Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Dearest Enemy BY FOX HOLDEN _Well trained actors are taught the old tradition that the show must go on. But what's the point of it all when your audience is very, very dead?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] From somewhere there was a buzzing sound. It kept repeating. The gentle throb of it vibrated his eardrums; the vibrations registered somewhere at the bottom edges of his brain. Buzzzz. Insistently, like a wasp. Like a trapped wasp.... But there were no wasps in the streamlined metal shell of Vanguard-I. _Better answer_, another part of his brain whispered. _Better answer ... they want to tell you what to do...._ _God!_ Some sweat oozed from the dark bunches of his eyebrows, fogged the binocular eye-piece of the orbit-synchronized refractor, but he kept watching, he could not stop watching. _Buzzz! Buzzzz!_ Red gouts of flame, as big as a pin-head, as big as a shirt-button, as big as--damn the fogging--up! No, no it was the mushrooms, not the fogging; you could count them, like puffs of gunsmoke along a firing-line stippling the Atlantic seaboard, now branching, riddling westward--others drifting eastward from the Pacific as though groping toward a pre-planned rendezvous. _Buzzzz! Buzzzz!_ He would answer. There would be the sound of another man's voice and that would make it all real. If he silenced the buzzer and listened to the voice it would be real and not a final training-film; the films would be over, the lectures over, the flight-tests over, the eliminations over and he and Streeter chosen and Streeter dead and buried at Space and now he was alone up in Vanguard-I.... Vanguard-I was "up" and Earth was "down" and both were real. Beyond the buzzing, both would be real. The strong young voice was an old voice as it answered the buzzing, as it gave sound to words for the UHF's panel-mike. "Home Plate, Home Plate, this is Mrs. Grundy, over..." "Mrs. Grundy this is Home Plate. Are you reading? Are you ready for a circus or is all your money gone? Over..." "Ready for a circus. Regret delay in acknowledging. I--was in Observation, over." "Mrs. Grundy, your Daddy-o wants to talk to you so bye bye baby...." General Knight himself. Knight himself to talk to him ... so it was that bad. _Of course it was that bad!_ "Mrs. Grundy can you read, over...." Knight's voice. It sounded calm. It sounded unruffled. You had to know Knight, you had to have heard him often to know that it was not calm, that it was not at all unruffled....