Free Alternating Currents by Frederik Pohl Page B

feet. I looked down, and froze.
     
    There on the floor at my feet - visible through the lower part of my fearfully bluish, transparent legs - was the limp and lifeless body of myself.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    It was not at once that I deduced what had gone wrong, nor was it very quickly that I calmed down enough to realize fully my new status; but it should have been obvious. All the world knows that no really old skeleton is complete; the small, peripheral bones are almost always lost, dissolved or devoured by the time the excavators find the main bulk. And so the museums employ sculptors to piece out the missing parts in plaster of paris - vulgar plaster, whose silicon chemistry was never alive and cannot yield up a ghost. . . . But, as my friend had assured me, with what inner malicious glee I can only now appreciate, the woven willow never failed; and since there was no ghost to be conjured from the chunk of moulded plaster, it did what it had left to do, and conjured up the ghost of me.
     
    All in all, I have no alternative but to admit, my present way of life (should I say, ‘of death?’) has its compensations. I do not need to eat or sleep, and I have the ancient little Bantu, N’Ginga, for company in the long night hours and when Brandon is away. He does not wish to make our existence public as yet, though most of the upper-echelon staff of the Museum knows about us; and he promises to find my friend from upstate New York as soon as he can, to find out how to release us from the compulsion to remain where we were commanded to appear. That I look forward to: once free of that part of the spell, both N’Ginga and I can go to meet others like us.
     
    Meanwhile, I have my work, of dictating to Brandon and his helpers all that I can remember of all the magic I had learned. Both N’Ginga and I are anxious to do whatever Brandon wants of us, you see, which is why he is learning English. Partly it is because we want to advance the cause of scientific knowledge, and partly, too, because we are anxious to be released; it is a little lonely for us here. It wasn’t quite so bad while there were three of us, though the Boy Pharaoh was poor enough company. But when he ceased to be with us (I can’t find the proper words to describe the process, you see) it was the first time any of us had realized that even ghosts were, in some ways, vulnerable.
     
    It was entirely my own fault and carelessness; but I wish I had not been so free to conjure up the ghosts of lions and lizards; I have wished it more and more since N’Ginga came running to me, face almost pale, to show me what lizard-teeth had done to the wraith of the Boy.
     
    <>
     
    ~ * ~
     
     
    Let the Ants Try
     
     
     
     
    Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn’t: he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.
     
    He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course, weren’t as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.
     
    That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of 1960.
     
    He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down; he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency Administration laughed at him. ‘Move in, if you’re crazy enough to stay.’
     
    When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained