lings for ten thousand years. But had they revealed
themselves to any before? That was the important thing.
"You're getting too excited, Forry," she said. "I know
you have a thousand questions bubbling in your mind.
But you'll get things straighter and quicker if you'll just
listen quietly to my story. Okay? Good! Lean back and
listen."
There was a planet the size and shape of Earth rotating
around a Sol-type sun on the edge of the Andromeda
galaxy, which was 800,000 light years distant from Earth.
The sky was a blaze of luminous gas and giant stars shin-
ing through the gas. The planet of the Tocs had no moon,
hence was tideless.
The fifth planet out had two small moons but no seas
in which tides could occur. This was the dying world of
the Ogs, an evil race.
"Geeze!" Forry thought, and the extent of his excite-
ment could be gauged by his use of the mild expletive. He
abhorred the use, even in his mind, of the most dilute of
expletives.
"Geeze! This is just like Gernsback! Or Early
Campbell!"
The Tocs and the Ogs were not human beings. They
were amphibious creatures who passed back and forth
from a state of pure energy to that of matter. They formed
configurations of bound energy in one condition and con-
figurations of matter in the other. Their shape depended
on that which they wished to imitate—or to create. But
they did have limitations of size and shape. The smallest
body that could be formed was about the size of a large
fox or, if they took to the air, a large bat. When they ex-
isted as the smaller animals, they carried the energy ex-
cess in an invisible form as a sort of exhaust trail. Or
perhaps the analogy could be energy packed into an
intangible and transparent suitcase.
"What is your true shape?" Forry said.
"You were not to talk," Alys said, flashing white teeth.
She looked so beautiful and so young that he felt a pang
of desire. Or was it an ache for his own lost youth?
"We have no true shape, unless you would call the
shape we use the most our true one. I suppose you could,
since long utility of a particular shape results in a certain
'hardening' of that shape. It becomes more difficult to
change it as time goes on. And it requires more energy
to keep it in a nonhuman form. So, since most of us have
been in the human shape for so long, you might say that
that is our true shape."
The Ogs and the Tocs had come into contact when
space travel was invented. Neither used rockets or anti-
gravitational machines. They traveled from one place in
space to another by means of a very peculiar device. That
is, it was peculiar from the human viewpoint.
The device was made of a synthetic metal formed into
the shape of a large goblet or chalice. That particular
form was required because only that form could gather,
or focus, the mental energies of a Mover. Perhaps a closer
translation of the Toc word would be Captain. The Cap-
tain was the only person who could activate the device
so that the Tocs could be teleported from one point in
space to another.
"Why would the Captain be the only one able to ac-
tivate the device—this chalice?" Forry said.
"That is the limitation of this device, let us call it the
Grail," Alys said. "It has a certain superficial resemblance
to the grail of your medieval myths, although the inner
surface has a geometry that would be alien, even terrify-
ing, to human eyes.
"The Grail is matter, but it is activated only by a cer-
tain rare type of energy radiation. Of brainwave radia-
tion, I suppose you would call it, but there is more to it
than that. Anyway, the Grail, to act as a spaceship, or a
teleporter, must be controlled by a Mover, or Captain.
And there were only about a hundred Captains born
for every million of us born."
"Born?" Forry said, his eyebrows raising. "How can an
energy configuration be born?"
She waved her hand impatiently and said, "I am speak-
ing by analogy only. If I have to explain every detail of an
exceedingly complex culture, we'll be here for twenty
years. Let me talk."
The Ogs had discovered their Grails and found their
Captains the same time as the Tocs. There was travel
between the two planets almost at once and war a little
later. The Ogs were evil and wanted to enslave the Tocs.
Forry had some mental reservations about this. He
would wait until he had heard the Ogs' side before he
judged.
The Tocs had repulsed the Ogs with heavy losses on
both sides. Finally, there was peace. The Tocs and the
Ogs then turned their attentions to other worlds. Since
distance meant nothing to the Grail, since a hundred
thousand light years could be traversed as swiftly as a
mile, that is, instantaneously, the universe was open to
both races.
But with the billions on billions of habitable planets in
the universe, and the limited number of Captains, only a
few could be explored. Earth was one of them, and about
a thousand Tocs had come here. Almost immediately, the
Ogs had sent an expedition here also. The peace did not
extend to planets outside their system, so the Ogs had no
compunctions about attacking the Tocs.
The Ogs and Tocs had waged a mutually disastrous war.
They had destroyed each other's Grail and killed each
other's Captains. And so they were marooned on Earth.
"We lived among the humans but not of them," Alys
said. "Our ability to take different forms gave rise to a
number of superstitions about the supernatural origins of
vampires, werewolves, fairies, and what have you. We
Tocs were the basis of the good fairies, although we
changed into animal shape, or other shapes, quite often.
But we weren't hostile to human beings, that is, if they
followed the proper ethics we weren't."
Over the ten thousand years, the War, the occasional
killing of human beings, and suicide cut the original num-
ber of about two thousand Tocs and Ogs down to about a
hundred each. However, every Toc or Og whose material
form was slain was not dead. He became an energy con-
figuration again and could regain material form. But this
process took a long time on Earth because the magnetic
conditions here were not the same as in the mother system.
"That accounts for ghosts?" Forry said.
"Yes. Human beings don't have ghosts. When they die,
they are forever dead. But a Toc or Og who has died in
material form needs to attach himself to a locale where he
has both the optimum magnetic conditions and human
beings. He has to, shall we say, 'feed' off the energy of
human beings. And when he has gained enough form, in
a phase which you humans call ectoplasm, he needs blood
or sex to get a completely materi
al body. The Tocs need
sex and the Ogs need blood."
She paused and then said, "One of us recently regained
corporeal form by contact with Herald Childe. She literally
fucked herself into flesh. Of course, she was able to do it
far more swiftly with Childe than she would have with
one who was completely a human being."
34
"What the hell does that mean?" said Forry, who almost
never swore.
"I mean that Childe is the only Captain in existence.
But he doesn't know it as yet."
"Why not?"
"Because he was born half-human and raised by human
parents. Because a Captain has a delicate psychic con-
stitution and must be handled delicately until he has fully
matured. Childe is a fully mature man in the physical
sense, but he is a baby in regard to his psychic powers."
"Just one minute," Forry said. "I don't want to digress,
but if you beings can come back to material life after being
killed, why haven't these Captains that were killed come
back to life?"
"Some did and were killed by one side or the other be-
cause their existence could not be kept secret. Others
never made it because conditions weren't right. You see,
if we had a Captain and a Grail, we could not only return
to our home world. We could also bring all our departed
comrades back into corporeality. The Toc or Og in his
pure energy-complex phase is a rather mindless being. He
has some intelligence, but the main reason he gets back to
matter is that he has a drive to do so, an instinct. He wan-
ders around until he happens to come across a locale with
the proper setup for reconverting him. And reconversion
takes a long long time generally."
"Pardon the interruption," Forry said.
If he had not seen that transformation from middle age
to youth, he would have thought he was experiencing the
world's biggest hoax. But he was convinced. He was ac-
tually talking, face to face, with an extraterrestrial. One
that would have made the strangest creature of science-
fiction, or even those in Weird Tales magazine, rather
mundane.
He thought, In a sense, she's telling me the story of the
Martians and Venusians waging an underground war for
control of Earth. Hugo, you should be here! Oh, boy, if I
could just flip a switch and let the sci-fi fans and the Count
Dracula Society in on this!
And then he sobered. If this was true, and he believed
it was, this was no mere fiction story or child's delight. It
was a deadly war.
"Childe?" he said.
"Let's go back to 1788," she said. "To the birth of the
male who would become George Gordon, Lord Byron,
the famous, if not great, English poet. At the time he was
born, of course, no one, including us, knew that he would
become world-famous. Nor did we have any way of pre-
dicting whether he would become a Captain or just an-
other human being. Or just another Toc."
"I'm bursting with questions," he said, smiling. "But I
refrain."
"He was our first birth," she said. "On Toc, where con-
ditions are optimum, births are very rare. That is, births
from a copulation between, or among, our energy con-
figuration phases do not happen often. But then that is
counterbalanced by our lack of a death rate.
"Here on Earth, we had never succeeded in producing an
infant in the energy configuration. Then a Captain was
reconverted into material form. One of us had the idea of
preserving his genetic abilities in case he should get killed,
which he was later on. The Captain happened to be living
near the Byrons at that time, and he became the lover of
Lady Byron with the purpose of impregnating her. There
were a hundred of us, almost our full complement,
gathered together nearby the night she conceived George.
I suppose it is the only case, except one, where a hundred
people copulated to produce one baby. We poured our
mental energies into Lady Byron, and we succeeded. Co-
existing with the fusion of sperm and ovum was the crea-
tion of an energy embryo. This embryo was attached, no,
was fused with the body of the infant Byron. You might
say that he was the only human being up to then who
actually had a soul."
"Pardon me, but how did that energy embryo develop?
Did it become a separate entity or … ?"
"It fuses with the nervous system and becomes one with
the corporeal entity. Not identical but similar. It survives
after the death of the body.
"However, this creation of an energy baby requires
much outpouring of energy on our part. At the same time
that we were concentrating our metal energies, we were
fucking like mad corporeally. It was probably the biggest
gang-bang in history, if you will pardon such language,
Forry dear. I know you don't like to use dirty words or
especially to hear them.
"Unfortunately, though the baby grew up to have some
remarkable talents, it did not develop the psychic abilities
of a Captain. Not that that would have done much good,
anyway, because we did not have a Grail. But we hoped
metal, bit by bit, over thousands of years. On Toc we
could have done it in a year, but here, where the minerals
are scarce and the materials for building the potentializers
are even more rare, we took an agonizingly long time
getting what we needed. Then the Ogs made a raid and
stole what metal we had.
"They knew that Byron was to be our Captain. They
moved in, became acquainted with him, and we could do
little about it. Then they abandoned him when they found
out that he lacked the Captaincy.
"We were in despair for a while. But Byron still had
the genetic potentiality for a Captain, and we decided to
take advantage of that. If he couldn't be a Captain, per-
haps his child could be."
"Childe?" Forry said, ever alert for the chance to pun.
She nodded and said, "Exactly. We got specimens of his
sperm by a method I won't go into and froze it. Not with
ice or liquid hydrogen but with an energy configuration.
And we waited.
"We waited while our enemies, the Ogs, obtained more
metal, enough to make a Grail. Then we chose a woman
with suitable genetic qualities, humanly speaking, because
those have to be considered, too. You wouldn't want the
Captain to be an inferior physical or mental specimen.
And we deliberately settled on Mrs. Childe because of
the name. And its association with Byron, too. After all,
we use human languages and so we think something like
humans. Only like, not exactly as."
"Thus, the Herald Childe from the Childe Harold?"
"If you said H-E-R-A-L-D, yes. Herald. The Child that
Heralds the rebirth of our Toc energy ghosts, their re-
materialization. And our return to the Promised L
and of
our native planet. The dead shall rise and we shall cross
the river Zion into the land of Beulah, if I can mix up a
few quotations. You get the idea."
"And what about Childe and the Grail?" Forry said.
Alys Merrie opened her mouth to reply, but she shut it
when someone beat at the door and shouted.
35
At noon, the ringing of the doorbell awakened Childe. He
staggered out into the front room, past Sybil, who was
still sleeping, and threw open the door. A gust of rain wet
him and covered the three men standing on his porch. He
realized immediately that he should have been more
cautious, but by then it was too late. The first man
stepped inside, holding a spray can. Childe held his breath
and ran towards his bedroom, where he kept a gun. He
stopped when the man called, "Childe! Your wife!"
The second man was by Sybil with a knife at her
throat. The third, Fred Pao or his twin, held an air gun.
The first man sprayed a gas over Sybil just as she
opened her eyes and said, "Wha … ?"
She fell back asleep, and Pao said, "It won't hurt her.
Now your turn, Mr. Childe."
He could still run for the bedroom, he thought. But
these men would cut Sybil's throat if they thought they
had anything to gain by it. Of course, he might be able to
kill all three of them with his gun, but what good would
that do Sybil? On the other hand, if he surrendered,
wouldn't he and Sybil be as good as dead?
He did not know. That was the paralyzing factor. He
did not know. And from what had passed between
Vivienne and Hindarf he surmised that he was regarded
as something special.
"All right," he said. "I surrender."
The man with the spray can approached him and shot
the vapor in his face. He wanted to hold his breath, but it
was foolish putting off the inevitable. After glancing at his
wristwatch, he breathed in.
It was thirty minutes later when he awoke. He was
lying on a comfortable bed and looking up at a canopy.
He turned his head and saw Sybil beside him. She was
still unconscious. He got out of bed with some effort,