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Title: Spacemen are born

Author: Bolling Branham

Release date: February 12, 2021 [eBook #64530]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPACEMEN ARE BORN ***

SPACEMEN ARE BORN

By BOLLING BRANHAM

Everyone knows that spacemen are born—not

made. But grav-bound Trase Barnes, No. 1 v.p.

of Air-Lines, Inc., bet his arrogant soul that

he could shoot Saturn's rings—and live.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories May 1952.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

O, Jewel of the Eastern Sky,

O, Mother of many things,

Bring home your sons to safety,

From the Stars to Saturn's rings....

Curse it, I am too old to go to space, and why can't I be content with that?

Must I hear the spacemen's songs and the stories they tell, so that the breath of romance aches each day in my bones? For here on Earth's cool moon I am as close to the sky as I need be, and the sky is close enough to me.

But those spacemen who go to Saturn—ah, they have viewed a scene that exists nowhere else in all our universe, and I think they delight in singing the Saturn "Home Song" in my ears and telling me of the wonders of Saturn's skies.

For have you ever been to Saturn? No, you needn't go away, for in a moment I'm going to tell the story of Trase Barnes. But in order to understand him you've got to know about Saturn.

For, you see, you're coasting when you come in, riding with idling jets, cutting in under the edge of the outside ring, into the darkness away from the sun. On the fourth day you go between the big ring and the crape, and then, when you look above you—you see one magnificent reason why men go to space.

There's Saturn.

The God of Time, he is, and you're looking out over the flatness of the rings at the yellow bulk of a planet, filling your sky ahead. Yellow, streaked with purple streamers, fading away at the edges into the blackness that is eternal space. Yes, fortunes have been made and lost on trips to Saturn, but no one loses the memory of how it looks when you shoot the rings.

Now about Trase Barnes....

Trase was born here on the Moon, right in the dispatcher's station, with the pull of artificial gravity helping to push the blood around for the first time in his little squalling body.

You know what gravity does for you? Of course, it's the reason that today spacemen are a special breed. Back when every country was racing to get the first rocket on the moon no one thought much about gravity except how to nullify it.

But when the first men got out in space on the way to the moon, they couldn't think much of gravity except how to get back to it. They didn't get back, nor did the men on the next trip, nor the next sixteen brave crews that darted off into the night sky with the howling fire coming out below them. It was number 19 before they found the trouble, for aboard it was the first crew member with spacemen's ear—and don't we know now that spacemen are born?

Maybe you know they're born and not made, and maybe you don't know why. I'll tell you then, cause my story isn't right without it.

Back when I was a kid in Tennessee, I used to raise a thousand chickens every spring and never lost but a few. But there was one chicken one year that I'll remember for the rest of my days. He never was able to walk. From the time he was hatched he kept falling on his face, or his behind, and rolling over and over, with the other chickens walking on him. So one day I asked the Doc what was wrong.

"No equilibrium," said the Doc, and now you know what that means! Right inside his ear the canals were messed up, the canals where the liquid rolls around, and this chicken didn't know which way was up. Seems like he didn't have any liquid in there. No liquid at all.

Well, that's what makes a spaceman. A man with a normal ear, why he knows which way is up or down, because the gravity pulls that liquid around in there, and it rolls over those sensory hairs which contact the brain with the latest information. But when the first spacemen got out into space, there wasn't any gravity to pull the liquid, and it charged around in there whichever way it felt like—up, down, sideways, whichever way they moved their heads, and the walls, sky, and world just whirled around. They all got sick; couldn't see, couldn't eat, couldn't move. Most of the first rockets just passed right on by the moon and went out into space, and those that didn't just piled into it head on, with half-dead men lying at the controls.

But in number 19 there was a man who'd always had trouble with his sense of balance, a man who fell easily and hit hard when he went down. That man saved his crew. For when they got out in space they got sick, like the other eighteen crews, but the other man, he just heaved a sigh of relief, just looked out at the sky and the stars and the great big universe of space, and his whole insides cried, "This is for me!"

Yes sir, he was a spaceman-born—the first spaceman—and he brought that ship back by himself to tell the world that spacemen are born.

It was a funny thing too. For so many of the born spacemen are weaklings, kids who never feel sure of themselves, who never can play hard games because they're always falling down. Other kids always made fun of them, but now these men came into their own. They weren't at home on the earth, the moon, Mars, or any planet—their home was the deep purple nothingness of space.

And they built our space colonies and have always run our space-lanes.

But Trase Barnes wasn't one of them.

Like I say, Trase's father was a spaceman, a long thin giant of a man who loved the sky and lived in it. Trase's mother was like his father, a space-woman born, and they lived out there at No-Grav City, hung there fifty thousand miles away from the moon, where spacemen live without the heavy bonds of gravity.

But Mrs. Barnes came into the Moon-Station hospital to have her baby, and naturally she hoped for a son—a spaceman-born. But Trase was just as sound and healthy as an Iowa pig in October, and he knew from the beginning which way was up and down. But how he hated it!

When Trase's pa came back from a long haul out to Pluto—he'd been gone a year and a half—and found out that Trase would never be a spaceman, he broke into tears. Only time he ever cried.

Well, they lived with him and they raised him, here in the gravity of the moon. His pa had to make a living, hitching space hulks back and forth in the dark of the sky, but his ma was as kind as ever; she just gritted her teeth and stayed in the gravity with him till he got out of Moon-Station prep-school. They finally had another child, a girl, who was a space-woman born. Now she's a woman pilot on a Mercury to Venus run.

Oh, how Trase hated himself, and the world, and most of all the gravity that bound his feet to the ground. His first wanderings were out there to the space-port, where the spacemen in their gray uniforms strolled easily about and swaggered before his eyes. There were the mysterious vessels, crouched in their launching racks, their skins shiny with the flow-sheen imparted to them by tremendous speeds out in nothing. There were the gatherings of spacemen to talk about the black, black side of Mercury, the pale corona of the sun seen from Neptune, the thousands of square miles of flat green moss on Venus, but mostly they talked of the purple and yellow rings of Saturn, and the deep-breath feeling of space.

So Trase would go back to his school books and try to understand arithmetic and geography, and his body would always be on time, his physical being would say "present"—but his mind, ah, his mind wandered a golden pathway among the glittering worlds of the sky.

His little fingers were deft and quick, and by the time he was ten he had made a dozen space-models. There was a model of old number 19, crude, rough, and laughable, with its huge stepped rockets that were dropped away to the rear on the way to the moon. There beside his schoolbooks was the Adventurer II, first ship to go inside Mercury's orbit and come back to tell the tale. His walls were lined with pictures of such men as Rak Bartel, the laughing spaceman who rescued the Wofford expedition from the wilds of Titan, and over there was Colombo Dante, the pale little Indian half-breed who held ten speed records around the solar system that are still unbeaten today.

But under his pillow was the picture of Mortan Barnes, his father, whose huge, thin face gave the appearance of looking wistfully at the stars. Yet, it couldn't have been more wistful than the eyes of Trase.

So Trase went on with his growing up, and they told him to study medicine, so he gobbled up his chemistry, his biology, and anthropology, but he studied space-math at night. By the time he got out of prep-school he could work some astro-nav problems in his head and knew the names, tonnages, and horsepower of the seven hundred models of space vessels without so much as cracking a book.

He read a story about a stowaway one day, and then he read it again. It made his mind start to working and he began to say to himself, "Maybe they're wrong about my ears. Maybe I would be a good spaceman. If a man's got a mind to be a spaceman, looks like he ought to be able to make himself do it, doesn't it?"

The space-station doctor spoke sympathetically. "No, Trase, there's very little that can be done. An operation, maybe—but the only doctor I know capable of performing such an operation is on Earth, and it would cost thousands of dollars. No, Trase, be happy, can't you? Most spacemen are not really happy. I think they really envy us gravity-bound people, for they can't ever know a real home. Can't you see the wistfulness in their faces and the haunted look deep back in their eyes?"

Yes, Trase could see all that, but to him it was because they saw things that no other man could see.

Trase didn't believe the doctor. He had to try it, so he smuggled himself into an air-lock one day, grabbed an air-suit, and wandered out on the ground of the moon.

Now the moon's got a little gravity, you know, but when Trase got out of the artificial gravity of the Moon-Station, he began to run into trouble. It was all right as long as he stood still, because the little gravity of the moon would pull at the liquid in his ears. But if he moved suddenly, why it would shake all around in there, and the moon and the stars and the bright big Earth over there would whirl in a blaze of light. Then Trase would wake up lying on his face with his suit messed up from being sick.

So Trase figured out a method of training himself. "I'll show 'em," he would groan through clenched teeth while the sky wheeled around his head. "By the Great Big Bear I'll show 'em that a spaceman can be made!"

His private method of training was to move in exaggerated slow motion. To walk out on the rough ground of the moon and lift one foot so-o-o slowly and carefully, with his eyes fixed on one tall, spiky peak of the Appenines, and with the crust of Mare Imbrium staying in place. He got where he could cover a mile or two in an earth-time afternoon, never taking his eyes off the fix on the mountain peak, never moving his head to catch a glimpse of the fiery trails of the space vessels roaring off into the purple-blue sky.

And the magic catch-phrase would come like a chant from between his twisted lips, "Spacemen are made ... spacemen are made!"

He really made a little headway. He got where he could move a little faster and could occasionally take a quick glance upward at the crystalline patchwork of the sky.

And what was that beautiful point of light out there?

Trase knew it was Saturn, and his eyes would be fixed upon it as a final mount of redemption, as the supreme goal of a well lived lifetime. He wheedled his way into the Moon-Station Astrodome and hungrily gulped in the sight of the ringed planet canted there in the scope view-finder. It was there! The rings were there, the huge planet was there, but the scope only showed you enough to make it just out of your reach; tantalizing, torturing—a pearl to melt through your fingers when you reached for it.

"Hi'ya Saturn!" he would cry. "God of Time that you are, you've waited a long time for me but I'll be there!"

Trase began going to the dispatcher's station, getting the schedules of arrivals and departures and destinations, and figuring the orbits. Then he could tell the exact time the space vessels were due to shoot the rings at Saturn, or burst through the 1,100 mile space between the crape ring and the middle one. Then he would be sitting there at the scope, imagining that he could see a ship—a so-small fleck of blackness skimming across the yellow of the watery hulk of Saturn. That was the way he saw the blow-up of the Andromeda, carrying a load of fissionable materials, when she burst in a flash of white-hot energy in a collision with some hunks of jet in the middle ring.

After he saw that, Trase walked home with something dead inside of him, with his head quiet, his shoulders drooping, his heart sobbing out the Saturn "Home Song" as he had heard his father sing it so often. For his father had been master of the Andromeda.

Trase was the one who had to tell his mother, and she took it, dry-eyed, for the first few minutes. But then she could stand it no longer, and she flung herself at her tall son, lean and muscular, and sobbed, "I'm glad you can't be a spaceman. I'm glad, I'm glad. It's a dirty life, and your reward is a flashing death in a fire-pit."

Trase held her while she sobbed out her grief. He had to keep swallowing down the lump in his own throat, but he could somehow keep seeing that white-hot burst of flame framed before the God of Time, and could imagine that his father's spirit was freed in the space he had loved, out there where he could live on forever, gazing on that magnificent scene.

After that, there wasn't any more studying medicine for Trase. He had to go to work. Because of his aptness with figures he got a job in the dispatcher's office as assistant calculator. It paid well, but somehow it didn't mean so much any more, for Trase seemed to be living in an emptiness greater than that of space. He clocked in and clocked out each shift, and his error index was smaller than that of any other clerk in the office. The other clerks used to look at him and grunt, "There goes Trase Barnes—never a mistake. He's just as infallible as the machine."

So he went up. Assistant calculator to calculator, to assistant dispatcher to dispatcher. In seven years he was chief dispatcher and in three more he ran the Moon-Station space-port. Twenty-nine years old, vice-president of Air-Lanes, Inc., owned a block of Marsopolis, Inc., stock, and had never been off the moon.

In later years, it kind of quit bothering him, except sometimes when some of his pilots came in to make a report and they'd seen a flashing meteor on Io, or had screamed through the blue, thin, upper atmosphere of Jupiter—and they simply could not hide their feelings in the language of official reports. At times like that, Trase would sometimes slip on the air-suit, go through his old routine out there on the forgotten dust of Mare Imbrium, and mutter his phrase about "Spacemen are made!"

But it was just a ritual, just an escape, just a way of breathing an occasional bit of life into an empty dream, and Trase knew it. Where was that feeling of yesterday, that lift in his breast, that catch in his throat, that wild calling from out there among the white stars that made his legs tremble, his heart hammer, and his spirit cry out, "I'll be there"?

Where, indeed, had the ghosts gone, those ghosts that fought so bitterly the mound-bound vision of himself, sitting at his desk and never leaving the moon?

Trase had just come in from one of those visits one afternoon when Irinia Custer walked into his office unannounced, and caught him there in an unlighted office, staring out at the constellations low on the horizon.

Now, Irinia was almost a legend. Her reaction time was the fastest of any pilot employed by Air-Lanes Inc. Her hardness and cynicism in the face of danger, death, and the accepted ideals of life made top story-telling material wherever spacemen gathered. She wouldn't have needed to be beautiful, but on top of it all she was; for her sensuous figure and black hair, with equally coal-black eyes, made her wild beauty as legendary as her deeds. Yet Trase Barnes was known to be twice as cold-blooded as she, an automaton who sent pilots into danger with nothing but money in mind.

So Irinia eased quietly into Trase's office that afternoon, and there the tough man sat, with his back to the door, staring out the huge lucite port into the jewelled splendor of the clear night sky—seeing the constellations that to Trase were as familiar as the walls of his office.

Irinia stood quietly behind him for a moment, then she spoke. "So the v.p. likes the stars," she breathed slowly, but her voice was not scornful. "The big, moon-bound executive, with ice-water in his veins, has got a spark of romance."

Trase turned to her slowly, a part of his mind still out there among the stars where strange kings and queens fought for galactic empires.

Irinia looked at him, at the expression on Trase's face, and then suddenly she could read the whole story written there in plain characters. Right there in his eyes she could see the soul of a spaceman penned up in a moon-bound cage.

And suddenly Irinia Custer felt sorry for the hardness that was in her spirit, sorry for her bitter, cynical attitude, sorry for the dirty, laughing nicknames she had fashioned among space-crews for vice-president Trase Barnes.

They looked at each other for a long time. Then Trase got out the thick words slowly. "Well, I'm stuck, Irinia," he smiled. "You know the way I feel—the secret's out, and I know you'll tell it."

Irinia started to talk, but something was lodged in her throat and her mouth felt dry, strangely dry. She walked over to Trase and her trembling hand reached out and touched the features of his face, and the fierceness of what she felt inside her made her whole body shake.

"Yes, I know, Trase," she breathed. "I know." Then suddenly she put her head on his shoulder and cried.

Well, that's the way it goes, you know. The two toughest people in spacing ran together, and it was like joining two ribbons of molten steel. It was a love such as the Moon-Station had seldom seen, and the talk ran through the space-lines like it had never gone before. It had been bound to happen to Trase, yet all the worlds wept for the two of them. Because everyone knew that nothing was worse than for a spaceman or woman to be mated with a ground-bounder.

At first their happiness was untouchably supreme, and Trase walked about in a kind of warm haze, deliciously aware of things he had never before noticed—the pleasant coughing sound of a Moon-Dog barking, the tinny clatter of dishes that rang out from the Spacemen's Mess; all small things which never before had meaning, but which now made him seem like part of the world.

Yet, it caught up with them, for they both knew that Irinia couldn't give up space and Trase couldn't go to space. Or could he?

It got Trase to thinking. Hadn't there been something about a doctor, or an operation ... maybe now he had the money to pay. He went back to see the space doctor who told him that, and found that he was dead. He asked other doctors and they told him that it was a bunch of foolishness, that they had never known of a successful operation of that type, that the only thing to remember was the phrase, "Spacemen are born—not made."

Trase got kind of tired of hearing it, but no doctor would risk his reputation on the operation.

So that was that.

Trase and Irinia talked it over; that is, as much as they could with their throats kind of choked up, and they decided the only thing they could do was to forget each other. Irinia could never be happy living in gravity. So she went off to space again, and Trase just sat back at his great carved oaken desk, looked out his lucite port, and pondered.

Oh, that Trase was a thinker, and his thinking got faster and faster as the days went by, and sometimes again he began to be seen on an earth-time afternoon down on the flight line, watching the ships come in and out. It was a place he hadn't frequented in years.

By the time Irinia got back on her trip from Deimos, his face was hard—hard as the thought that was in his mind. He called Irinia to come to his office. She didn't want to, because they had vowed never to speak again, but somehow, from the tone of the note, she had to come.

"O.K., veepee," she cracked, a frozen, bitter, mask of a smile on her lips, "What've I done now?"

Trase said, "I'm going to space."

Irinia's face went white for a minute, but she knew her Trase—and she knew argument was no good.

"Where?" she whispered.

"Saturn," Trase replied.

"Oh, no!" cried Irinia. "Not Saturn! It's the worst of them all."

"I know it is," Trase said. "That's the reason I want to go."

"You'll never come back alive," whispered Irinia. "If the sickness doesn't get you, the rings will."

"Maybeso, Irinia. But I need your help. I've got plans and I need you. If I make this trip, maybe I can make others. Maybe ... maybe I can prove that spacemen can be made. But if I can't make it without sickness, I promise you I'll never bother you or ask anything of you again."

"But what are your plans, Trase?"

"Drugs, first, Irinia. Progressive slackening off, and attempted self-induced hypnotism. Small artificial gravity unity, enough to create about a tenth of earth gravity. I think I can do it, Irinia."

"But it's all been tried before, Trase, and it's never worked! You know that—it's deeply psychological as well as physical. You can't do it simply by wanting it!"

Trase looked long and hard at her. His smile was almost ghastly. "Life is worth nothing to me unless I try it, Irinia," he said quietly.

So that did it. Trase cashed in his stock in Air-Lanes, bought a ship and they went to work on it. He couldn't get a first-rate crew because the news got around about what they were trying to do, and no self-respecting spaceman would have anything to do with it. But there were drifters to be had.

They blew off in the middle of the two-week moon night, the polyglot crew grazing the space-station dome, and setting off ten degrees off course, with Trase strapped in his bunk and drugged into unconsciousness, and Irinia cursing the crew in pure venom they had never heard before.

And that, essentially, was the way the trip went. Irinia never weakened and by the time they were two months out she had the crew almost to a state of discipline.

Of course, drugs had been tried before—they were the method used to transport non-space-born passengers between the Earth and the moon. Irinia fed Trase intravenously. At the end of the two months she turned on the puny artificial gravity system and let him come awake.

His first words were, "Where's Saturn?"

"O, Trase, we haven't even got well started yet," Irinia cried.

Trase came awake. He tried to sit up in his bunk, and fell out lightly on the floor with his whole insides heaving. Irinia dosed him up again and toyed with the idea of turning back. But Trase was in good health, so she decided to go on. At the end of the third month, Trase found that he could lie flat on his back in his bunk with eyes blindfolded, and with no movement at all. This way he could stay awake at stated intervals, as long as there was no change in course or velocity.

Oh, the beauty of open space! Though he couldn't get out of his bunk to see it, Trase knew that they were way out in the middle of nowhere, and Irinia would come around to tell him about it.

The time passed, and then Saturn began gradually to fill the screen of the ship's vision-plate, and Irinia began to worry. For to shoot the rings required plenty of deft acceleration and deceleration, and Irinia knew that Trase couldn't stand the maneuvering.

"How about just a look at Saturn from a distance, Trase?" Irinia would ask.

"We've got to shoot the rings," he would reply grimly.

So Irinia knew he wouldn't be satisfied with anything less, and she went busily about the procedure of lining up the polyglot crew for the ring-shooting.

At fifty million miles from Saturn she fired two small braking blasts, and Trase cried out from his bunk and was sick again. She ran back to him and said, "Oh, Trase, let me drug you till we get there."

His white suffering face showed clenched teeth. He grabbed her arm and said, "I'll make it, Irinia, I'll make it. Just let me know when the view gets good."

So she let him alone and went about the business of braking. She heard no more groans from Trase. But when she went back to see him, there he would be with his hands gripped until the knuckles showed white, with the bedclothes gripped between his teeth. "I'll make it, Irinia," he would gasp. Then sometimes she would hear him cry, "I'll be there, God of Time, I'll be there!"

Space-sickness and nausea.... Those it doesn't kill generally try to kill themselves.

Well, from fifty million miles it's a four-day trip to shoot the rings and get started away again, and there was Trase with the universe spinning around his ears, suffering as much as anyone can suffer.

They went in under the darkness of the huge outside ring, for the rings were canted at that time almost their total 28 degrees to the ecliptic.

And then out of the misery and the eons of suffering Trase suddenly heard a voice, "Trase! Trase! Come to the Astrodome, we're shooting the rings! Trase, we're shooting the rings!"

Trase prayed. His hands reached out for the bunk straps and he felt Irinia helping him. He had long ago lost everything on his stomach but the world whirled in a wild clanging clatter of craziness and he had to be guided along the passageway.

"I can't make it!" he cried at once, and Irinia had to drag him back to his feet, and then he said, "Yes, I can—I'll be there."

Well, that was the way Trase made it. His clothes reeking with his sickness, his body wasted away from inaction, his eyes dimmed and glazed over from suffering, his face a mask of thin ferocity from his determination. But he made it.

There's Saturn, Trase.

He looked out over the burning brilliant flatness of the crape ring to the huge yellow hulk of the God of Time towering over him. The light and majesty of what he saw swam to his brain out of the fogs of bitterness that had shrouded his soul and he saw it—one magnificent reason why men go to space.

Personal Saturn, unreachable Saturn ... yellow, streaked with purple streamers, fading away at the edges into the blackness that is eternal space. From there at the edge of the crape ring it is as though you were standing on a plain of golden dust, staring up into the face of destiny. The features of the face are plain, formed out of the whirling evanescent colors of the gases whipped around on the surface by cyclonic winds. You can see rainbows and pots of gold fashioned and then whipped away to change to greater things. The breath of eternal mystery blows on the spirit, and spacemen say you can see anything you desire.

The ship lurched this way and that as the jets kept it on its course, and Trase suddenly realized that the sickness had dropped away from him like a fetter. The ship headed back towards Titan for a refueling stop, but Trase sat there and stared at Saturn until the Astrodome got around to the front and the jet trails obscured the view at the rear. He was not sick while he looked at Saturn.

His clear-headedness lasted about half-an-hour. Then Trase got sick again. He was sick for a day and a half, until the ship began to come in on Titan.

But the drifter crew had hid out some Mercurian liquor and got drunk before landing. They failed to cut the jets. Irinia cursed until the spaceship bulkheads turned red hot, but she fell and knocked herself out running down from the pilot's compartment to the engine-room. And so there was the ship headed wide-open into Titan with the crew drunk, Irinia unconscious, and Trase dead-sick in his bunk.

Well, you'll know now that Trase saved the day. He began to think of Saturn as he had seen it. He staggered down to the engine-room, cut the jets, then ran up to the pilot's room where the rough surface of Titan stared him in the face. And he wasn't sick while he thought of Saturn.

The ship cracked up but nobody was killed. They hadn't been able to get any insurance with an unlicensed crew, so that left Trase flat-broke. He wasn't a veepee anymore since he had no stock in Air-Lanes, and Irinia got fired for taking the extended leave.

So things were kind of tough for a while, but.... Where are they now? Oh, you know, you've heard all about it. They found a backer, and now they're out on Pluto with a space-drive job, getting ready to set out for Centauri. And Trase has never been sick again.

What does it prove?

Well, see those words written right there over the entrance to the spacemen's mess? Those are the words Trase used when they pulled him out of the wreck on Titan. I'll read them for you. "I've seen Saturn! And to you who have seen it, I don't need to say whether spacemen can be made. To others, to millions of youngsters who want to be spacemen, I'll say now that spacemen are born. But to each of them I'll say this—If you want to be a spaceman, you don't need a spaceman's ear, all you need is a spaceman's soul."

So the spacemen took that and added another verse to the Saturn "Home Song," and it's the one that really makes me hurt because I can't go to space again. Sometimes late at night I hear them singing it from far out on the field when a crew is coming in off a run, and that's when I know you can't stop them. You can't stop the born spacemen until they reach the stars. The verse goes like this:

Oh, Saturn, the God of Time,

May your majesty never fade.

For your beauty is final proof,

Spacemen are born not made.

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