessing's book needs another round of edits which will take a lot of time
D. It shows Dr. Melrose where the weak points in Dr. Lessing's work is
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BRAMBLE BUSH BY ALAN E. NOURSE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes. And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again. MOTHER GOOSE Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk with a sigh. "All right, Jack—what's wrong?" "This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth. "He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period." "So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy. "Tommy? Come over and sit down." There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin, with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape. The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear. Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently. "I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy. "Why?" "I just don't. I hate it there." "Are you frightened?" The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly. "Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?" "No. Oh, no!" "Then what?" Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off—" He fingered the grey plastic helmet. "You think that would make you feel better?" "It would, I know it would." Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the monitor is for, don't you?" "It stops things from going out." "That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator. You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off, away from the Farm." The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there—" The fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I never want to go back." "Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has been going on for three weeks ?" "I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern—we see so much of that up there." "I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to deal with this morning—the one who's threatening to upset the whole Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with. I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy downstairs." "Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman. "Certainly! And Jack—in this case, be sure of it. If Tommy's in the trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands." Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book, and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled. Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm—yet he hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really get back to work again. The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the International Psionics Conference: Dear Dr. Lessing: In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order— They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going—but the book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good title—concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right. And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and baffling new science. For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds, with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush became— But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a theory to work by— At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir." He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please." Dr. Peter Melrose was tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about the office in awe. "I'm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the Master in the trembling flesh!" Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand—" "Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before—but never before a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!" He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!" "If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch. "I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply, "because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping." Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me—just what, exactly, do you want?" "I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of 'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes. "You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference," snapped Lessing. The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year, but you didn't seem to get the idea." "Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale', we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's true." "If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's false as Satan." "And our controls are above suspicion." "So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too." "Oh, yes—I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little misdirected, is all." "According to your Theory, that is." "Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics—but at least you're energetic enough." "We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong." Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is." Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the day to take a trip?" "I've got 'til New Year." Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the Farm this afternoon." The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?" "Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...." Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside. "What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along through the afternoon sun. "I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating." Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose. Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here." "It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped. "Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here." "Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis." "Of course, you're sure you were measuring something ." "Oh, yes. We certainly were." "Yet you said that you didn't know what." "That's right," said Lessing. "We don't." "And you don't know why your instruments measure whatever they're measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at all. It's not inconceivable that the children might be measuring the instruments , eh?" Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable." "Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a theory on." "Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb." "Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories. I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're digging for it?" "We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're exploring—nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't work in the dark forever—we've got to have a working hypothesis to guide us." "So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly. "For a working hypothesis—yes. We've known for a long time that every human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not just a few here and there—every single one. It's a differentiating quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality." "Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't prove that, of course, but I'll play along." Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults. Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we have the Farm—to try to discover why. What forces that potential underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get at it any more?" "And you think you have an answer," said Melrose. "We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains the available data." The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics. Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a long, low building. "All right, young man—come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show you our answer." In the main office building they donned the close-fitting psionic monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source. "The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The monitors are quite effective—a simple Renwick scrambler screen." "It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose. "As far as we can measure, yes." "Which may not be very far." Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem effective for our purposes." "But you don't know why," added Melrose. "All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen works—why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by; one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars. They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress. "Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as they walked along, "and some have been here for years. We maintain a top-ranking curriculum—your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't so far afield at that—with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center funds. Other children come to us—foundlings, desertees, children from broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions where they can develope what potential they have— without the presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject to. The results have been remarkable." He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing in a large room. "They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose, they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what makes them go, and we don't care—they go. That's all we need. Like that one, for instance—" In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch, nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered. Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of activity. "What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few moments. "Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually, had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale." Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon—it doesn't hold for any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to place them together—they drew each other like magnets. One of our workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't right. It wasn't the instruments, of course." Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I want you to watch this very closely." He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing. He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall. The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in the tower with his thumb. The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks out of place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out of place.... Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent bursts of green fire and went dark. The block tower fell with a crash. Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly. "Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his jaw. "You think that it's adult psi-contact that drives the child's potential underground—that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a sort of colossal candle-snuffer." "That's what I think," said Lessing. "How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?" Lessing blinked. "Why should they?" "Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down." "But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall down." Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What would you say to that?" "I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data. According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is sheer nonsense." "And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?" "I would." "And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see what danger you're in? If you publish your book now, you will become an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could possibly happen would be— the appearance of an Authority ." Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence. At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force. "Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have to throw them off and keep going." Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific grounds aren't right at all, in this case." Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing—" "He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after the theory." "So it seems. But why?" "Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?" "He knows more about his field than anybody else does." "He seems to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories—and then defends them for all he's worth ." "But why shouldn't he?" "Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's what he says that counts." "But we know you're right," Dorffman protested. "Do we?" "Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the Farm." "Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better—" A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy—" She broke off helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined." "What happened?" "Nothing exactly—happened. I don't quite know how to describe it." She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large children's playroom. "See what you think." The boy sat stolidly in the corner of the room. He looked up as they came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there, gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands. Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said. The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine. "Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror, clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away—" When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on the hand. Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise." "Go away." "Do you know who I am?" Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away." "Why are you afraid, Tommy?" "I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away." "Why do you hurt?" "I—can't get it—off," the boy said. The monitor , Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone horribly wrong—could the boy really be sensing the source of the trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psi-high youngster's mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more—he had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors of the child's mind like a smothering fog—it was a fearful thing. A healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But this youngster was sick— And yet an animal instinctively seeks its own protection . With trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered. The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head. Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A sense of warmth—peace and security and comfort—swept in as the fear faded from the boy's face. The fire engine clattered to the floor. They analyzed the tapes later, punching the data cards with greatest care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and classification that all their data underwent. It was late that night when they had the report back in their hands. Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with anything we've observed before. There must be an error." "Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely. We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes according to the theory—except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?" "Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we misread the data—" "Didn't you see his face ?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he acted ? What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow for." They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going to do?" "I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify—to line everything up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed the path altogether." "But the book is due! The Conference speech—" "I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly. "It'll be costly—but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian. But a few revisions could change all that—" He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for a while—and maybe that way one of the lads who's really sniffing out the trail will get somebody to listen to him! "Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade that puppy out there to come here and work for me—"
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A. It shows that Dr. Melrose could have been right, because this is not consistent with Dr. Lessing's prior conclusions
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What does Jones likely think Evans is up to when he finds him?
A. He saw that he was setting up a mine to start collecting water
B. He thought he had found a new source of crystals
C. He thought he was already dead
D. He thought his oxygen machine was meant to be a temporary survival tool
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ALL DAY SEPTEMBER By ROGER KUYKENDALL Illustrated by van Dongen [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Some men just haven't got good sense. They just can't seem to learn the most fundamental things. Like when there's no use trying—when it's time to give up because it's hopeless.... The meteor, a pebble, a little larger than a match head, traveled through space and time since it came into being. The light from the star that died when the meteor was created fell on Earth before the first lungfish ventured from the sea. In its last instant, the meteor fell on the Moon. It was impeded by Evans' tractor. It drilled a small, neat hole through the casing of the steam turbine, and volitized upon striking the blades. Portions of the turbine also volitized; idling at eight thousand RPM, it became unstable. The shaft tried to tie itself into a knot, and the blades, damaged and undamaged were spit through the casing. The turbine again reached a stable state, that is, stopped. Permanently stopped. It was two days to sunrise, where Evans stood. It was just before sunset on a spring evening in September in Sydney. The shadow line between day and night could be seen from the Moon to be drifting across Australia. Evans, who had no watch, thought of the time as a quarter after Australia. Evans was a prospector, and like all prospectors, a sort of jackknife geologist, selenologist, rather. His tractor and equipment cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand was paid for. The rest was promissory notes and grubstake shares. When he was broke, which was usually, he used his tractor to haul uranium ore and metallic sodium from the mines at Potter's dike to Williamson Town, where the rockets landed. When he was flush, he would prospect for a couple of weeks. Once he followed a stampede to Yellow Crater, where he thought for a while that he had a fortune in chromium. The chromite petered out in a month and a half, and he was lucky to break even. Evans was about three hundred miles east of Williamson Town, the site of the first landing on the Moon. Evans was due back at Williamson Town at about sunset, that is, in about sixteen days. When he saw the wrecked turbine, he knew that he wouldn't make it. By careful rationing, he could probably stretch his food out to more than a month. His drinking water—kept separate from the water in the reactor—might conceivably last just as long. But his oxygen was too carefully measured; there was a four-day reserve. By diligent conservation, he might make it last an extra day. Four days reserve—plus one is five—plus sixteen days normal supply equals twenty-one days to live. In seventeen days he might be missed, but in seventeen days it would be dark again, and the search for him, if it ever began, could not begin for thirteen more days. At the earliest it would be eight days too late. "Well, man, 'tis a fine spot you're in now," he told himself. "Let's find out how bad it is indeed," he answered. He reached for the light switch and tried to turn it on. The switch was already in the "on" position. "Batteries must be dead," he told himself. "What batteries?" he asked. "There're no batteries in here, the power comes from the generator." "Why isn't the generator working, man?" he asked. He thought this one out carefully. The generator was not turned by the main turbine, but by a small reciprocating engine. The steam, however, came from the same boiler. And the boiler, of course, had emptied itself through the hole in the turbine. And the condenser, of course— "The condenser!" he shouted. He fumbled for a while, until he found a small flashlight. By the light of this, he reinspected the steam system, and found about three gallons of water frozen in the condenser. The condenser, like all condensers, was a device to convert steam into water, so that it could be reused in the boiler. This one had a tank and coils of tubing in the center of a curved reflector that was positioned to radiate the heat of the steam into the cold darkness of space. When the meteor pierced the turbine, the water in the condenser began to boil. This boiling lowered the temperature, and the condenser demonstrated its efficiency by quickly freezing the water in the tank. Evans sealed the turbine from the rest of the steam system by closing the shut-off valves. If there was any water in the boiler, it would operate the engine that drove the generator. The water would condense in the condenser, and with a little luck, melt the ice in there. Then, if the pump wasn't blocked by ice, it would return the water to the boiler. But there was no water in the boiler. Carefully he poured a cup of his drinking water into a pipe that led to the boiler, and resealed the pipe. He pulled on a knob marked "Nuclear Start/Safety Bypass." The water that he had poured into the boiler quickly turned into steam, and the steam turned the generator briefly. Evans watched the lights flicker and go out, and he guessed what the trouble was. "The water, man," he said, "there is not enough to melt the ice in the condenser." He opened the pipe again and poured nearly a half-gallon of water into the boiler. It was three days' supply of water, if it had been carefully used. It was one day's supply if used wastefully. It was ostentatious luxury for a man with a month's supply of water and twenty-one days to live. The generator started again, and the lights came on. They flickered as the boiler pressure began to fail, but the steam had melted some of the ice in the condenser, and the water pump began to function. "Well, man," he breathed, "there's a light to die by." The sun rose on Williamson Town at about the same time it rose on Evans. It was an incredibly brilliant disk in a black sky. The stars next to the sun shone as brightly as though there were no sun. They might have appeared to waver slightly, if they were behind outflung corona flares. If they did, no one noticed. No one looked toward the sun without dark filters. When Director McIlroy came into his office, he found it lighted by the rising sun. The light was a hot, brilliant white that seemed to pierce the darkest shadows of the room. He moved to the round window, screening his eyes from the light, and adjusted the polaroid shade to maximum density. The sun became an angry red brown, and the room was dark again. McIlroy decreased the density again until the room was comfortably lighted. The room felt stuffy, so he decided to leave the door to the inner office open. He felt a little guilty about this, because he had ordered that all doors in the survey building should remain closed except when someone was passing through them. This was to allow the air-conditioning system to function properly, and to prevent air loss in case of the highly improbable meteor damage. McIlroy thought that on the whole, he was disobeying his own orders no more flagrantly than anyone else in the survey. McIlroy had no illusions about his ability to lead men. Or rather, he did have one illusion; he thought that he was completely unfit as a leader. It was true that his strictest orders were disobeyed with cheerful contempt, but it was also true his mildest requests were complied with eagerly and smoothly. Everyone in the survey except McIlroy realized this, and even he accepted this without thinking about it. He had fallen into the habit of suggesting mildly anything that he wanted done, and writing orders he didn't particularly care to have obeyed. For example, because of an order of his stating that there would be no alcoholic beverages within the survey building, the entire survey was assured of a constant supply of home-made, but passably good liquor. Even McIlroy enjoyed the surreptitious drinking. "Good morning, Mr. McIlroy," said Mrs. Garth, his secretary. Morning to Mrs. Garth was simply the first four hours after waking. "Good morning indeed," answered McIlroy. Morning to him had no meaning at all, but he thought in the strictest sense that it would be morning on the Moon for another week. "Has the power crew set up the solar furnace?" he asked. The solar furnace was a rough parabola of mirrors used to focus the sun's heat on anything that it was desirable to heat. It was used mostly, from sun-up to sun-down, to supplement the nuclear power plant. "They went out about an hour ago," she answered, "I suppose that's what they were going to do." "Very good, what's first on the schedule?" "A Mr. Phelps to see you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Phelps," McIlroy greeted him. "Good afternoon," Mr. Phelps replied. "I'm here representing the Merchants' Bank Association." "Fine," McIlroy said, "I suppose you're here to set up a bank." "That's right, I just got in from Muroc last night, and I've been going over the assets of the Survey Credit Association all morning." "I'll certainly be glad to get them off my hands," McIlroy said. "I hope they're in good order." "There doesn't seem to be any profit," Mr. Phelps said. "That's par for a nonprofit organization," said McIlroy. "But we're amateurs, and we're turning this operation over to professionals. I'm sure it will be to everyone's satisfaction." "I know this seems like a silly question. What day is this?" "Well," said McIlroy, "that's not so silly. I don't know either." "Mrs. Garth," he called, "what day is this?" "Why, September, I think," she answered. "I mean what day ." "I don't know, I'll call the observatory." There was a pause. "They say what day where?" she asked. "Greenwich, I guess, our official time is supposed to be Greenwich Mean Time." There was another pause. "They say it's September fourth, one thirty a.m. " "Well, there you are," laughed McIlroy, "it isn't that time doesn't mean anything here, it just doesn't mean the same thing." Mr. Phelps joined the laughter. "Bankers' hours don't mean much, at any rate," he said. The power crew was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear several of the mirrors loose. "What happened here?" Spotty Cade, one of the electrical technicians asked his foreman, Cowalczk, over the intercommunications radio. "I've got about a hundred pinholes in the cables out here. It's no wonder they don't work." "Meteor shower," Cowalczk answered, "and that's not half of it. Walker says he's got a half dozen mirrors cracked or pitted, and Hoffman on bank three wants you to replace a servo motor. He says the bearing was hit." "When did it happen?" Cade wanted to know. "Must have been last night, at least two or three days ago. All of 'em too small for Radar to pick up, and not enough for Seismo to get a rumble." "Sounds pretty bad." "Could have been worse," said Cowalczk. "How's that?" "Wasn't anybody out in it." "Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way." "I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit." "It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented. "That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them." "You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?" Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one. After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag. "A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon." He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him. One at a time, back in the tractor, he took the crystals out of the bags and analyzed them as well as he could without using a flame which would waste oxygen. The ones that looked like zeolites were zeolites, all right, or something very much like it. One of the crystals that he thought was quartz turned out to be calcite, and one of the ones that he was sure could be nothing but calcite was actually potassium nitrate. "Well, now," he said, "it's probably the largest natural crystal of potassium nitrate that anyone has ever seen. Man, it's a full inch across." All of these needed water to form, and their existence on the Moon puzzled him for a while. Then he opened the bag that had contained the unusual hexagonal crystals, and the puzzle resolved itself. There was nothing in the bag but a few drops of water. What he had taken to be a type of rock was ice, frozen in a niche that had never been warmed by the sun. The sun rose to the meridian slowly. It was a week after sunrise. The stars shone coldly, and wheeled in their slow course with the sun. Only Earth remained in the same spot in the black sky. The shadow line crept around until Earth was nearly dark, and then the rim of light appeared on the opposite side. For a while Earth was a dark disk in a thin halo, and then the light came to be a crescent, and the line of dawn began to move around Earth. The continents drifted across the dark disk and into the crescent. The people on Earth saw the full moon set about the same time that the sun rose. Nickel Jones was the captain of a supply rocket. He made trips from and to the Moon about once a month, carrying supplies in and metal and ores out. At this time he was visiting with his old friend McIlroy. "I swear, Mac," said Jones, "another season like this, and I'm going back to mining." "I thought you were doing pretty well," said McIlroy, as he poured two drinks from a bottle of Scotch that Jones had brought him. "Oh, the money I like, but I will say that I'd have more if I didn't have to fight the union and the Lunar Trade Commission." McIlroy had heard all of this before. "How's that?" he asked politely. "You may think it's myself running the ship," Jones started on his tirade, "but it's not. The union it is that says who I can hire. The union it is that says how much I must pay, and how large a crew I need. And then the Commission ..." The word seemed to give Jones an unpleasant taste in his mouth, which he hurriedly rinsed with a sip of Scotch. "The Commission," he continued, making the word sound like an obscenity, "it is that tells me how much I can charge for freight." McIlroy noticed that his friend's glass was empty, and he quietly filled it again. "And then," continued Jones, "if I buy a cargo up here, the Commission it is that says what I'll sell it for. If I had my way, I'd charge only fifty cents a pound for freight instead of the dollar forty that the Commission insists on. That's from here to Earth, of course. There's no profit I could make by cutting rates the other way." "Why not?" asked McIlroy. He knew the answer, but he liked to listen to the slightly Welsh voice of Jones. "Near cost it is now at a dollar forty. But what sense is there in charging the same rate to go either way when it takes about a seventh of the fuel to get from here to Earth as it does to get from there to here?" "What good would it do to charge fifty cents a pound?" asked McIlroy. "The nickel, man, the tons of nickel worth a dollar and a half on Earth, and not worth mining here; the low-grade ores of uranium and vanadium, they need these things on Earth, but they can't get them as long as it isn't worth the carrying of them. And then, of course, there's the water we haven't got. We could afford to bring more water for more people, and set up more distilling plants if we had the money from the nickel. "Even though I say it who shouldn't, two-eighty a quart is too much to pay for water." Both men fell silent for a while. Then Jones spoke again: "Have you seen our friend Evans lately? The price of chromium has gone up, and I think he could ship some of his ore from Yellow Crater at a profit." "He's out prospecting again. I don't expect to see him until sun-down." "I'll likely see him then. I won't be loaded for another week and a half. Can't you get in touch with him by radio?" "He isn't carrying one. Most of the prospectors don't. They claim that a radio that won't carry beyond the horizon isn't any good, and one that will bounce messages from Earth takes up too much room." "Well, if I don't see him, you let him know about the chromium." "Anything to help another Welshman, is that the idea?" "Well, protection it is that a poor Welshman needs from all the English and Scots. Speaking of which—" "Oh, of course," McIlroy grinned as he refilled the glasses. " Slainte, McIlroy, bach. " [Health, McIlroy, man.] " Slainte mhor, bach. " [Great Health, man.] The sun was halfway to the horizon, and Earth was a crescent in the sky when Evans had quarried all the ice that was available in the cave. The thought grew on him as he worked that this couldn't be the only such cave in the area. There must be several more bubbles in the lava flow. Part of his reasoning proved correct. That is, he found that by chipping, he could locate small bubbles up to an inch in diameter, each one with its droplet of water. The average was about one per cent of the volume of each bubble filled with ice. A quarter of a mile from the tractor, Evans found a promising looking mound of lava. It was rounded on top, and it could easily be the dome of a bubble. Suddenly, Evans noticed that the gauge on the oxygen tank of his suit was reading dangerously near empty. He turned back to his tractor, moving as slowly as he felt safe in doing. Running would use up oxygen too fast. He was halfway there when the pressure warning light went on, and the signal sounded inside his helmet. He turned on his ten-minute reserve supply, and made it to the tractor with about five minutes left. The air purifying apparatus in the suit was not as efficient as the one in the tractor; it wasted oxygen. By using the suit so much, Evans had already shortened his life by several days. He resolved not to leave the tractor again, and reluctantly abandoned his plan to search for a large bubble. The sun stood at half its diameter above the horizon. The shadows of the mountains stretched out to touch the shadows of the other mountains. The dawning line of light covered half of Earth, and Earth turned beneath it. Cowalczk itched under his suit, and the sweat on his face prickled maddeningly because he couldn't reach it through his helmet. He pushed his forehead against the faceplate of his helmet and rubbed off some of the sweat. It didn't help much, and it left a blurred spot in his vision. That annoyed him. "Is everyone clear of the outlet?" he asked. "All clear," he heard Cade report through the intercom. "How come we have to blow the boilers now?" asked Lehman. "Because I say so," Cowalczk shouted, surprised at his outburst and ashamed of it. "Boiler scale," he continued, much calmer. "We've got to clean out the boilers once a year to make sure the tubes in the reactor don't clog up." He squinted through his dark visor at the reactor building, a gray concrete structure a quarter of a mile distant. "It would be pretty bad if they clogged up some night." "Pressure's ten and a half pounds," said Cade. "Right, let her go," said Cowalczk. Cade threw a switch. In the reactor building, a relay closed. A motor started turning, and the worm gear on the motor opened a valve on the boiler. A stream of muddy water gushed into a closed vat. When the vat was about half full, the water began to run nearly clear. An electric eye noted that fact and a light in front of Cade turned on. Cade threw the switch back the other way, and the relay in the reactor building opened. The motor turned and the gears started to close the valve. But a fragment of boiler scale held the valve open. "Valve's stuck," said Cade. "Open it and close it again," said Cowalczk. The sweat on his forehead started to run into his eyes. He banged his hand on his faceplate in an unconscious attempt to wipe it off. He cursed silently, and wiped it off on the inside of his helmet again. This time, two drops ran down the inside of his faceplate. "Still don't work," said Cade. "Keep trying," Cowalczk ordered. "Lehman, get a Geiger counter and come with me, we've got to fix this thing." Lehman and Cowalczk, who were already suited up started across to the reactor building. Cade, who was in the pressurized control room without a suit on, kept working the switch back and forth. There was light that indicated when the valve was open. It was on, and it stayed on, no matter what Cade did. "The vat pressure's too high," Cade said. "Let me know when it reaches six pounds," Cowalczk requested. "Because it'll probably blow at seven." The vat was a light plastic container used only to decant sludge out of the water. It neither needed nor had much strength. "Six now," said Cade. Cowalczk and Lehman stopped halfway to the reactor. The vat bulged and ruptured. A stream of mud gushed out and boiled dry on the face of the Moon. Cowalczk and Lehman rushed forward again. They could see the trickle of water from the discharge pipe. The motor turned the valve back and forth in response to Cade's signals. "What's going on out there?" demanded McIlroy on the intercom. "Scale stuck in the valve," Cowalczk answered. "Are the reactors off?" "Yes. Vat blew. Shut up! Let me work, Mac!" "Sorry," McIlroy said, realizing that this was no time for officials. "Let me know when it's fixed." "Geiger's off scale," Lehman said. "We're probably O.K. in these suits for an hour," Cowalczk answered. "Is there a manual shut-off?" "Not that I know of," Lehman answered. "What about it, Cade?" "I don't think so," Cade said. "I'll get on the blower and rouse out an engineer." "O.K., but keep working that switch." "I checked the line as far as it's safe," said Lehman. "No valve." "O.K.," Cowalczk said. "Listen, Cade, are the injectors still on?" "Yeah. There's still enough heat in these reactors to do some damage. I'll cut 'em in about fifteen minutes." "I've found the trouble," Lehman said. "The worm gear's loose on its shaft. It's slipping every time the valve closes. There's not enough power in it to crush the scale." "Right," Cowalczk said. "Cade, open the valve wide. Lehman, hand me that pipe wrench!" Cowalczk hit the shaft with the back of the pipe wrench, and it broke at the motor bearing. Cowalczk and Lehman fitted the pipe wrench to the gear on the valve, and turned it. "Is the light off?" Cowalczk asked. "No," Cade answered. "Water's stopped. Give us some pressure, we'll see if it holds." "Twenty pounds," Cade answered after a couple of minutes. "Take her up to ... no, wait, it's still leaking," Cowalczk said. "Hold it there, we'll open the valve again." "O.K.," said Cade. "An engineer here says there's no manual cutoff." "Like Hell," said Lehman. Cowalczk and Lehman opened the valve again. Water spurted out, and dwindled as they closed the valve. "What did you do?" asked Cade. "The light went out and came on again." "Check that circuit and see if it works," Cowalczk instructed. There was a pause. "It's O.K.," Cade said. Cowalczk and Lehman opened and closed the valve again. "Light is off now," Cade said. "Good," said Cowalczk, "take the pressure up all the way, and we'll see what happens." "Eight hundred pounds," Cade said, after a short wait. "Good enough," Cowalczk said. "Tell that engineer to hold up a while, he can fix this thing as soon as he gets parts. Come on, Lehman, let's get out of here." "Well, I'm glad that's over," said Cade. "You guys had me worried for a while." "Think we weren't worried?" Lehman asked. "And it's not over." "What?" Cade asked. "Oh, you mean the valve servo you two bashed up?" "No," said Lehman, "I mean the two thousand gallons of water that we lost." "Two thousand?" Cade asked. "We only had seven hundred gallons reserve. How come we can operate now?" "We picked up twelve hundred from the town sewage plant. What with using the solar furnace as a radiator, we can make do." "Oh, God, I suppose this means water rationing again." "You're probably right, at least until the next rocket lands in a couple of weeks." PROSPECTOR FEARED LOST ON MOON IPP Williamson Town, Moon, Sept. 21st. Scientific survey director McIlroy released a statement today that Howard Evans, a prospector is missing and presumed lost. Evans, who was apparently exploring the Moon in search of minerals was due two days ago, but it was presumed that he was merely temporarily delayed. Evans began his exploration on August 25th, and was known to be carrying several days reserve of oxygen and supplies. Director McIlroy has expressed a hope that Evans will be found before his oxygen runs out. Search parties have started from Williamson Town, but telescopic search from Palomar and the new satellite observatory are hindered by the fact that Evans is lost on the part of the Moon which is now dark. Little hope is held for radio contact with the missing man as it is believed he was carrying only short-range, intercommunications equipment. Nevertheless, receivers are ... Captain Nickel Jones was also expressing a hope: "Anyway, Mac," he was saying to McIlroy, "a Welshman knows when his luck's run out. And never a word did he say." "Like as not, you're right," McIlroy replied, "but if I know Evans, he'd never say a word about any forebodings." "Well, happen I might have a bit of Welsh second sight about me, and it tells me that Evans will be found." McIlroy chuckled for the first time in several days. "So that's the reason you didn't take off when you were scheduled," he said. "Well, yes," Jones answered. "I thought that it might happen that a rocket would be needed in the search." The light from Earth lighted the Moon as the Moon had never lighted Earth. The great blue globe of Earth, the only thing larger than the stars, wheeled silently in the sky. As it turned, the shadow of sunset crept across the face that could be seen from the Moon. From full Earth, as you might say, it moved toward last quarter. The rising sun shone into Director McIlroy's office. The hot light formed a circle on the wall opposite the window, and the light became more intense as the sun slowly pulled over the horizon. Mrs. Garth walked into the director's office, and saw the director sleeping with his head cradled in his arms on the desk. She walked softly to the window and adjusted the shade to darken the office. She stood looking at McIlroy for a moment, and when he moved slightly in his sleep, she walked softly out of the office. A few minutes later she was back with a cup of coffee. She placed it in front of the director, and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up, Mr. McIlroy," she said, "you told me to wake you at sunrise, and there it is, and here's Mr. Phelps." McIlroy woke up slowly. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. His neck was stiff from sleeping in such an awkward position. "'Morning, Mr. Phelps," he said. "Good morning," Phelps answered, dropping tiredly into a chair. "Have some coffee, Mr. Phelps," said Mrs. Garth, handing him a cup. "Any news?" asked McIlroy. "About Evans?" Phelps shook his head slowly. "Palomar called in a few minutes back. Nothing to report and the sun was rising there. Australia will be in position pretty soon. Several observatories there. Then Capetown. There are lots of observatories in Europe, but most of them are clouded over. Anyway the satellite observatory will be in position by the time Europe is." McIlroy was fully awake. He glanced at Phelps and wondered how long it had been since he had slept last. More than that, McIlroy wondered why this banker, who had never met Evans, was losing so much sleep about finding him. It began to dawn on McIlroy that nearly the whole population of Williamson Town was involved, one way or another, in the search. The director turned to ask Phelps about this fact, but the banker was slumped in his chair, fast asleep with his coffee untouched. It was three hours later that McIlroy woke Phelps. "They've found the tractor," McIlroy said. "Good," Phelps mumbled, and then as comprehension came; "That's fine! That's just line! Is Evans—?" "Can't tell yet. They spotted the tractor from the satellite observatory. Captain Jones took off a few minutes ago, and he'll report back as soon as he lands. Hadn't you better get some sleep?" Evans was carrying a block of ice into the tractor when he saw the rocket coming in for a landing. He dropped the block and stood waiting. When the dust settled from around the tail of the rocket, he started to run forward. The air lock opened, and Evans recognized the vacuum suited figure of Nickel Jones. "Evans, man!" said Jones' voice in the intercom. "Alive you are!" "A Welshman takes a lot of killing," Evans answered. Later, in Evans' tractor, he was telling his story: "... And I don't know how long I sat there after I found the water." He looked at the Goldburgian device he had made out of wire and tubing. "Finally I built this thing. These caves were made of lava. They must have been formed by steam some time, because there's a floor of ice in all of 'em. "The idea didn't come all at once, it took a long time for me to remember that water is made out of oxygen and hydrogen. When I remembered that, of course, I remembered that it can be separated with electricity. So I built this thing. "It runs an electric current through water, lets the oxygen loose in the room, and pipes the hydrogen outside. It doesn't work automatically, of course, so I run it about an hour a day. My oxygen level gauge shows how long." "You're a genius, man!" Jones exclaimed. "No," Evans answered, "a Welshman, nothing more." "Well, then," said Jones, "are you ready to start back?" "Back?" "Well, it was to rescue you that I came." "I don't need rescuing, man," Evans said. Jones stared at him blankly. "You might let me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file my claim." "Claim?" "Sure, man, I've thousands of tons of water here. It's the richest mine on the Moon!" THE END
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D. He thought his oxygen machine was meant to be a temporary survival tool
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Why did the Lane family move to Wisconsin?
A. For Mr. Lane’s work
B. To be near family and friends
C. For Mrs. Lane’s singing career
D. For Peggy’s school
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PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER I Dramatic Dialogue “Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions like this can’t be made quickly.” “But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother, her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?” Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in your way. The only question is whether the time is right, or if you should wait longer.” 2 “Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already! The theater is full of beginners a year and even two years younger than I am, and girls of my age have lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to wait for?” Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs against the wall behind him. He took his time before answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was warm and slow. “Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging from the plays I’ve seen you in at high school and college—that you have a real talent. But I thought that if you would go on with college for three more years and get your degree, you would gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use and enjoy for the rest of your life—” “But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried. “There’s more to life than that,” her father put in. “There’s history and literature and foreign languages and mathematics and sciences and music and art and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating and all important.” “None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,” Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important to my life.” 3 Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered just the same way when I was your age, except that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and practice it needed.” She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s intense expression, then took a deep breath before going on. “What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful, but the theater is full of young girls whose parents thought they were the most talented things alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school and college plays; girls who have everything except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you to have something to fall back on, just in case you ever need it.” Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a teacher’s certificate so that you can always find useful work if you have to. Then you can try your luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?” 4 Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for a few moments before answering. Then, looking first at her mother and then at her father, she replied firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we were talking about anything else but acting, but we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better chance now than I will in three years. But I can see your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll make a bargain with you.” “What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously. “If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance. And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before I try the theater again. How does that sound to you?” “It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but are you so confident that you’ll see results in one year? After all, some of our top stars worked many times that long before getting any recognition.” “I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,” Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time, and maybe be able to make a living out of acting. And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to, I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t, I’ll come home.” 5 “It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed and expected to see her name in lights in a few weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning to think that maybe she’s right about this being the best time.” “Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed. Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t ... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he took it out of his mouth before continuing more evenly. “Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because we love you so much and want what’s going to make you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember, I’m not a complete stranger to show business. Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the Eagle , I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and actresses ... and I know how hard the city often was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it a little longer and let me talk to your mother some more.” 6 Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.” Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.” As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she turned to look back just in time to see her mother throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance. Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind her and started for the barn. Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming, she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting. Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube. Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against Peggy’s hand in appreciation. As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet and checked to see that there was enough straw in the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and the new life that she might soon be going to. 7 Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people supported good schools, an excellent library, and two good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community College attracted theater groups and concert artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating. And of course, all of this was in addition to the usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing, movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a girl could want. Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded street, every country road, field, lake, and stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then as soon as she possibly could. It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave Rockport. She was not running away from anything, she reminded herself; she was running to something. To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering towers of a make-believe movie-set New York? Would it really be like that? Or would it be something different, something like the dreary side-street world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in movies? 8 Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going from office to office looking for a part in a play, Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big, soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the horse’s cheek. “Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air won’t clear my silly mind!” With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind, stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents had reached a decision about her future. Fighting down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to see how they were coming along, Peggy continued down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s house at the end of the block. As she walked by her own home, she noticed with a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on the front lawn broke up the light from the windows behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment, or maybe a little more, she wondered why she wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be better? 9 II Dramatic Decision Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair, which was now white with lather and piled up in a high, soapy knot. “You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are you doing it again—or still?” Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds. “Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s a nervous habit!” “It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh. “Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head. “There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?” 10 After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled another dry towel around her head like an Indian turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient, tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered, bedroom. When they had made themselves comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came straight to the point. “So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked. “How do you know they haven’t decided anything yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone. “Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against the New York trip, your face would be as long as Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it! You would have been flying around the room and talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was decided yet.” “You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince Mother and Dad by now.” “Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!” With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at her. A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful smile. 11 “You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before treating me like an adult.” “Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I know that they’re not the least bit worried about your being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a doubt in the world about you. But they know how hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they want to be sure that you have a profession in case you don’t get a break in show business.” “I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain” with her parents. “They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded, “and when I went out, they were talking it over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only change your mind and decide to come with me and try it too!” 12 After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before, and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s not there when it isn’t!” “But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle comedy and character lines as well as anyone I know!” Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot more to being an actress—a successful one—than reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something you can’t learn; you either have it, or you don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can make them look at you and respond to you and be with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress. And that’s why I’m not.” “But, Jean—” Peggy began. 13 “No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this enough before, and I’m not going to change my mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my certificate as an English teacher.” “And what about acting? Can you get it out of your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked. “That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,” Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look that was completely out of place on her round, freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special course in the literature of the theater and maybe another one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the high-school drama group and put on plays. That way, I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming much more serious, “I have a chance really to do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage one or two people with real talent like yours, then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth while.” Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental, or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s talent had touched her more than she could say. 14 The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind her back. Running out of the bedroom, she called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about time for your big Hour of Decision scene!” It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt that her parents had had enough time to talk things out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her mother and father every minute she could. Reaching her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the words. Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him through the window. He was speaking on the telephone, and now she caught his words. “Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again, after all these years! Good-by.” As Peggy entered the room, her father put down the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,” he said, “it’s all set.” “What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a run to her father’s side. 15 “Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s not a man in the world who can hold out against two determined women.” He leaned back against the fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship, to the big easy chair and slowly sat down. “Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried. “Where’s the enthusiasm?” Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and poised ... and very grown-up,” she said. “But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she jumped out of the chair—“to yell whoopee !” She yelled at the top of her lungs. After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement, Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the favorite household conference room, for cookies and milk and more talk. “Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,” but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the phone, and where are the three of us going, and what’s all set?” 16 “One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s experience in the theater. But then we had to decide just where you would live, and where you should study, and how much money you would need, and a whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for some years, but I thought she might give us some good advice.” “And did she?” Peggy asked. “We were luckier than I would have thought possible,” Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into a rooming house especially for young actresses. She always wanted a house of her own with a garden in back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone. This way, she can afford to run a big place and at the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says she has a room that you can have!” “Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted. “I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses, and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she can teach me loads!” “I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can the New York Dramatic Academy.” “Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky. “Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country! How—?” 17 “Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted. “You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place to study acting, and she said she would set up an audition for you in two days. The term starts in a couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.” “Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New York day after tomorrow, just like that?” “Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting time, once his mind is made up.” “Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe what she had heard. “What are we sitting here talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—” “Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk about what you should read, and take an afternoon plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to be a busy time for all of us.” Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense of what her father said. She finished her milk and cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs to bed. But it was one thing to go to bed and another to go to sleep. 18 Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and the patterns of light and shade cast by the street lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows, she reviewed the roles she had played since her first time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh herself on? Which ones would she do best? And which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized that she had grown and developed past some of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited to her talent and her appearance. But both had changed. She was certainly not a mature actress yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something sharper was called for. Perhaps Viola in Twelfth Night ? Or perhaps not Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy would think she was too arty or too pretentious? Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of stormy emotion, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire ? Or, better for her development and age, a light, brittle, comedy role...? 19 Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be talking with the characters from another and moving about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or three different plays. More actors kept coming on in a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast asleep.
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A. For Mr. Lane’s work
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What text sequences are associated with each vertex?
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### Introduction
Networks are ubiquitous, with prominent examples including social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) or citation networks of research papers (e.g., arXiv). When analyzing data from these real-world networks, traditional methods often represent vertices (nodes) as one-hot representations (containing the connectivity information of each vertex with respect to all other vertices), usually suffering from issues related to the inherent sparsity of large-scale networks. This results in models that are not able to fully capture the relationships between vertices of the network BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . Alternatively, network embedding (i.e., network representation learning) has been considered, representing each vertex of a network with a low-dimensional vector that preserves information on its similarity relative to other vertices. This approach has attracted considerable attention in recent years BIBREF2 , BIBREF0 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 . Traditional network embedding approaches focus primarily on learning representations of vertices that preserve local structure, as well as internal structural properties of the network. For instance, Isomap BIBREF9 , LINE BIBREF3 , and Grarep BIBREF10 were proposed to preserve first-, second-, and higher-order proximity between nodes, respectively. DeepWalk BIBREF0 , which learns vertex representations from random-walk sequences, similarly, only takes into account structural information of the network. However, in real-world networks, vertices usually contain rich textual information (e.g., user profiles in Facebook, paper abstracts in arXiv, user-generated content on Twitter, etc.), which may be leveraged effectively for learning more informative embeddings. To address this opportunity, BIBREF11 proposed text-associated DeepWalk, to incorporate textual information into the vectorial representations of vertices (embeddings). BIBREF12 employed deep recurrent neural networks to integrate the information from vertex-associated text into network representations. Further, BIBREF13 proposed to more effectively model the semantic relationships between vertices using a mutual attention mechanism. Although these methods have demonstrated performance gains over structure-only network embeddings, the relationship between text sequences for a pair of vertices is accounted for solely by comparing their sentence embeddings. However, as shown in Figure 1 , to assess the similarity between two research papers, a more effective strategy would compare and align (via local-weighting) individual important words (keywords) within a pair of abstracts, while information from other words (e.g., stop words) that tend to be less relevant can be effectively ignored (down-weighted). This alignment mechanism is difficult to accomplish in models where text sequences are first embedded into a common space and then compared in pairs BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 . We propose to learn a semantic-aware Network Embedding (NE) that incorporates word-level alignment features abstracted from text sequences associated with vertex pairs. Given a pair of sentences, our model first aligns each word within one sentence with keywords from the other sentence (adaptively up-weighted via an attention mechanism), producing a set of fine-grained matching vectors. These features are then accumulated via a simple but efficient aggregation function, obtaining the final representation for the sentence. As a result, the word-by-word alignment features (as illustrated in Figure 1 ) are explicitly and effectively captured by our model. Further, the learned network embeddings under our framework are adaptive to the specific (local) vertices that are considered, and thus are context-aware and especially suitable for downstream tasks, such as link prediction. Moreover, since the word-by-word matching procedure introduced here is highly parallelizable and does not require any complex encoding networks, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), our framework requires significantly less time for training, which is attractive for large-scale network applications. We evaluate our approach on three real-world datasets spanning distinct network-embedding-based applications: link prediction, vertex classification and visualization. We show that the proposed word-by-word alignment mechanism efficiently incorporates textual information into the network embedding, and consistently exhibits superior performance relative to several competitive baselines. Analyses considering the extracted word-by-word pairs further validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. ### Problem Definition
A network (graph) is defined as $G = \lbrace V,E\rbrace $ , where $V$ and $E$ denote the set of $N$ vertices (nodes) and edges, respectively, where elements of $E$ are two-element subsets of $V$ . Here we only consider undirected networks, however, our approach (introduced below) can be readily extended to the directed case. We also define $W$ , the symmetric $\mathbb {R}^{N \times N}$ matrix whose elements, $w_{ij}$ , denote the weights associated with edges in $V$ , and $V$0 , the set of text sequences assigned to each vertex. Edges and weights contain the structural information of the network, while the text can be used to characterize the semantic properties of each vertex. Given network $V$1 , with the network embedding we seek to encode each vertex into a low-dimensional vector $V$2 (with dimension much smaller than $V$3 ), while preserving structural and semantic features of $V$4 . ### Framework Overview
To incorporate both structural and semantic information into the network embeddings, we specify two types of (latent) embeddings: ( $i$ ) $_s$ , the structural embedding; and ( $ii$ ) $_t$ , the textual embedding. Specifically, each vertex in $G$ is encoded into a low-dimensional embedding $= [_s; _t]$ . To learn these embeddings, we specify an objective that leverages the information from both $W$ and $T$ , denoted as $$= \sum _{e \in E} _{\textrm {struct}}(e) + _{\textrm {text}}(e) + _{\textrm {joint}}(e) \,,$$ (Eq. 4) where $_{\textrm {struct}}$ , $_{\textrm {text}}$ and $_{\textrm {joint}}$ denote structure, text, and joint structure-text training losses, respectively. For a vertex pair $\lbrace v_i,v_j\rbrace $ weighted by $w_{ij}$ , $_{\textrm {struct}}(v_i, v_j)$ in ( 4 ) is defined as BIBREF3 $$_{\textrm {struct}}(v_i, v_j) = w_{ij} \log p(^i_s|^j_{s}) \,,$$ (Eq. 5) where $p(^i_s|^j_{s})$ denotes the conditional probability between structural embeddings for vertices $\lbrace v_i,v_j\rbrace $ . To leverage the textual information in $T$ , similar text-specific and joint structure-text training objectives are also defined $$_{\textrm {text}}(v_i, v_j) & = w_{ij} \alpha _1 \log p(^i_t|^j_{t}) \,, \\
_{\textrm {joint}}(v_i, v_j) & = w_{ij} \alpha _2 \log p(^i_t|^j_{s}) \\
& + w_{ij}\alpha _3 \log p(^i_s|^j_{t}) \,,$$ (Eq. 6) where $p(^i_t|^j_t)$ and $p(^i_t|^j_s)$ (or $p(^i_s|^j_t)$ ) denote the conditional probability for a pair of text embeddings and text embedding given structure embedding (or vice versa), respectively, for vertices $\lbrace v_i,v_j\rbrace $ . Further, $\alpha _1$ , $\alpha _2$ and $\alpha _3$ are hyperparameters that balance the impact of the different training-loss components. Note that structural embeddings, $_s$ , are treated directly as parameters, while the text embeddings $_t$ are learned based on the text sequences associated with vertices. For all conditional probability terms, we follow BIBREF3 and consider the second-order proximity between vertex pairs. Thus, for vertices $\lbrace v_i,v_j\rbrace $ , the probability of generating $_i$ conditioned on $_j$ may be written as $$p(^i|^j) = \frac{\exp \left({^j}^T ^i\right)}{\textstyle {\sum }_{k=1}^{N}\exp \left({^j}^T ^k\right)} \,.$$ (Eq. 7) Note that ( 7 ) can be applied to both structural and text embeddings in ( 5 ) and ( 6 ). Inspired by BIBREF13 , we further assume that vertices in the network play different roles depending on the vertex with which they interact. Thus, for a given vertex, the text embedding, $_t$ , is adaptive (specific) to the vertex it is being conditioned on. This type of context-aware textual embedding has demonstrated superior performance relative to context-free embeddings BIBREF13 . In the following two sections, we describe our strategy for encoding the text sequence associated with an edge into its adaptive textual embedding, via word-by-context and word-by-word alignments. ### Word-by-Context Alignment
We first introduce our base model, which re-weights the importance of individual words within a text sequence in the context of the edge being considered. Consider text sequences associated with two vertices connected by an edge, denoted $t_a$ and $t_b$ and contained in $T$ . Text sequences $t_a$ and $t_b$ are of lengths $M_a$ and $M_b$ , respectively, and are represented by $_a\in \mathbb {R}^{d\times M_a}$ and $_b\in \mathbb {R}^{d\times M_b}$ , respectively, where $d$ is the dimension of the word embedding. Further, $t_b$0 denotes the embedding of the $t_b$1 -th word in sequence $t_b$2 . Our goal is to encode text sequences $t_a$ and $t_b$ into counterpart-aware vectorial representations $_a$ and $_b$ . Thus, while inferring the adaptive textual embedding for sentence $t_a$ , we propose re-weighting the importance of each word in $t_a$ to explicitly account for its alignment with sentence $t_b$ . The weight $\alpha _i$ , corresponding to the $i$ -th word in $t_a$ , is generated as: $$\alpha _i = \frac{\exp (\tanh (_1 _b + _2 ^{(i)}_a))}{\sum _{j = 1}^{M_a} \exp (\tanh (_1 _b + _2 ^{(j)}_a))} \,,$$ (Eq. 9) where $_1$ and $_2$ are model parameters and $_b = \sum _{i = 1}^{M_b} x^b_i$ is the context vector of sequence $t_b$ , obtained by simply averaging over all the word embeddings in the sequence, similar to fastText BIBREF19 . Further, the word-by-context embedding for sequence $t_a$ is obtained by taking the weighted average over all word embeddings $$h_a = \textstyle {\sum }_{i = 1}^{M_a} \alpha _i ^{(i)}_a \,.$$ (Eq. 10) Intuitively, $\alpha _i$ may be understood as the relevance score between the $i$ th word in $t_a$ and sequence $t_b$ . Specifically, keywords within $t_a$ , in the context of $t_b$ , should be assigned larger weights, while less important words will be correspondingly down-weighted. Similarly, $h_b$ is encoded as a weighted embedding using ( 9 ) and ( 10 ). ### Fine-Grained Word-by-Word Alignment
With the alignment in the previous section, word-by-context matching features $\alpha _i$ are modeled; however, the word-by-word alignment information (fine-grained), which is key to characterize the relationship between two vertices (as discussed in the above), is not explicitly captured. So motivated, we further propose an architecture to explicitly abstract word-by-word alignment information from $t_a$ and $t_b$ , to learn the relationship between the two vertices. This is inspired by the recent success of Relation Networks (RNs) for relational reasoning BIBREF20 . As illustrated in Figure 2 , given two input embedding matrices $_a$ and $_b$ , we first compute the affinity matrix $\in \mathbb {R}^{M_b\times M_a}$ , whose elements represent the affinity scores corresponding to all word pairs between sequences $t_a$ and $t_b$ $$= ^T_b_a \,.$$ (Eq. 13) Subsequently, we compute the context-aware matrix for sequence $t_b$ as $$_b = \textrm {softmax}() \,, \qquad \widetilde{}_b = _b_b \,,$$ (Eq. 14) where the $\textrm {softmax}(\cdot )$ function is applied column-wise to $$ , and thus $_b$ contains the attention weights (importance scores) across sequence $t_b$ (columns), which account for each word in sequence $t_a$ (rows). Thus, matrix $\widetilde{}_b \in \mathbb {R}^{d\times M_a}$ in ( 14 ) constitutes an attention-weighted embedding for $_b$ . Specifically, the $i$ -th column of $\widetilde{}_b$ , denoted as $\widetilde{}^{(i)}_b$ , can be understood as a weighted average over all the words in $$0 , where higher attention weights indicate better alignment (match) with the $$1 -th word in $$2 . To abstract the word-by-word alignments, we compare $^{(i)}_a$ with $\widetilde{}^{(i)}_b$ , for $i=1,2,...,M_a$ , to obtain the corresponding matching vector $$^{(i)}_a=f_{\textrm {align}}\left(^{(i)}_a,\widetilde{}^{(i)}_b\right) \,,$$ (Eq. 15) where $f_{\textrm {align}}(\cdot )$ represents the alignment function. Inspired by the observation in BIBREF16 that simple comparison/alignment functions based on element-wise operations exhibit excellent performance in matching text sequences, here we use a combination of element-wise subtraction and multiplication as $
f_{\textrm {align}}(^{(i)}_a,\widetilde{}^{(i)}_a) = [^{(i)}_a - \widetilde{}^{(i)}_a; ^{(i)}_a \odot \widetilde{}^{(i)}_a] \,,
$ where $\odot $ denotes the element-wise Hadamard product, then these two operations are concatenated to produce the matching vector $^{(i)}_a$ . Note these operators may be used individually or combined as we will investigate in our experiments. Subsequently, matching vectors from ( 15 ) are aggregated to produce the final textual embedding $_t^a$ for sequence $t_a$ as $$_t^a=f_{\textrm {aggregate}}\left(^{(1)}_a,^{(2)}_a,...,^{(M_a)}_a\right) \,,$$ (Eq. 16) where $f_{\textrm {aggregate}}$ denotes the aggregation function, which we specify as the max-pooling pooling operation. Notably, other commutative operators, such as summation or average pooling, can be otherwise employed. Although these aggregation functions are simple and invariant to the order of words in input sentences, they have been demonstrated to be highly effective in relational reasoning BIBREF15 , BIBREF20 . To further explore this, in Section "Ablation Study" , we conduct an ablation study comparing different choices of alignment and aggregation functions. The representation $_b$ can be obtained in a similar manner through ( 13 ), ( 14 ), ( 15 ) and ( 16 ), but replacing ( 13 ) with $= ^T_a_b$ (its transpose). Note that this word-by-word alignment is more computationally involved than word-by-context; however, the former has substantially fewer parameters to learn, provided we no longer have to estimate the parameters in ( 9 ). ### Training and Inference
For large-scale networks, computing and optimizing the conditional probabilities in ( 4 ) using ( 7 ) is computationally prohibitive, since it requires the summation over all vertices $V$ in $G$ . To address this limitation, we leverage the negative sampling strategy introduced by BIBREF21 , i.e., we perform computations by sampling a subset of negative edges. As a result, the conditional in ( 7 ) can be rewritten as: $ \begin{aligned}
p(^i|^j) & = \log \sigma \left({^j}^T ^i\right) \\
& + \sum _{i=1}^{K} \mathbb {E}_{^i\sim P(v)}\left[\log \sigma (-{^j}^T ^i)\right] \,,
\end{aligned}
$ where $\sigma (x) = 1/(1+\exp (-x))$ is the sigmoid function. Following BIBREF21 , we set the noise distribution $P(v) \propto d_v^{3/4}$ , where $d_v$ is the out-degree of vertex $v\in V$ . The number of negative samples $K$ is treated as a hyperparameter. We use Adam BIBREF22 to update the model parameters while minimizing the objective in ( 4 ). ### Related Work
Network embedding methods can be divided into two categories: (i) methods that solely rely on the structure, e.g., vertex information; and (ii) methods that leverage both the structure the network and the information associated with its vertices. For the first type of models, DeepWalk BIBREF0 has been proposed to learn node representations by generating node contexts via truncated random walks; it is similar to the concept of Skip-Gram BIBREF21 , originally introduced for learning word embeddings. LINE BIBREF3 proposed a principled objective to explicitly capture first-order and second-order proximity information from the vertices of a network. Further, BIBREF4 introduced a biased random walk procedure to generate the neighborhood for a vertex, which infers the node representations by maximizing the likelihood of preserving the local context information of vertices. However, these algorithms generally ignore rich heterogeneous information associated with vertices. Here, we focus on incorporating textual information into network embeddings. To learn semantic-aware network embeddings, Text-Associated DeepWalk (TADW) BIBREF11 proposed to integrate textual features into network representations with matrix factorization, by leveraging the equivalence between DeepWalk and matrix factorization. CENE (Content-Enhanced Network Embedding) BIBREF12 used bidirectional recurrent neural networks to abstract the semantic information associated with vertices, which further demonstrated the advantages of employing textual information. To capture the interaction between sentences of vertex pairs, BIBREF13 further proposed Context-Aware Network Embedding (CANE), that employs a mutual attention mechanism to adaptively account for the textual information from neighboring vertices. Despite showing improvement over structure-only models, these semantic-aware methods cannot capture word-level alignment information, which is important for inferring the relationship between node pairs, as previously discussed. In this work, we introduce a Word-Alignment-based Network Embedding (WANE) framework, which aligns and aggregates word-by-word matching features in an explicit manner, to obtain more informative network representations. ### Experimental Results
We experiment with three variants for our WANE model: (i) WANE: where the word embeddings of each text sequence are simply average to obtain the sentence representations, similar to BIBREF19 , BIBREF25 . (ii) WANE-wc: where the textual embeddings are inferred with word-by-context alignment. (iii) WANE-ww: where the word-by-word alignment mechanism is leveraged to capture word-by-word matching features between available sequence pairs. ### Link Prediction
Table 1 presents link prediction results for all models on Cora dataset, where different ratios of edges are used for training. It can be observed that when only a small number of edges are available, e.g., $15\%$ , the performances of structure-only methods is much worse than semantic-aware models that have taken textual information into consideration The perfromance gap tends to be smaller when a larger proportion of edges are employed for training. This highlights the importance of incorporating associated text sequences into network embeddings, especially in the case of representing a relatively sparse network. More importantly, the proposed WANE-ww model consistently outperforms other semantic-aware NE models by a substantial margin, indicating that our model better abstracts word-by-word alignment features from the text sequences available, thus yields more informative network representations. Further, WANE-ww also outperforms WANE or WANE-wc on a wide range of edge training proportions. This suggests that: (i) adaptively assigning different weights to each word within a text sequence (according to its paired sequence) tends to be a better strategy than treating each word equally (as in WANE). (ii) Solely considering the context-by-word alignment features (as in WANE-wc) is not as efficient as abstracting word-by-word matching information from text sequences. We observe the same trend and the superiority of our WANE-ww models on the other two datasets, HepTh and Zhihu datasets, as shown in Table 2 and 3 , respectively. ### Multi-label Vertex Classification
We further evaluate the effectiveness of proposed framework on vertex classification tasks with the Cora dataset. Similar to BIBREF13 , we generate the global embedding for each vertex by taking the average over its context-aware embeddings with all other connected vertices. As shown in Figure 3 (c), semantic-aware NE methods (including naive combination, TADW, CENE, CANE) exhibit higher test accuracies than semantic-agnostic models, demonstrating the advantages of incorporating textual information. Moreover, WANE-ww consistently outperforms other competitive semantic-aware models on a wide range of labeled proportions, suggesting that explicitly capturing word-by-word alignment features is not only useful for vertex-pair-based tasks, such as link prediction, but also results in better global embeddings which are required for vertex classification tasks. These observations further demonstrate that WANE-ww is an effective and robust framework to extract informative network representations. We further consider the case where the training ratio is less than $10\%$ , and evaluate the learned network embedding with a semi-supervised classifier. Following BIBREF11 , we employ a Transductive SVM (TSVM) classifier with a linear kernel BIBREF26 for fairness. As illustrated in Table 4 , the proposed WANE-ww model exhibits superior performances in most cases. This may be due to the fact that WANE-ww extracts information from the vertices and text sequences jointly, thus the obtained vertex embeddings are less noisy and perform more consistently with relatively small training ratios BIBREF11 . ### Ablation Study
Motivated by the observation in BIBREF16 that the advantages of different functions to match two vectors vary from task to task, we further explore the choice of alignment and aggregation functions in our WANE-ww model. To match the word pairs between two sequences, we experimented with three types of operations: subtraction, multiplication, and Sub & Multi (the concatenation of both approaches). As shown in Figure 3 (a) and 3 (b), element-wise subtraction tends to be the most effective operation performance-wise on both Cora and Zhihu datasets, and performs comparably to Sub & Multi on the HepTh dataset. This finding is consistent with the results in BIBREF16 , where they found that simple comparison functions based on element-wise operations work very well on matching text sequences. In terms of the aggregation functions, we compare (one-layer) CNN, mean-pooling, and max-pooling operations to accumulate the matching vectors. As shown in Figure 3 (b), max-pooling has the best empirical results on all three datasets. This may be attributed to the fact that the max-pooling operation is better at selecting important word-by-word alignment features, among all matching vectors available, to infer the relationship between vertices. ### Qualitative Analysis
To visualize the learned network representations, we further employ $t$ -SNE to map the low-dimensional vectors of the vertices to a 2-D embedding space. We use the Cora dataset because there are labels associated with each vertex and WANE-ww to obtain the network embeddings. As shown in Figure 4 where each point indicates one paper (vertex), and the color of each point indicates the category it belongs to, the embeddings of the same label are indeed very close in the 2-D plot, while those with different labels are relatively farther from each other. Note that the model is not trained with any label information, indicating that WANE-ww has extracted meaningful patterns from the text and vertex information available. The proposed word-by-word alignment mechanism can be used to highlight the most informative words (and the corresponding matching features) wrt the relationship between vertices. We visualize the norm of matching vector obtained in ( 15 ) in Figure 5 for the Cora dataset. It can be observed that matched key words, e.g., `MCMC', `convergence', between the text sequences are indeed assigned higher values in the matching vectors. These words would be selected preferentially by the final max-pooling aggregation operation. This indicates that WANE-ww is able to abstract important word-by-word alignment features from paired text sequences. ### Conclusions
We have presented a novel framework to incorporate the semantic information from vertex-associated text sequences into network embeddings. An align-aggregate framework is introduced, which first aligns a sentence pair by capturing the word-by-word matching features, and then adaptively aggregating these word-level alignment information with an efficient max-pooling function. The semantic features abstracted are further encoded, along with the structural information, into a shared space to obtain the final network embedding. Compelling experimental results on several tasks demonstrated the advantages of our approach. In future work, we aim to leverage abundant unlabeled text data to abstract more informative sentence representations BIBREF27 , BIBREF28 , BIBREF29 , BIBREF30 . Another interesting direction is to learn binary and compact network embedding, which could be more efficient in terms of both computation and memory, relative to its continuous counterpart BIBREF31 . Figure 1: Example of the text information (abstracts) associated to two papers in a citation network. Key words for matching are highlighted. Figure 2: Schematic of the proposed fine-grained word alignment module for incorporating textual information into a network embedding. In this setup, word-by-word matching features are explicitly abstracted to infer the relationship between vertices. Table 1: AUC scores for link prediction on the Cora dataset. Table 2: AUC scores for link prediction on the HepTh dataset. Table 3: AUC scores for link prediction on the Zhihu dataset. Figure 3: (a, b) Ablation study on the choice of different alignment and aggregation functions. (c) Test accuracy of supervised vertex classification on the Cora dataset. Figure 4: t-SNE visualization of the learned network embeddings on the Cora dataset. Table 4: Semi-supervised vertex classification results on the Cora dataset. Figure 5: Visualization of the word-level matching vectors. Darker shades represent larger values of the norm of m(i) at each word position.
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abstracts, sentences
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Why does the UN want to arrest Umluana?
A. Umluana conspired to attack Belderkan.
B. Umluana conspired to attack another nation.
C. Umluana has violated the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.
D. Umluana is the head of a gang called The Golden Spacemen.
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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog, January 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE GREEN BERET By TOM PURDOM It's not so much the decisions a man does make that mark him as a Man—but the ones he refrains from making. Like the decision "I've had enough!" Illustrated by Schoenherr Read locked the door and drew his pistol. Sergeant Rashid handed Premier Umluana the warrant. "We're from the UN Inspector Corps," Sergeant Rashid said. "I'm very sorry, but we have to arrest you and bring you in for trial by the World Court." If Umluana noticed Read's gun, he didn't show it. He read the warrant carefully. When he finished, he said something in Dutch. "I don't know your language," Rashid said. "Then I'll speak English." Umluana was a small man with wrinkled brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than Read's. "The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to my party." In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside the door. "If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you." "I don't think so," Umluana said. "No, if you kill me, all Africa will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me in court." Read clicked off the safety. "Corporal Read is very young," Rashid said, "but he's a crack shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he likes to shoot, too." Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck. "Help! Kidnap. " Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve. "Let's be off," Rashid said. The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a catatonic trance. A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward, covering their retreat. The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the lawn. They climbed in. "How did it go?" The driver and another inspector occupied the front seat. "They'll be after us in half a minute." The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of grenades. "I better cover," he said. "Thanks," Rashid said. The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes. The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud that rose before them. "Is he all right?" the driver asked. "I don't think I hurt him." Rashid took a syrette from his vest pocket. "Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what will happen at the Game Preserve." Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off until they reached Geneva. "They don't know who's coming," he said. "They don't make them tough enough to stop this boy." Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile. Two types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps: those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read was the second type. A tall, lanky Negro he had spent his school days in one of the drab suburbs that ring every prosperous American city. It was the home of factory workers, clerks, semiskilled technicians, all who do the drudge work of civilization and know they will never do more. The adults spent their days with television, alcohol and drugs; the young spent their days with gangs, sex, television and alcohol. What else was there? Those who could have told him neither studied nor taught at his schools. What he saw on the concrete fields between the tall apartment houses marked the limits of life's possibilities. He had belonged to a gang called The Golden Spacemen. "Nobody fools with me," he bragged. "When Harry Read's out, there's a tiger running loose." No one knew how many times he nearly ran from other clubs, how carefully he picked the safest spot on the battle line. "A man ought to be a man," he once told a girl. "He ought to do a man's work. Did you ever notice how our fathers look, how they sleep so much? I don't want to be like that. I want to be something proud." He joined the UN Inspector Corps at eighteen, in 1978. The international cops wore green berets, high buttonless boots, bush jackets. They were very special men. For the first time in his life, his father said something about his ambitions. "Don't you like America, Harry? Do you want to be without a country? This is the best country in the world. All my life I've made a good living. Haven't you had everything you ever wanted? I've been a king compared to people overseas. Why, you stay here and go to trade school and in two years you'll be living just like me." "I don't want that," Read said. "What do you mean, you don't want that?" "You could join the American Army," his mother said. "That's as good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier." "I want to be a UN man. I've already enlisted. I'm in! What do you care what I do?" The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers. Read went through six months training on Madagascar. Twice he nearly got expelled for picking fights with smaller men. Rather than resign, he accepted punishment which assigned him to weeks of dull, filthy extra labor. He hated the restrictions and the iron fence of regulations. He hated boredom, loneliness and isolation. And yet he responded with enthusiasm. They had given him a job. A job many people considered important. He took his turn guarding the still disputed borders of Korea. He served on the rescue teams that patrol the busy Polar routes. He mounted guard at the 1980 World's Fair in Rangoon. "I liked Rangoon," he even told a friend. "I even liked Korea. But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing cards and shooting the bull and then there's a plane crash or something and you go out and win a medal. That's great for me. I'm lazy and I like excitement." One power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any head of state whose country violated international law. Could the World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to attack another nation? For years Africa had been called "The South America of the Old World." Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years, 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black population of Africa still struggled toward political equality. Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very day he took control the new dictator and his African party began to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to build himself an empire. He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa, promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro leaders, having just won representation in the South African Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed they could use their first small voice in the government to win true freedom for their people. But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more investigation by the UN. But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again. The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear war. Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He went where they sent him and did what they told him to do. The car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two passengers scanned the sky. A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country. But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour. They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game Preserve station and manning its controls. They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get there before it could be defended. "There's no military base near Miaka," Rashid said. "We might get there before the Belderkans." "Here comes our escort," Read said. A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in behind them. "One thing," Read said, "I don't think they'll shoot at us while he's in the car." "Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors." Sergeant Rashid came from Cairo. He had degrees in science and history from Cambridge but only the Corp gave him work that satisfied his conscience. He hated war. It was that simple. Read looked back. He saw three spots of sunlight about two hundred feet up and a good mile behind. "Here they come, Sarge." Rashid turned his head. He waved frantically. The two men in the other car waved back. "Shall I duck under the trees?" the driver asked. "Not yet. Not until we have to." Read fingered the machine gun he had picked up when he got in the car. He had never been shot at. Twice he had faced an unarmed mob, but a few shots had sent them running. Birds flew screaming from their nests. Monkeys screeched and threw things at the noisy, speeding cars. A little cloud of birds surrounded each vehicle. The escort car made a sharp turn and charged their pursuers. The big rifle fired twice. Read saw the Belderkan cars scatter. Suddenly machine-gun bullets cracked and whined beside him. "Evade," Rashid said. "Don't go down." Without losing any forward speed, the driver took them straight up. Read's stomach bounced. A shell exploded above them. The car rocked. He raised his eyes and saw a long crack in the roof. "Hit the floor," Rashid said. They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him. I can't do anything , Read thought. They're too far away to shoot back. All we can do is run. The sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he crawled in waves down his own back. Another explosion, this time very loud. Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear window. "Two left. Keep down, Read." "Can't we go down?" Read said. "They'll get to Miaka before us." He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion. Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops burned. "How much farther?" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices. "There it is now. Shall I take us right in?" "I think you'd better." The station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by the transmitter booth. Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana. The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel. There were three technicians in the station and no passengers. All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran howling for the jungle. Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened fire on the largest car. "Now, I can shoot back," he said. "Now we'll see what they do." "Are you ready, Rashid?" yelled the driver. "Man, get us out of here!" The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game Preserve. The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read looked out the door and saw his first battlefield. Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead inspector lay behind an overturned couch. Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other recruits complained. "That's the way this world is. You people with the weak stomachs better get used to it." Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth. A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and the blood he deposited on the floor. "Did you get Umluana?" he asked Sergeant Rashid. "He's in the booth. What's going on?" Rashid's Middle East Oxford seemed more clipped than ever. "They hit us with two companies of troops a few minutes ago. I think half our men are wounded." "Can we get out of here?" "They machine-gunned the controls." Rashid swore. "You heard him, Read! Get out there and help those men." He heard the screams of the wounded, the crack of rifles and machine guns, all the terrifying noise of war. But since his eighteenth year he had done everything his superiors told him to do. He started crawling toward an easy-chair that looked like good cover. A bullet cracked above his head, so close he felt the shock wave. He got up, ran panicky, crouched, and dove behind the chair. An inspector cracked the valve on a smoke grenade. A white fog spread through the building. They could see anyone who tried to rush them but the besiegers couldn't pick out targets. Above the noise, he heard Rashid. "I'm calling South Africa Station for a copter. It's the only way out of here. Until it comes, we've got to hold them back." Read thought of the green beret he had stuffed in his pocket that morning. He stuck it on his head and cocked it. He didn't need plain clothes anymore and he wanted to wear at least a part of his uniform. Bullets had completely shattered the wall in front of him. He stared through the murk, across the broken glass. He was Corporal Harry Read, UN Inspector Corps—a very special man. If he didn't do a good job here, he wasn't the man he claimed to be. This might be the only real test he would ever face. He heard a shout in rapid French. He turned to his right. Men in red loincloths ran zigzagging toward the station. They carried light automatic rifles. Half of them wore gas masks. "Shoot the masks," he yelled. "Aim for the masks." The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines. In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for cover. The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance. The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew they had wrecked the transmitter controls. The first direct attack had been repulsed. They could attack many more times and continue to spray the building with bullets. They could also try to go around the hill and attack the station from above; if they did, the inspectors had a good view of the hill and should see them going up. The inspectors had taken up good defensive positions. In spite of their losses, they still had enough firepower to cover the area surrounding the station. Read surveyed his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover, the Belderkans could sneak to the top of the hill. Gas grenades are only three inches long. They hold cubic yards of gas under high pressure. Read unclipped a telescoping rod from his vest pocket. He opened it and a pair of sights flipped up. A thin track ran down one side. He had about a dozen grenades left, three self-propelling. He slid an SP grenade into the rod's track and estimated windage and range. Sighting carefully, not breathing, muscles relaxed, the rod rock steady, he fired and lobbed the little grenade into the ditch. He dropped another grenade beside it. The heavy gas would lie there for hours. Sergeant Rashid ran crouched from man to man. He did what he could to shield the wounded. "Well, corporal, how are you?" "Not too bad, sergeant. See that ditch out there? I put a little gas in it." "Good work. How's your ammunition?" "A dozen grenades. Half a barrel of shells." "The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on, then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to surrender." "How do you think they'll treat us?" "That we'll have to see." An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room. Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a wounded man screamed for help. "There's a garage downstairs," Rashid said. "In case the copter doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles with gasoline." "We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry." Rashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill? He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body. "Listen," said a German. Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big motor. "Armor," the German said. The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away. A loud-speaker blared. ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS. ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS. YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS. WE HAVE ATOMIC WARHEADS, ALL GASES, ROCKETS AND FLAME THROWERS. IF YOU DO NOT SURRENDER OUR PREMIER, WE WILL DESTROY YOU. "They know we don't have any big weapons," Read said. "They know we have only gas grenades and small arms." He looked nervously from side to side. They couldn't bring the copter in with that thing squatting out there. A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors; then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their masks couldn't filter. Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing, mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly. But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky room. "We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes. Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who wants to go hunting with me?" For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's devotion to peace had no limits. Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required something more than a hunger for self-respect. Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this building, lay battered men and dead men. All UN inspectors. All part of his life. And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and pain, had become a part of him. "I'll take a cocktail, Sarge." "Is that Read?" "Who else did you expect?" "Nobody. Anybody else?" "I'll go," the Frenchman said. "Three should be enough. Give us a good smoke screen." Rashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at thirty-foot intervals along the floor. "Remember," Rashid said. "We have to knock out that gun." Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster. Rashid whistled. Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here. Gunfire shook the hill. The Belderkans couldn't see them but they knew what was going on and they fired systematically into the smoke. Bullets ploughed the ground beside him. He raised his head and found the dim silhouette of the tank. He tried not to think about bullets ploughing through his flesh. A bullet slammed into his hip. He fell on his back, screaming. "Sarge. Sarge. " "I'm hit, too," Rashid said. "Don't stop if you can move." Listen to him. What's he got, a sprained ankle? But he didn't feel any pain. He closed his eyes and threw himself onto his stomach. And nearly fainted from pain. He screamed and quivered. The pain stopped. He stretched out his hands, gripping the wine bottles, and inched forward. Pain stabbed him from stomach to knee. "I can't move, Sarge." "Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—" "What?" Guns clattered. Bullets cracked. "Sergeant Rashid! Answer me." He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the mist. "I'm a UN man," he mumbled. "You people up there know what a UN man is? You know what happens when you meet one?" When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm. But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you. He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel. That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm. He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had decided something in the world was more important than himself, but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything else. With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of the bottle. Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank. His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the bottle down the dark throat. As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt the bottle leave his hand. The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station, surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans. His mother hung the Global Medal above the television set. "He must have been brave," she said. "We had a fine son." "He was our only son," her husband said. "What did he volunteer for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?" His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home. THE END
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C. Umluana has violated the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.
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What are the main sources of recall errors in the mapping?
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### Introduction
The two largest standardized, cross-lingual datasets for morphological annotation are provided by the Universal Dependencies BIBREF1 and Universal Morphology BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 projects. Each project's data are annotated according to its own cross-lingual schema, prescribing how features like gender or case should be marked. The schemata capture largely similar information, so one may want to leverage both UD's token-level treebanks and UniMorph's type-level lookup tables and unify the two resources. This would permit a leveraging of both the token-level UD treebanks and the type-level UniMorph tables of paradigms. Unfortunately, neither resource perfectly realizes its schema. On a dataset-by-dataset basis, they incorporate annotator errors, omissions, and human decisions when the schemata are underspecified; one such example is in fig:disagreement. A dataset-by-dataset problem demands a dataset-by-dataset solution; our task is not to translate a schema, but to translate a resource. Starting from the idealized schema, we create a rule-based tool for converting UD-schema annotations to UniMorph annotations, incorporating language-specific post-edits that both correct infelicities and also increase harmony between the datasets themselves (rather than the schemata). We apply this conversion to the 31 languages with both UD and UniMorph data, and we report our method's recall, showing an improvement over the strategy which just maps corresponding schematic features to each other. Further, we show similar downstream performance for each annotation scheme in the task of morphological tagging. This tool enables a synergistic use of UniMorph and Universal Dependencies, as well as teasing out the annotation discrepancies within and across projects. When one dataset disobeys its schema or disagrees with a related language, the flaws may not be noticed except by such a methodological dive into the resources. When the maintainers of the resources ameliorate these flaws, the resources move closer to the goal of a universal, cross-lingual inventory of features for morphological annotation. The contributions of this work are: ### Background: Morphological Inflection
Morphological inflection is the act of altering the base form of a word (the lemma, represented in fixed-width type) to encode morphosyntactic features. As an example from English, prove takes on the form proved to indicate that the action occurred in the past. (We will represent all surface forms in quotation marks.) The process occurs in the majority of the world's widely-spoken languages, typically through meaningful affixes. The breadth of forms created by inflection creates a challenge of data sparsity for natural language processing: The likelihood of observing a particular word form diminishes. A classic result in psycholinguistics BIBREF4 shows that inflectional morphology is a fully productive process. Indeed, it cannot be that humans simply have the equivalent of a lookup table, where they store the inflected forms for retrieval as the syntactic context requires. Instead, there needs to be a mental process that can generate properly inflected words on demand. BIBREF4 showed this insightfully through the wug-test, an experiment where she forced participants to correctly inflect out-of-vocabulary lemmata, such as the novel noun wug. Certain features of a word do not vary depending on its context: In German or Spanish where nouns are gendered, the word for onion will always be grammatically feminine. Thus, to prepare for later discussion, we divide the morphological features of a word into two categories: the modifiable inflectional features and the fixed lexical features. A part of speech (POS) is a coarse syntactic category (like verb) that begets a word's particular menu of lexical and inflectional features. In English, verbs express no gender, and adjectives do not reflect person or number. The part of speech dictates a set of inflectional slots to be filled by the surface forms. Completing these slots for a given lemma and part of speech gives a paradigm: a mapping from slots to surface forms. Regular English verbs have five slots in their paradigm BIBREF5 , which we illustrate for the verb prove, using simple labels for the forms in tab:ptb. A morphosyntactic schema prescribes how language can be annotated—giving stricter categories than our simple labels for prove—and can vary in the level of detail provided. Part of speech tags are an example of a very coarse schema, ignoring details of person, gender, and number. A slightly finer-grained schema for English is the Penn Treebank tagset BIBREF6 , which includes signals for English morphology. For instance, its VBZ tag pertains to the specially inflected 3rd-person singular, present-tense verb form (e.g. proves in tab:ptb). If the tag in a schema is detailed enough that it exactly specifies a slot in a paradigm, it is called a morphosyntactic description (MSD). These descriptions require varying amounts of detail: While the English verbal paradigm is small enough to fit on a page, the verbal paradigm of the Northeast Caucasian language Archi can have over 1500000 slots BIBREF7 . ### Two Schemata, Two Philosophies
Unlike the Penn Treebank tags, the UD and UniMorph schemata are cross-lingual and include a fuller lexicon of attribute-value pairs, such as Person: 1. Each was built according to a different set of principles. UD's schema is constructed bottom-up, adapting to include new features when they're identified in languages. UniMorph, conversely, is top-down: A cross-lingual survey of the literature of morphological phenomena guided its design. UniMorph aims to be linguistically complete, containing all known morphosyntactic attributes. Both schemata share one long-term goal: a total inventory for annotating the possible morphosyntactic features of a word. ### Universal Dependencies
The Universal Dependencies morphological schema comprises part of speech and 23 additional attributes (also called features in UD) annotating meaning or syntax, as well as language-specific attributes. In order to ensure consistent annotation, attributes are included into the general UD schema if they occur in several corpora. Language-specific attributes are used when only one corpus annotates for a specific feature. The UD schema seeks to balance language-specific and cross-lingual concerns. It annotates for both inflectional features such as case and lexical features such as gender. Additionally, the UD schema annotates for features which can be interpreted as derivational in some languages. For example, the Czech UD guidance uses a Coll value for the Number feature to denote mass nouns (for example, "lidstvo" "humankind" from the root "lid" "people"). UD represents a confederation of datasets BIBREF8 annotated with dependency relationships (which are not the focus of this work) and morphosyntactic descriptions. Each dataset is an annotated treebank, making it a resource of token-level annotations. The schema is guided by these treebanks, with feature names chosen for relevance to native speakers. (In sec:unimorph, we will contrast this with UniMorph's treatment of morphosyntactic categories.) The UD datasets have been used in the CoNLL shared tasks BIBREF9 . ### UniMorph
In the Universal Morphological Feature Schema BIBREF10 , there are at least 212 values, spread across 23 attributes. It identifies some attributes that UD excludes like information structure and deixis, as well as providing more values for certain attributes, like 23 different noun classes endemic to Bantu languages. As it is a schema for marking morphology, its part of speech attribute does not have POS values for punctuation, symbols, or miscellany (Punct, Sym, and X in Universal Dependencies). Like the UD schema, the decomposition of a word into its lemma and MSD is directly comparable across languages. Its features are informed by a distinction between universal categories, which are widespread and psychologically real to speakers; and comparative concepts, only used by linguistic typologists to compare languages BIBREF11 . Additionally, it strives for identity of meaning across languages, not simply similarity of terminology. As a prime example, it does not regularly label a dative case for nouns, for reasons explained in depth by BIBREF11 . The UniMorph resources for a language contain complete paradigms extracted from Wiktionary BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 . Word types are annotated to form a database, mapping a lemma–tag pair to a surface form. The schema is explained in detail in BIBREF10 . It has been used in the SIGMORPHON shared task BIBREF14 and the CoNLL–SIGMORPHON shared tasks BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 . Several components of the UniMorph schema have been adopted by UD. ### Similarities in the annotation
While the two schemata annotate different features, their annotations often look largely similar. Consider the attested annotation of the Spanish word mandaba (I/he/she/it) commanded. tab:annotations shows that these annotations share many attributes. Some conversions are straightforward: VERB to V, Mood=Ind to IND, Number=Sing to SG, and Person=3 to 3. One might also suggest mapping Tense=Imp to IPFV, though this crosses semantic categories: IPFV represents the imperfective aspect, whereas Tense=Imp comes from imperfect, the English name often given to Spanish's pasado continuo form. The imperfect is a verb form which combines both past tense and imperfective aspect. UniMorph chooses to split this into the atoms PST and IPFV, while UD unifies them according to the familiar name of the tense. ### UD treebanks and UniMorph tables
Prima facie, the alignment task may seem trivial. But we've yet to explore the humans in the loop. This conversion is a hard problem because we're operating on idealized schemata. We're actually annotating human decisions—and human mistakes. If both schemata were perfectly applied, their overlapping attributes could be mapped to each other simply, in a cross-lingual and totally general way. Unfortunately, the resources are imperfect realizations of their schemata. The cross-lingual, cross-resource, and within-resource problems that we'll note mean that we need a tailor-made solution for each language. Showcasing their schemata, the Universal Dependencies and UniMorph projects each present large, annotated datasets. UD's v2.1 release BIBREF1 has 102 treebanks in 60 languages. The large resource, constructed by independent parties, evinces problems in the goal of a universal inventory of annotations. Annotators may choose to omit certain values (like the coerced gender of refrescante in fig:disagreement), and they may disagree on how a linguistic concept is encoded. (See, e.g., BIBREF11 's ( BIBREF11 ) description of the dative case.) Additionally, many of the treebanks were created by fully- or semi-automatic conversion from treebanks with less comprehensive annotation schemata than UD BIBREF0 . For instance, the Spanish word vas you go is incorrectly labeled Gender: Fem|Number: Pl because it ends in a character sequence which is common among feminine plural nouns. (Nevertheless, the part of speech field for vas is correct.) UniMorph's development is more centralized and pipelined. Inflectional paradigms are scraped from Wiktionary, annotators map positions in the scraped data to MSDs, and the mapping is automatically applied to all of the scraped paradigms. Because annotators handle languages they are familiar with (or related ones), realization of the schema is also done on a language-by-language basis. Further, the scraping process does not capture lexical aspects that are not inflected, like noun gender in many languages. The schema permits inclusion of these details; their absence is an artifact of the data collection process. Finally, UniMorph records only exist for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, though the schema is broader than these categories. For these reasons, we treat the corpora as imperfect realizations of the schemata. Moreover, we contend that ambiguity in the schemata leave the door open to allow for such imperfections. With no strict guidance, it's natural that annotators would take different paths. Nevertheless, modulo annotator disagreement, we assume that within a particular corpus, one word form will always be consistently annotated. Three categories of annotation difficulty are missing values, language-specific attributes, and multiword expressions. ### A Deterministic Conversion
In our work, the goal is not simply to translate one schema into the other, but to translate one resource (the imperfect manifestation of the schema) to match the other. The differences between the schemata and discrepancies in annotation mean that the transformation of annotations from one schema to the other is not straightforward. Two naive options for the conversion are a lookup table of MSDs and a lookup table of the individual attribute-value pairs which comprise the MSDs. The former is untenable: the table of all UD feature combinations (including null features, excluding language-specific attributes) would have 2.445e17 entries. Of course, most combinations won't exist, but this gives a sense of the table's scale. Also, it doesn't leverage the factorial nature of the annotations: constructing the table would require a massive duplication of effort. On the other hand, attribute-value lookup lacks the flexibility to show how a pair of values interacts. Neither approach would handle language- and annotator-specific tendencies in the corpora. Our approach to converting UD MSDs to UniMorph MSDs begins with the attribute-value lookup, then amends it on a language-specific basis. Alterations informed by the MSD and the word form, like insertion, substitution, and deletion, increase the number of agreeing annotations. They are critical for work that examines the MSD monolithically instead of feature-by-feature BIBREF25 , BIBREF26 : Without exact matches, converting the individual tags becomes hollow. Beginning our process, we relied on documentation of the two schemata to create our initial, language-agnostic mapping of individual values. This mapping has 140 pairs in it. Because the mapping was derived purely from the schemata, it is a useful approximation of how well the schemata match up. We note, however, that the mapping does not handle idiosyncrasies like the many uses of dative or features which are represented in UniMorph by argument templates: possession and ergative–absolutive argument marking. The initial step of our conversion is using this mapping to populate a proposed UniMorph MSD. As shown in sec:results, the initial proposal is often frustratingly deficient. Thus we introduce the post-edits. To concoct these, we looked into UniMorph corpora for these languages, compared these to the conversion outputs, and then sought to bring the conversion outputs closer to the annotations in the actual UniMorph corpora. When a form and its lemma existed in both corpora, we could directly inspect how the annotations differed. Our process of iteratively refining the conversion implies a table which exactly maps any combination of UD MSD and its related values (lemma, form, etc.) to a UniMorph MSD, though we do not store the table explicitly. Some conversion rules we've created must be applied before or after others. These sequential dependencies provide conciseness. Our post-editing procedure operates on the initial MSD hypothesis as follows: ### Experiments
We evaluate our tool on two tasks: To be clear, our scope is limited to the schema conversion. Future work will explore NLP tasks that exploit both the created token-level UniMorph data and the existing type-level UniMorph data. ### Intrinsic evaluation
We transform all UD data to the UniMorph. We compare the simple lookup-based transformation to the one with linguistically informed post-edits on all languages with both UD and UniMorph data. We then evaluate the recall of MSDs without partial credit. Because the UniMorph tables only possess annotations for verbs, nouns, adjectives, or some combination, we can only examine performance for these parts of speech. We consider two words to be a match if their form and lemma are present in both resources. Syncretism allows a single surface form to realize multiple MSDs (Spanish mandaba can be first- or third-person), so we define success as the computed MSD matching any of the word's UniMorph MSDs. This gives rise to an equation for recall: of the word–lemma pairs found in both resources, how many of their UniMorph-converted MSDs are present in the UniMorph tables? Our problem here is not a learning problem, so the question is ill-posed. There is no training set, and the two resources for a given language make up a test set. The quality of our model—the conversion tool—comes from how well we encode prior knowledge about the relationship between the UD and UniMorph corpora. ### Extrinsic evaluation
If the UniMorph-converted treebanks perform differently on downstream tasks, then they convey different information. This signals a failure of the conversion process. As a downstream task, we choose morphological tagging, a critical step to leveraging morphological information on new text. We evaluate taggers trained on the transformed UD data, choosing eight languages randomly from the intersection of UD and UniMorph resources. We report the macro-averaged F1 score of attribute-value pairs on a held-out test set, with official train/validation/test splits provided in the UD treebanks. As a reference point, we also report tagging accuracy on those languages' untransformed data. We use the state-of-the-art morphological tagger of BIBREF0 . It is a factored conditional random field with potentials for each attribute, attribute pair, and attribute transition. The potentials are computed by neural networks, predicting the values of each attribute jointly but not monolithically. Inference with the potentials is performed approximately by loopy belief propagation. We use the authors' hyperparameters. We note a minor implementation detail for the sake of reproducibility. The tagger exploits explicit guidance about the attribute each value pertains to. The UniMorph schema's values are globally unique, but their attributes are not explicit. For example, the UniMorph Masc denotes a masculine gender. We amend the code of BIBREF0 to incorporate attribute identifiers for each UniMorph value. ### Results
We present the intrinsic task's recall scores in tab:recall. Bear in mind that due to annotation errors in the original corpora (like the vas example from sec:resources), the optimal score is not always $100\%$ . Some shortcomings of recall come from irremediable annotation discrepancies. Largely, we are hamstrung by differences in choice of attributes to annotate. When one resource marks gender and the other marks case, we can't infer the gender of the word purely from its surface form. The resources themselves would need updating to encode the relevant morphosyntactic information. Some languages had a very low number of overlapping forms, and no tag matches or near-matches between them: Arabic, Hindi, Lithuanian, Persian, and Russian. A full list of observed, irremediable discrepancies is presented alongside the codebase. There are three other transformations for which we note no improvement here. Because of the problem in Basque argument encoding in the UniMorph dataset—which only contains verbs—we note no improvement in recall on Basque. Irish also does not improve: UD marks gender on nouns, while UniMorph marks case. Adjectives in UD are also underspecified. The verbs, though, are already correct with the simple mapping. Finally, with Dutch, the UD annotations are impoverished compared to the UniMorph annotations, and missing attributes cannot be inferred without external knowledge. For the extrinsic task, the performance is reasonably similar whether UniMorph or UD; see tab:tagging. A large fluctuation would suggest that the two annotations encode distinct information. On the contrary, the similarities suggest that the UniMorph-mapped MSDs have similar content. We recognize that in every case, tagging F1 increased—albeit by amounts as small as $0.16$ points. This is in part due to the information that is lost in the conversion. UniMorph's schema does not indicate the type of pronoun (demonstrative, interrogative, etc.), and when lexical information is not recorded in UniMorph, we delete it from the MSD during transformation. On the other hand, UniMorph's atomic tags have more parts to guess, but they are often related. (E.g. Ipfv always entails Pst in Spanish.) Altogether, these forces seem to have little impact on tagging performance. ### Related Work
The goal of a tagset-to-tagset mapping of morphological annotations is shared by the Interset project BIBREF28 . Interset decodes features in the source corpus to a tag interlingua, then encodes that into target corpus features. (The idea of an interlingua is drawn from machine translation, where a prevailing early mindset was to convert to a universal representation, then encode that representation's semantics in the target language. Our approach, by contrast, is a direct flight from the source to the target.) Because UniMorph corpora are noisy, the encoding from the interlingua would have to be rewritten for each target. Further, decoding the UD MSD into the interlingua cannot leverage external information like the lemma and form. The creators of HamleDT sought to harmonize dependency annotations among treebanks, similar to our goal of harmonizing across resources BIBREF29 . The treebanks they sought to harmonize used multiple diverse annotation schemes, which the authors unified under a single scheme. BIBREF30 present mappings into a coarse, universal part of speech for 22 languages. Working with POS tags rather than morphological tags (which have far more dimensions), their space of options to harmonize is much smaller than ours. Our extrinsic evaluation is most in line with the paradigm of BIBREF31 (and similar work therein), who compare syntactic parser performance on UD treebanks annotated with two styles of dependency representation. Our problem differs, though, in that the dependency representations express different relationships, while our two schemata vastly overlap. As our conversion is lossy, we do not appraise the learnability of representations as they did. In addition to using the number of extra rules as a proxy for harmony between resources, one could perform cross-lingual projection of morphological tags BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 . Our approach succeeds even without parallel corpora. ### Conclusion and Future Work
We created a tool for annotating Universal Dependencies CoNLL-U files with UniMorph annotations. Our tool is ready to use off-the-shelf today, requires no training, and is deterministic. While under-specification necessitates a lossy and imperfect conversion, ours is interpretable. Patterns of mistakes can be identified and ameliorated. The tool allows a bridge between resources annotated in the Universal Dependencies and Universal Morphology (UniMorph) schemata. As the Universal Dependencies project provides a set of treebanks with token-level annotation, while the UniMorph project releases type-level annotated tables, the newfound compatibility opens up new experiments. A prime example of exploiting token- and type-level data is BIBREF34 . That work presents a part-of-speech (POS) dictionary built from Wiktionary, where the POS tagger is also constrained to options available in their type-level POS dictionary, improving performance. Our transformation means that datasets are prepared for similar experiments with morphological tagging. It would also be reasonable to incorporate this tool as a subroutine to UDPipe BIBREF35 and Udapi BIBREF36 . We leave open the task of converting in the opposite direction, turning UniMorph MSDs into Universal Dependencies MSDs. Because our conversion rules are interpretable, we identify shortcomings in both resources, using each as validation for the other. We were able to find specific instances of incorrectly applied UniMorph annotation, as well as specific instances of cross-lingual inconsistency in both resources. These findings will harden both resources and better align them with their goal of universal, cross-lingual annotation. ### Acknowledgments
We thank Hajime Senuma and John Sylak-Glassman for early comments in devising the starting language-independent mapping from Universal Dependencies to UniMorph. Figure 1: Example of annotation disagreement in UD between two languages on translations of one phrase, reproduced from Malaviya et al. (2018). The final word in each, “refrescante”, is not inflected for gender: It has the same surface form whether masculine or feminine. Only in Portuguese, it is annotated as masculine to reflect grammatical concord with the noun it modifies. Table 1: Inflected forms of the English verb prove, along with their Penn Treebank tags Table 2: Attested annotations for the Spanish verb form “mandaba” “I/he/she/it commanded”. Note that UD separates the part of speech from the remainder of the morphosyntactic description. In each schema, order of the values is irrelevant. Figure 2: Transliterated Persian with a gloss and translation from Karimi-Doostan (2011), annotated in a Persianspecific schema. The light verb construction “latme zadan” (“to damage”) has been spread across the sentence. Multiword constructions like this are a challenge for word-level tagging schemata. Table 3: Token-level recall when converting Universal Dependencies tags to UniMorph tags. CSV refers to the lookup-based system. Post-editing refers to the proposed method. Table 4: Tagging F1 using UD sentences annotated with either original UD MSDs or UniMorph-converted MSDs
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irremediable annotation discrepancies, differences in choice of attributes to annotate, The resources themselves would need updating to encode the relevant morphosyntactic information. Some languages had a very low number of overlapping forms, and no tag matches or near-matches between them, the two annotations encode distinct information, incorrectly applied UniMorph annotation, cross-lingual inconsistency in both resources
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Why does Casey feels regret about choosing prison over the court’s option to be sent into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to study its inhabitants?
A. Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will kill him, Casey opts for a jail sell. When he’s told that Jupiter is filled with insect-like beings who share his enthusiasm for a reckless lifestyle, and that the mission could actually make him rich, Casey fears that he’s lost his dare devil edge.
B. Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will take too much energy on his part, Casey opts for a jail sell instead. When he’s told that Jupiter is filled with friendly life forms who love emerald and crystal as much as he does, and that the mission could actually prove his innocence, Casey fears that he’s lost his dare devil edge.
C. Casey is terrorized by his fellow prisoner, Pard Hoskins, which makes him regret not taking the chance to fly head first into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. A true dare devil would have taken the challenge, after all.
D. Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will kill him, Casey opts for a jail sell. When he’s told that Jupiter is not as dangerous as once thought, and that the mission could actually make him rich, Casey fears that he’s lost his daredevil edge.
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JUPITER'S JOKE By A. L. HALEY Casey Ritter, the guy who never turned down a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods of idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward the great red spot of terrible Jupiter. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Those methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner, and sewed up tight. Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately, in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not to rat on him before taking the job. Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter. I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out. Then I croaked, "Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir? Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?" Being civil to the court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen, a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence. The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny throat, and told me what for. "You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter," he said. "Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—" I snorted. "Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy tales! How could any—" The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again. "I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field, the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we say, eminently suited to the task." He beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me! Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup.... At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not unless it was a straight suicide mission! I feebly massaged my throat. "Pictures?" I whispered. "Show me 'em." Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out. I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well, a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to gangrene around the edges. The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties had taken my voice again. "How big?" I whispered. He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "About the size of a man, I believe." I raised my shrinking head. "Take me to jail!" I said firmly, and collapsed onto my chair. A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. "So this is the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!" he sneered. "Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!" I shuddered. "You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!" They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back turned. How stupid could they get? When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C. made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed. At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a right to be; and after awhile I braced him. I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip. "Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me," he says. "I just made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed." "Oh, no!" I moaned. "What were you trying to do, start a feud between us and Mars?" He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. "Buddy," he said reverently, "I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again! Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!" His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a fresh scent. I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to him. "How'd you make the getaway?" I asked, taking him at his word. He looked loftily past me. "Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise where I cached 'em." "Cached what?" "The rocks, stupe." I hardly heard the cut. "You mean you really did get away with them?" My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was impossible. I'd investigated once myself. He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard coming. That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a week later. By that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead, he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, "When I chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl won't give me fer 'em—" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it. "Jupiter!" I goggled at him. "Akroida! Who's she?" He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he was sure I'd been born. "Don't you know nothin', butterhead?" From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke again. The memory still makes me fry. "Akroida," he explained in his own sweet time, "is the queen-scorp of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago, remember?" He winked broadly. "It come from Mars in the first place, you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em, if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—" He went off into a dream about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back. "You mean those scorpions have really got brains?" "Brains!" he snorted. "Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone. Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce, so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!" He sighed regretfully. "But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer them emeralds." I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins. But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it. So did I. For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone, while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a letter to the S.S.C. The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me, friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad. "I put on a yeller slicker," he confessed sadly. "That there ammonia mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to an audience with the old rip." He shook his head slowly. "The kid that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all. I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it a-purpose to upset her." Then he winked at me. "But then I got off in a corner and cooked up some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida, though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper." He ruminated a few minutes. "Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an' put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful." II Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp. I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and to remind me that this was public service, strictly. "These—" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—"These jewels are as nothing, Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—" He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—"IF you succeed, your reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man." That twitch of the nose riled me no little. "I ain't failed yet!" I snarled at him. "Just you wait till I do, feller!" I slipped the string of emeralds back into its little safe. "Instead of sniping at me, why don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?" With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and passionate purple. I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean. That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise! The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor, I eased along. But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally. There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty. Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing, though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too. I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its expression. I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone else. "I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming lady," I informed him. "However, I have something very special in the way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might be interested." He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up screaming.... Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted. Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye, and I gagged again. My actions didn't bother him a bit. "Jewels, did you say?" he tapped out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff.... A shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it, and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo. Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, "How's about taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida, old pal?" Or words to that effect. He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. "Anything! Just anything you desire, my dearest friend." I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. "I'm Casey Ritter. What's your label, chum?" "Attaboy," he ticked coyly. "Attaboy?" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. "Who named you that?" He simpered. "My dear friend, Pard Hoskins." I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?" He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly. Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him. "Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow in my boat." Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place? Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts. Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me. Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions, all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt. Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth. It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly. It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant. In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my eyeballs felt paralyzed. Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C. persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds. Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the airlock. III That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of space. In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather? Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls. We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it glowed like the inside of a red light. No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all that red! A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one! Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit. Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding, shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire. Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went across to her alone with the arsenic. Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I could hear her question reverberate away over where I was. "Who from?" asked Akroida. That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code at all. "Who from?" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush. "Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly remarkable jewels," he confessed coyly. Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. "His name?" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my direction. "Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?" Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. "I—uh—the stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman." He ducked his head and fearfully waited. A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. "An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?" Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly. The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with that dragon's tail of hers.
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D. Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will kill him, Casey opts for a jail sell. When he’s told that Jupiter is not as dangerous as once thought, and that the mission could actually make him rich, Casey fears that he’s lost his daredevil edge.
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How does the Watcher feel about Neena and Var's arrival?
A. He is thankful to have company to pass his wisdom to
B. He is a little disappointed to not have time to himself
C. He is suspicious of any people who would enter where he lives
D. He is thankful to have any interaction with other humans
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WHEN THE MOUNTAIN SHOOK By Robert Abernathy Illustrated by Kelly Freas [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer.... At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun. Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her. The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening twilight, even as her love was about him. Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass." He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with vengeance. "Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago." She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this. For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass, she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days. "Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock. "Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm. Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the best I can do now. Come on." There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might never have won through. It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. They heard no sound. The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful. Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their childhood; but neither had been here before. But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling in the light that poured from within. They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy. The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here." "You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he had not meant to be. The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch. Come in! You're letting in the wind." Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then turned questioningly to the young pair. "We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can spare it. We're pursued." "Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world is as bad as it was when I was last in it." Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young." Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours behind us." "A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families." Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk. "And what will you do now?" Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear to follow us." "To the mountain, you mean." "And into it, if need be." The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you—are you willing to follow your lover in this?" Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why, I will lead, if his courage should fail him." The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men." "We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth." "Do you believe that?" "As one believes stories." "It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom. Var stared down at his hands. "The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them. They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars. "Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder. "In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships. "From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...." Var and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their vision, and they saw— Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a shaking of the earth. Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead, poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces, naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood. Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned. Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound. They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship, and it was leaving. It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others cried desolately— wait! Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and the ship was gone. The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno, and the city burned and burned.... Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man who was the Mountain Watcher. "Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep, their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely. "I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance, folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again." The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally, "this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking." Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say, "You are tired. Best sleep until morning." Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed. Var woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how it was. He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know the face. Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you? Where's the Watcher?" The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here." "You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—" "Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away." Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you, Watcher." "Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga mountain?" Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no alternative." There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and they followed him outside. The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain. It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and gave nothing back. Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the curling fog hid everything. "You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will be too late for them to overtake Var." That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into one. They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: " It would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone irreparable.... But to become I and you again—that cannot be borne. " They said in unison, "No. Not that." The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the Ryzga mountain." Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little dizzied by the rapid flood of detail. "You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night. Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You don't blame us?" "You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!" They groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that the pursuit already halved their lead. They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep. Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently, head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle circuits.... The two stood shivering together. The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they heard a great voice crying, "There they are!" Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've caught you now!" Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows. Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!" Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him exhorting his men to haste. Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent whisper said, "Come on!" Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness. At Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising potential that seemed to whisper Ready ... ready.... The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more— Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being, pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out. The immaterial globe of light danced on before them. "Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not blocked.... Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that might be near at hand. From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay, then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the dark burrow: " Stop! —before you go too far!" Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go free." In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world outside should crumble to ruin around them. "Follow us, then!" They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream. Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood before their monstrous and inhuman power. Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart. Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum.... For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life. They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold. There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood. Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them. He was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway. That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow. With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures.... He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange. "Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically excellent stock...." There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will— toward the stars, the stars! The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest...." Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face. The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place: Decision! He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it. Neena screamed. Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished. But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves. Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind. Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in our world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way." Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. "Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us man could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right." The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed. Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience. In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var. Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz? Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?"
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A. He is thankful to have company to pass his wisdom to
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What is an underlying issue that the writer touches upon throughout the whole passage?
A. The two memoirs are completely inaccurate, and thus nothing that is offered can be true.
B. Shawn clearly had deep relationships with many people. Thus, it's hard to fully understand his life and his thoughts.
C. Shawn had been cheating on his wife, and even without getting a proper divorce he still pursued Ross.
D. There are different sources with differing opinions, making it hard to infer the total truth about Shawn and later Tina Brown.
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Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.
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D. There are different sources with differing opinions, making it hard to infer the total truth about Shawn and later Tina Brown.
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Who are the Karna?
A. The Karna are the second most powerful race in the galaxy. They are skilled negotiators.
B. The Karna are a race of warriors bent on destroying the Earth.
C. The Karna are a peaceful species trying to negotiate a surrender to Earth.
D. The Karna are a predator race who are trying to invade the Earth, to use humans as a food source.
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IN CASE OF FIRE By RANDALL GARRETT There are times when a broken tool is better than a sound one, or a twisted personality more useful than a whole one. For instance, a whole beer bottle isn't half the weapon that half a beer bottle is ... Illustrated by Martinez In his office apartment, on the top floor of the Terran Embassy Building in Occeq City, Bertrand Malloy leafed casually through the dossiers of the four new men who had been assigned to him. They were typical of the kind of men who were sent to him, he thought. Which meant, as usual, that they were atypical. Every man in the Diplomatic Corps who developed a twitch or a quirk was shipped to Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador to His Utter Munificence, the Occeq of Saarkkad. Take this first one, for instance. Malloy ran his finger down the columns of complex symbolism that showed the complete psychological analysis of the man. Psychopathic paranoia. The man wasn't technically insane; he could be as lucid as the next man most of the time. But he was morbidly suspicious that every man's hand was turned against him. He trusted no one, and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plots and persecutions. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. He was psychologically incapable of making a decision if he were faced with two or more possible alternatives of any major importance. Number three ... Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers away from him. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. He considered himself an individual, for instance, but wasn't the basic similarity there, after all? He was—how old? He glanced at the Earth calendar dial that was automatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it. Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, and gray hair? Well, he had an excellent record in the Corps, if nothing else. One of the top men in his field. And he had his memories of Diane, dead these ten years, but still beautiful and alive in his recollections. And—he grinned softly to himself—he had Saarkkad. He glanced up at the ceiling, and mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate it to the blue sky beyond it. Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space—a great, yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns, and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void. Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere out there, a war was raging. He didn't even like to think of that, but it was necessary to keep it in mind. Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of the alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought. And, Malloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. He was not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, but it was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Saarkkad, and that meant keeping on good terms with the Saarkkadic government. The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form—if one allowed the term to cover a wide range of differences—but their minds just didn't function along the same lines. For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and for nine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. To their way of thinking, an important official was aloof. The greater his importance, the greater must be his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who, themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. It was a long, roundabout way of doing business, but it was the only way Saarkkad would do any business at all. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and animals—products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe. It was Bertrand Malloy's job to keep the production output high and to keep the materiel flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts. The job would have been a snap cinch in the right circumstances; the Saarkkada weren't difficult to get along with. A staff of top-grade men could have handled them without half trying. But Malloy didn't have top-grade men. They couldn't be spared from work that required their total capacity. It's inefficient to waste a man on a job that he can do without half trying where there are more important jobs that will tax his full output. So Malloy was stuck with the culls. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter what was wrong with a man, as long as he had the mental ability to dress himself and get himself to work, useful work could be found for him. Physical handicaps weren't at all difficult to deal with. A blind man can work very well in the total darkness of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial or total losses of limbs can be compensated for in one way or another. The mental disabilities were harder to deal with, but not totally impossible. On a world without liquor, a dipsomaniac could be channeled easily enough; and he'd better not try fermenting his own on Saarkkad unless he brought his own yeast—which was impossible, in view of the sterilization regulations. But Malloy didn't like to stop at merely thwarting mental quirks; he liked to find places where they were useful . The phone chimed. Malloy flipped it on with a practiced hand. "Malloy here." "Mr. Malloy?" said a careful voice. "A special communication for you has been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I bring it in?" "Bring it in, Miss Drayson." Miss Drayson was a case in point. She was uncommunicative. She liked to gather in information, but she found it difficult to give it up once it was in her possession. Malloy had made her his private secretary. Nothing—but nothing —got out of Malloy's office without his direct order. It had taken Malloy a long time to get it into Miss Drayson's head that it was perfectly all right—even desirable—for her to keep secrets from everyone except Malloy. She came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middle thirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as though someone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn it over to Malloy. She laid them carefully on the desk. "If anything else comes in, I'll let you know immediately, sir," she said. "Will there be anything else?" Malloy let her stand there while he picked up the communique. She wanted to know what his reaction was going to be; it didn't matter because no one would ever find out from her what he had done unless she was ordered to tell someone. He read the first paragraph, and his eyes widened involuntarily. "Armistice," he said in a low whisper. "There's a chance that the war may be over." "Yes, sir," said Miss Drayson in a hushed voice. Malloy read the whole thing through, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Miss Drayson stood there calmly, her face a mask; her emotions were a secret. Finally, Malloy looked up. "I'll let you know as soon as I reach a decision, Miss Drayson. I think I hardly need say that no news of this is to leave this office." "Of course not, sir." Malloy watched her go out the door without actually seeing her. The war was over—at least for a while. He looked down at the papers again. The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing for peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately. Earth was willing. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it to continue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on for more than thirteen years now. Peace was necessary. But not peace at any price. The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars and winning at the peace table. They were clever, persuasive talkers. They could twist a disadvantage to an advantage, and make their own strengths look like weaknesses. If they won the armistice, they'd be able to retrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a few years. Now—at this point in time—they could be beaten. They could be forced to allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm, rendered impotent. But if the armistice went to their own advantage ... Already, they had taken the offensive in the matter of the peace talks. They had sent a full delegation to Saarkkad V, the next planet out from the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited only by low-intelligence animals. The Karna considered this to be fully neutral territory, and Earth couldn't argue the point very well. In addition, they demanded that the conference begin in three days, Terrestrial time. The trouble was that interstellar communication beams travel a devil of a lot faster than ships. It would take more than a week for the Earth government to get a vessel to Saarkkad V. Earth had been caught unprepared for an armistice. They objected. The Karna pointed out that the Saarkkad sun was just as far from Karn as it was from Earth, that it was only a few million miles from a planet which was allied with Earth, and that it was unfair for Earth to take so much time in preparing for an armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared? Did they intend to fight to the utter destruction of Karn? It wouldn't have been a problem at all if Earth and Karn had fostered the only two intelligent races in the galaxy. The sort of grandstanding the Karna were putting on had to be played to an audience. But there were other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, most of whom had remained as neutral as possible during the Earth-Karn war. They had no intention of sticking their figurative noses into a battle between the two most powerful races in the galaxy. But whoever won the armistice would find that some of the now-neutral races would come in on their side if war broke out again. If the Karna played their cards right, their side would be strong enough next time to win. So Earth had to get a delegation to meet with the Karna representatives within the three-day limit or lose what might be a vital point in the negotiations. And that was where Bertrand Malloy came in. He had been appointed Minister and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to the Earth-Karn peace conference. He looked up at the ceiling again. "What can I do?" he said softly. On the second day after the arrival of the communique, Malloy made his decision. He flipped on his intercom and said: "Miss Drayson, get hold of James Nordon and Kylen Braynek. I want to see them both immediately. Send Nordon in first, and tell Braynek to wait." "Yes, sir." "And keep the recorder on. You can file the tape later." "Yes, sir." Malloy knew the woman would listen in on the intercom anyway, and it was better to give her permission to do so. James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered, and thirty-eight. His hair was graying at the temples, and his handsome face looked cool and efficient. Malloy waved him to a seat. "Nordon, I have a job for you. It's probably one of the most important jobs you'll ever have in your life. It can mean big things for you—promotion and prestige if you do it well." Nordon nodded slowly. "Yes, sir." Malloy explained the problem of the Karna peace talks. "We need a man who can outthink them," Malloy finished, "and judging from your record, I think you're that man. It involves risk, of course. If you make the wrong decisions, your name will be mud back on Earth. But I don't think there's much chance of that, really. Do you want to handle small-time operations all your life? Of course not. "You'll be leaving within an hour for Saarkkad V." Nordon nodded again. "Yes, sir; certainly. Am I to go alone?" "No," said Malloy, "I'm sending an assistant with you—a man named Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?" Nordon shook his head. "Not that I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?" "Not necessarily. He's a pretty shrewd operator, though. He knows a lot about interstellar law, and he's capable of spotting a trap a mile away. You'll be in charge, of course, but I want you to pay special attention to his advice." "I will, sir," Nordon said gratefully. "A man like that can be useful." "Right. Now, you go into the anteroom over there. I've prepared a summary of the situation, and you'll have to study it and get it into your head before the ship leaves. That isn't much time, but it's the Karna who are doing the pushing, not us." As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy said softly: "Send in Braynek, Miss Drayson." Kylen Braynek was a smallish man with mouse-brown hair that lay flat against his skull, and hard, penetrating, dark eyes that were shadowed by heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked him to sit down. Again Malloy went through the explanation of the peace conference. "Naturally, they'll be trying to trick you every step of the way," Malloy went on. "They're shrewd and underhanded; we'll simply have to be more shrewd and more underhanded. Nordon's job is to sit quietly and evaluate the data; yours will be to find the loopholes they're laying out for themselves and plug them. Don't antagonize them, but don't baby them, either. If you see anything underhanded going on, let Nordon know immediately." "They won't get anything by me, Mr. Malloy." By the time the ship from Earth got there, the peace conference had been going on for four days. Bertrand Malloy had full reports on the whole parley, as relayed to him through the ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek to Saarkkad V. Secretary of State Blendwell stopped off at Saarkkad IV before going on to V to take charge of the conference. He was a tallish, lean man with a few strands of gray hair on the top of his otherwise bald scalp, and he wore a hearty, professional smile that didn't quite make it to his calculating eyes. He took Malloy's hand and shook it warmly. "How are you, Mr. Ambassador?" "Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything on Earth?" "Tense. They're waiting to see what is going to happen on Five. So am I, for that matter." His eyes were curious. "You decided not to go yourself, eh?" "I thought it better not to. I sent a good team, instead. Would you like to see the reports?" "I certainly would." Malloy handed them to the secretary, and as he read, Malloy watched him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a good man, Malloy had to admit, but he didn't know all the ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps. When Blendwell looked up from the reports at last, he said: "Amazing! They've held off the Karna at every point! They've beaten them back! They've managed to cope with and outdo the finest team of negotiators the Karna could send." "I thought they would," said Malloy, trying to appear modest. The secretary's eyes narrowed. "I've heard of the work you've been doing here with ... ah ... sick men. Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?" Malloy nodded. "I think so. The Karna put us in a dilemma, so I threw a dilemma right back at them." "How do you mean?" "Nordon had a mental block against making decisions. If he took a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble making up his mind whether to kiss her or not until she made up his mind for him, one way or the other. He's that kind of guy. Until he's presented with one, single, clear decision which admits of no alternatives, he can't move at all. "As you can see, the Karna tried to give us several choices on each point, and they were all rigged. Until they backed down to a single point and proved that it wasn't rigged, Nordon couldn't possibly make up his mind. I drummed into him how important this was, and the more importance there is attached to his decisions, the more incapable he becomes of making them." The Secretary nodded slowly. "What about Braynek?" "Paranoid," said Malloy. "He thinks everyone is plotting against him. In this case, that's all to the good because the Karna are plotting against him. No matter what they put forth, Braynek is convinced that there's a trap in it somewhere, and he digs to find out what the trap is. Even if there isn't a trap, the Karna can't satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced that there has to be—somewhere. As a result, all his advice to Nordon, and all his questioning on the wildest possibilities, just serves to keep Nordon from getting unconfused. "These two men are honestly doing their best to win at the peace conference, and they've got the Karna reeling. The Karna can see that we're not trying to stall; our men are actually working at trying to reach a decision. But what the Karna don't see is that those men, as a team, are unbeatable because, in this situation, they're psychologically incapable of losing." Again the Secretary of State nodded his approval, but there was still a question in his mind. "Since you know all that, couldn't you have handled it yourself?" "Maybe, but I doubt it. They might have gotten around me someway by sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon and Braynek have blind spots, but they're covered with armor. No, I'm glad I couldn't go; it's better this way." The Secretary of State raised an eyebrow. " Couldn't go, Mr. Ambassador?" Malloy looked at him. "Didn't you know? I wondered why you appointed me, in the first place. No, I couldn't go. The reason why I'm here, cooped up in this office, hiding from the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic bigshot should, is because I like it that way. I suffer from agoraphobia and xenophobia. "I have to be drugged to be put on a spaceship because I can't take all that empty space, even if I'm protected from it by a steel shell." A look of revulsion came over his face. "And I can't stand aliens!" THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction March 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.
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A. The Karna are the second most powerful race in the galaxy. They are skilled negotiators.
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How is Lane able to hover over the buildings?
A. He has anti-gravity boots.
B. He is in a helicopter.
C. He has a jet pack.
D. He has anti-gravity devices implanted in his body.
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MUTINEER By ROBERT J. SHEA For every weapon there was a defense, but not against the deadliest weapon—man himself! Raging , Trooper Lane hovered three thousand feet above Tammany Square. The cool cybrain surgically implanted in him was working on the problem. But Lane had no more patience. They'd sweat, he thought, hating the chill air-currents that threw his hovering body this way and that. He glared down at the three towers bordering on the Square. He spat, and watched the little white speck fall, fall. Lock me up in barracks. All I wanted was a little time off. Did I fight in Chi for them? Damn right I did. Just a little time off, so I shouldn't blow my top. Now the lid's gone. He was going over all their heads. He'd bowled those city cops over like paper dolls, back at the Armory. The black dog was on Lane's back. Old Mayor himself was going to hear about it. Why not? Ain't old Mayor the CinC of the Newyork Troopers? The humming paragrav-paks embedded beneath his shoulder blades held him motionless above Newyork's three administrative towers. Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace. Court House. Lane cursed his stupidity. He hadn't found out which one was which ahead of time. They keep Troopers in the Armory and teach them how to fight. They don't teach them about their own city, that they'll be fighting for. There's no time. From seven years old up, Troopers have too much to learn about fighting. The Mayor was behind one of those thousands of windows. Old cybrain, a gift from the Trooper surgeons, compliments of the city, would have to figure out which one. Blood churned in his veins, nerves shrieked with impatience. Lane waited for the electronic brain to come up with the answer. Then his head jerked up, to a distant buzz. There were cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats whirred along the translucent underside of Newyork's anti-missile force-shield, the Shell. Old cybrain better be fast. Damn fast! The cybrain jolted an impulse through his spine. Lane somersaulted. Cybrain had taken charge of his motor nerves. Lane's own mind was just along for the ride. His body snapped into a stiff dive position. He began to plummet down, picking up speed. His mailed hands glittered like arrowheads out in front. They pointed to a particular window in one of the towers. A predatory excitement rippled through him as he sailed down through the air. It was like going into battle again. A little red-white-and-green flag fluttered on a staff below the window. Whose flag? The city flag was orange and blue. He shrugged away the problem. Cybrain knew what it was doing. The little finger of his right hand vibrated in its metal sheath. A pale vibray leaped from the lensed fingertip. Breakthrough! The glasstic pane dissolved. Lane streamed through the window. The paragrav-paks cut off. Lane dropped lightly to the floor, inside the room, in battle-crouch. A 3V set was yammering. A girl screamed. Lane's hand shot out automatically. A finger vibrated. Out of the corner of his eye, Lane saw the girl fold to the floor. There was no one else in the room. Lane, still in a crouch, chewed his lip. The Mayor? His head swung around and he peered at the 3V set. He saw his own face. "Lashing police with his vibray," said the announcer, "Lane broke through the cordon surrounding Manhattan Armory. Two policemen were killed, four others seriously injured. Tammany Hall has warned that this man is extremely dangerous. Citizens are cautioned to keep clear of him. Lane is an insane killer. He is armed with the latest military weapons. A built-in electronic brain controls his reflexes—" "At ease with that jazz," said Lane, and a sheathed finger snapped out. There was a loud bang. The 3V screen dissolved into a puddle of glasstic. The Mayor. Lane strode to the window. The two police boats were hovering above the towers. Lane's mailed hand snapped open a pouch at his belt. He flipped a fist-sized cube to the floor. The force-bomb "exploded"—swelled or inflated, really, but with the speed of a blast. Lane glanced out the window. A section of the energy globe bellied out from above. It shaded the view from his window and re-entered the tower wall just below. Now the girl. He turned back to the room. "Wake up, outa-towner." He gave the blonde girl a light dose of the vibray to slap her awake. "Who are you?" she said, shakily. Lane grinned. "Trooper Lane, of the Newyork Special Troops, is all." He threw her a mock salute. "You from outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen a Newyork girl with yellow hair in years. Orange or green is the action. Whatcha doing in the Mayor's room?" The girl pushed herself to her feet. Built, Lane saw. She was pretty and clean-looking, very out-of-town. She held herself straight and her blue-violet eyes snapped at him. "What the devil do you think you're doing, soldier? I am a diplomat of the Grassroots Republic of Mars. This is an embassy, if you know what that means." "I don't," said Lane, unconcerned. "Well, you should have had brains enough to honor the flag outside this window. That's the Martian flag, soldier. If you've never heard of diplomatic immunity, you'll suffer for your ignorance." Her large, dark eyes narrowed. "Who sent you?" "My cybrain sent me." She went openmouthed. "You're Lane ." "I'm the guy they told you about on the 3V. Where's the Mayor? Ain't this his place?" "No. No, you're in the wrong room. The wrong building. That's the Mayor's suite over there." She pointed. "See where the balcony is? This is the Embassy suite. If you want the Mayor you'll have to go over there." "Whaddaya know," said Lane. "Cybrain didn't know, no more than me." The girl noticed the dark swell of the force-globe. "What's that out there?" "Force-screen. Nothing gets past, except maybe a full-size blaster-beam. Keeps cops out. Keeps you in. You anybody important?" "I told you, I'm an ambassador. From Mars. I'm on a diplomatic mission." "Yeah? Mars a big city?" She stared at him, violet eyes wide. "The planet Mars." "Planet? Oh, that Mars. Sure, I've heard of it—you gotta go by spaceship. What's your name?" "Gerri Kin. Look, Lane, holding me is no good. It'll just get you in worse trouble. What are you trying to do?" "I wanna see the Mayor. Me and my buddies, we just come back from fighting in Chi, Gerri. We won. They got a new Mayor out there in Chi. He takes orders from Newyork." Gerri Kin said, "That's what the force-domes did. The perfect defense. But also the road to the return to city-states. Anarchy." Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we done what they wanted us to do. We did the fighting for them. So we come back home to Newyork and they lock us up in the Armory. Won't pay us. Won't let us go nowhere. They had cops guarding us. City cops." Lane sneered. "I busted out. I wanna see the Mayor and find out why we can't have time off. I don't play games, Gerri. I go right to the top." Lane broke off. There was a hum outside the window. He whirled and stared out. The rounded black hulls of the two police paragrav-boats were nosing toward the force-screen. Lane could read the white numbers painted on their bows. A loudspeaker shouted into the room: "Come out of there, Lane, or we'll blast you out." "You can't," Lane called. "This girl from Mars is here." "I repeat, Lane—come out or we'll blast you out." Lane turned to the girl. "I thought you were important." She stood there with her hands together, calmly looking at him. "I am. But you are too, to them. Mars is millions of miles away, and you're right across the Square from the Mayor's suite." "Yeah, but—" Lane shook his head and turned back to the window. "All right, look! Move them boats away and I'll let this girl out!" "No deal, Lane. We're coming in." The police boats backed away slowly, then shot straight up, out of the line of vision. Lane looked down at the Square. Far below, the long, gleaming barrel of a blaster cannon caught the dim light filtering down through Newyork's Shell. The cannon trundled into the Square on its olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar mounting and took up a position equidistant from the bases of the three towers. Now a rumble of many voices rose from below. Lane stared down to see a large crowd gathering in Tammany Square. Sound trucks were rolling to a stop around the edges of the crowd. The people were all looking up. Lane looked across the Square. The windows of the tower opposite, the ones he could see clearly, were crowded with faces. There were white dot faces on the balcony that Gerri Kin had pointed out as the Mayor's suite. The voice of a 3V newscaster rolled up from the Square, reechoing against the tower walls. "Lane is holding the Martian Ambassador, Gerri Kin, hostage. You can see the Martian tricolor behind his force-globe. Police are bringing up blaster cannon. Lane's defense is a globe of energy similar to the one which protects Newyork from aerial attack." Lane grinned back at Gerri Kin. "Whole town's down there." Then his grin faded. Nice-looking, nice-talking girl like this probably cared a lot more about dying than he did. Why the hell didn't they give him a chance to let her out? Maybe he could do it now. Cybrain said no. It said the second he dropped his force-screen, they'd blast this room to hell. Poor girl from Mars, she didn't have a chance. Gerri Kin put her hand to her forehead. "Why did you have to pick my room? Why did they send me to this crazy city? Private soldiers. Twenty million people living under a Shell like worms in a corpse. Earth is sick and it's going to kill me. What's going to happen?" Lane looked sadly at her. Only two kinds of girls ever went near a Trooper—the crazy ones and the ones the city paid. Why did he have to be so near getting killed when he met one he liked? Now that she was showing a little less fear and anger, she was talking straight to him. She was good, but she wasn't acting as if she was too good for him. "They'll start shooting pretty quick," said Lane. "I'm sorry about you." "I wish I could write a letter to my parents," she said. "What?" "Didn't you understand what I said?" "What's a letter?" "You don't know where Mars is. You don't know what a letter is. You probably can't even read and write!" Lane shrugged. He carried on the conversation disinterestedly, professionally relaxed before battle. "What's these things I can't do? They important?" "Yes. The more I see of this city and its people, the more important I realize they are. You know how to fight, don't you? I'll bet you're perfect with those weapons." "Listen. They been training me to fight since I was a little kid. Why shouldn't I be a great little fighter?" "Specialization," said the girl from Mars. "What?" "Specialization. Everyone I've met in this city is a specialist. SocioSpecs run the government. TechnoSpecs run the machinery. Troopers fight the wars. And ninety per cent of the people don't work at all because they're not trained to do anything." "The Fans," said Lane. "They got it soft. That's them down there, come to watch the fight." "You know why you were kept in the Armory, Lane? I heard them talking about it, at the dinner I went to last night." "Why?" "Because they're afraid of the Troopers. You men did too good a job out in Chi. You are the deadliest weapon that has ever been made. You. Single airborne infantrymen!" Lane said, "They told us in Trooper Academy that it's the men that win the wars." "Yes, but people had forgotten it until the SocioSpecs of Newyork came up with the Troopers. Before the Troopers, governments concentrated on the big weapons, the missiles, the bombs. And the cities, with the Shells, were safe from bombs. They learned to be self-sufficient under the Shells. They were so safe, so isolated, that national governments collapsed. But you Troopers wiped out that feeling of security, when you infiltrated Chi and conquered it." "We scared them, huh?" Gerri said, "You scared them so much that they were afraid to let you have a furlough in the city when you came back. Afraid you Troopers would realize that you could easily take over the city if you wanted to. You scared them so much that they'll let me be killed. They'll actually risk trouble with Mars just to kill you." "I'm sorry about you. I mean it, I like—" At that moment a titanic, ear-splitting explosion hurled him to the carpet, deafened and blinded him. He recovered and saw Gerri a few feet away, dazed, groping on hands and knees. Lane jumped to the window, looked quickly, sprang back. Cybrain pumped orders to his nervous system. "Blaster cannon," he said. "But just one. Gotcha, cybrain. I can beat that." He picked up the black box that generated his protective screen. Snapping it open with thumb-pressure, he turned a small dial. Then he waited. Again an enormous, brain-shattering concussion. Again Lane and Gerri were thrown to the floor. But this time there was a second explosion and a blinding flash from below. Lane laughed boyishly and ran to the window. "Look!" he called to Gerri. There was a huge gap in the crowd below. The pavement was blackened and shattered to rubble. In and around the open space sprawled dozens of tiny black figures, not moving. "Backfire," said Lane. "I set the screen to throw their blaster beam right back at them." "And they knew you might—and yet they let a crowd congregate!" Gerri reeled away from the window, sick. Lane said, "I can do that a couple times more, but it burns out the force-globe. Then I'm dead." He heard the 3V newscaster's amplified voice: "—approximately fifty killed. But Lane is through now. He has been able to outthink police with the help of his cybrain. Now police are feeding the problem to their giant analogue computer in the sub-basement of the Court House. The police analogue computer will be able to outthink Lane's cybrain, will predict Lane's moves in advance. Four more blaster cannon are coming down Broadway—" "Why don't they clear those people out of the Square?" Gerri cried. "What? Oh, the Fans—nobody clears them out." He paused. "I got one more chance to try." He raised a mailed glove to his mouth and pressed a small stud in the wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ, this is Lane." A voice spoke in his helmet. "Lane, this is Trooper HQ. We figured you'd call." "Get me Colonel Klett." Thirty seconds passed. Lane could hear the clank of caterpillar treads as the mobile blaster cannon rolled into Tammany Square. The voice of the commanding officer of the Troopers rasped into Lane's ear: "Meat-head! You broke out against my orders! Now look at you!" "I knew you didn't mean them orders, sir." "If you get out of there alive, I'll hang you for disobeying them!" "Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl here—somebody important—from Mars. You know, the planet. Sir, she told me we could take over the city if we got loose. That right, sir?" There was a pause. "Your girl from Mars is right, Lane. But it's too late now. If we had moved first, captured the city government, we might have done it. But they're ready for us. They'd chop us down with blaster cannon." "Sir, I'm asking for help. I know you're on my side." "I am, Lane." The voice of Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd never admit it if you had a chance of getting out of there alive. You've had it, son. I'd only lose more men trying to rescue you. When they feed the data into that analogue computer, you're finished." "Yes, sir." "I'm sorry, Lane." "Yes, sir. Over and out." Lane pressed the stud on his gauntlet again. He turned to Gerri. "You're okay. I wish I could let you out. Old cybrain says I can't. Says if I drop the force-globe for a second, they'll fire into the room, and then we'll both be dead." Gerri stood with folded arms and looked at him. "Do what you have to do. As far as I can see, you're the only person in this city that has even a little bit of right on his side." Lane laughed. "Any of them purple-haired broads I know would be crazy scared. You're different." "When my grandparents landed on Mars, they found out that selfishness was a luxury. Martians can't afford it." Lane frowned with the effort of thinking. "You said I had a little right on my side. That's a good feeling. Nobody ever told me to feel that way about myself before. It'll be better to die knowing that." "I know," she said. The amplified voice from below said, "The police analogue computer is now hooked directly to the controls of the blaster cannon battery. It will outguess Lane's cybrain and check his moves ahead of time." Lane looked at Gerri. "How about giving me a kiss before they get us? Be nice if I kissed a girl like you just once in my life." She smiled and walked forward. "You deserve it, Lane." He kissed her and it filled him with longings for things he couldn't name. Then he stepped back and shook his head. "It ain't right you should get killed. If I take a dive out that window, they shoot at me, not in here." "And kill you all the sooner." "Better than getting burned up in this lousy little room. You also got right on your side. There's too many damn Troopers and not enough good persons like you. Old cybrain says stay here, but I don't guess I will. I'm gonna pay you back for that kiss." "But you're safe in here!" "Worry about yourself, not about me." Lane picked up the force-bomb and handed it to her. "When I say now, press this. Then take your hand off, real fast. It'll shut off the screen for a second." He stepped up on to the window ledge. Automatically, the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks. "So long, outa-towner. Now! " He jumped. He was hurtling across the Square when the blaster cannons opened up. They weren't aimed at the window where the little red-white-and-green tricolor was flying. But they weren't aimed at Lane, either. They were shooting wild. Which way now? Looks like I got a chance. Old cybrain says fly right for the cannons. He saw the Mayor's balcony ahead. Go to hell, old cybrain. I'm doing all right by myself. I come to see the Mayor, and I'm gonna see him. Lane plunged forward. He heard the shouts of frightened men. He swooped over the balcony railing. A man was pointing a blaster pistol at him. There were five men on the balcony—emergency! Years of training and cybrain took over. Lane's hand shot out, fingers vibrating. As he dropped to the balcony floor in battle-crouch, the men slumped around him. He had seen the man with the blaster pistol before. It was the Mayor of Newyork. Lane stood for a moment in the midst of the sprawled men, the shrieks of the crowd floating up to him. Then he raised his glove to his lips. He made contact with Manhattan Armory. "Colonel Klett, sir. You said if we captured the city government we might have a chance. Well, I captured the city government. What do we do with it now?" Lane was uncomfortable in his dress uniform. First there had been a ceremony in Tammany Square inaugurating Newyork's new Military Protectorate, and honoring Trooper Lane. Now there was a formal dinner. Colonel Klett and Gerri Kin sat on either side of Lane. Klett said, "Call me an opportunist if you like, Miss Kin, my government will be stable, and Mars can negotiate with it." He was a lean, sharp-featured man with deep grooves in his face, and gray hair. Gerri shook her head. "Recognition for a new government takes time. I'm going back to Mars, and I think they'll send another ambassador next time. Nothing personal—I just don't like it here." Lane said, "I'm going to Mars, too." "Did she ask you to?" demanded Klett. Lane shook his head. "She's got too much class for me. But I like what she told me about Mars. It's healthy, like." Klett frowned. "If I thought there was a gram of talent involved in your capture of the Mayor, Lane, I'd never release you from duty. But I know better. You beat that analogue computer by sheer stupidity—by disregarding your cybrain." Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid if it worked." "That's what bothers me. It calls for a revision in our tactics. We've got a way of beating those big computers now, should anyone use them against us." "I just didn't want her to be hurt." "Exactly. The computer could outguess a machine, like your cybrain. But you introduced a totally unpredictable factor—human emotion. Which proves what I, as a military man, have always maintained—that the deadliest weapon in man's arsenal is still, and will always be, the individual soldier." "What you just said there, sir," said Lane. "That's why I'm leaving Newyork." "What do you mean?" asked Colonel Klett. "I'm tired of being a weapon, sir. I want to be a human being." END Work is the elimination of the traces of work. —Michelangelo Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from If July 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.
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D. He has anti-gravity devices implanted in his body.
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What representations are presented by this paper?
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1.1.1.1em Mahault Garnerin, Solange Rossato, Laurent Besacier LIG, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, FR-38000 Grenoble, France [email protected] With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing use of deep-learning architectures, the question of ethics, transparency and fairness of AI systems has become a central concern within the research community. We address transparency and fairness in spoken language systems by proposing a study about gender representation in speech resources available through the Open Speech and Language Resource platform. We show that finding gender information in open source corpora is not straightforward and that gender balance depends on other corpus characteristics (elicited/non elicited speech, low/high resource language, speech task targeted). The paper ends with recommendations about metadata and gender information for researchers in order to assure better transparency of the speech systems built using such corpora. speech resources, gender, metadata, open speech language resources (OpenSLR) ### Introduction
The ever growing use of machine learning has put data at the center of the industrial and research spheres. Indeed, for a system to learn how to associate an input X to an output Y, many paired examples are needed to learn this mapping process. This need for data coupled with the improvement in computing power and algorithm efficiency has led to the era of big data. But data is not only needed in mass, but also with a certain level of quality. In this paper we argue that one of the main quality of data is its transparency. In recent years, concerns have been raised about the biases existing in the systems. A well-known case in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the example of word embeddings, with the studies of bolukbasi2016man and caliskan2017semantics which showed that data are socially constructed and hence encapsulate a handful of social representations and power structures, such as gender stereotypes. Gender-bias has also been found in machine translation tasks BIBREF0, as well as facial recognition BIBREF1 and is now at the center of research debates. In previous work, we investigated the impact of gender imbalance in training data on the performance of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, showing that the under-representation of women led to a performance bias of the system for female speakers BIBREF2. In this paper, we survey the gender representation within an open platform gathering speech and language resources to develop speech processing tools. The aim of this survey is twofold: firstly, we investigate the gender balance within speech corpora in terms of speaker representation but also in terms of speech time available for each gender category. Secondly we propose a reflection about general practices when releasing resources, basing ourselves on some recommendations from previous work. Contributions. The contributions of our work are the following: an exploration of 66 different speech corpora in terms of gender, showing that gender balance is achieved in terms of speakers in elicited corpora, but that it is not the case for non-elicited speech, nor for the speech time allocated to each gender category an assessment of the global lack of meta-data within free open source corpora, alongside recommendations and guidelines for resources descriptions, based on previous work ### OpenSLR
Open Speech Language Resources (OpenSLR) is a platform created by Daniel Povey. It provides a central hub to gather open speech and language resources, allowing them to be accessed and downloaded freely. OpenSLR currently hosts 83 resources. These resources consist of speech recordings with transcriptions but also of softwares as well as lexicons and textual data for language modeling. As resources are costly to produce, they are most of the time a paying service. Therefore it is hard to study gender representation at scale. We thus focus on the corpora available on OpenSLR due to their free access and to the fact that OpenSLR is explicitly made to help develop speech systems (mostly ASR but also text-to-speech (TTS) systems). In our work, we focus on speech data only. Out of the 83 resources gathered on the platform, we recorded 53 speech resources. We did not take into account multiple releases of the same corpora but only kept the last version (e.g. TED LIUM BIBREF3) and we also removed subsets of bigger corpora (e.g. LibriTTS corpus BIBREF4). We make the distinction between a resource and a corpus, as each resource can contain several languages (e.g. Vystadial korvas2014) or several accent/dialect of a same language (e.g. the crowdsourced high-quality UK and Ireland English Dialect speech data set googleuken2019). In our terminology, we define a corpus as monolingual and monodialectal, so resources containing different dialects or languages will be considered as containing different corpora. We ended up with 66 corpora, in 33 different languages with 51 dialect/accent variations. The variety is also great in terms of speech types (elicited and read speech, broadcast news, TEDTalks, meetings, phonecalls, audiobooks, etc.), which is not suprising, given the many different actors who contributed to this platform. We consider this sample to be of reasonable size to tackle the question of gender representation in speech corpora. OpenSLR also constitutes a good indicator of general practice as it does not expect a defined format nor does have explicit requirements about data structures, hence attesting of what metadata resources creators consider important to share when releasing resources for free on the Web. ### Methodology
In order to study gender representation within speech resources, let us start by defining what gender is. In this work, we consider gender as a binary category (male and female speakers). Nevertheless, we are aware that gender as an identity also exists outside of these two categories, but we did not find any mention of non-binary speakers within the corpora surveyed in our study. Following work by doukhan2018open, we wanted to explore the corpora looking at the number of speakers of each gender category as well as their speech duration, considering both variables as good features to account for gender representation. After the download, we manually extracted information about gender representation in each corpus. ### Methodology ::: Speaker Information and Lack of Meta-Data
The first difficulty we came across was the general absence of information. As gender in technology is a relatively recent research interest, most of the time gender demographics are not made available by the resources creators. So, on top of the further-mentioned general corpus characteristics (see Section SECREF11), we also report in our final table where the gender information was found and whether it was provided in the first place or not. The provided attribute corresponds to whether gender info was given somewhere, and the found_in attribute corresponds to where we extracted the gender demographics from. The different modalities are paper, if a paper was explicitly cited along the resource, metadata if a metadata file was included, indexed if the gender was explicitly indexed within data or if data was structured in terms of gender and manually if the gender information are the results of a manual research made by ourselves, trying to either find a paper describing the resources, or by relying on regularities that seems like speaker ID and listening to the recordings. We acknowledge that this last method has some methodological shortcomings: we relied on our perceptual stereotypes to distinguish male from female speakers, most of the time for languages we have no knowledge of, but considering the global lack of data, we used it when corpora were small enough in order to increase our sample size. ### Methodology ::: Speech Time Information and Data Consistency
The second difficulty regards the fact that speech time information are not standardised, making impossible to obtain speech time for individual speakers or gender categories. When speech time information is provided, the statistics given do not all refer to the same measurements. Some authors report speech duration in hours e.g. panayotov2015librispeech,hernandez2018ted, some the number of utterances (e.g BIBREF5) or sentences (e.g. googleuken2019), the definition of these two terms never being clearly defined. We gathered all information available, meaning that our final table contains some empty cells, and we found that there was no consistency between speech duration and number of utterances, excluding the possibility to approximate one by the other. As a result, we decided to rely on the size of the corpora as a (rough) approximation of the amount of speech data available, the text files representing a small proportion of the resources size. This method however has drawbacks as not all corpora used the same file format, nor the same sampling rate. Sampling rate has been provided as well in the final table, but we decided to rely on qualitative categories, a corpus being considered small if its size is under 5GB, medium if it is between 5 and 50GB and large if above. ### Methodology ::: Corpora Characteristics
The final result consists of a table reporting all the characteristics of the corpora. The chosen features are the following: the resource identifier (id) as defined on OpenSLR the language (lang) the dialect or accent if specified (dial) the total number of speakers as well as the number of male and female speakers (#spk, #spk_m, #spk_f) the total number of utterances as well as the total number of utterances for male and female speakers (#utt, #utt_m, #utt_f) the total duration, or speech time, as well as the duration for male and female speakers (dur, dur_m, dur_f) the size of the resource in gigabytes (sizeGB) as well as a qualitative label (size, taking its value between “big", “medium", “small") the sampling rate (sampling) the speech task targeted for the resource (task) is it elicited speech or not: we define as non-elicited speech data which would have existed without the creation of the resources (e.g TedTalks, audiobooks, etc.), other speech data are considered as elicited the language status (lang_status): a language is considered either as high- or low-resourced. The language status is defined from a technological point of view (i.e. are there resources or NLP systems available for this language?). It is fixed at the language granularity (hence the name), regardless of the dialect or accent (if provided). the year of the release (year) the authors of the resource (producer) ### Analysis ::: Gender Information Availability
Before diving into the gender analysis, we report the number of corpora for which gender information was provided. Indeed, 36.4% of the corpora do not give any gender information regarding the speakers. Moreover, almost 20% of the corpora do not provide any speaker information whatsoever. Table sums up the number of corpora for which speaker's gender information was provided and if it was, where it was found. We first looked at the metadata file if available. If no metadata was provided, we searched whether gender was indexed within the data structure. At last, if we still could not find anything, we looked for a paper describing the data set. This search pipeline results in ordered levels for our found_in category, meaning papers might also be available for corpora with the “metadata" or “indexed" modalities. When gender information was given it was most of the time in terms of number of speakers in each gender categories, as only five corpora provide speech time for each category. Table reports what type of information was provided in terms of gender, in the subset of the 42 corpora containing gender information. We observe that gender information is easier to find when it regards the number of speakers, than when it accounts for the quantity of data available for each gender group. Due to this lack of data, we did not study the speech time per gender category as intended, but we relied on utterance count when available. It is worth noticing however, that we did not find any consistency between speech time and number of utterances, so such results must be taken with caution. Out of the 42 corpora providing gender information, 41 reported speaker counts for each gender category. We manually gathered speaker gender information for 7 more corpora, as explained in the previous section, reaching a final sample size of 47 corpora. ### Analysis ::: Gender Distribution Among Speakers ::: Elicited vs Non-Elicited Data
Generally, when gender demographics are provided, we observe the following distribution: out of the 6,072 speakers, 3,050 are women and 3,022 are men, so parity is almost achieved. We then look at whether data was elicited or not, non-elicited speech being speech that would have existed without the corpus creation such as TEDTalks, interviews, radio broadcast and so on. We assume that if data was not elicited, gender imbalance might emerge. Indeed, non-elicited data often comes from the media, and it has been shown, that women are under-represented in this type of data BIBREF6. This disparity of gender representation in French media BIBREF7, BIBREF8 precisely led us to the present survey. Our expectations are reinforced by examples such as the resource of Spanish TEDTalks, which states in its description regarding the speakers that “most of them are men" mena2019. We report results in Table . In both cases (respectively elicited and non-elicited speech), gender difference is relatively small (respectively 5.6 percentage points and 5.8 points), far from the 30 percentage points difference observed in BIBREF2. A possible explanation is that either elicited or not, corpora are the result of a controlled process, so gender disparity will be reduced as much as possible by the corpus authors. However, we notice that, apart from Librispeech BIBREF9, all the non-elicited corpora are small corpora. When removing Librispeech from the analysis, we observe a 1/3-2/3 female to male ratio, coherent with our previous findings. This can be explained by the care put by the creators of the Librispeech data set to "[ensure] a gender balance at the speaker level and in terms of the amount of data available for each gender" BIBREF9, while general gender disparity is observed in smaller corpora. What emerges from these results is that when data sets are not elicited or carefully balanced, gender disparity creeps in. This gender imbalance is not observed at the scale of the entire OpenSLR platform, due to the fact that most of the corpora are elicited (89.1%). Hence, the existence of such gender gap is prevented by a careful control during the data set creation process. ### Analysis ::: Gender Distribution Among Speakers ::: High-resource vs Low-resource Languages
In the elicited corpora made available on OpenSLR, some are of low-resource languages other high-resource languages (mostly regional variation of high-resources languages). When looking at gender in these elicited corpora, we do not observe a difference depending on the language status. However, we can notice that high-resource corpora contain twice as many speakers, all low-resource language corpora being small corpora. ### Analysis ::: Gender Distribution Among Speakers ::: “How Can I Help?": Spoken Language Tasks
Speech corpora are built in order to train systems, most of the time ASR or TTS ones. We carry out our gender analysis taking into account the task addressed and obtain the results reported in Table . We observe that if gender representation is almost balanced within ASR corpora, women are better represented in TTS-oriented data sets. This can be related to the UN report of recommendation for gender-equal digital education stating that nowadays, most of the vocal assistants are given female voices which raises educational and societal problems BIBREF10. This gendered design of vocal assistants is sometimes justified by relying on gender stereotypes such as “female voices are perceived as more helpful, sympathetic or pleasant." TTS systems being often used to create such assistants, we can assume that using female voices has become general practice to ensure the adoption of the system by the users. This claim can however be nuanced by nass2005wired who showed that other factors might be worth taking into account to design gendered voices, such as social identification and cultural gender stereotypes. ### Analysis ::: Speech Time and Gender
Due to a global lack of speech time information, we did not analyse the amount of data available per speaker category. However, utterance counts were often reported, or easily found within the corpora. We gathered utterance counts for a total of 32 corpora. We observe that if gender balance is almost achieved in terms of number of speakers, at the utterance level, men speech is more represented. But this disparity is only the effect of three corpora containing 51,463 and 26,567 korvas2014 and 8376 mena2019 utterances for male speakers, while the mean number of utterances per corpora is respectively 1942 for male speakers and 1983 for female speakers. Removing these three outliers, we observe that utterances count is balanced between gender categories. It is worth noticing, that the high amount of utterances of the outliers is surprising considering that these three corpora are small (2.1GB, 2.8GB) and medium (5.2GB). This highlights the problem of the notion of utterance which is never being explicitly defined. Such difference in granularity is thus preventing comparison between corpora. ### Analysis ::: Evolution over Time
When collecting data, we noticed that the more recent the resources, the easier it was to find gender information, attesting of the emergence of gender in technology as a relevant topic. As pointed out by Kate crawford2017nips in her NeurIPS keynote talk, fairness in AI has recently become a huge part of the research effort in AI and machine learning. As a result, methodology papers have been published, with for example the work of bender2018data, for NLP data and systems, encouraging the community towards rich and explicit data statements. Figure FIGREF34 shows the evolution of gender information availability in the last 10 years. We can see that this peek of interest is also present in our data, with more resources provided with gender information after 2017. ### Recommendations
The social impact of big data and the ethical problems raised by NLP systems have already been discussed by previous work. wilkinson2016fair developed principles for scientific data management and stewardship, the FAIR Data Principles, based on four foundational data characteristics that are Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability BIBREF11. In our case, findability and accessibility are taken into account by design, resources on OpenSLR being freely accessible. Interoperability and Reusability of data are however not yet achieved. Another attempt to integrate this discussion about data description within the NLP community has been made by COUILLAULT14.424, who proposed an Ethics and Big Data Charter, to help resources creators describe data from a legal and ethical point of view. hovy2016social highlighted the different social implications of NLP systems, such as exclusion, overgeneralisation and exposure problems. More recently, work by bender2018data proposed the notion of data statement to ensure data transparency. The common point of all these studies is that information is key. The FAIR Principles are a baseline to guarantee the reproducibility of scientific findings. We need data to be described exhaustively in order to acknowledge demographic bias that may exist within our corpora. As pointed out by hovy2016social, language is always situated and so are language resources. This demographic bias in itself will always exist, but by not mentioning it in the data description we might create tools and systems that will have negative impacts on society. The authors presented the notion of exclusion as a demographic misrepresentation leading to exclusion of certain groups in the use of a technology, due to the fact that this technology fail to take them into account during its developing process. This directly relates to our work on ASR performance on women speech, and we can assume that this can be extended to other speaker characteristics, such as accent or age. To prevent such collateral consequences of NLP systems, bender2018data advocated the use of data statement, as a professional and research practice. We hope the present study will encourage researchers and resources creators to describe exhaustively their data sets, following the guidelines proposed by these authors. ### Recommendations ::: On the Importance of Meta-Data
The first take-away of our survey is that obtaining an exhaustive description of the speakers within speech resources is not straightforward. This lack of meta-data is a problem in itself as it prevents guaranteeing the generalisability of systems or linguistics findings based on these corpora, as pointed out by bender2018data. As they rightly highlighted in their paper, the problem is also an ethical one as we have no way of controlling the existence of representation disparity in data. And this disparity may lead to bias in our systems. We observed that most of the speech resources available contain elicited speech and that on average, researchers are careful as to balance the speakers in terms of gender when crafting data. But this cannot be said about corpora containing non-elicited speech. And apart from Librispeech, we observed a general gender imbalance, which can lead to a performance decrease on female speech BIBREF2. Speech time measurements are not consistent throughout our panel of resources and utterance counts are not reliable. We gathered the size of the corpora as well as the sampling rate in order to estimate the amount of speech time available, but variation in terms of precision, bit-rate, encoding and containers prevent us from reaching reliable results. Yet, speech time information enables us to know the quantity of data available for each category and this directly impacts the systems. This information is now given in papers such as the one describing the latest version of TEDLIUM, as this information is paramount for speaker adaptation. bender2018data proposed to provide the following information alongside corpus releases: curation rationale, language variety, speaker demographic, annotator demographic, speech situation, text characteristics, recording quality and others. Information we can add to their recommendations relates to the duration of the data sets in hours or minutes, globally and per speaker and/or gender category. This could allow to quickly check the gender balance in terms of quantity of data available for each category, without relying on an unreliable notion of utterance. This descriptive work is of importance for the future corpora, but should also be made for the data sets already released as they are likely to be used again by the community. ### Recommendations ::: Transparency in Evaluation
Word Error Rate (WER) is usually computed as the sum of the errors made on the test data set divided by the total number of words. But if such an evaluation allows for an easy comparison of the systems, it fails to acknowledge for their performance variations. In our survey, 13 of the 66 corpora had a paper describing the resources. When the paper reported ASR results, none of them reported gendered evaluation even if gender information about the data was provided. Reporting results for different categories is the most straightforward way to check for performance bias or overfitting behaviours. Providing data statements is a first step towards, but for an open and fair science, the next step should be to also take into account such information in the evaluation process. A recent work in this direction has been made by mitchell2019model who proposed to describe model performance in model cards, thus encouraging a transparent report of model results. ### Conclusion
In our gender survey of the corpora available on the OpenSLR platform, we observe the following trends: parity is globally achieved on the whole, but interactions with other corpus characteristics reveal that gender misrepresentation needs more than just a number of speakers to be identified. In non-elicited data (meaning type of speech that would have existed without the creation of the corpus, such as TEDTalks or radio broadcast), we found that, except in Librispeech where gender balance is controlled, men are more represented than women. It also seems that most of the corpora aimed at developing TTS systems contain mostly female voices, maybe due to the stereotype associating female voice with caring activities. We also observe that gender description of data has been taken into account by the community, with an increased number of corpora provided with gender meta-data in the last two years. Our sample containing only 66 corpora, we acknowledge that our results cannot necessarily be extended to all language resources, however it allows us to open discussion about general corpus description practices, pointing out a lack of meta-data and to actualise the discourse around the social implications of NLP systems. We advocate for a more open science and technology by following guidelines such as the FAIR Data Principle or providing data statements, in order to ensure scientific generalisation and interoperability while preventing social harm. ### Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by MIAI@Grenoble-Alpes (ANR-19-P3IA-0003). ### Copyrights
The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) proceedings are published by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA). They are available online from the conference website. ELRA's policy is to acquire copyright for all LREC contributions. In assigning your copyright, you are not forfeiting your right to use your contribution elsewhere. This you may do without seeking permission and is subject only to normal acknowledgement to the LREC proceedings. The LREC 2020 Proceedings are licensed under CC-BY-NC, the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. ### Language Resource References
lrec languageresource Table 1: Information availability on gender in OpenSLR corpora. Table 2: Type of information provided in terms of gender alongside the 42 corpora containing gender information. Table 3: Speaker gender distribution in data depending on the type of speech. NB: the two last lines refer to the nonelicited corpora, the only difference is that the last line does not take Librispeech into account. Table 5: Speaker gender representation in data depending on the task. ASR stands for Automatic Speech Recognition, TTS stands for Text To Speech, and NA accounts for the corpora for which no task was explicitly cited. Table 4: Speaker gender distribution in elicited corpora depending on language status. Table 6: Number of speakers of each gender and number of utterances for each gender category within the subset of corpora providing utterance count by gender. N.B: two corpora provided utterance count by gender but no speaker count, so the number of speakers is only given as a trend. Figure 1: Evolution of gender information availability in OpenSLR resources from 2010 to 2019.
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the number of speakers of each gender category, their speech duration
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How did the man's treatment change by most of the people after his thumbprints were taken?
A. He went from being treated as a criminal to being treated as one of the usual inhabitants of Dondromogon.
B. He went from being treated with suspicion to being revered.
C. He went from being treated as an invader to reluctantly worshipped as Yandro.
D. He went from being respected as a foreigner to being respected as a deity.
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Warrior of Two Worlds By MANLY WADE WELLMAN He was the man of two planets, drawn through the blackness of space to save a nation from ruthless invaders. He was Yandro, the Stranger of the Prophecy—and he found that he was destined to fight both sides. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] My senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind, insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me. Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages: "Where am I?" And at once there was an answer: " You lie upon the world Dondromogon. " I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above, beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and knuckled dust from my eyes. "How did I get here?" I demanded of the speaker. "It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?" And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked yet again: "Who am I?" The voice had a note of triumph. "You do not know that. It is as well, for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on Dondromogon." "Destined—leadership—" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet Dondromogon might be. "Birth and beginning—destined leadership—" Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly true. "Dondromogon?" I mumbled. "The name is strange to me." "It is a world the size of your native one," came words of information. "Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat, wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable." My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by mighty gales ... the voice was to be heard again: "War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War, unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected. Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar. Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil." A pause. "You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that wrong?" "Anyone would wish that," I replied. "But how—" "You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery of the Masters ." The voice became grand. "Suffice it that you were needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your destiny." I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim blocky silhouette, a building of sorts. The voice spoke no more. I had not the time to wonder about it. I got to my feet, bent double to keep from being blown over, and staggered toward the promised haven. I reached it, groped along until I found a door. There was no latch, handle or entry button, and I pounded heavily on the massive panels. The door opened from within, and I was blown inside, to fall sprawling. I struck my forehead upon a floor of stone or concrete, and so was half-stunned, but still I could distinguish something like the sound of agitated voices. Then I felt myself grasped, by both shoulders, and drawn roughly erect. The touch restored my senses, and I wrenched myself violently free. What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my back to a solid wall. My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster. With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity. "Who are you, and where are you from?" said one of the two, a broad-faced middle-aged fellow. "Don't lie any more than you can help." I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and level: "Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment. I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for shelter." "He's a Newcomer spy," quoth the other. "Let's put him under arrest." "And leave this gate unguarded?" demanded the other. "Sound the signal," and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on the wall beside the door-jamb. "There's a bigger reward for capture than for warning," objected his friend in turn, "and whoever comes to take this man will claim 'capture.' I'll guard here, and you take him in, then we'll divide—" "No. Yours is the idea. I'll guard and you take him in." The second man studied me apprehensively. "He's big, and looks strong, even without weapons." "Don't be afraid," I urged. "I'll make no resistance, if you'll only conduct me to your commander. I can show him that I'm no spy or enemy." Both stared narrowly. "No spy? No enemy?" asked the broad-faced one who had first spoken. Then, to his comrade: "No reward, then." "I think there'll be a reward," was the rejoinder, and the second man's hand stole to the sword-weapon. With a whispering rasp it cleared from its scabbard. "If he's dead, we get pay for both warning and capture—" His thumb touched a button at the pommel of the hilt. The dull blade suddenly glowed like heated iron, and from it crackled and pulsed little rainbow rays. There was no time to think or plan or ponder. I moved in, with a knowing speed that surprised me as much as the two guards. Catching the fellow's weapon wrist, I clamped it firmly and bent it back and around. He whimpered and swore, and his glowing sword dropped. Its radiant blade almost fell on my naked foot. Before the clang of its fall was through echoing, I had caught it up, and set the point within inches of its owner's unprotected face. "Quiet, or I'll roast you," I told him. The other had drawn a weapon of his own, a pistol-form arrangement. I turned on him, but too late. He pressed the trigger, and from the muzzle came—not a projectile but a flying, spouting filament of cord that seemed to spring on me like a long thin snake and to fasten coil after coil around my body. The stuff that gushed from the gun-muzzle seemed plastic in form, but hardened so quickly upon contact with the air, it bound me like wire. Half a dozen adroit motions of the fellow's gun hand, and my arms were caught to my body. I dropped my sword to prevent it burning me, and tried to break away, but my bonds were too much for me. "Let me out of this," I growled, and kicked at the man with my still unbound foot. He snapped a half-hitch on my ankle, and threw me heavily. Triumphant laughter came from both adversaries. Then: "What's this?" The challenge was clear, rich, authoritative. Someone else had come, from a rearward door into the stone-walled vestibule where the encounter was taking place. A woman this time, not of great height, and robust but not heavy. She was dressed for vigorous action in dark slacks with buskins to make them snug around ankles and calves, a jerkin of stout material that was faced with metal armor plates and left bare her round, strong arms. A gold-worked fillet bound her tawny hair back from a rosy, bold-featured face—a nose that was positively regal, a mouth short and firm but not hard, and blue eyes that just now burned and questioned. She wore a holstered pistol, and a cross-belt supported several instruments of a kind I could not remember seeing before. A crimson cloak gave color and dignity to her costume, and plainly she was someone of position, for both the men stiffened to attention. "A spy," one ventured. "He pushed in, claimed he was no enemy, then tried to attack—" "They lie," I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before her regard. "They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story of vigilance. I only defended myself." "Get him on his feet," the young woman said, and the two guards obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. "Gods! What a mountain of a man!" she exclaimed. "Can you walk, stranger?" "Barely, with these bonds." "Then manage to do so." She flung off her cloak and draped it over my nakedness. "Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair hearing." We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals. Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and conducted me along. "You are surely not of us," she commented. "Men I have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?" I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. "I am from a far world," I replied. "It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know nothing. Memory left me." "The story is a strange one," she commented. "And your name?" "I do not know that, either. Who are you?" "Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask questions. Enter here." We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's. She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner. "Stranger," he said to me, "can you think of no better tale to tell than you now offer?" "I tell the truth," was my reply, not very gracious. "You will have to prove that," he admonished me. "What proof have I?" I demanded. "On this world of yours—Dondromogon, isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition." "I am a scientist," offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. "His gaze," she muttered. The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared, received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly, bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified manner. This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me. "The stranger of the prophecy!" he cried, in a voice that made us all jump. The officer rose from behind the table. "Are you totally mad, Sporr? You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—" "But it is, it is!" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. "Look at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—" He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. "To my study," he commanded. "On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great gold-bound book that is third from the right." Then he turned back, and bowed toward me. "Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger," he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. "Pardon these short-sighted ones—deign to save us from our enemies—" The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: "If Sporr speaks truth, and he generally does, you have committed a blasphemy." The other made a little grimace. "This may be Yandro, though I'm a plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro," and he was most respectful, "he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my caution against possible impostors." "Who might Yandro be?" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and loose draperies. Old Sporr almost crowed. "You see? If he was a true imposter, he would come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—" "As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold to come with no memory of anything," supplied the officer. "Score one against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I you." The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once, his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees. "Happy, happy the day," he jabbered, "that I was spared to see our great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient time by the First Comers!" Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. "It is very like," she half-stammered. The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect. "I still say you will understand my caution," he addressed me, with real respect and shyness this time. "If you are Yandro himself, you can prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—" And he held the book toward me. It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black. "Behold," Doriza was saying, "matters which even expert identification men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the real man—" "That could be plastic surgery," rejoined the officer. "Such things are artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily assumed." Doriza shook her head. "That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the thumb-print—" "Oh, yes, the thumb-print," I repeated wearily. "By all means, study my thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me." "Bonds," mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands. "Thumb-prints?" I offered. Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All three gazed. "The same," said Doriza. And they were all on their knees before me. "Forgive me, great Yandro," said the officer thickly. "I did not know." "Get up," I bade them. "I want to hear why I was first bound, and now worshipped." II They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. "I am Rohbar, field commander of this defense position," he said with crisp respect. "Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza, a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies." "Enemies?" I repeated. "The Newcomers," supplemented Doriza. "They have taken the "Other Side" of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves at the poles. Now," and her voice rang joyously, "you will lead us to defeat and crush them utterly!" "Not naked like this," I said, and laughed. I must have sounded foolish, but it had its effect. "Follow me, deign to follow me," Sporr said. "Your clothing, your quarters, your destiny, all await you." We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after level of light and sound. "Our cities are below ground," he quavered. "Whipped by winds above, we must scrabble in the depths for life's necessities—chemicals to transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and weapons—" The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and stopped. "I have arranged for that," Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers combing his beard in embarrassment. "Arranged food for me?" I prompted sharply. "As if you know I had come? What—" "Pardon, great Yandro," babbled Sporr. "I was saying that I arranged food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow." We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room. "Behold!" he said, with a dramatic gesture. "Your garments, even as they have been preserved against your coming!" It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments of which Sporr spoke. The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone. Knowing that it was expected of me, I went to the locker and opened the door. The garments inside were old, I could see, but well kept and serviceable. I studied their type, and my hands, if not my mind, seemed familiar with them. There was a kiltlike item, belted at the waist and falling to mid-thigh. A resilient band at the top, with a series of belt-holes, made it adaptable to my own body or to any other. Then came an upper garment, a long strip of soft, close-woven fabric that spiralled around the torso from hip to armpit, the end looping over the left shoulder and giving full play to the arms. A gold-worked fillet bound the brows and swept back my longish hair, knotting at the nape of the neck. The only fitted articles were a pair of shoes, metal-soled and soft-uppered, that went on well enough and ran cross-garters up to below the knee, like buskins. The case also held a platinum chain for the neck, a belt-bag, and a handsome sword, with clips to fasten them in place. These things, too, I donned, and closed the glass door. The light struck it at such an angle as to make it serve for a full-length mirror. With some curiosity I gazed at my image. The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets. All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a distressed people. I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes. Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together. "It is indeed Yandro, our great chief," he mumbled. Then he turned and crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall. "I announce," he intoned into it. "I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall." Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering. Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and kissing it. "I serve Yandro," she vowed tremulously. "Now and forever—and happy that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all Dondromogon." "Please get up," I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I felt. "Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand." "I am Yandro's orderly and helper," she said. Rising, she ranged herself at my left hand. "Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited in the audience hall." It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a mixture of awe and brightness. "It is necessary that we live like this," she explained. "The hot air of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of life." I looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric, which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. "The other side, where those you call the Newcomers dwell and fight," I reminded. "Is it also windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements." Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: "Great Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles." We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece: "Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!" I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet; and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium. That spacious chamber had rows of benches, with galleries above, that might have seated a thousand. However, only a dozen or so were present, on metal chairs ranged across the stage upon which we entered. They were all men but two, and wore robes of black, plum-purple or red. At sight of me, they rose together, most respectfully. They looked at me, and I looked at them. My first thought was, that if these were people of authority and trust in the nation I seemed destined to save, my work was cut out for me. Not that they really seemed stupid—none had the look, or the subsequent action, of stupidity. But they were not pleasant. Their dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with some steadiness, but with no frankness anywhere. One man had a round, greedy-seeming face. Another was too narrow and cunning to look it. Of the women, one was nearly as tall as I and nobly proportioned, with hair of a red that would be inspiring were it not so blatantly dyed. The other was a little wisp of a brunette, with teeth too big for her scarlet mouth and bright eyes like some sort of a rodent. They all wore jewelry. Too much jewelry. My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And Doriza now spoke to the gathering: "Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience." " Yandro! " They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me. Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it: "Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are they true?" "The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not been told," intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but fixing me with his wise old eyes. One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward. He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache. "I am Gederr, senior of this Council," he purred. "If Yandro permits, I will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak." "Barak!" I repeated. "I—I—" And I paused. When I had to learn my own name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name? "Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute." Thus Gederr continued. "Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to encompass his destruction." He grinned, and licked his full lips. "Now, even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours." "You honor me," I told him. "Yet I still know little. It seems that I am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help." Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured to her "Tell him, Elonie." Then he faced me. "Have we Yandro's permission to sit?" "By all means," I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself. The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green water fixed upon me.
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B. He went from being treated with suspicion to being revered.
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What is Rupert doing in Tangier?
A. He is on a business trip to find a source of protein.
B. He is vacationing.
C. He is on a mission to encourage international conflict.
D. He is in Tangier to watch the satellite launch.
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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.
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C. He is on a mission to encourage international conflict.
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Which terms best describe the medical field's response to new development of medical technology?
A. gratuitous and enthusiastic
B. methodical and cumbersome
C. equivocal and inconsistent
D. deadpan and leisurely
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Obstetrics for beginners It's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face… So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out. The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market. The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving. To understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity. The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. "Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route," says Tydeman, "that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy." Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. "We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about." Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. "There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence," says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory. In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. This could be boosting the frequency of impaction. But, again, no one is certain. When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. "When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby," says Tydeman, "you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal]." As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. "It makes your fingers hurt," says Tydeman. "It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking." If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. "In our unit," says Tydeman, "when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times." Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective. Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. "What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head." From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was. Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place. The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. "We were at the point of getting one made in silicone," says Tydeman, "when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator." No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself. That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. "I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge," he says. "I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric." Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. "We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design." They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies. This presented a problem. "If you've applied for research money," says Tydeman, "but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work." On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective. That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. "It wasn't actually that difficult," Tydeman says. When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. "I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London," he says. "Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'." The following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. "Terribly flattering," Tydeman laughs. With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter. So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: "Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own." To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman. At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. "Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for," says Briley. It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. "When we first brought Debra out," Briley recalls, "some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good." Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately. A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device. The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD. One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands. As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real coup de théâtre , this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment. Oddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.
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C. equivocal and inconsistent
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