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John F. Dooley

Software Development, Design and

Coding
With Patterns, Debugging, Unit Testing,
and Refactoring
2nd ed.
John F. Dooley
Galesburg, Illinois, USA

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the

author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book’s
product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484231524 . For
more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-
code .

ISBN 978-1-4842-3152-4 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-3153-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3153-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961306

© John F. Dooley 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material
is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms
or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage
and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book.

Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a
trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and
images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the
trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the
trademark. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks,
service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as
such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or
not they are subject to proprietary rights.

While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true
and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the
editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any
errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no
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For Diane, who is always there, and for Patrick, the best son a guy
could have.
Preface
What’s this book all about? Well, it’s about how to develop software
from a personal perspective. We’ll look at what it means for you to
take a problem and produce a program to solve it from beginning to
end. That said, this book focuses a lot on design. How do you design
software? What things do you take into account? What makes a
good design? What methods and processes are there to help you
design software? Is designing small programs different from
designing large ones? How can you tell a good design from a bad
one? What general patterns can you use to help make your design
more readable and understandable?
It’s also about code construction. How do you write programs
and make them work? “What?” you say. “I’ve already written eight
gazillion programs! Of course I know how to write code!” Well, in
this book, we’ll explore what you already do and investigate ways to
improve on that. We’ll spend some time on coding standards,
debugging, unit testing, modularity, and characteristics of good
programs. We’ll also talk about reading code, what makes a program
readable, and how to review code that others have written with an
eye to making it better. Can good, readable code replace
documentation? How much documentation do you really need?
And it’s about software engineering, which is usually defined as
“the application of engineering principles to the development of
software.” What are engineering principles ? Well, first, all
engineering efforts follow a defined process . So we’ll be spending a
bit of time talking about how you run a software development
project and what phases there are to a project. We’ll talk a lot about
agile methodologies, how they apply to small development teams
and how their project management techniques work for small- to
medium-sized projects. All engineering work has a basis in the
application of science and mathematics to real-world problems. So
does software development. As I’ve said already, we’ll be spending a
lot of time examining how to design and implement programs that
solve specific problems.
By the way, there’s at least one other person (besides me) who
thinks software development is not an engineering discipline. I’m
referring to Alistair Cockburn, and you can read his paper, “The End
of Software Engineering and the Start of Economic-Cooperative
Gaming,” at
http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+end+of+software+en
gineering+and+the+start+of+economic-
cooperative+gaming .
Finally, this book is about professional practice, the ethics and
the responsibilities of being a software developer, social issues,
privacy, how to write secure and robust code, and the like. In short,
those fuzzy other things that one needs in order to be a professional
software developer.
This book covers many of the topics described for the ACM/IEEE
Computer Society Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree
Programs in Computer Science (known as CS2013). 1 In particular, it
covers topics in a number of the Knowledge Areas of the Guidelines,
including Software Development Fundamentals, Software
Engineering, Systems Fundamentals, Parallel and Distributed
Computing, Programming Languages, and Social Issues and
Professional Practice. It’s designed to be both a textbook for a
junior-level undergraduate course in software design and
development and a manual for the working professional. Although
the chapter order generally follows the standard software
development sequence, one can read the chapters independently
and out of order. I’m assuming that you already know how to
program and that you’re conversant with at least one of these
languages: Java, C, or C++. I’m also assuming you’re familiar with
basic data structures, including lists, queues, stacks, maps, and
trees, along with the algorithms to manipulate them.
In this second edition, most of the chapters have been updated,
some new examples have been added, and the book discusses
modern software development processes and techniques. Much of
the plan-driven process and project-management discussions from
the first edition have been removed or shortened, and longer and
new discussions of agile methodologies, including Scrum, Lean
Software Development, and Kanban have taken their place. There
are new chapters on parallel programming and parallel design
patterns, and a new chapter on ethics and professional practice.
I use this book in a junior-level course in software development.
It’s grown out of the notes I’ve developed for that class over the
past 12 years. I developed my own notes because I couldn’t find a
book that covered all the topics I thought were necessary for a
course in software development, as opposed to one in software
engineering. Software engineering books tend to focus more on
process and project management than on design and actual
development. I wanted to focus on the design and writing of real
code rather than on how to run a large project. Before beginning to
teach, I spent nearly 18 years in the computer industry, working for
large and small companies, writing software, and managing other
people who wrote software. This book is my perspective on what it
takes to be a software developer on a small- to medium-sized team
and help develop great software.
I hope that by the end of the book you’ll have a much better idea
of what the design of good programs is like, what makes an effective
and productive developer, and how to develop larger pieces of
software. You’ll know a lot more about design issues. You’ll have
thought about working in a team to deliver a product to a written
schedule. You’ll begin to understand project management, know
some metrics and how to review work products, and understand
configuration management. I’ll not cover everything in software
development—not by a long stretch—and we’ll only be giving a
cursory look at the management side of software engineering, but
you’ll be in a much better position to visualize, design, implement,
and test software of many sizes, either by yourself or in a team.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Todd Green of Apress for encouraging me and
making this book possible. The staff at Apress, especially Jill Balzano
and Michael Thomas, have been very helpful and gracious. The book
is much better for their reviews, comments, and edits.
Thanks also to all my students in CS 292 over the last 12 years,
who have put up with successive versions of the course notes that
became this book, and to my CS department colleagues David Bunde
and Jaime Spacco, who put up with me for all these years. And my
thanks also go to Knox College for giving me the time and resources
to finish both editions of this book.
Finally, I owe everything to Diane, who hates that I work nights,
but loves that I can work at home.
Contents
Chapter 1:​Introduction to Software Development

What We’re Doing

So, How to Develop Software?​

Conclusion

References

Chapter 2:​Software Process Models

The Four Variables

A Model That’s not a Model At All:​Code and Fix

Cruising over the Waterfall

Iterative Models

Evolving the Iterative Model

Risk:​The Problem with Plan-Driven Models

Agile Methodologies

Agile Values and Principles

eXtreme Programming (XP)

XP Overview

The Four Basic Activities

Implementing XP:​The 12 Practices

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 Scrum

Scrum Roles

The Sprint

Scrum Artifacts

Sprint Flow

Lean Software Development

Principle 1:​Eliminate Waste

Principle 2:​Build Quality In

Principle 3:​Create Knowledge

Principle 4:​Defer Commitment

Principle 5:​Deliver Fast

Principle 6:​Respect People

Principle 7:​Optimize the Whole

Kanban

The Kanban board, WIP, and Flow

Lead Time

Conclusion

References

Chapter 3:​Project Management Essentials

Project Planning
 Project Organization

Risk Analysis

Resource Requirements

Task Estimates

Project Schedule

Velocity

Project Oversight

Status Reviews and Presentations

Defects

The Retrospective

Conclusion

References

Chapter 4:​Requirements

What Types of Requirements Are We Talking About?​

User Requirements

Domain Requirements

Non-Functional Requirements

Non-Requirements

Requirements Gathering in a Plan-Driven Project

But I Don’t Like Writing!

 Outline of a Functional Specification

Design and New Feature Ideas

One More Thing

Requirements Gathering in an Agile Project

The Three Cs

INVEST in Stories

Product Backlog

SMART Tasks

Sprint/​Iteration Backlog

Requirements Digging

Why Requirements Digging Is Hard

Analyzing the Requirements

Conclusion

References

Chapter 5:​Software Architecture

General Architectural Patterns

The Main Program—Subroutine Architectural Pattern

Pipe-and-Filter Architecture

An Object-Oriented Architectural Pattern

An MVC Example:​Let’s Hunt!

 The Client-Server Architectural Pattern

The Layered Approach

Conclusion

References

Chapter 6:​Design Principles

The Design Process

Desirable Design Characteristics (Things Your Design

Should Favor)

Design Heuristics

Designers and Creativity

Conclusion

References

Chapter 7:​Structured Design

Structured Programming

Stepwise Refinement

Example of Stepwise Refinement:​The Eight-Queens

Problem

Modular Decomposition

Example:​Keyword in Context

Conclusion

References
Chapter 8:​Object-Oriented Overview

An Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Process

Requirements Gathering and Analysis

Design

Implementation and Testing

Release/​Maintenance/​Evolution

Doing the Process

The Problem Statement

The Feature List

Use Cases

Decompose the Problem

Class Diagrams

Code Anyone?​

Conclusion

References

Chapter 9:​Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

Analysis

An Analytical Example

Design

Change in the Right Direction

 Recognizing Change

Songbirds Forever

A New Requirement

Separating Analysis and Design

Shaping the Design

Abstraction

Conclusion

References

Chapter 10:​Object-Oriented Design Principles

List of Fundamental Object-Oriented Design Principles

Encapsulate Things in Your Design That Are Likely to

Change

Code to an Interface Rather Than to an Implementation

The Open-Closed Principle

The Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle

The Single Responsibility Principle

The Liskov Substitution Principle

The Dependency Inversion Principle

The Interface Segregation Principle

The Principle of Least Knowledge

 Class Design Guidelines

Conclusion

References

Chapter 11:​Design Patterns

Design Patterns and the Gang of Four

The Classic Design Patterns

Patterns We Can Use

Creational Patterns

Structural Patterns

Behavioral Patterns

Conclusion

References

Chapter 12:​Parallel Programming

Concurrency vs.​Parallelism

Parallel Computers

Flynn’s Taxonomy

Parallel Programming

Scalability

Performance

Obstacles to Performance Improvement

 How to Write a Parallel Program

Parallel Programming Models

Designing Parallel Programs

Parallel Design Techniques

Programming Languages and APIs (with examples)

Parallel Language Features

Java Threads

OpenMP

The Last Word on Parallel Programming

References

Chapter 13:​Parallel Design Patterns

Parallel Patterns Overview

Parallel Design Pattern Design Spaces

A List of Parallel Patterns

Embarrassingly Parallel

Master/​Worker

Map and Reduce

MapReduce

Divide &​Conquer

Fork/​Join
 A Last Word on Parallel Design Patterns

References

Chapter 14:​Code Construction

A Coding Example

Functions and Methods and Size

Formatting, Layout, and Style

General Layout Issues and Techniques

White Space

Block and Statement Style Guidelines

Declaration Style Guidelines

Commenting Style Guidelines

Identifier Naming Conventions

Refactoring

When to Refactor

Types of Refactoring

Defensive Programming

Assertions Are Helpful

Exceptions

Error Handling

Exceptions in Java
 The Last Word on Coding

References

Chapter 15:​Debugging

What Is an Error, Anyway?​

What Not To Do

An Approach to Debugging

Reproduce the Problem Reliably

Find the Source of the Error

Fix the Error (Just That One)!

Test the Fix

Look for More Errors

Source Code Control

The Collision Problem

Source Code Control Systems

One Last Thought on Coding and Debugging:​Pair

Programming

Conclusion

References

Chapter 16:​Unit Testing

The Problem with Testing

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 That Testing Mindset

When to Test?​

Testing in an Agile Development Environment

What to Test?​

Code Coverage:​Test Every Statement

Data Coverage:​Bad Data Is Your Friend?​

Characteristics of Tests

How to Write a Test

The Story

The Tasks

The Tests

JUnit:​A Testing Framework

Testing Is Good

Conclusion

References

Chapter 17:​Code Reviews and Inspections

Walkthroughs, Reviews, and Inspections

Walkthroughs

Code Reviews

Code Inspections
 Inspection Roles

Inspection Phases and Procedures

Reviews in Agile Projects

How to Do an Agile Peer Code Review

Summary of Review Methodologies

Defect Tracking Systems

Defect Tracking in Agile Projects

Conclusion

References

Chapter 18:​Ethics and Professional Practice

Introduction to Ethics

Ethical Theory

Deontological Theories

Consequentialism​(Teleological Theories)

Ethical Drivers

Legal Drivers

Professional Drivers

Ethical Discussion and Decision Making

Identifying and Describing the Problem

Analyzing the Problem

 Case Studies

#1 Copying Software

#2 Who’s Computer Is It?​

#3 How Much Testing Is Enough?​

#4 How Much Should You Tell?​

The Last Word on Ethics?​

References

The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

Preamble

Contents &​Guidelines

The ACM/​IEEE-CS Software Engineering Code of Ethics

PREAMBLE

PRINCIPLES

Chapter 19:​Wrapping It all Up

What Have You Learned?​

What to Do Next?​

References

Index
About the Author and About the
Technical Reviewer
About the Author
John F. Dooley
is the William and Marilyn Ingersoll Emeritus
Professor of Computer Science at Knox
College in Galesburg, Illinois. Before
returning to teaching in 2001, Professor
Dooley spent nearly 18 years in the software
industry as a developer, designer, and
manager working for companies such as Bell
Telephone Laboratories, McDonnell Douglas,
IBM, and Motorola, along with an obligatory
stint as head of development at a software
startup. He has more than two dozen professional journal and
conference publications and four books to his credit, along with
numerous presentations. He has been a reviewer for the Association
for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer
Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium for the last 36
years and reviews papers for the IEEE Transactions on Education,
the ACM Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
(ITiCSE) Conference, and other professional conferences. He has
developed short courses in software development and created three
separate software engineering courses at the advanced
undergraduate level.

About the Technical Reviewer

Michael Thomas
has worked in software development for more than 20 years as an
individual contributor, team lead, program manager, and vice
president of engineering. Michael has more than ten years
experience working with mobile devices. His current focus is in the
medical sector using mobile devices to accelerate information
transfer between patients and healthcare providers.
Footnotes
1 The Joint Task Force on Computing Education. 2013. “Computer Science Curricula
2013: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer
Science.” New York, NY: ACM/IEEE Computer Society.
www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf .
© John F. Dooley 2017
John F. Dooley, Software Development, Design and Coding,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3153-1_1

1. Introduction to Software Development

John F. Dooley1
(1) Galesburg, Illinois, USA

“Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature
of software makes it unlikely that there will be any—no
inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and
simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale
integration did for computer hardware. We cannot expect ever
to see twofold gains every two years.”
— Frederick J. Brooks, Jr.1

So, you’re asking yourself, why is this book called Software

Development, Design and Coding? Why isn’t it called All About
Programming or Software Engineering? After all, isn’t that what
software development is? Well, no. Programming is a part of
software development, but it’s certainly not all of it. Likewise,
software development is a part of software engineering , but it’s not
all of it.
Here’s the definition of software development that we’ll use in
this book: software development is the process of taking a set of
requirements from a user (a problem statement), analyzing them,
designing a solution to the problem, and then implementing that
solution on a computer.
Isn’t that programming, you ask? No. Programming is really the
implementation part, or possibly the design and implementation
part, of software development. Programming is central to software
development, but it’s not the whole thing.
Well, then, isn’t it software engineering? Again, no. Software
engineering also involves a process and includes software
development, but it also includes the entire management side of
creating a computer program that people will use, including project
management, configuration management, scheduling and
estimation, baseline building and scheduling, managing people, and
several other things. Software development is the fun part of
software engineering.
So, software development is a narrowing of the focus of software
engineering to just that part concerned with the creation of the
actual software. And it’s a broadening of the focus of programming
to include analysis, design, and release issues.

What We’re Doing

It turns out that, after 70 or so years of using computers, we’ve
discovered that developing software is hard. Learning how to
develop software correctly, efficiently, and beautifully is also hard.
You’re not born knowing how to do it, and many people, even those
who take programming courses and work in the industry for years,
don’t do it particularly well. It’s a skill you need to pick up and
practice—a lot. You don’t learn programming and development by
reading books—not even this one. You learn it by doing it. That, of
course, is the attraction: to work on interesting and difficult
problems. The challenge is to work on something you’ve never done
before, something you might not even know if you can solve. That’s
what has you coming back to create new programs again and again.
There are probably several ways to learn software development.
But I think that all of them involve reading excellent designs, reading
a lot of code, writing a lot of code, and thinking deeply about how
you approach a problem and design a solution for it. Reading a lot of
code, especially really beautiful and efficient code, gives you lots of
good examples about how to think about problems and approach
their solution in a particular style. Writing a lot of code lets you
experiment with the styles and examples you’ve seen in your
reading. Thinking deeply about problem solving lets you examine
how you work and how you do design, and lets you extract from
your labors those patterns that work for you; it makes your
programming more intentional.

So, How to Develop Software?

The first thing you should do is read this book. It certainly won’t tell
you everything, but it will give you a good introduction into what
software development is all about and what you need to do to write
great code. It has its own perspective, but that’s a perspective based
on 20 years writing code professionally and another 22 years trying
to figure out how to teach others to do it.
Despite the fact that software development is only part of
software engineering , software development is the heart of every
software project. After all, at the end of the day what you deliver to
the user is working code. A team of developers working in concert
usually creates that code. So, to start, maybe we should look at a
software project from the outside and ask what does that team need
to do to make that project a success?
In order to do software development well, you need the
following:
A small, well-integrated team : Small teams have fewer lines of
communication than larger ones. It’s easier to get to know your
teammates on a small team. You can get to know their
strengths and weaknesses, who knows what, and who is the
“go-to” person for particular problems or particular tools. Well-
integrated teams have usually worked on several projects
together. Keeping a team together across several projects is a
major job of the team’s manager. Well-integrated teams are
more productive, are better at holding to a schedule, and
produce code with fewer defects at release. The key to keeping
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Against the
Stone Beasts
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Against the Stone Beasts

Author: James Blish

Illustrator: Donel

Release date: February 25, 2021 [eBook #64630]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAINST THE

STONE BEASTS ***
Against the Stone Beasts
 By JAMES BLISH

Down the time-track tumbled Andreson, to land in a

continuum of ghastly matter-and-space reversal—and
find a love that shattered the very laws of life!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories Fall 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The letters on the fly-specked glass were simple, almost dogmatic.
Andreson eyed them with some amusement. Art agents seldom have
any taste, he thought; can't afford to.
The sign repeated, Special Showing of Surrealist Paintings, and
declined to offer further information. Andreson started to walk on,
then hovered indecisively. Modern arts of all kinds were his province
in preparation for a doctorate thesis. It wouldn't do to let the
smallest example go by without inspection. He went in.
The improvised gallery was musty with the odor of departed
vegetables, and very cold. Like the sign, the show had been set up
with a braggart simplicity. No programs, no furniture, no eager
guides—there were not even any guards. Andreson wondered what
was to stop a thief from stooping under the heavy rayon rope, which
kept the frames out of reach of curious or greedy fingers, and
making off with the whole collection.
With his first look at the paintings themselves, Andreson was
blessing his good daemon fervently for having guided his footsteps.
He could not place the works in any specific category; they certainly
were not surrealistic, unless the word had been used in its original
meaning of "super-realistic." The artist had used fantasy for his
sources, true enough, but the results were not the usual
shapelessness.
He angled his long body over the rope and inspected the nearest
one. It was a huge canvas, reaching almost to the floor, and it
depicted a building or similar structure like a glistening glass rod,
rising from a forest of lesser rods toward a red sun of almost
tangible hotness. A single figure, man-like, but borne aloft on taut,
delicate wings which suggested a bat rather than a human, floated
over the nearest of the towers. A quick glance revealed that all the
paintings but one contained several of these shapes; the one
exception was a field of stars with a torpedo streaking across it.
His quick glance confirmed another suspicion. The scenes were in
deliberate order, as if attempting a pictorial history of the flying
people. He felt vaguely disappointed. This stuff was garden-variety
fantasy, verging on the conceptions of science-fiction. Still, there was
a magnificent technique behind it all—a blending and effacing of
brush-strokes which made the Dutch look like billboard-splashers,
and a mastery of glaze which made each scene glow like an
illuminated transparency.
This last painting by the door, for instance. It showed the translucent
city again, with approximately the same details—but with a barely-
perceptible dimming of the red sunlight, a single tower jaggedly
shattered, a few other tiny touches, the artist had given it an
atmosphere of almost unbearable desolation. It was the same
fabulous metropolis—but it was tragic, deserted, lost. Peering
hopelessly from the summit of the broken tower was a tiny face,
looking directly upward at Andreson.
He allowed himself an appreciative shudder, and methodically went
around the gallery, following the history the pictures built up. It
seemed commonplace enough: a race of space-travellers who had
colonized the Earth, perhaps some time in the dim past, had built a
civilization, and had finally succumbed to some undepicted doom.
What was amazing was the utterly convincing way the well-worn
story was told. It was real—super-real, indeed, for it commanded
more belief and sympathy than the everyday human tragedies.
Andreson took out his fountain pen and an unopened letter and
walked toward the door. He must get the address of this place and
attempt to locate the artist. John Kimball's inscription on the
envelope reminded him that Johnny, though a scientist, dabbled in
the arts and would be interested. He ripped open the flap, then
stopped in mid-stride, ducked under the rayon cord to look at the
spaceship scene.
In many ways this was the most wonderful of the lot. Even a night
sky or a telescope field has no depth; it is merely a black surface
containing spots of light; but the picture surpassed nature. It had a
stereoscopic quality, all the more startling because it was impossible
to ascertain how it was done. Andreson noted with a chuckle that
the agent had placed the paintings in such order that there was a
strong draft blowing toward the picture, as if being drained away
into that awesome vacuum. A strictly phony trick, but clever
nonetheless. Curious in spite of his better instincts, he put out a
tentative finger to the surface of the scene—
The fountain pen clattered to the floor.
He gaped idiotically, and stirred with his finger at the nothingness
where the picture still seemed to be. In his shock-numbed mind two
words burned fiercely:
It's real.
Ridiculous. Tensely he forced himself to move his hand in deeper,
against the yelling of his nerves. It struck a slight, tingling
resistance, like a curtain of static electricity—and then the blood was
pounding in each finger as if trying to burst through the skin. He
snatched the hand back. There was a vacuum there; cut off from the
room by some unseen force through which the air was leaking
rapidly.
Teetering on the edge of panic, he struggled to make better sense of
the facts. The prickly pounding he had felt in his fingers might well
have been electrical and only that, and Johnny Kimball had once
demonstrated for him the "static jet" which might explain the draft
of air. Three-dimensional television, perhaps—
He shook his head. No inventor would set up a demonstration like
this, in an abandoned grocery, without any announcement or
literature; nor would there be likely to be eighteen screens, each one
showing a motionless and quite impossible scene. No; it was insane,
but these garish things were—
Windows.
Into what? Clutching at his frayed emotions, he took a step toward
the next frame. His foot crunched on the forgotten fountain pen. For
a second he flailed in terror at nothing, and then pitched head
foremost over the low ledge.

After a moment the sweet piping spoke again. "You are not hurt.
The mental shock will pass shortly."
Andreson said nothing and stared fixedly at the crimson glow
underneath his eyelids. Physically he was unhurt, but his sanity was
precarious. In his mind, behind the closed lids, it happened over and
over again: the long twisting fall, with the great city spinning and
growing beneath him in a riot of color, and damp hot air gushing
past him, the sudden swooping of the dark figure and the thrum of
wings. He tried to pass out again and awaken on the floor of the
gallery, but the cold, chiming voice jabbed him awake again.
"This is quite real. You are intelligent enough to accept it—stop
thinking like an infant."
The motherly reprimand under such circumstances planted a small
germ of amusement somewhere in his mind, and he grasped it
frantically and began to laugh, still keeping his eyes clenched shut.
Even without seeing its face, he could feel the creature's alarm at his
hysteria, but he allowed the shaking to exhaust him into a sort of
calmness. Only when his breathing had become controlled and even
did he allow himself a second look.
Red sunlight played harshly in upon him through the translucent
walls of the small room, and burned sullenly within the crystal bar
which crossed above his head. One wall was recessed with what
seemed to be bookshelves, and odd articles of furniture stood here
and there; but evidently none of them had been designed for
humans, for he was lying on the smooth floor, his jacket bunched
under his head. The cowled shape still arched over him with Satanic
solicitude, black against the glare, and somehow smaller than he
had expected it to be. He hoped that that cape would not expand
into wings—not yet—for his new calm still stood at the shimmering
verge of madness.
"Thank you," he said carefully. "I owe you my life."
The silhouetted head moved as if to dismiss the matter. "Your
sudden appearance in mid-air was startling. We were fortunate that
I happened to be in flight at the time."
With a whispering sound, like the rustling of heavy cloth, the figure
moved out of the direct rays of the sun and settled gracefully against
one of the furniture-like things. The light struck it full, and Andreson
gasped and sat bolt upright.
She was winged, no doubt about that. But the bat-like impression
those wings had given him seemed to have been only a product of
distance. Seen in closeup, the wings were tawny and delicate, and
traced with intricate veins, their ribs were close-set, the webbing like
the sheerest silk. They rose from the girl's back where her
shoulderblades should have been, and at rest curved around her
sides and made a backdrop for her legs and feet.
Except for those gorgeous pinions, which set her off like two great
Japanese fans, she might have been human, or close to it. She no
more suggested the rodent than the goddess Diana would have
suggested a female gorilla. The wings, something about the bony
structure underlying her face, a vague otherness about her
proportions—except for these minute differences she could have
passed anywhere for a strikingly lovely human girl. Her clothing was
brief and simple, and not weighted with ornaments, for she needed
free limbs and no useless baggage for flight.
Andreson realized that he was goggling and rearranged his face as
best he could. She did not seem to take his amazed inspection as
anything but normal, however. "Are you a time-traveller?" she asked,
tilted her head curiously. "We could think of no other explanation.
Are you from our track?"
"I don't know," Andreson confessed. "My trip was accidental, and the
mechanism is a mystery to me." He considered asking about the
gallery, but the girl's questions had already told him it would be
fruitless.
He masked his emotions in the mechanism of locating and lighting a
cigarette, while the girl waited with polite patience. It was hard to
forget that there was an obscure doom prophesied—or had it been
merely narrated, as historical fact?—for this exquisite creature and
her whole civilization, and he was determined to say nothing about it
until he knew what he was talking about.
"I discovered in my time a sort of gateway to your time, and to
seventeen other nearly synchronous moments, set up by a scientist
unknown to me. Each of the gates seems to open upon one single
specific instant. For instance: before I fell into the one which brought
me here, I saw a figure I'm sure was yours. And it was motionless
above the city, all the time that I was watching it."
He broke off suddenly. "Wait a minute. If this is another time—well,
suppose you tell me: am I speaking your language, or do you know
mine? Or are you a telepath?"

She laughed, each sound a clear, musical tone, as if she had been
struck by a desire to sing the Bell Song. "Don't you know your own
language when you hear it? No, the Varese are not telepathic—few
races are. But a truly telepathic race allied with us has provided our
culture with a good stock of equipment for tapping various parts of
the mind. We use it for education. We simply tapped your language
centers while you were unconscious."
A shadow passed across the glowing wall, and he heard the already-
familiar hum of wings. A moment later a newcomer was outlined in
the sunlight in a low doorway which seemed to open on empty
space. It was a man, this time, a figure almost exactly Andreson's
height, and perhaps a little older, though it was hard to judge. He
smiled unpleasantly at the human, revealing two upper incisors
which were slightly larger than the rest of his teeth, and demanded,
"Well, what time is he?"
"What time are you?" Andreson countered. "We've no record of you
in our history. You could have flourished, died, or moved on a dozen
times without our knowing it—our records go back only three
thousand years."
"Well taken," the Varan said, making himself comfortable on one of
the odd "chairs." "We're not native, here, of course. But so far we've
found no mammals on this planet, except a few egg-laying ones that
aren't even entirely warm-blooded yet; so you must be a
considerable distance in our future. Furthermore, you're a time-
traveller, which means that you know more than we do, for time is a
problem we have never broken."
The girl shook her head slowly, all traces of her former laughter
vanished. "It's no use, Atel. He's here by accident, and isn't a
scientist."
"What's the matter?" Andreson said. Both faces looked so somber
that he nearly forgot his own problem. "Are you in trouble?"
"We're at war," the girl said softly. "And we shall probably be
exterminated, all of us, before the year is over."
Andreson remembered again the picture of the deserted city, and
despite the hot sun he felt the same chill.
"This planet you call Earth," Atel said, "has no life on its surface now
with enough intelligence to count up to three. But after we had been
here fifty-three of its years, we discovered that Earth has a
civilization of its own all the same—inside."
A dozen legends chased through Andreson's mind at once. "Cave-
dwellers of some sort? It hardly seems credible."
"No, not cave-dwellers. These aren't even solid, and they couldn't
live in caves. They live in the Earth—in the rock itself, and all the
way down to the core. They are—space-beasts. They move through
solid matter just as you and I move through space, and are stopped
by space as we are stopped by a solid wall. In the air, for instance,
we're safe from them, for what is to us a thin gas is for them a
viscous, almost rigid medium. In the oceans, we meet on equal
terms; but true solids are their natural medium."
"How did you discover them?"
"They discovered us," the girl said. "They have besieged the city
ever since the fifty-third year after our landing. They're invisible, of
course, but we can see them as openings in the earth. The openings
change shape as they move, and of course no natural pit does that.
In their own universe, the hollow Earth bounded by its solid
atmosphere, they are flying creatures, and their sense of gravity is
the reverse of ours."
Her clear, fluting voice became steadily duller, losing its inflection as
the tale went on. "Before we came here," she said, "we had
encountered what our scientists call counter-matter—matter of
opposite electrical nature to ours. But this complete inversion of
space-matter relationships was unknown to us. The space-beasts
knew about it. They are bent on driving us from the Earth...."

Andreson felt his mind reeling into hysteria again. It was difficult
enough to accept the spotless, shining glass chamber and the two
winged Varese—but this story of an inside-out universe and its air-
treading masters—if only John Kimball had been the one to hear it—
"Sometimes," Atel said reflectively, "I think the Varese have earned
their defeat. There was a time when we were carrying the fight into
the enemy's own cosmos. But it was their cosmos, not ours, and
they knew it very well! Our change of state, while it enabled us to
see our foes, could not change our mental orientation. We were lost
in that hollow darkness. We could not forget that each great gulf
was actually a mountain, the sudden chasms were buildings we
ourselves had built,—and the things like tiny burrows which kept
opening and closing all about our feet were the footfalls of our
brothers. And the space-beasts swooped upon us, each of them with
six tiers of wings muttering against the solid magma of the Earth,
and our weapons were crude and worthless...."
Andreson's mind tasted the concept and rejected it with a shudder.
"But surely," he said as steadily as he could, "you must have better
weapons, now."
"Oh, yes, we have the weapons. But we are decadent, and have lost
the initiative to be the aggressors. The machines that accomplished
the reversal of state for our ancestors have lain idle for a century in
the bowels of our city. We no longer understand them. We are
dying, first of all, of old age—the space-beasts are the accident that
speeds us along the way. Shall I tell you what we use against them
now?"
The girl stirred protestingly. Andreson looked at her, but she would
not return the glance. Atel went on relentlessly.
"Look." From under his tunic he produced a heavy, long metal rod.
"A club? But—I don't see how—"
"It's hollow," Atel said succinctly. "The metal, of course, is useless,
but the vacuum inside is steel-hard to them. Space crushing into
space, and gouts of hard radiation bursting like blood from the
contact. That's all we have now, that and a feeble energising process
which sometimes seals off the foundations of the city. Walls, and
clubs! Our last miserable recourses—and then—
"Then the space-beasts will own the Earth again."

II

By the time John Kimball had finished disconnecting the leads to the
multiple screen and rewiring the master converter he was nearly
blind with fatigue and his fingertips jerked and danced uncontrollably
on the verniers. The sleepless nights of the previous week, and the
emotional strain under which he had been working throughout was
taking its toll now. After the wave-splitting effect had first suggested
it to him, he had spent most of the week erecting the
demonstration, and quite probably the triumphant letter he had
mailed to Andreson afterwards had been a little crazy.
As soon as he had posted the letter he had managed to get in about
twenty hours of deathlike slumber. It was hardly enough, but there
was no help for that now. Except for the first, sickening shock—for
the discarded, empty envelope on the floor, the splintered fountain
pen, and the one screen featureless and flickeringly gray, had told
him what had happened in instant detail—he had wasted no time
cursing himself for his grandiose "gallery" stunt. The Colossus in the
cellar would need many hours of weary, desperate work before the
cauterized scars of Andreson's cannoning fall through the tissues of
Time would open enough to permit Kimball to follow.
A tumbler clicked in the pre-dawn silence, and a flood of magnetons
sped through the primary coils. The ensuing process was quiet and
invisible, but Kimball could feel it—the familiar, nauseating strain
which had first led him to the basic principle. It meant that tiny
lacunae were being born in the fabric of Time, spreading and
merging as the spinning magnetic field tore at them. He slumped on
his stool and waited. He was not sure that the last hour's work had
been even approximately right, but his gibbering nerves would no
longer permit calculation or delicate mechanical correction. The die
was cast, and wherever the nascent achronic gateway led, he would
have to follow.
After a moment he discovered that the climbing dial needles were
hypnotizing him. Getting up from the stool, he proceeded to collect
his equipment, moving like a zombie. It was futile to wish he had
studied the period more closely, but at least it was clear that the age
of the winged colonists had been warfare; best to be armed, though
there was a good chance that his pistol would be far outclassed. A
flashlight clipped to his belt, and an alcohol compass tuned to the
machine's field rather than the Earth's, and he was ready.
He stepped into the heavy torus coil which terminated the series—
there had been no time to set up a new frame—and turned out the
cellar light.
The machine made no sound, and in the blackness no one could
have seen that after a few moments it was alone.

The light of the red sun ran back and forth along the catwalk in
quivering lines, and all around it the city glistened in faery-like
beauty. Andreson regarded the bridge dubiously; it was little more
than a thread of crystal.
"It will bear your weight," the girl said, mistaking his trepidation.
Masking his thoughts, he set out across it.
"They have come through several times, just recently," Atel
continued evenly. "In a sort of borer—I suppose they thought of it as
that—whose walls were invisible, its machinery a contorted group of
vacancies in a solid interior. But we destroyed the solid part, and
they were crushed. It is hard to imagine how empty space could
crush. But we have the law that two objects may not exist in the
same space at the same time, and this seems to be its converse."
Andreson tried it out: two spaces cannot exist in the same—in the
same what? Abruptly his head was whirling and in the vast distance
the earth reeled and shuddered; the glassy thread under his feet
seemed to swivel back and forth like a tightrope. He was going over
—
Behind him, powerful vanes cracked open, and lean hands grappled
his shoulders firmly. "Thanks," he gasped, flailing with his feet at the
landing of the next building. Atel grinned contemptuously and leaned
him against the wall like a manikin.
"Nevertheless," the winged man proceeded as imperturbably as ever,
"they learn rapidly. If they ever find out the secret of reversing their
condition, we can close the book on Varan history." He jerked open
the door to which the platform led, and Andreson and the girl
followed him through.
From the level upon which they were standing all the way up to the
summit of this new tower there was a vast chamber, domed with a
clear roof. Around the base of the dome proper a ledge or platform
ran, upon which was more of the furniture-like stuff—evidently a sort
of solarium. Extending outside the walls as well as inside, it gave the
building the look of a giant in a plastic helmet. At the apex of the
dome a gem, like a giant's diamond, was fixed, rotating slowly,
catching the sunlight and sending a parade of rainbow hues over the
seats banked far below.
"Starstone Chamber," the girl said. "Our council hall."
"It's beautiful. Not a place for stuffy-minded men, I'd say."
They walked down through the tiers of seats toward the bottom of
the arena, where what appeared to be the head of a spiral staircase
was visible.
"Where are we bound?"
"To Goseq, one of our senior psychologists," Atel said. "We want to
see what we can dredge up about the sciences of your period.
Doubtless your observation, being untrained, missed most of the
essentials, but there ought to be some kind of residuum in your
subconscious."
"Why don't you fly me back to where I fell out of?" Andreson
suggested stiffly. "I realize that you can't expect to remember the
exact spot, but those 'windows' must look both ways, and should be
findable. I could send you a more suitable specimen—a friend of
mine who's a scientist—"
"We do know the exact spot," Atel interrupted. "We have detectors
in operation at all times—naturally! But a thorough search of that
area revealed nothing."
Andreson sighed. "I was afraid of that. The apparatus evidently
wasn't intended to be used for an airplane; I suppose I blew it out."
The girl, who had been preceding them, stopped at the top of the
stairwell and levelled a dainty finger at Atel. "Why don't you stop
tormenting him because he's not a scientist?" she demanded angrily.
"It isn't his fault! He's doing his best for us!"
Atel's eyebrows would have shot up, had he had any. "Certainly," he
purred, with an ironical gesture. "I'm sure you understand my
attitude, Mr. Andreson. As a non-scientist, you are more of a
curiosity than a gift, and that is a disappointment to us. We shall try
to make your stay here as comfortable—and as short—as possible."
Andreson, taken aback at the girl's sudden outburst, hardly knew
what to say. He was spared the task of replying, however—
The sun went out!

The girl gave a smothered little cry, and the human clumsily tried to
make his way through the blackness toward where he had last seen
her. A powerful four-fingered hand grasped his elbow roughly.
"Stand still," Atel growled. "Jina! It may be another attack. Wait for
the tower lights."
Andreson was uncertain as to whether "Jina!" was an expletive or
the girl's name, which he had never heard before, but he stood still,
resisting an impulse to shake Atel off. After a moment an eerie
sound drifted to his ears: a distant, musical keening.
"Ah. It is a raid—there's the alarm."
As he spoke, a dim radiance filtered down over them, bringing the
ranked seats of the council chamber into ghostly relief. It was
coming down from the dome, but the great jewel no longer
scattered rainbows. The light did not seem to have any single
source.
"Aloft with him," Atel ordered.
Reluctantly the girl gripped the Earthman's other arm, and two pairs
of wings thrummed together in the echoing chamber. He felt himself
arrowing dizzily skyward, and tried to hold his body stiff.
A second later they were standing on the high ledge among the
deserted couches. Below them, the city, seen here from its highest
tower, was presenting a heart stopping new facet of its beauty.
Every one of the crystalline shafts were gleaming with blue-white
flame along its entire length; though no single one was too bright to
be looked at directly, their total effect was of a sea of light almost as
brilliant as high noon. Tiny motes drifted back and forth across the
pillars of radiance: Varans in flight, evidently going to their posts in
answer to the alarm.

But when Andreson looked up to see what had happened to the sun,
what he saw wiped the miracle of the city from his mind.
The sky had turned to rock. The whole metropolis was trapped in a
tremendous hemisphere of some strange substance, a stony bowl,
smooth and polished, and veined with dark red lines like bad marble.
Here and there the glow of the city struck sullen fire against the
lava-like surface.
When Atel finally spoke, his voice had none of its previous
arrogance. "They have us now," he husked. "Our sky is granite to
them—and they've destroyed cubic miles of it, instantaneously! Our
power, our air ... cut off!"
"They've worked a miracle," the girl said with unwilling respect. "The
beasts are scientists—we knew that in the beginning. Don't you see,
Atel? They'll use that dome to get above the city! And their borers,
too—"
Indecisively Atel spread his wings half-way. "We can't carry this
Earthman about the city now," he said. "Jina, go to your post. I'll
take him back to my rooms."
"But—" Andreson and the girl protested simultaneously.
"Need I remind you that I command this sector during emergencies,
by Council order?" the Varan snapped. "He'll be no safer with us
than alone in the apartments. Take him down again."
Mutely Jina took the human's arm, and the two picked him up again
—he was becoming a little tired of being catapulted through the air
once every hour—and plunged back to the catwalk door.
"All right," the Varan told the girl, his voice edged with impatience.
"You're needed elsewhere, Jina."
She disappeared silently into the cavern of Starstone Chamber. Atel
slid the door back and cocked his head, a grotesque silhouette
against the faintly hazed oval opening. After a moment, Andreson
heard the sound too: a weird, intermittent buzzing noise. It set his
teeth on edge, and sent little waves of sheer hatred coursing
through his body. The stocky Varan drew him out onto the platform
and pointed upward.
"Borers," he grunted. "You can see one from here."
It was quite high, about half-way between the summit of the tower
and the surface of the rock sky, and moving very slowly. It reminded
Andreson of a legless centipede—a long, joined cylinder, with the
same stony, red-veined texture that the great bowl presented. In the
feeble light he thought he saw small openings appearing and
vanishing: the space-beasts, moving about inside their mechanism!
The brief glimpse was somehow the most horrible thing he had ever
seen. He could distinguish at least two other tones in the gruesome
buzzing, and he knew that the borer was not alone above the city.
"They've learned that hollow things are deadly—learned from us,"
Atel spat out bitterly. "See the column of light inching out from the
borer's nose? They are disintegrating a tunnel for their vacuum
torpedoes. It's a slow-motion kind of warfare—but when one side
wins constantly, it can't last forever. Feel the radiation?"
Andreson discovered that he was scratching. His skin felt as if he
had a mild sunburn. "The boring mechanism?" he suggested.
"Right," Atel admitted, his tone grudging. "Matter-against-matter
generates radiant heat. Space-against-space generates X-rays and
worse. Deadly stuff! If our gunners can only—"
Andreson never heard the end of the sentence. Without the slightest
warning he was again sprawling through the hot dark air—
Alone!

III

Kimball's right shoe caught in a burrow and he fell again. This time
the expected shock came late; evidently he had been on the brink of
a pit of some sort, for his shoulders slammed against the hard
ground with an unexpected impact, and he slewed down a long
decline. He lay at the bottom for an indefinite period—neither time
nor distance had any meaning in this blackness—and then got up
again.
Through the steady, muted roaring which had been in his ears ever
since he had dropped from the torus coil, a roaring like the sound in
a seashell, multiplied to the point of madness, a leathery muttering
sound began to grow. He yanked his flashlight from the belt-clip and
shot a cone of light upward.
He was rewarded with a ululating, deafening scream, and something
winged and huge sheared off from the beam. The muttering of the
wings faded again, and with it went a sticky blubbering, like the
crying of an idiot child. Sick at his stomach, he pumped a shot after
it, and was surprised to hear it scream again.
That would hold them for a while. They weren't very cautious about
the automatic, for they seemed to expect that he would score a hit
with it only by rare chance; but they hated the flashlight. They'd not
try that dive-bombing stunt on him soon again.
He could hear them settling around the rim of the pit. Deliberately
he lit a cigarette. For a second he could see the bulky, pasty bodies
and the blinded heads arching above him; then they all whispered
with agony and drew away out of sight. Even the dim coal of the
burning fag was too much for them.
But before long the batteries of the flashlight would be drained, the
cigarettes gone, the matches exhausted. When that time came,
Kimball knew, he would be torn to tatters, but it didn't bother him
much now. He had been almost unconscious with fatigue when the
badly-adjusted master machine had dumped him into this
nightmare; but the beasts, savage though they were, had been
curious. For a while they had questioned him with very little hostility,
and had aroused his interest enough to give him second—or had it
been twenty-second?—wind. Their upsetting version of telepathy,
which projected subtly different emotional states instead of ideas,
had awakened him thoroughly.
He had just realized that he had arrived inside the Earth, probably in
a space-negative state to boot, when he had felt the urge for a
cigarette....
He sighed and stood up. There was no way to tell how long he had
been in this midnight universe, but if he could only stick it out until a
full twenty-four hours were up, the master machine would act on
him again. The faulty windings of its coils would prevent it from
returning him to the abandoned grocery as it was supposed to do—
but at least it would throw him out of this black, demon-haunted
universe.
At his movement, the beasts rustled eagerly back to the rim of the
pit, scarcely audible in the mass echo which was as natural to the
hollow world as air. He turned on the flashlight, pointing it at the
ground—he did not care to hear them all scream at once. There was
a thundering flurry of wings above him; then silence.
Doggedly, he began to climb. Keep moving, he thought, you can
sleep in your next universe—wherever that'll be.
The beasts wheeled patiently.

Andreson lay tasting the sensation of being dead for several minutes
before he realized that he was hardly even jarred. His eyes were
open, but nothing he could see made sense to him. There was no
sign of Atel. Lying flat on his back, he looked stupidly upward at a
column of soft light that seemed to reach miles into the air, ending in
glowing haze. The rock dome had vanished, and in its place was a
pattern of gigantic, garish stalactites.
Wait a minute. There was something familiar here—
He rolled over cautiously and found an edge to the mysterious
surface he had fallen to. He thrust his head over it and peered
downward.
The rock dome was below him, not above! The space-beasts, who
reacted to gravity in reverse, had imposed their environment upon
the city. Only the solarium platform, which had been directly above
where he had been standing on the catwalk, had saved him from
mashing against the dome. He wondered if the Varan gunners had
been able to hit any of the borers under these conditions. He
couldn't hear the buzzing sound—no, wait, there was a single
buzzing tone, seemingly far away. Well, two down, anyhow.
A winged figure sailed by below him, its pinions tensely outspread,
gulling the air. He shouted at it, but there was no response. He
wondered what had happened to Atel. He must have fallen from the
catwalk, too, but certainly he couldn't have been hurt—he didn't look
like the type to pass out in mid-air. Andreson called again. After a
pause, an infinitely remote response came back to him:
Atelatelteltellelellll....
The echo of his first shout! The Varan must have forgotten about
him in the shock of the reversal, and flown off to his post, leaving
the Earthman stranded. Andreson knew it was quite possible that he
had been deliberately abandoned, but he forced himself not to think
about it.
Right now, he had to get off this ledge, and back inside a building. A
preferable spot would be Atel's rooms; they were close, and there
would be only a short, harmless distance to fall either way, no
matter what the warring factions did with the city's gravity. Yet Atel's
doorway, so mockingly close, was in reality as good as miles away
unless he could figure out something nearly as good as flying!
Suppose he should wait where he was, and fall back to the catwalk
when the Varans succeeded in neutralizing the effect? He
shuddered. The catwalk was narrow and he might easily miss it. In
any case, it might take a long time—the space-beasts seemed to
have the edge on the Varans so far, and if they won, he'd starve
here. He eyed the wall of the building above him. It was about
twenty feet "up" to the catwalk, and no handholds were visible. The
top side—now the "under" side—of the solarium platform was no
better; all the furniture had long since fallen away, and even had it
been still there, bolted to the surface, he'd have thought twice
before trying to crawl from couch to couch toward Starstone
Chamber's roof. It was a long way to the rock sky.
He risked standing up, hoping that the Varese would not choose this
instant to change things around again—if they did, he'd be dumped
on his head. The illusion of downness was quite perfect, but it was
hard to forget that it was an illusion. His knees wobbled as if he
were standing on a pile of telephone books.
After steadying himself against the wall, he made a slow circuit of
the tower, stepping over the structural members of the platform
cautiously. No doorways here—even a flying people usually enter
floors from the top side. Returning, he eyed the upper edge of the
catwalk doorway. It was an eight-foot opening, and he was exactly
six feet tall; that left a margin of about six feet, which he might be
able to jump. He wasn't in very good shape, and the platform didn't
offer much of a starting run, but he'd have to chance it.
He backed gingerly to the edge of the platform, hunched, ran,
leaped. He struck the glassy wall at full length, and clawed frantically
at it—
Missed. The drop back to the deck knocked the wind out of him
again, but he got up stubbornly. Crouch ... run ... leap—

His hands latched over the edge of the lintel and closed on it.
Drawing his knees up into his waist, he planted his toes and heaved.
The first push got his elbows over the edge, and after a long
struggle he managed to bend his body over it at the belt.
Suspended, he looked dizzily "down" at the inside of the Chamber,
his feet dangling in thin air.
It was only an equivalent distance to the bottom side of the inner
solarium platform, but he didn't want to go that way. There'd be no
sense in rattling aimlessly about the roof of the hall, waiting for his
back to be broken across the seats. Somehow, he had to work
himself down to the catwalk.
There was no other way but to shinny along the side of the lintel. He
swapped ends, so that his legs were now in the Chamber, and took
off his shoes and socks with a good deal of difficulty. His feet were
sweating—indeed, he was wet all over—so he wiped them with the
tops of the socks; then he began precariously to inch himself
upward.
By the time he made the bottom side of the catwalk, he was weak
with fear, and his clothes were soaked; but he couldn't allow himself
any time to recover, for there was now nothing "above" him but the
chasm of the city street. He worked his way across on his hands and
knees—no matter which way "down" was, this was a thin bridge for
an earthbound man, a bridge much more decorative than it was
useful—and lowered himself over the edge until he could curl his
body around Atel's doorway.
A moment later he was sprawled on Atel's ceiling, amid a litter of the
surly Varan's personal effects. He had hardly come to rest when he
fainted with a small sigh.

The second flipover of the city's gravity barely jounced him, but it
seemed to cause a lot of damage elsewhere. He had just gotten to
his feet when a terrific crash rang from the street below, and was
followed at once by others in other parts of the metropolis. He went
to the catwalk and looked over it—very tentatively, for he was warier
than ever of open spaces—but the distance was too great. He
guessed that something which hadn't been fastened down when the
original reversal took place had just made the return trip.
As he peered, four or five of the winged people stepped from a
platform far below his eyrie, and began to mount. Since they were
between him and the glowing side of the next building, he did not
recognize Atel and Jina among them until they were almost upon
him.
As they settled gracefully on the catwalk, he noted with some
surprise that they were all armed with a glass-muzzled, pistol-like
weapon instead of the usual metal bar; and judging from their
expressions, they anticipated trouble.
"I see you weren't killed," Atel said grimly. He seemed a bit
disappointed.
"No. But I did a lot of dropping back and forth," Andreson returned
acidly. "Why the artillery?"
"These men are members of the Council Guard. They think you're a
spy of some sort. They suspect me, too, for forgetting about you
during the fighting."
"That's ridiculous!" Jina burst in, her breast pulsing hotly. "They
never thought of it until you suggested it!"
"We can't afford to run any risks."
"Who am I spying for?" Andreson demanded. "The beasts? Jina's
right—it is ridiculous."
"Yes, the beasts," one of the Guardsmen said flatly. "You're a native
of Earth, no matter what your Time, and so are they. You could
easily be the vanguard of a raid."
Andreson's temper was already short from the buffeting he had
taken. "There's not a shred of evidence for such a theory," he
snapped.
"Unfortunately, there is," Atel purred. "We noticed a beast travelling
through the foundations of the city, just below the energy barrier,
and managed to trap it. We let it get up into a pillar and then
energized both ends. We were just about to kill it with hollow slugs
when it materialized—the first time the beasts have ever succeeded
in doing it, and it's an evil augury."
"Well? I still don't see...."
"It was an Earthman."
Andreson's mind nibbled around the edges of the fact. It was
startling enough in itself, but he could make little sense of it. How
would an Earthman have gotten into the reverse universe? And how
at this Time in the dim past?
"Perhaps it's another victim of the gallery," he suggested, frowning.
"It never occured to me before, but that infernal place might have
been set up deliberately as a time-trap—perhaps by the beasts!"
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